The free market and concern for the environment are compatible – indeed symbiotic.  Farmers care about their land and are amongst those most concerned about mining causing problems in our food growing areas of QLD.  The govt is the farmer’s enemy here, possibly siding with the mining companies.

Property rights give families a reason to preserve the environment because they are preserving their livelihoods . That is the most effective incentive because it is the most intimate.

Having govt control environment issues disperses responsibility through many ignorant distant hands – through power-hungry bureaucrats who believe they need to shape the world, through politicians looking to curry favour with the mining industry, through those who have no direct interest in the land itself.

Invariably those with the best knowledge and the greatest interest in local environmental issues are those with the most direct stake – the private owners of land affected by the pollution! 

Tourism is concerned for the Great Barrier Reef.  The boating and fishing industries are concerned about the quality of our waterways. 

The govt and the mining companies are the very agents to be most feared, because they have the least direct stake in the long-term viability of the local ecosystem.  Note that even though mining companies are nominally “private” corporations, they are actually in a sense govt agents, taking temporary leasing rights from the govt to mine.  These concessions from the govt to mine are for a temporary period only and therefore it is more accurate to consider mining companies as quasi-govt authorities in many cases.

Libertarians have long been concerned for the environment.  Please take the time to read this excellent piece from Murray Rothbard.

Please think carefully next time you hear a govt mouthpiece talking about “saving the environment”.  What they are invariably saying is “Give me more power.”

Let it never be said I am irrationally negative about politicians and government employees.

Here is a courageous, correct and fundamentally sound statement from the Swedish Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, as reported in today’s Daily Telegraph:

We have been very clear that we do not put taxpayer money intended for healthcare or education into owning car companies or covering losses in car companies.  You cannot save jobs just by pushing in taxpayers’ money if you don’t have the competitiveness to survive in a tough industry with overcapacity.

Wow.

I am in awe. 

He is resisting pleas from the unions and pressure from GM to pour public money into Saab to save it.  He is right.

What the Australian govt did in comparison was shameful.

I note that St Vincent’s Hospital may have to reduce purchases of new equipment because of $24 million in investment losses, I note that millions of dollars have been wasted on shoddy insulation due to the govt meddling in the private market for insulation in Australia, I note that hospitals are (according to the Tele) at overcapacity dealing with the spike in new births taking place, I note that billions and billions have gone to save the local car industry and the banks.  From themselves.

I’m off work because of illness right now.  Losing money.  It wasn’t my fault. 

Where’s my handout?

Once it starts, where does it stop?

The answer is it doesn’t.  Until the whole system collapses and anarchy reigns.

According to Austrian School economist and Libertarian thinker, Murray Rothbard, every government employee and government contractor is a parasite living off coercively acquired taxes that should never have been “stolen” from the people.

Leaving aside the accuracy of Murray Rothbard’s description of govt employees and assuming it to be true, what would the mind of these parasites look like?

Well, first and foremost, they would be paranoid about the inherently unnecessary, irrelevant and redundant role they play in society.  They know they sit around doing nothing.  They know they are a negative, parasitic drain on society’s precious resources.  They see the money coming in from “stolen” taxes and they know they are shockingly unproductive and unresponsive when compared to the market.  They fear and resent this fact, like mortals fear and resent death.

So, logically, they will obsess about their own “relevance”, constantly justifying their role in society by creating false “alarms” needing their “vital expertise”, constantly talking up the importance of their work, constantly looking for validation and publicity, constantly trying to deny the essentially irrelevant nature of their existence.

Now, think of the fact that Osama Bin Laden “conveniently” hasn’t been captured for 8 years and yet the US and UK govts scream that this is a vital task of govt for self-defence; think of the ridiculous misinformation regarding climate change and the screaming over the “need” for a govt enforced solution (such as an ETS); think of the SIMULTANEOUS and INCONSISTENT need for “stimulus” spending by govt, with the Treasurer and other govt hacks bleating on about how govt was essential to keep Australia spending money on stuff no one else would buy (if it was necessary it would have been bought without the govt having to step in); think of the countless ways in which govt employees assume they know what they are doing but simply do nothing other than confuse, obstruct, slow down and otherwise frustrate the workings of the market… and then consider the wisdom of Murray Rothbard’s analysis.

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Occupied UC Berkeley, 18 November 2009

Being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening.
UC President Mark Yudof

Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.
Karl Marx

Politics is death that lives a human life.
Achille Mbembe

Yes, very much a cemetery.  Only here there are no dirges, no prayers, only the repeated testing of our threshold for anxiety, humiliation, and debt.  The classroom just like the workplace just like the university just like the state just like the economy manages our social death, translating what we once knew from high school, from work, from our family life into academic parlance, into acceptable forms of social conflict.

Who knew that behind so much civic life (electoral campaigns, student body representatives, bureaucratic administrators, public relations officials, Peace and Conflict Studies, ad nauseam) was so much social death?  What postures we maintain to claim representation, what limits we assume, what desires we dismiss?

And in this moment of crisis they ask us to twist ourselves in a way that they can hear.  Petitions to Sacramento, phone calls to Congressmen—even the chancellor patronizingly congratulates our September 24th student strike, shaping the meaning and the force of the movement as a movement against the policies of Sacramento.  He expands his institutional authority to encompass the movement.  When students begin to hold libraries over night, beginning to take our first baby step as an autonomous movement he reins us in by serendipitously announcing library money.  He manages movement, he kills movement by funneling it into the electoral process.  He manages our social death.  He looks forward to these battles on his terrain, to eulogize a proposition, to win this or that—he and his look forward to exhausting us.

He and his look forward to a reproduction of the logic of representative governance, the release valve of the university plunges us into an abyss where ideas are wisps of ether—that is, meaning is ripped from action.  Let’s talk about the fight endlessly, but always only in their managed form: to perpetually deliberate, the endless fleshing-out-of—when we push the boundaries of this form they are quick to reconfigure themselves to contain us: the chancellor’s congratulations, the reopening of the libraries, the managed general assembly—there is no fight against the administration here, only its own extension.

Each day passes in this way, the administration on the look out to shape student discourse—it happens without pause, we don’t notice nor do we care to. It becomes banal, thoughtless.  So much so that we see we are accumulating days: one semester, two, how close to being this or that, how far?  This accumulation is our shared history.  This accumulation—every once in a while interrupted, violated by a riot, a wild protest, unforgettable fucking, the overwhelming joy of love, life shattering heartbreak—is a muted, but desirous life.  A dead but restless and desirous life.

The university steals and homogenizes our time yes, our bank accounts also, but it also steals and homogenizes meaning.  As much as capital is invested in building a killing apparatus abroad, an incarceration apparatus in California, it is equally invested here in an apparatus for managing social death.  Social death is, of course, simply the power source, the generator, of civic life with its talk of reform, responsibility, unity.  A  ‘life,’ then, which serves merely as the public relations mechanism for death: its garrulous slogans of freedom and democracy designed to obscure the shit and decay in which our feet are planted. Yes, the university is a graveyard, but it is also a factory: a factory of  meaning which produces civic life and at the same time produces social death.  A factory which produces the illusion that meaning and reality can be separated; which everywhere reproduces the empty reactionary behavior of students based on the values of life (identity), liberty (electoral politics), and happiness (private property).  Everywhere the same whimsical ideas of the future. Everywhere democracy. Everywhere discourse to shape our desires and distress in a way acceptable to the electoral state, discourse designed to make our very moments here together into a set of legible and fruitless demands.

Totally managed death. A machine for administering death, for the proliferation of technologies of death. As elsewhere, things rule. Dead objects rule. In this sense, it matters little what face one puts on the university—whether Yudof or some other lackey. These are merely the personifications of the rule of the dead, the pools of investments, the buildings, the flows of materials into and out of the physical space of the university—each one the product of some exploitation—which seek to absorb more of our work, more tuition, more energy. The university is a machine which wants to grow, to accumulate, to expand, to absorb more and more of the living into its peculiar and perverse machinery: high-tech research centers, new stadiums and office complexes. And at this critical juncture the only way it can continue to grow is by more intense exploitation, higher tuition, austerity measures for the departments that fail to pass the test of ‘relevancy.’

But the ‘irrelevant’ departments also have their place.  With their ‘pure’ motives of knowledge for its own sake, they perpetuate the blind inertia of meaning ostensibly detached from its social context.  As the university cultivates its cozy relationship with capital, war and power, these discourses and research programs play their own role, co-opting and containing radical potential.  And so we attend lecture after lecture about how ‘discourse’ produces ‘subjects,’ ignoring the most obvious fact that we ourselves are produced by this discourse about discourse which leaves us believing that it is only words which matter, words about words which matter.  The university gladly permits the precautionary lectures on biopower; on the production of race and gender; on the reification and the fetishization of commodities.  A taste of the poison serves well to inoculate us against any confrontational radicalism.  And all the while power weaves the invisible nets which contain and neutralize all thought and action, that bind revolution inside books, lecture halls.

There is no need to speak truth to power when power already speaks the truth.  The university is a graveyard– así es. The graveyard of liberal good intentions, of meritocracy, opportunity, equality, democracy. Here the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. We graft our flesh, our labor, our debt to the skeletons of this or that social cliché. In seminars and lectures and essays, we pay tribute to the university’s ghosts, the ghosts of all those it has excluded—the immiserated, the incarcerated, the just-plain-fucked. They are summoned forth and banished by a few well-meaning phrases and research programs, given their book titles, their citations.  This is our gothic—we are so morbidly aware, we are so practiced at stomaching horror that the horror is thoughtless.

In this graveyard our actions will never touch, will never become the conduits of a movement, if we remain permanently barricaded within prescribed identity categories—our force will be dependent on the limited spaces of recognition built between us.  Here we are at odds with one another socially, each of us: students, faculty, staff, homebums, activists, police, chancellors, administrators, bureaucrats, investors, politicians, faculty/ staff/ homebums/ activists/ police/ chancellors/ administrators/ bureaucrats/ investors/ politicians-to-be.  That is, we are students, or students of color, or queer students of color, or faculty, or Philosophy Faculty, or Gender and Women Studies faculty, or we are custodians, or we are shift leaders—each with our own office, place, time, and given meaning.  We form teams, clubs, fraternities, majors, departments, schools, unions, ideologies, identities, and subcultures—and thankfully each group gets its own designated burial plot.  Who doesn’t participate in this graveyard?

In the university we prostrate ourselves before a value of separation, which in reality translates to a value of domination.  We spend money and energy trying to convince ourselves we’re brighter than everyone else.  Somehow, we think, we possess some trait that means we deserve more than everyone else.  We have measured ourselves and we have measured others.  It should never feel terrible ordering others around, right? It should never feel terrible to diagnose people as an expert, manage them as a bureaucrat, test them as a professor, extract value from them their capital as a businessman.  It should feel good, gratifying, completing.  It is our private wet dream for the future; everywhere, in everyone this same dream of domination.  After all, we are intelligent, studious, young. We worked hard to be here, we deserve this.

We are convinced, owned, broken.  We know their values better than they do: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. This triumvirate of sacred values are ours of course, and in this moment of practiced theater—the fight between the university and its own students—we have used their words on their stages: Save public education!

When those values are violated by the very institutions which are created to protect them, the veneer fades, the tired set collapses: and we call it injustice, we get indignant.  We demand justice from them, for them to adhere to their values.  What many have learned again and again is that these institutions don’t care for those values, not at all, not for all. And we are only beginning to understand that those values are not even our own.

The values create popular images and ideals (healthcare, democracy, equality, happiness, individuality, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, public education) while they mean in practice the selling of commodified identities, the state’s monopoly on violence, the expansion of markets and capital accumulation, the rule of property, the rule of exclusions based on race, gender, class, and domination and humiliation in general.  They sell the practice through the image.  We’re taught we’ll live the images once we accept the practice.

In this crisis the Chancellors and Presidents, the Regents and the British Petroleums, the politicians and the managers, they all intend to be true to their values and capitalize on the university economically and socially—which is to say, nothing has changed, it is only an escalation, a provocation.  Their most recent attempt to reorganize wealth and capital is called a crisis so that we are more willing to accept their new terms as well as what was always dead in the university, to see just how dead we are willing to play, how non-existent, how compliant, how desirous.

Every institution has of course our best interest in mind, so much so that we’re willing to pay, to enter debt contracts, to strike a submissive pose in the classroom, in the lab, in the seminar, in the dorm, and eventually or simultaneously in the workplace to pay back those debts.  Each bulging institutional value longing to become more than its sentiment through us, each of our empty gestures of feigned-anxiety to appear under pressure, or of cool-ambivalence to appear accustomed to horror, every moment of student life, is the management of our consent to social death.

Social death is our banal acceptance of an institution’s meaning for our own lack of meaning.  It’s the positions we thoughtlessly enact.  It’s the particular nature of being owned.

Social rupture is the initial divorce between the owners and the owned.

A social movement is a function of war.  War contains the ability to create a new frame, to build a new tension for the agents at play, new dynamics in the battles both for the meaning and the material.  When we move without a return to their tired meaning, to their tired configurations of the material, we are engaging in war.

It is November 2009.  For an end to the values of social death we need ruptures and self-propelled, unmanaged movements of wild bodies.  We need, we desire occupations.  We are an antagonistic dead.

Talk to your friends, take over rooms, take over as many of these dead buildings. We will find one another.

Life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning precisely only through a decision.  –Giorgio Agamben

Fur Free Friday

Below is a partial vid of Fur Free Friday. Jon Gosselin 2.0 enjoyed spuing random facts at us about how B2 doesn’t sell real fur (see  below), claimed we were “always” at this B2 location (we’d never been there before), and then he threatened us with some bylaw ticket.

Prior correspondence with B2:

Shame on B2/Brown’s shoe company for selling dog fur from China!

B2 Shoes has 2 locations in Vancouver, 1112 Robson St (604-687-3383) and 650 W 41st Ave, (604-261-2071).  Recently they have brought in men’s and women’s winter jackets with HUGE raccoon dog trims on them.  The jackets can be viewed at this website, http://www.mackage.com/.

The jackets are actually labelled ASIATIC RACCOON, and in fact there is no such animal, if you google asiatic raccoon the first thing that comes up is RACCOON DOG, a species of canine from China.
Click here to view footage of a fur farm in China where raccoon dogs are having their skin removed when they are not even close to being dead, or even unconscious, http://www.peta.org/feat/chineseFurFarms/index.asp .

The company claims that the jackets are in fact raccoon (not that it matters to us which species it is), this is the answer we got:

“I have attached the letter that my supplier has written you explaining your concerns about the fur trims used on his garments.    Also attached are Chinese appraisal reports confirming that the furs used are in fact Raccoon and not dog.”

Click here: b2, to read B2 further try to defend themselves.

A Shocking Look Inside Chinese Fur Farms:

When undercover investigators made their way onto Chinese fur farms recently, they found that many animals are still alive and struggling desperately when workers flip them onto their backs or hang them up by their legs or tails to skin them. When workers begin to cut the skin and fur from an animal’s leg, the free limbs kick and writhe. Workers stomp on the necks and heads of animals who struggle too hard in order to make a clean cut. When the fur is finally peeled off over the animals’ heads, their naked, bloody bodies are thrown onto a pile of other animals. Some are still alive, breathing in ragged gasps and blinking slowly. Some of the animals’ hearts are still beating five to 10 minutes after they have been skinned. Before they are skinned alive, animals are pulled from their cages and thrown to the ground. Workers bludgeon them with metal rods or slam them onto hard surfaces, causing broken bones and convulsions but not always immediate death. Animals watch helplessly as workers make their way down the rows.

Undercover investigators from Swiss Animal Protection/EAST International recently toured fur farms in China’s Hebei Province, and it quickly became clear why outsiders are banned from visiting Chinese fur farms. There is no national animal welfare law in China, which means that farmers can house and slaughter animals however they see fit. These animals suffer miserable lives and excruciating deaths. The investigators found horrors beyond their worst fears and concluded, “Conditions on Chinese fur farms make a mockery of the most elementary animal welfare standards. In their lives and their unspeakable deaths, these animals have been denied even the simplest acts of kindness.”

Living Hell

On Chinese fur farms, foxes, minks, rabbits, and other animals pace and shiver in outdoor wire cages, exposed to driving rain, freezing nights, and scorching sun. Mother animals—who are driven insane from rough handling and intense confinement and have nowhere to hide while giving birth—often kill their babies after delivering litters. Diseases and injuries are widespread, and animals suffering from anxiety-induced psychosis chew on their own limbs and throw themselves repeatedly against the bars of their cages.

Is There a Skeleton in Your Closet?

The globalization of the fur trade has made it impossible to know where fur products come from. Animal skins move through international auction houses and are purchased and distributed to manufacturers around the world. Finished goods are often exported. Even if a fur garment’s label says that it was made in a European country, the animals were likely raised and slaughtered elsewhere—possibly on an unregulated Chinese fur farm.

Because fur’s origin can’t be traced, anyone who wears any fur at all shares the blame for the horrific conditions on Chinese fur farms. The only way to prevent such unimaginable cruelty is never to wear fur.

New Libertarian Manifesto

Click it, save it, read it, live it, change the world, simple as that.

Not sure what the heck they’re talking about? visit Agorism.info for more, well, info.

But have no fear, this sexy blog is not forgotten! If any of y’all are personally familiar with me, you’ll know I’ve been really busy lately. But, while I may not have been blogging, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve been busy promoting liberty. I have begun broadcasting once a week from 10pm-12am on wednesday nights. I broadcast with rick caldwell, and you can listen at Ifaq.us we’ve got about 9 shows under our belts so far (we did an annex of our 8th show because of massive content overflow). So far it has been an exceptional expierence and has grown much more quickly than I would have expected. I’ve also registered Thenewactivist.org, although I have not yet fixed it up like it needs to be. (actually, right now, it’s a picture of a hot japanese girl and a bunch of random test pages).  But yeah, thats what I’ve been up to, and most of why I’ve been gone for so long.

I saw how anarchy works. The birds didn’t need any of the others, really, but they followed a leader … until the flock went in a direction they didn’t like. Then they veered off. Some went with a new leader. Some ended up on their own.

I realized when I was watching that happen that there are so many connections … necessary connections between people that that sort of anarchy just isn’t possible in a thinking/feeling population.

I was watching—really—how free they were. It was a beautiful thing. I don’t think that sort of freedom is possible for people, though, and seeking it out would just disrupt the balances we all set up in our lives.

By Larken Rose

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, in Philadelphia, a bunch of guys got together and wrote a letter to their king. The letter was very eloquent, and well thought out, but it basically boiled down to this:

“Dear King George,
You’re not the boss of us!
Sincerely,
A Bunch of Troublemakers”

That’s essentially what the Declaration of Independence was: a bunch of radicals declaring that they would no longer recognize the right of their king to rule them, at all, ever again. They went on to create a new boss, which turned into a new oppressor, but we’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s consider the essence of that attitude: “You’re not the boss of me!”

This July 4th, like every year, millions of Americans are celebrating Independence Day with various parades, picnics, fireworks, and so on. But how many of those people celebrating have ever actually considered what the Declaration was actually about, and what the colonists actually did? The colonists did not merely beg the king to change his ways. In fact, the Declaration explains how they had tried that, to no avail. Instead, the colonists were doing something far more drastic.

In short, they committed treason. They broke the law. They disobeyed their government. They were traitors, criminals and tax cheats. The Boston Tea Party was not merely a tax protest, but open lawlessness. Furthermore, truth be told, some of the colonists were even cop-killers. At Lexington, when King George’s “law enforcers” told the colonists to lay down their guns, the colonists responded with, “No, you’re not the boss of us!” (Well, that was the meaning, if not the exact verbiage.) And so we had “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” widely regarded as the beginning of the American Revolution.

Looking back now, we know the outcome. We know who eventually won, and we don’t mind cheering for the rebels. But make no mistake: when you cheer for the founders of this country, you are cheering for law-breakers and traitors. As well you should. But, for all the flag-waving and celebrating that goes on every July 4th, do Americans actually believe in what the colonists did? Do they really believe in the attitude expressed in the Declaration of Independence? Are they really still capable of supporting a mantra of “You’re not the boss of me!”?

In short, no. Imagine the equivalent of what the colonists did so many years ago, being done today. Imagine a group of people writing a letter to the United States government, sending a letter to Congress and to the President, saying that they would no longer pay federal taxes, they would no longer obey federal laws, and that they would resist–by force, if necessary–any attempt by federal agents to enforce those laws. How would a group which did such things be viewed today, by most Americans?

They would be viewed as nut-cases, scofflaws and terrorists, despicable criminals and malcontents. They would be scorned as the scum of the earth, despised by just about everyone who today celebrates Independence Day.

How ironic.

So why the double standard? Why would the American public today condemn the exact same attitudes and behaviors which they glorify and praise in the context of the American Revolution? Quite simply, it’s because, for all the proud talk of “land of the free and home of the brave,” the spirit of resistance–the courage to say “You’re not the boss of us!”–has been trained out of the American people.

We have become a nation of wimps.

For years and years, in the churches and schools, on the news, in the media, and from everywhere around us, we have been taught one thing above all else: that obedience to authority is the highest virtue, and that disobedience is the worst sin. As a result, even most of those who now claim to be zealous advocates for individual rights and personal liberty will almost always couch their “demands” with disclaimers that, of course, their efforts for justice will be done “within the system,” and that they would never advocate anything “illegal.” They claim to be devout proponents of freedom, and yet all they ever do is seek a political solution, whether through lobbying of politicians, elections, or other government-approved means.

Of course, government never approves of anything which might actually endanger government power. As the bumper-sticker says, “If voting made a difference, it would be illegal.” And why should civilized people assume that change must be done “legally” and “within the system”? That is obviously NOT what the Declaration of Independence was about. In fact, the Declaration states quite plainly that when a government ceases to be a protector of individual liberty, it is not only the right, but the DUTY of the people to ALTER or ABOLISH that form of government. In other words, when the government becomes an oppressor, instead of a protector– as is obviously the case today–the people are morally obligated to adopt an attitude of, “You’re not the boss of us!”

So how many Americans are doing that? Almost none. Instead, even the most vocal critics of corruption and injustice usually do little more than banging their heads against a brick wall, begging, in half a dozen different ways, for the tyrants to please be nicer to us. (Meanwhile, they go to great lengths to distance themselves from people like me, for fear of what the general public might think of them. As a result, I believe the general public, and those in government, view them pretty much as I view them: as harmless and irrelevant conformists, destined to forever beg for freedom, and never achieve it.)

Make no mistake, begging and whining is not what the Declaration of Independence was about. It was about breaking the law, when the law is unjust. It was about committing treason, when the rulers became oppressive. It was about disobedience–civil disobedience, when effective, and not-so-civil disobedience when necessary. It was about open resistance, including violent resistance when called for.

So where is that attitude today? Where is the candidate advocating such a thing? Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams–where are the modern equivalents? For all the whining about extremists, where are those willing to openly resist injustice? Not only don’t most Americans believe in resisting tyranny, they feel extremely uncomfortable just hearing others talk about it, even in abstract terms (like this).

Maybe it’s just that we’re not quite at the level of oppression to justify resistance. Is that it? Hardly. If two or three percent taxation justified rebellion in 1776, why doesn’t fifty percent taxation justify it now? If a few puny excise taxes on tea and pieces of paper justified it then, why don’t the myriad of unavoidable, crushing taxes at all levels, and the hordes of callous, vindictive tax collectors justify it now? If the relatively unusual cases of Redcoats abusing colonists justified it then, why doesn’t it justify it when American police see no problem with randomly stopping, detaining, interrogating and searching anyone they want, whenever they want, for any reason or no reason at all?

Does anyone think Thomas Jefferson, if he were alive today, would quietly allow himself to be strip-searched, and allow his belongings to be rummaged through, by some brain-dead TSA thug? Read the Fourth Amendment. They had a revolution over that sort of thing. Does anyone think that Patrick Henry would take kindly to being robbed blind to pay for whatever war-mongering the politicians wanted to engage in this week? Read what the Founders said about standing armies. They had a revolution over that sort of thing. Think James Madison would go along with being disarmed, by the various state and federal control freaks? Read the Second Amendment. They had a revolution over that sort of thing. Think George Washington would be happy to have both his earnings and savings constantly looted by a parasite class, to pay for all manner of wealth redistribution, political handouts and other socialist garbage? Think Thomas Paine would gladly be extorted to give all his money to some giant, failed corporation or some huge international bank? Think the founders would have quietly gone along with what this country has become today? Think they would have done nothing more than vote, or whine?

Well, the founders are dead. And, unfortunately, so is their spirit of resistance. In short, just about all of the flag-waving and celebrating that happens every July 4th is nothing but empty hypocrisy. How many Americans today can say, loudly and proudly, like they mean it, “Give me liberty or give me death!”? Or, at least, in the modern vernacular, “You’re not the boss of me!”? Anyone? In this nation that imagines itself to be the land of the free and the home of the brave, where are those who dare to resist, or even dare to talk about it? And I don’t mean voting, or whining to your congressman, or begging your masters to not whip you so hard. I’m talking about resisting, refusing to obey.

America, where is your Independence Day pride now? Exactly what are you proud of? I have a message for you, from a guy named Sam. Samuel Adams, that is. Yeah, the beer guy. But he did a little more for this country than make beer. Here is his message:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

When’s the last time you heard a modern so-called “statesman” say something like that?

So what happened? When did Americans lose their ability to say, “You’re not the boss of me,” and why? Yes, most people are scared, and for good reason. With the capacity for violence of the current police state, and the willingness of the politicians and their thugs to crush anyone who threatens their power, everyone has to choose his battles carefully, and decide for himself what he’s willing to risk, what is worth fighting for and what isn’t.

That makes sense, but there is more to it than just fear. Because not only won’t most Americans resist, but they will condemn anyone who does. If you do what the founders did, most people in this country would call you a tax cheat, a malcontent, a criminal, a traitor, even a terrorist. Why? Why do Americans now vehemently condemn those who say and do exactly what the Founders did a couple hundred years ago? When did our priorities and view of the world change so drastically, and why?

I’ll tell you why. Gradually, and very systematically, we have been trained to measure our own worth, not by what we produce, not by how we treat other people, but by how well we obey authority. Consider the term, “law abiding taxpayer.” How many people wear that label as a badge of honor? “I am a law-abiding taxpayer!” When they say that, they mean, “I’m a good person.” But is that what it really means?

Well, “law-abiding” just means that you do whatever the politicians tell you to do. We speak with great reverence of this thing called “the law,” as if it is the decree of the gods, which no decent human being would dare to disobey. But what is it really? It’s whatever the politicians decide to command you to do. Why on earth would anyone think that obedience to a bunch of liars and crooks is some profound moral obligation? Is there any reason for us to treat with reverence such commands and demands? No rational reason, no. The only reason we do it is because we have been trained to do it.

Some might point out that obeying the laws against theft and murder is a good thing to do. Well, yes and no. It is good to refrain from committing theft and murder, but it is NOT because “the law” says so. It is because theft and murder are inherently wrong, as they infringe upon the rights of others. And that was true before any politician passed a “law” about it, and will be true even if they “legalize” theft and murder (as every government has done, in the name of “taxation” and “war”). What is right and wrong does not at all depend upon what is “legal” or “illegal.” And if you need POLITICIANS to tell you what is right and what is wrong, you need your head examined. Instead, you should judge the validity of so- called “laws” by whether they match what is inherently right and wrong. Thomas Jefferson put it this way:

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because the law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.”

So why should anyone be proud of being “law-abiding,” when all it means is blindly obeying whatever arbitrary commands the parasite class spews out this week? And pride in being a “taxpayer” is no better, since all that phrase means is that you give the politicians lots of money. When, exactly, did obeying politicians and giving them money become the measure of whether you’re a good person?

Consider Nazi Germany. Were the law-abiding taxpayers in Nazi Germany the good guys? No. By obeying the so-called “laws” of that time, the majority allowed, or even assisted in, a nearly incomprehensible level of evil. And by being “taxpayers,” they provided the funding for it. No, the good people in Germany were the criminals and tax cheats, who refused to assist, even passively, in the oppressions done in the name of “government.”

The same is true under the regimes of Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro–you can go right down the list (and it’s a very long list). Under every nasty regime in history, the obedient subjects, who quietly did as they were told, the law-abiding taxpayers, were not the good guys. The law-breakers and rebels, the so-called traitors and terrorists, those were the good guys. How about in this country, when slavery was legal? The cowards were the ones obeying the law, while the good guys broke it.

How about here, today? Is it good to fund what the government is doing? Do you have some moral obligation to give your “fair share” of however many thousands of dollars, so Obama can give it to his banker buddies? Is it noble to fund whatever war the politicians decide to engage in this week? Do you like paying for the detention and torture of people who haven’t been convicted, or even charged with any crime? (By the way, instead of doing away with that, Obama just gave it a new name: preventative detention.) Is it some great virtue to have helped to finance the police state growing up all around you, on both the federal and state levels? In short, is being a “law-abiding taxpayer” really something you should be proud of, or is it something you should be ashamed of?

Over time we have forgotten a very important secret–a secret the control freaks don’t want you to know; a secret some of the Founders hinted at, though even most of them didn’t seem to fully grasp it. Ready for it?

You own yourself.

You are not the property of the politicians, or anyone else. I own me, and you own you. Each of you owns himself. Sounds simple enough, right? And most people respond with, “Well duh, of course. That’s no secret. We knew that.” But in reality most people don’t know that.

If you own yourself, would anyone have the right to take, without your consent, the fruits of your labor? What you earn, with your time and effort, does anyone have the right to take that from you by force? Of course not, most will answer. Really? And what if they call it “taxation”? “Oh, well, that’s different.” No, it isn’t.

If you own yourself, would anyone have the right to force you to pay rent for a house you already paid for, under threat of taking your house away? Of course not. What if they call it “property taxes”? Oh, that’s different. No, it isn’t. And you can go right down the list: if you truly own yourself, the vast majority of so- called “laws,” at all levels, are absolutely illegitimate. As Jefferson put it, ANY so-called “law” that infringes upon individual liberty–which is dang near all of them–is inherently bogus.

But let’s take it one step further. If you own yourself–your life, liberty and property–doesn’t that imply that you have the right to defend those things from any and all aggressors? Yes. What if the aggressors call themselves “government” and call their attacks and robberies “law” and “taxes”? You still have the right. Changing the name of an act cannot make something bad into something good. And if you have the right to defend your life, liberty and property from all aggressors, it stands to reason that you have the right to equip yourself to do so. In other words, you have the right to be armed–the right to possess the equipment to exert whatever force is necessary to repel any attempts to infringe upon your rights to life, liberty and property.

I know it makes people uncomfortable (especially people who work for the government) when I say the following: I want every sane, adult American to have the ability to use force, including deadly force, against government agents. I don’t want people randomly gunning down cops, but I do want the people to retain the ability to forcibly resist their own government. The very concept bothers a lot of people, but what is the alternative? The alternative is something a lot scarier: that the people should NOT have the means to resist their own government.

But, once again, even most people who claim to be vehemently pro-freedom, don’t like to talk about what that really means. Many “gun rights” organizations, for example, go to great lengths to beg the politicians to LET them remain armed. Why? At Lexington, when the British troops told the colonists to lay down their weapons, what was the response? Did the colonists say, “Awe, can’t we keep them, pretty please?”? No, they had a very different attitude, something alone the lines of, “You’re not the boss of us!”

If you own yourself–and this is a big one–it is not only your right, but your most profound obligation as a human being, to judge for yourself what is right and wrong, and to act accordingly. But what if people claiming to be “authority” want to force you to do something contrary to what you deem to be right? Do you have an obligation to obey them, and ignore your own conscience? No. What if their threats are called “legislation”? It makes no difference.

You are always, at all times, in every situation, obligated to do what you deem right, no matter what so-called “government” and “authority” and “law” have to say about it. And when the tyrants and control freaks, authoritarian thugs and megalomaniacs, try to tell you that you are an evil, nasty, despicable criminal and traitor for daring to think for yourself, you have a right and duty to stand firm, and say, with confidence, “You are not the boss of me!”

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I recently revisited the idea of anarcho-syndicalism and am coming to the conclusion that I have a good deal of affinity with its political and economic philosophy. An ongoing critique of (a certain kind of) community development that I am trying to piece together seems to be leading to many anarcho-syndicalist conclusions. Is that perhaps because this position already informs my thinking?

One things is clear… I am completely disgruntled by the way that dominant theories of economics see it as a science independent of human power and thought. Where is the engagement with the innumerable factors that shape people’s behaviours? Where are the critiques? Where are normative statements. OK. No ranting. But in any case, a more expansive, thoughtful form of economics, one that sees itself as just one of many important domains of our existence is sorely needed. Behavioural economics may be making some headway here but at times it runs the risk of merely trying to better accommodate ‘irrational’ human behaviour into its framework. That framework is typically the dominant economic one which continues to prioritise rent-seeking, profit-maximising, and growth ahead of everything else. Other fields of economics such as ecological economics may provide more fundamental critiques of dominant economic thinking and practice. ‘Political economy’, actually a precursor to modern ‘economics’, which considered structural relations of production and consumption in addition to ethical considerations may still have much of value to contribute in making critiques of the contemporary de-politicised positivist field of ‘economics’.

What happens when the insights gained from various inter-disciplinary critiques of mainstream economic thinking and practice are merged with a critique of community development (as failing to address the structural and contextual factors inherent in a capitalist economy enforced or protected by a state power with a monopoly on violence within an already divided and unequal society that undermines an ecologically sound high quality of life for all)? Alternatives are badly needed in our patterns of economic, social and political organisation. Power, as an underlying element that shapes social, political and economic orders, needs critical attention. But people cannot engage actively with abstract ‘powers’ or ‘forces’, even though they may speak out against them. They can engage only with embodied power: power living in the relationships between the things, people, events, processes and ideas around them.

Community development seeks to create a culture of cooperation and mutual upliftment based on an equal distribution of power within the community. It includes attempts to create committees of representative-leaders who can be kept genuinely accountable to the people. This is good. But what about the powerful, who will often, thanks to the prevailing logics of the games they are playing, feel they have little to gain by helping along community development efforts (though they may be prepared to become patrons of certain activities that reinforce or establish their status and power)? Who are they? How do they derail community development efforts? In an Indian village, who are the powerful? Where is power concentrated? What about the influence of powerful actors outside of the community on shaping local realities? This last question needs to be handled with caution as macro-critiques must not be permitted to undermine micro-action – for example, by leading to an over-investment of time and energy in protest and policy advocacy. Engaging with locally embodied power must be a central feature of any efforts at social change because shouting into the wind is often ineffective. Indeed, it is quite probable that protest and policy advocacy efforts that emerge through and within direct practical engagements with local embodied/manifest power will be better targeted, more timely and generally more effective.

In a context where the only hope of reversing environmental degradation, ending absolute poverty (I.e. not enough water and food for a healthy life) and creating a vibrant local economy is through massive investment (time, energy, money and resources) in the restoration of natural resources (or the establishment of ecologically sound enterprises and industries) – surely the question of who controls the funds for such investment (and of course, what they do with it) becomes pivotal to the future of the locality. Aside from private wealth and the resources mobilised by NGOs, the financial resources of the State, large amounts of which are made available through local government in the form of schemes and policies, cannot be ignored, simply because it far exceeds any other available source (though there are other very critical reasons to be considered, such as the fact that the state can be, and often is, used as a tool by those with more power to consolidate this power, for example, by using or legitimising the use of force).

And so, this calls the State into the game. The State: that bizarre, ever-present, looming yet inaccessible ‘thing’, that network of relationships and meaning that has special powers vested in it, supposedly, ‘by the people’. Anarchist critiques of the state present it as a massive obstacle to liberation of the oppressed and exploited because of the role it plays in either directly supporting or, as the agent with a monopoly on legal violence, simply turning a blind eye to both oppression and exploitation. But somehow, I can’t see the state just closing down one day. How do anarcho-syndicalists relate to the state? What is the relationship between syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists? Can an initiative be anarcho-syndicalist at its core but, given State-infested circumstances, find itself necessarily making compromises on its anti-State position – at least in practice?

I think this ties in closely to a question that really tickles me: is it really possible to ‘claim’ spaces and make them into ‘people’s spaces’? Can ‘the people’ encroach, claim, re-claim or hi-jack formal institutions of government – especially at the local level? How would this change the very essence of the State? Would a claimed State still be a State or would it become something else altogether?

And who are (or what is) ‘the people’? Are ‘the people’ a united group who have signed a contract with the State? Are they fragmented? Do some dominate and exploit others? Do some have more control over the state ‘machinery’ than others? ‘The people’, in my view, needs to be unpacked to avoid its reduction into a seemingly homogeneous entity when in reality it is internally complex with unclear boundaries. Otherwise meaningless propositions and conclusions will be made that do not serve to deepen our understanding of reality but rather reinforce idealised and ungrounded notions of reality based on abstract concepts.

Unpacking ‘the people’ through a ‘power lens’ would reveal ‘it’ (it, of course is not really a discernible ‘thing’) to be a complex and internally heterogeneous patterning of power relations. Those ‘with power’ are those with the most control over the means of retaining and accumulating power with respect to others in society. Clearly, those who gain the most at present are not likely to want to lose their relative position of advantage with respect to others when they are not the ones who have to pay the price for it. Without a more equal distribution of control over the means of retaining and accumulating power amongst (or within) ‘the people’, a more socially and ecologically just outcome is unlikely to be forthcoming. More specifically, those with power are unlikely to want to let anyone take it away.

Talk of ‘the people’ taking over local government, therefore, demands first a proper formulation of ‘the people’. Which people? The answer is, broadly speaking, those with less power. The losers. Those whose lives are getting (absolutely or even relatively) worse or harder instead of better. Those whose exploitation through the complex machinations of the modern economy undermine their sustainable livelihoods and replace them with money, worsening environmental conditions and an increasingly hard to maintain quality of life. You were born in this family so you must toil in the factory. There is no question of ethics in any of this. Things just are how they are.

So essentially, we are talking about the disempowered and marginalised claiming not just a greater share of power in local government, but striving for a more equitable and flowing distribution of power within society in general. With respect to local government, this refers to a process in which the pattern of power relations between (and amongst) the people and their representative-leaders changes from one of excessive concentration in the hands of leader-representatives (and the puppet-masters for whom they work) to one of more distributed power, in which leader-representatives are held accountable to the people by the people. Experimentation with alternative forms of power relations is, therefore, essential at the level of the locality. No doubt participation in alternative power relations in spaces outside the locality, or in alternative, created spaces, can provide an experience of different power relations and the dream of enacting them in more familiar spaces.

Familiar spaces represent something familiar to our minds and bodies and, perhaps unsurprisingly, often invoke familiar responses. Enacting alternative forms of power relating – which don’t take long before they stick out like sore thumbs – is difficult. Not only does conditioning or the internalisation of roles, power, relationships, practices in the form of habitus (and the fear of reactions to deviations from what is ‘expected’), come in to play but so too does the active response of those around one who may not feel so enthusiastic having the established order challenged. All the more so when the very power of these individuals vis-a-vis others is derived from the established order.

What might be the factors that encourage people to cross a line and challenge power relations? For an SC woman to pluck up the courage to perform a dramatisation of open defecation (her present reality) in front of a crowd of 700 fellow-villagers? Or to stand up and challenge an influential local politician in front of the same crowd? For a harijan to sit on a the same jajam as a brahmin (or vice-versa)? How do the ‘power relations’ internalised or imagined in one’s mind shape the way an individual behaves and responds to ‘power signals’ received from others (whether they were sent intentionally or not)? While all this warrants further inquiry, it is clear that such changes happen. In my observation, the following points seem to be key, though by no means a complete list of, factors:

• Individual concern for a particular issue
• Participation in a social network that gives strength and confidence
• Participating in/experiencing alternative power relations in alternative spaces
• Practicing alternative power relations in different kinds of spaces (household, neighbourhood meeting, local government meetings, government offices)

It seems critical to recognise that not all changes in power relations – indeed, not most – are likely to entail what may appear to an outside or casual observer as a significant shift in or challenge to established power relations. What is important to recognise, however, is the symbolic significance of the ‘transgression’ in the eyes of the transgressor, those whom she ‘transgresses’ with (or on behalf of) and those who are ‘transgressed’ against. Thoughtful transgression against established oppressive political, economic or social orders, in which transgressions emerge through a process of interaction, collective meaning-making by a group of interdependent individuals sharing common purposes and identities (whatever brings them together), must, therefore, lie at the heart of any significant process of change towards a more just society.

Of course, the future is unclear and the fruits of efforts made today should not be expected tomorrow. I would hold that so long as a social process is founded on these basic elements of thoughtful transgression and continuous interaction with a widening array of ‘others’, they are likely to head in the right direction. There will be failed attempts, mistakes, collapses, turn-arounds and all the rest of it. There will also be successes that help to lay the foundation for the emergence of radical new social institutions that are co-created more transparently and pro-actively by those who live them. New norms (patterns of interaction) will begin to emerge through the myriad transgressions that are made on a day-to-day basis.

The real questions we have to work on, as we deepen our understanding of the complex matrix of oppressive relations within which we exist, are which transgressions to engage in, which to support, and which to avoid – and this forces us to consider critically the ethical dimensions of our particular ideology and the practices it legitimises. Is the transgression against one’s own internalised power relations (my habitus)? Is it carried out ’symbolically’ in a ’safe space’ as an act of secret deviance to create collective meaning? Is it carried out openly in the face of the ‘other’? And if so, is it identified as a transgression by those present? How is it dealt with? How is the way the transgression is enacted and perceived linked to what follows? What happens if the transgressors get co-opted? These are some of the questions that any individual, group, organisation or movement truly concerned with bringing about profound change needs to engage with.

It came as a surprise to me when I realised, sifting through our reviews one fine day, we hadn’t done a single Punk band! I’ve only heard a little bit of it, and Baba T is a huge fan of the Punk aesthetic and ethic, so I set out to review the Pistols, and their only album ever.

The Pistols aren’t the first punk rock band, but they pulled massively in two different directions, compared to the Ramones. Firstly, they distilled all the lyrics down to the pure anarchist manifesto that is the sum of the lyrics of this album. Secondly, they added a bit more dynamics to the music and a little bit more technical proficiency in their instrumentalists. Only a bit. Except for Sid Vicious, of course, who couldn’t really play bass, yet is surely one of the greatest bassists of all time, if only for sheer attitude.

Doesn't get 'Punker' than this

No matter, Glen Matlock recorded these studio lines. They are just OK. As is the guitar playing(whoa, guitar solos!). As is the drumming. They are more proficient than the Ramones, but The Ramones really were about all four members there, whereas The Pistols reek of Johnny Rotten + 3 guys playing Punk Rock. Great as the Pistols are, I prefer The Ramones any day of the week.

The one thing that really strikes you about the Pistols though, is Johnny Rotten’s ’singing’. He sounds like he is barely tolerant of the establishment and is doing them a huge favour by pointing out that which is bleeding obvious to him. Brilliant.

I know the Sex Pistols were massively influential, but frankly I’m not sure how much their music had to do it. We all know about Malcolm Mclaren, who did a fantastic (if opportunistic) job of promoting the Sex Pistols as bonafide outlaws. And then there is Sid Vicious and that hooker chick he was dating whose name escapes me. See what I mean? Most of the stuff related to the Pistols that got a lot of attention is their behaviour than their music. I mean, the songs themselves aren’t too consistent. Of course, ‘God Save the Queen’ is an absolutely fantastic. ‘EMI’ is great too. But the real Anarchist manifesto here is ‘Anarchy in the UK’. Brilliant. But the other songs? I’m afraid they’re not too hot.

Punk Rock is music boiled down to its bare bones in all its glory. And this here is the only sort of a politics that bare-bones music could adjust itself to: anarchy. It’s fantastic as far as the big perspective is taken, looking at the Pistols as a response to stuffy middle class comfort. Despite the massive influence this album has had, I wish it had had a couple of other great songs. Four out of twelve isn’t enough. This doesn’t quite sound right.

- El Bajista

That’s not how it will work here. That’s how it did work in Zimbabwe. I saw a tragic scene on cable TV (not on Oz TV) where a Zimbabwe woman was desperately sifting through sand by a river. The reporter asked her what she was doing. She said she needed a few tiny pieces of gold dust from this river or she and her two babies would starve to death. So in Zimbabwe producers really did want gold dust for bread.

Here, it is likely the currency will still be enforced (at the point of a govt gun) but that the gold price will (eventually) jump. How high, no one knows. When, no one knows.

So you put your “real” savings (cash you don’t need for 12 months) in one ounce pieces of gold. If it goes down (IT WILL!) don’t worry. Don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations. Just know that in extremis, if the monetary system breaks down, societies have ALWAYS relied on gold when govts collapse. Zimbabwe is just a recent example.

I won’t produce and sell anything at the end of the day if I don’t get paid in gold and silver.

Then, when (not if) the US$ collapses or default occurs, you exchange SOME gold for the toilet paper of the day and continue on your merry way. The money you had in your pocket is worth less, but the gold is worth more. Simple. You keep selling your gold when the price jumps and you think the monetary system is back to stability. Right now, it’s a no-brainer – China is the buyer of last resort for gold so LT there is no risk for gold in US$. The only risk is gold in A$. That is something I can’t predict. However I know the stupidity of the RBA and the banks in Australia and know the models they use to price risk, so I’m fairly confident gold will go up even in A$ given the fairly uniform stupidity of our own financial institutions. They should all get out of residential property and set up branches to service sustainable farmers who will see incomes jump when China starts importing food – but they have no idea.

Investors used to save in gold so they could get money out of the banking system, realising that their deposits were not actually at the bank (they were already lent out under FRB). As I’ve argued before the central banks have proven themselves to be completely gutless and will print if there’s a bank run, so that reason to hold gold no longer really applies. It also means deposits ARE money today.

As long as you put your money in a TBTF institution the central bank can be guaranteed to keep bailing and bailing and bailing until we are drowning in liquidity. Like the US today.

You save LT in gold because when this happens, it is not that you can’t get your paper out of the bank; the paper becomes toilet paper at the end of the day. It is 100% certain. Only the timing is in question.

The whole of monetary history from 1694 on is a simple one: The bankers embezzle. There is a bank run exposing bank illiquidity/insolvency. The bankers friends in govt and at the central bank have to make a fateful decision: Defend the bank (print money/bail out the bank at the expense of savers and the general public) or Let the Bank Die and keep the money supply constant.

On every occasion I have studied (even in the 1930s) the central bank has tried to save their private banker friends first. Every time. I cannot think of an instance when the central bank has said – “No, I’m gong to let 5 big banks fail.” It just never happens. TBTF means “I’ve grown so big that I own you, the central bank, and the govt.”

The whole game is destroyed NOT by banks runs or insolvency BUT either by a currency crisis OR when malinvestments in the real economy become so obvious and the price mechanism is so distorted by the debasement of the means of exchange that there is true economic “anarchy”. In this case there isn’t hyperinflation so much as a freezing of all decision-making and investment because the price mechanism no longer works. This actually happened in Vic in 1991 – I was there. There should have been a “depreciation” of the Victorian currency, but because we had a national currency I got to see a deflationary economic crisis there. It was very close to economic anarchy in Victoria with Pyramid failing and terrible stories of savings lost, lives destroyed.

This will now happen on a global scale when the US has its own Victoria, 1991. It may not necessarily be a collapse of the dollar first. It may be that the US$ is supported – but like Victoria it experiences economic anarchy and massive unemployment. If the currency doesn’t “adjust” (die) then people do.

A Crime Called Freedom by Os Congaceiros is now out of print seemingly with no second print run coming from Eberhardt Press.  The highly anticipated second volume translated by Wolfi Landstreicher is canceled as well.  As this was, in our opinion, one of the best books that Eberhard produced, it seems odd.

We have a just a few copies left…

From the description on the back of A Crime Called Freedom:

“Os Cangaceiros was a group of delinquents caught up in the spirit of the French insurrection of 1968 who refused to let that spirit die. With nothing but contempt for the self-sacrificial ideology practiced by “specialists in armed struggle”, this uncontrollable band of social rebels wreaked havoc on the French state — attacking infrastructures of oppression, supporting popular revolts, stealing and releasing secret blueprints for high-tech prisons, raiding the offices of corporate collaborators, and creating their lives in complete opposition to the world based on work. This volume, translated by Wolfi Landstreicher, is the first substantial collection of the writings of Os Cangaceiros in English.”

From the description of the second volume:

“The book was tentatively titled Millenarian Rebels during production, and the final working title was Outlaws of the Sertão. In this book, members of the French revolutionary group Os Cangaceiros write about their fierce Brazilian namesakes, as well as the millenarian groups of the dispossessed and the urban poor who joined together in movements of social reform at the dawn of the 20th century, only to find themselves in an apocalyptic struggle with the Brazilian state.”

However the contents of the first volume and some of the second are now available to download.

-Volume I

-volume II

http://eberhardtpress.org/catalog/crimecalledfreedom.php

here’s a hint into American Culture: the term “black” is narely used to describe something good.  hello…has anyone ever read the play Othello?  read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson?  read anything by anyone that has influenced or was influenced by american literature…?  The color black is a symbol for Evil, its very mention a formidable foreshadowing of events that will most likely lead to someone’s death.  Not to mention that, very often, the color black is Literally tenebrific, like the last 46 days without sun.  Red, on the other hand, makes us passionate and hungry.  It represents drama, intrigue, and sexy lingerie.  Why not Red Friday?  …the day to commit wholeheartedly to that which makes you a better self: Shopping!

when it comes to Black Friday, the link between black and red isn’t all that far off.  after some quick research, i found that some historians think the coinage of the term was in representation of ye old bank books going from In the Red to Back in Black by none other than FDR–that great spender of money who brought us a *new* economy, which relied even more on the sale of goods than ever before (!).  but even if i were nequient to find that particular explication waaaaay down on the google search list (you see it down there…all the way at…number…Five!), i could still easily learn–from that most horrid and unreliable of sources we’ll just refer to as W, in order to save my job–that Black Friday wasn’t coined to describe something pleasant, useful for marketing gurus and retailing execs everywhere.  it’s BLACK FRIDAY.  duh!

actually, i’m not “learning” here (are you?), i’m confirming a suspicion that’s been nagging at me this week as i have been continually bombarded by those savvy advertisers on Facebook–I always click on those pesky ads that pop up! Don’t you!?!–to take advantage of their “Black Friday Sales.”  having previously dated an anarchist who would never have participated in anything carrying The Stank of Capitalism, i, indeed, at one time knew that Black Friday isn’t a “holiday” nor a “license to go on a shopping spree in the name of helping the very same economy that has so royally screwed my entire friends, family and community-at-large in the Ass.”  it’s Actually an anti-holiday: a lack of celebration in which the good people of the USA, e.g. {some} residents of cambridgeport along with the governor of new mexico, band together in the fight against capitalism (sort of like the cold war, only more boring) and Don’t Shop.

*screeeeeeeeeeeeech* {record player stops}

WHAT?  not shop on Black Friday, that holiest of days in which retailers take even more advantage of us than they would on any other “normal” shopping day???  You. Must. Be. Joking.

but yes, dear reader.  this practice does exist.  there are people who don’t shop on Black Friday.  pleasedon’thitmei’mtellingthetruth!!!

in the writing of this, it occurs to me that perhaps the anarchists were the ones to re-interpret the name “Black Friday.”  if it’s true that a traffic cop or some ad guy in Philadelphia was responsible for the moniker, which was really just meant to describe the god-awful amount of traffic on their city’s streets, then–hey–i can see how it might have become the name for the day in which we ALL spend too much money, thus ingesting our bank accounts with a god-awful amount of traffic.  thus, if we don’t spend too much money, we’re dishonoring all that is sacred about the ensuing season of commercialism, which would obviously be the point for those against Black Friday.

still, i don’t think it makes a good gimmick.  what true American wants to participate in something “Black,” unless you fancy yourself the Dark Knight or Darth Vader or Malcom X or something.  this november, i vote for Red Friday.

Possible Ad Slogans:

• Have you ever wanted to be on the Red Carpet? Go shopping on Red Friday, and you’ll feel just as beautiful and successful as Angeline Jolie in couture!

okay, i can only come up with one, but it should be a good jumping off point for those savvy advertisers (see reference above).  also, the color red can easily be twisted into something dark, though in a more subtle way (i.e. The Joker’s lips, “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather, the recent showtime phenomenon “Dexter”).  so anarchists, too, will be completely satisfied with this change.  it’s a win-win, which… isn’t very American.  oops.  i guess it’s a good thing i’m not president.

Is the National Rural Employment Gurantee Act (NREGA) simply government handouts or is it really an upliftment programme. What does it mean that the government is giving employment to people? Is this an ideal model? Is state ‘employment’ a permanent feature? How is payment by the state exchanged for productivity? What are the terms of the relationship between the employer (the state) and the employed (the people)? Does participation in national productivity secure an equal share of national productivity? Or do certain sectors get valued over others so that some industries – or for that matter professions – are accorded a higher value? What is the ratio of that higher value to the lower values? What is the state’s role in calibrating this? If the state pursues a growth agenda then what are the implications for those it employs?

Here the question comes down to what growth entails. If growth entails potentially irreversible environmental damage and increased poverty – which there is evidence to suggest that it does, even if it is exported overseas – then can it be achieved without the state using its power to coerce workers to undermine their own quality of life? Does the only way to maintain a ‘quality of life’ become to seal oneself off in air-conditioned apartments surrounded by high walls and guarded by a security guard? Is this a good quality life? And what is it’s cost to others who by the time and location of their birth find themselves in a worsening condition?

In letting the questions flow I know that I have toyed with a lot of ‘assumptions’: for example, that growth entails irreversible environmental destruction and increased poverty. Three key elements need attention here: ‘growth’, ‘irreversible’ and ‘poverty’. First, while I recognise that it is the particular pattern of growth that creates a particular pattern of consequences in environmental and social domains, I am not yet convinced that endless (’sustainable’) growth can be achieved without undermining important ecological and social processes that allow all people in all places to thrive (rather than have some suffer so that others can ‘thrive’). Second, the risk of the change being irreversible itself – or at least very costly to reverse – should be caution enough not to disregard the ecological foundations of the economy. Third, poverty should be understood not as a having a low monetary value but rather as a worsening overall quality of life. For example, a farmer who is able to operate a productive farm, even if small, may face less drudgery in the process of meeting his/her basic livelihood needs, without having to handle any money. At the same time, a landless labourer may have to toil for long hours in strenuous conditions only to be subject to hazardous machinery, abuse and exploitation, the vagaries of the market which could see reduced employment or an increase in food prices at any moment. Which would lead to a more stressful, vulnerable life? Of course, farming is not easy and is subject to its own vagaries – rainfall, for example. But a mixed farming practice, combined with sustainable local water management technologies could provide a significant degree of security – even against variations in rainfall, pests. Let alone the potential for a far more nutritious and healthy diet that would reduce health problems and costs!

It is worth clarifying that this is not a rant against industry, which no doubt can have its place, provided it goes through susbstantial revision both in terms of its social relations and its relationship with ecology. Just a call for a radically different form of industry.

But back to the earlier question about the NREGA. My sense is that employment by the government is a sub-optimal arrangement because unless the government and its agenda truly emerges from the people (rather than getting captured by ‘powerful’ interests) then the risk of a growth agenda undermining the quality of people’s lives seems ever-present. Especially given a global economic obsession with competing for high growth figures!

Is it possible to think of the state and its relationship with its employees (through NREGA-like schemes) as much the same, in principle, as the relationship between a business or industrial employer and his/her (statistically, more probably his) employees. Do the ‘workers’ of the state, that is to say its citizens (in some sense), need to unite and organise themselves so as to take control of the means of government? Because surely to do so would be to create a major shift in power relations in the primary institution responsible for upholding the kind of structures that permit a capitalist growth agenda (with all its consequent negative ‘externalities’). I can see this as the dream or vision for the Gram Panchayats, India’s ‘3rd tier’ of democratic government. But creating a policy document, building offices, employing secretaries and hosting elections does not amount to creating a functioning, participatory democracy. And there are a significant number of people who gain from the present arrangement. Most notably they are not the poor or the marginal.

I think the kind of work that Seva Mandir’s is doing is fundamental to the promotion of community self-governance through participatory democracy. Perhaps what I feel most strongly, however, is the need for Seva Mandir to really engage with the formal structures and mechanisms of the state and political power. If the citizens do not claim the Panchayats as their own, then they leave the most basic and accessible ‘organ’ of the state, and most certainly the rest of it, free to run its own reign. This doesn’t bode well for creating a new economy founded on social and ecological principles. While there are arguments for indirect and long-term benefits of the work that is carried out without involvement of the State, there is also the very real risk that governments make decisions that may ignore, undermine or render inadequate the efforts that organisations like Seva Mandir are making. Of course, Seva Mandir-like organisation faces their own internal problems too  – but that is something to be explored elsewhere.

Strong communities (highly networked, responsive, mutually accountable, etc.) appear to be an invaluable element in terms of holding ‘the government’ to account or even making it broadly responsive to their needs. So community development is a precursor or else means to local self-governance. But only, however, when it steps outside of its comfortable ‘community’ domain and begins to engage with the state as another common resource whose proper and sustainable management depends on the active participation of people who are familiar with the principles and practice of community development.

PS. this was a ramble and so apologies for the long, somewhat incoherent title (and quite possible contents)

We’re currently working on a new magazine for Yorkshire called ‘The Score’. If you have any news, views, articles, images or rants that you’d like to include then send them to yorkshire.anarchist [at] gmail.com

Mikhail Bakunin 1866
Revolutionary Catechism
…

II. Replacing the cult of God by respect and love of humanity, we proclaim human reason as the only criterion of truth; human conscience as the basis of justice; individual and collective freedom as the only source of order in society.

III. Freedom is the absolute right of every adult man and woman to seek no other sanction for their acts than their own conscience and their own reason, being responsible first to themselves and then to the society which they have voluntarily accepted.

IV. It is not true that the freedom of one man is limited by that of other men. Man is really free to the extent that his freedom, fully acknowledged and mirrored by the free consent of his fellowmen, finds confirmation and expansion in their liberty. Man is truly free only among equally free men; the slavery of even one human being violates humanity and negates the freedom of all.

V. The freedom of each is therefore realizable only in the equality of all. The realization of freedom through equality, in principle and in fact, is justice.

VI. If there is one fundamental principle of human morality, it is freedom. To respect the freedom of your fellowman is duty; to love, help, and serve him is virtue.

VII. Absolute rejection of every authority including that which sacrifices freedom for the convenience of the state. Primitive society had no conception of freedom; and as society evolved, before the full awakening of human rationality and freedom, it passed through a stage controlled by human and divine authority. The political and economic structure of society must now be reorganized on the basis of freedom. Henceforth, order in society must result from the greatest possible realization of individual liberty, as well as of liberty on all levels of social organization.

VIII. The political and economic organization of social life must not, as at present, be directed from the summit to the base – the center to the circumference – imposing unity through forced centralization. On the contrary, it must be reorganized to issue from the base to the summit – from the circumference to the center – according to the principles of free association and federation.

IX. Political organization. It is impossible to determine a concrete, universal, and obligatory norm for the internal development and political organization of every nation. The life of each nation is subordinated to a plethora of different historical, geographical, and economic conditions, making it impossible to establish a model of organization equally valid for all. Any such attempt would be absolutely impractical. It would smother the richness and spontaneity of life which flourishes only in infinite diversity and, what is more, contradict the most fundamental principles of freedom. However, without certain absolutely essential conditions the practical realization of freedom will be forever impossible.

These conditions are:

A. The abolition of all state religions and all privileged churches, including those partially maintained or supported by state subsidies. Absolute liberty of every religion to build temples to their gods, and to pay and support their priests.

B. The churches considered as religious corporations must never enjoy the same political rights accorded to the productive associations; nor can they be entrusted with the education of children; for they exist merely to negate morality and liberty and to profit from the lucrative practice of witchcraft.

C. Abolition of monarchy; establishment of a commonwealth.

D. Abolition of classes, ranks, and privileges; absolute equality of political rights for all men and women; universal suffrage. [Not in the state, but in the units of the new society. Note by Max Nettlau]

E. Abolition, dissolution, and moral, political, and economic dismantling of the all-pervasive, regimented, centralized State, the alter ego of the Church, and as such, the permanent cause of the impoverishment, brutalization, and enslavement of the multitude. This naturally entails the following: Abolition of all state universities: public education must be administered only by the communes and free associations. Abolition of the State judiciary: all judges must be elected by the people. Abolition of all criminal, civil, and legal codes now administered in Europe: because the code of liberty can be created only by liberty itself. Abolition of banks and all other institutions of state credit. Abolition of all centralized administration, of the bureaucracy, of all permanent armies and state police.

F. Immediate direct election of all judicial and civil functionaries as well as representatives (national, provincial, and communal delegates) by the universal suffrage of both sexes.

G. The internal reorganization of each country on the basis of the absolute freedom of individuals, of the productive associations, and of the communes. Necessity of recognizing the right of secession: every individual, every association, every commune, every region, every nation has the absolute right to self-determination, to associate or not to associate, to ally themselves with whomever they wish and repudiate their alliances without regard to so-called historic rights [rights consecrated by legal precedent] or the convenience of their neighbors. Once the right to secede is established, secession will no longer be necessary. With the dissolution of a “unity” imposed by violence, the units of society will be drawn to unite by their powerful mutual attraction and by inherent necessities. Consecrated by liberty, these new federations of communes, provinces, regions, and nations will then be truly strong, productive, and indissoluble.’

H. Individual rights.

1. The right of every man and woman, from birth to adulthood, to complete upkeep, clothes, food, shelter, care, guidance, education (public schools, primary, secondary, higher education, artistic, industrial, and scientific), all at the expense of society.

2. The equal right of adolescents, while freely choosing their careers, to be helped and to the greatest possible extent supported by society. After this, society will exercise no authority or supervision over them except to respect, and if necessary defend, their freedom and their rights.

3. The freedom of adults of both sexes must be absolute and complete, freedom to come and go, to voice all opinions, to be lazy or active, moral or immoral, in short, to dispose of one’s person or possessions as one pleases, being accountable to no one. Freedom to live, be it honestly, by one’s own labor, even at the expense of individuals who voluntarily tolerate one’s exploitation.

4. Unlimited freedom of propaganda, speech, press, public or private assembly, with no other restraint than the natural salutary power of public opinion. Absolute freedom to organize associations even for allegedly immoral purposes including even those associations which advocate the undermining (or destruction) of individual and public freedom.

5. Freedom can and must be defended only by freedom: to advocate the restriction of freedom on the pretext that it is being defended is a dangerous delusion. As morality has no other source, no other object, no other stimulant than freedom, all restrictions of liberty in order to protect morality have always been to the detriment of the latter. Psychology, statistics, and all history prove that individual and social immorality are the inevitable consequences of a false private and public education, of the degeneration of public morality and the corruption of public opinion, and above all, of. the vicious organization of society. An eminent Belgian statistician [Qu�telet] points out that society opens the way for the crimes later committed by malefactors. It follows that all attempts to combat social immorality by rigorous legislation which violates individual freedom must fail. Experience, on the contrary, demonstrates that a repressive and authoritarian system, far from preventing, only increases crime; that public and private morality falls or rises to the extent that individual liberty is restricted or enlarged. It follows that in order to regenerate society, we must first completely uproot this political and social system founded on inequality, privilege, and contempt for humanity. After having reconstructed society on the basis of the most complete liberty, equality, and justice – not to mention work – for all and an enlightened education inspired by respect for man – public opinion will then reflect the new humanity and become a natural guardian of the most absolute liberty [and public order. Ed.].

6. Society cannot, however, leave itself completely defenseless against vicious and parasitic individuals. Work must be the basis of all political rights. The units of society, each within its own jurisdiction, can deprive all such antisocial adults of political rights (except the old, the sick, and those dependent on private or public subsidy) and will be obliged to restore their political rights as soon as they begin to live by their own labor.

7. The liberty of every human being is inalienable and society will never require any individual to surrender his liberty or to sign contracts with other individuals except on the basis of the most complete equality and reciprocity. Society cannot forcibly prevent any man or woman so devoid of personal dignity as to place him- or herself in voluntary servitude to another individual; but it can justly treat such persons as parasites, not entitled to the enjoyment of political liberty, though only for the duration of their servitude.

8. Persons losing their political rights will also lose custody of their children. Persons who violate voluntary agreements, steal, inflict bodily harm, or above all, violate the freedom of any individual, native or foreigner, will be penalized according to the laws of society.

…

10. Individuals condemned by the laws of any and every association (commune, province, region, or nation) reserve the right to escape punishment by declaring that they wish to resign from that association. But in this case, the association will have the equal right to expel him and declare him outside
its guarantee and protection.

I. Rights of association [federalism]. The cooperative workers’ associations are a new fact in history. At this time we can only speculate about, but not determine, the immense development that they will doubtlessly exhibit in the new political and social conditions of the future. It is possible and even very likely that they will some day transcend the limits of towns, provinces, and even states. They may entirely reconstitute society, dividing it not into nations but into different industrial groups, organized not according to the needs of politics but to those of production. But this is for the future. Be that as it may, we can already proclaim this fundamental principle: irrespective of their functions or aims, all associations, like all individuals, must enjoy absolute freedom. Neither society, nor any part of society – commune, province, or nation – has the right to prevent free individuals from associating freely for any purpose whatsoever: political, religious, scientific, artistic, or even for the exploitation or corruption of the naive or alcoholics, provided that they are not minors. To combat charlatans and pernicious associations is the special affair of public opinion. But society is obliged to refuse to guarantee civic rights of any association or collective body whose aims or rules violate the fundamental principles of human justice. Individuals shall not be penalized or deprived of their full political and social rights solely for belonging to such unrecognized societies. The difference between the recognized and unrecognized associations will be the following: the juridically recognized associations will have the right to the protection of the community against individuals or recognized groups who refuse to fulfill their voluntary obligations.’ The juridically unrecognized associations will not be entitled to such protection by the community and none of their agreements will be regarded as binding.

J. The division of a country into regions, provinces, districts, and communes, as in France, will naturally depend on the traditions, the specific circumstances, and the particular nature of each country. We can only point out here the two fundamental and indispensable principles which must be put into effect by any country seriously trying to organize a free society. First: all organizations must proceed by way of federation from the base to the summit, from the commune to the coordinating association of the country or nation. Second: there must be at least one autonomous intermediate body between the commune and the country, the department, the region, or the province. Without such an autonomous intermediate body, the commune (in the strict sense of the term) would be too isolated and too weak to be able to resist the despotic centralistic pressure of the State, which will inevitably (as happened twice in France) restore to power a despotic monarchical regime. Despotism has its source much more in the centralized organization of the State, than in the despotic nature of kings.

K. The basic unit of all political organization in each country must be the completely autonomous commune, constituted by the majority vote of all adults of both sexes. No one shall have either the power or the right to interfere in the internal life of the commune. The commune elects all functionaries, law-makers, and judges. It administers the communal property and finances. Every commune should have the incontestable right to create, without superior sanction, its own constitution and legislation. But in order to join and become an integral part of the provincial federation, the commune must conform its own particular charter to the fundamental principles of the provincial constitution and be accepted by the parliament of the province. The commune must also accept the judgments of the provincial tribunal and any measures ordered by the government of the province. (All measures of the provincial government must be ratified by the provincial parliament.) Communes refusing to accept the provincial laws will not be entitled to its benefits.

L. The province must be nothing but a free federation of autonomous communes. The provincial parliament could be composed either of a single chamber with representatives of each of the communes or of two chambers, the other representing the population of the province, independent of the communes. The provincial parliament, without interfering in any manner whatsoever in the internal decisions of the communes will formulate the provincial constitution (based on the principles of this catechism). This constitution must be accepted by all communes wishing to participate in the provincial parliament. The provincial parliament will enact legislation defining the rights and obligations of individuals, communes, and associations in relation to the provincial federation, and the penalties for violations of its laws. It will reserve, however, the right of the communes to diverge on secondary points, though not on fundamentals.
The provincial parliament, in strict accordance with the Charter of the Federation of Communes, will define the rights and obligations existing between the communes, the parliament, the judicial tribunal, and the provincial administration. It will enact all laws affecting the whole province, pass on resolutions or measures of the national parliament, without, however, violating the autonomy of the communes and the province. Without interfering in the internal administration of the communes, it will allot to each commune its share of the provincial or national income, which will be used by the commune as its members decide. The provincial parliament will ratify or reject all policies and measures of the provincial administration which will, of course, be elected by universal suffrage. The provincial tribunal (also elected by universal suffrage) will adjudicate, without appeal, all disputes between communes and individuals, communes and communes, and communes and the provincial administration or parliament. [These arrangements will thus] lead not to dull, lifeless uniformity, but to a real living unity, to the enrichment of communal life. A unity will be created which reflects the needs and aspirations of the communes; in short, we will have individual and collective freedom. This unity cannot be achieved by the compulsion or violence of provincial power, for even truth and justice when coercively imposed must lead to falsehood and iniquity.

M. The nation must be nothing but a federation of autonomous provinces. [The organizational relations between the provinces and the nation will, in general, be the same as those between the communes and the province – Nettlau]

N. Principles of the International Federation. The union of nations comprising the International Federation will be based on the principles outlined above. It is probable, and strongly desired as well, that when the hour of the People’s Revolution strikes again, every nation will unite in brotherly solidarity and forge an unbreakable alliance against the coalition of reactionary nations. This alliance will be the germ of the future Universal Federation of Peoples which will eventually embrace the entire world. The International Federation of revolutionary peoples, with a parliament, a tribunal, and an international executive committee, will naturally be based on the principles of the revolution. Applied to international polity these principles are:

1 . Every land, every nation, every people, large or small, weak or strong, every region, province, and commune has the absolute right to self-determination, to make alliances, unite or secede as it pleases, regardless of so-called historic rights and the political, commercial, or strategic ambitions of States. The unity of the elements of society, in order to be genuine, fruitful, and durable, must be absolutely free: it can emerge only from the internal needs and mutual attractions of the respective units of society….

2. Abolition of alleged historic right and the horrible right of conquest.

3. Absolute rejection of the politics of aggrandizement, of the power and the glory of the State. For this is a form of politics which locks each country into a self-made fortress, shutting out the rest of humanity, organizing itself into a closed world, independent of all human solidarity, finding its glory and prosperity in the evil it can do to other countries. A country bent on conquest is necessarily a country internally enslaved.

4. The glory and grandeur of a nation lie only in the development of its humanity. Its strength and inner vitality are measured by the degree of its liberty.

5. The well-being and the freedom of nations as well as individuals are inextricably interwoven. Therefore, there must be free commerce, exchange, and communication among all federated countries, and abolition of frontiers, passports, and customs duties [tariffs]. Every citizen of a federated country must enjoy the same civic rights and it must be easy for him to acquire citizenship and enjoy political rights in all other countries adhering to the same federation. If liberty is the starting point, it will necessarily lead to unity. But to go from unity to liberty is difficult, if not impossible; even if it were possible, it could be done only by destroying a spurious “unity” imposed by force….

…

7. No federated country shall maintain a permanent standing army or any institution separating the soldier from the civilian. Not only do permanent ,armies and professional soldiers breed internal disruption, brutalization, and financial ruin, they also menace the independence and well-being of other nations. All able-bodied citizens should, if necessary, take up arms to defend their homes and their freedom. Each country’s military defense and equipment should be organized locally by the commune, or provincially, somewhat like the militias in Switzerland or the United States of America [circa 1860-7].

8. The International Tribunal shall have no other function than to settle, without appeal, all disputes between nations and their respective provinces. Differences between two federated countries shall be adjudicated, without appeal, only by the International Parliament, which, in the name of the entire revolutionary federation, will also formulate common policy and make war, if unavoidable, against the reactionary coalition.

9. No federated nation shall make war against another federated country. If there is war and the International Tribunal has pronounced its decision, the aggressor must submit. If this doesn’t occur, the other federated nations will sever relations with it and, in case of attack by the aggressor, unite to repel invasion.

10. All members of the revolutionary federation must actively take part in approved wars against a nonfederated state. If a federated nation declares unjust war on an outside State against the advice of the International Tribunal, it will be notified in advance that it will have to do so alone.

11. It is hoped that the federated states will eventually give up the expensive luxury of separate diplomatic representatives to foreign states and arrange for representatives to speak in the name of all the federated States.

12. Only nations or peoples accepting the principles outlined in this catechism will be admitted to the federation.

X. Social Organization. Without political equality there can be no real political liberty, but political equality will be possible only when there is social and economic equality.

A. Equality does not imply the leveling of individual differences, nor that individuals should be made physically, morally, or mentally identical. Diversity in capacities and powers – those differences between races, nations, sexes, ages, and persons – far from being a social evil, constitutes, on the contrary, the abundance of humanity. Economic and social equality means the equalization of personal wealth, but not by restricting what a man may acquire by his own skill, productive energy, and thrift.

B. Equality and justice demand only a society so organized that every single human being will – from birth through adolescence and maturity – find therein equal means, first for maintenance and education, and later, for the exercise of all his natural capacities and aptitudes. This equality from birth that justice demands for everyone will be impossible as long as the right of inheritance continues to exist.

…

D. Abolition of the right of inheritance. Social inequality – inequality of classes, privileges, and wealth – not by right but in fact. will continue to exist until such time as the right of inheritance is abolished. It is an inherent social law that de facto inequality inexorably produces inequality of rights; social inequality leads to political inequality. And without political equality – in the true, universal, and libertarian sense in which we understand it – society will always remain divided into two unequal parts. The first. which comprises the great majority of mankind, the masses of the people, will be oppressed by the privileged, exploiting minority. The right of inheritance violates the principle of freedom and must be abolished.

…

G. When inequality resulting from the right of inheritance is abolished, there will still remain inequalities [of wealth] – due to the diverse amounts of energy and skill possessed by individuals. These inequalities will never entirely disappear, but will become more and more minimized under the influence of education and of an egalitarian social organization, and, above all, when the right of inheritance no longer burdens the coming generations.

H. Labor being the sole source of wealth, everyone is free to die of hunger, or to live in the deserts or the forests among savage beasts, but whoever wants to live in society must earn his living by his own labor, or be treated as a parasite who is living on the labor of others.

I. Labor is the foundation of human dignity and morality. For it was only by free and intelligent labor that man, overcoming his own bestiality, attained his humanity and sense of justice, changed his environment, and created the civilized world. The stigma which, in the ancient as well as the feudal world, was attached to labor, and which to a great extent still exists today, despite all the hypocritical phrases about the “dignity of labor” – this stupid prejudice against labor has two sources: the first is the conviction, so characteristic of the ancient world, that in order to give one part of society the opportunity and the means to humanize itself through science, the arts, philosophy. and the enjoyment of human rights, another part of society, naturally the most numerous, must be condemned to work as slaves. This fundamental institution of ancient civilization was the cause of its downfall.
The city, corrupted and disorganized on the one hand by the idleness of the privileged citizens, and undermined on the other by the imperceptible but relentless activity of the disinherited world of slaves who, despite their slavery, through common labor developed a sense of mutual aid and solidarity against oppression, collapsed under the blows of the barbarian peoples.

Christianity, the religion of the slaves, much later destroyed ancient forms of slavery only to create a new slavery. Privilege, based on inequality and the right of conquest and sanctified by divine grace, again separated society into two opposing camps: the “rabble” and the nobility, the serfs and the masters. To the latter was assigned the noble profession of arms and government; to the serfs, the curse of forced labor. The same causes are bound to produce the same effects; the nobility, weakened and demoralized by depraved idleness, fell in 1789 under the blows of the revolutionary serfs and workers. The [French] Revolution proclaimed the dignity of labor and enacted the rights of labor into law. But only in law, for in fact labor remained enslaved. The first source of the degradation of labor, namely, the dogma of the political inequality of men, was destroyed by the Great Revolution. The degradation must therefore be attributed to a second source, which is nothing but the separation which still exists between manual and intellectual labor, which reproduces in a new form the ancient inequality and divides the world into two camps: the privileged minority, privileged not by law but by capital, and the majority of workers, no longer captives of the law but of hunger.

The dignity of labor is today theoretically recognized, and public opinion considers it disgraceful to live without working. But this does not go to the heart of the question. Human labor, in general, is still divided into two exclusive categories: the first – solely intellectual and managerial – includes the scientists, artists, engineers, inventors, accountants, educators, governmental officials, and their subordinate elites who enforce labor discipline. The second group consists of the great mass of workers, people prevented from applying creative ideas or intelligence, who blindly and mechanically carry out the orders of the intellectual-managerial elite. This economic and social division of labor has disastrous consequences for members of the privileged classes, the masses of the people, and for the prosperity, as well as the moral and intellectual development, of society as a whole.

For the privileged classes a life of luxurious idleness gradually leads to moral and intellectual degeneration. It is perfectly true that a certain amount of leisure is absolutely necessary for the artistic, scientific, and mental development of man; creative leisure followed by the healthy exercise of daily labor, one that is well earned and is socially provided for all according to individual capacities and preferences. Human nature is so constituted that the propensity for evil is always intensified by external circumstances, and the morality of the individual depends much more on the conditions of his existence and the environment in which he lives than on his own will. In this respect, as in all others, the law of social solidarity is essential: there can be no other moralizer for society or the individual than freedom in absolute equality. Take the most sincere democrat and put him on the throne; if he does not step down promptly, he will surely become a scoundrel. A born aristocrat (if he should, by some happy chance, be ashamed of his aristocratic lineage and renounce privileges of birth) will yearn for past glories, be useless in the present, and passionately oppose future progress. The same goes for the bourgeois: this dear child of capital and idleness will waste his leisure in dishonesty, corruption, and debauchery, or serve as a brutal force to enslave the working class, who will eventually unleash against him a retribution even more horrible than that of 1793.

The evils that the worker is subjected to by the division of labor are much easier to determine: forced to work for others because he is born to poverty and misery, deprived of all rational upbringing and education, morally enslaved by religious influence. He is catapulted into life, defenseless, without initiative and without his own will. Driven to despair by misery, he sometimes revolts, but lacking that unity with his fellow workers and that enlightened thought upon which power depends, he is often betrayed and sold out by his leaders, and almost never realizes who or what is responsible for his sufferings. Exhausted by futile struggles, he falls back again into the old slavery.
This slavery will last until capitalism is overthrown by the collective action of the workers. They will be exploited as long as education (which in a free society will be equally available to all) is the exclusive birthright of the privileged class; as long as this minority monopolizes scientific and managerial work and the people – reduced to the status of machines or beasts of burden – are forced to perform the menial tasks assigned to them by their exploiters. This degradation of human labor is an immense evil, polluting the moral, intellectual, and political institutions of society. History shows that an uneducated multitude whose natural intelligence is suppressed and who are brutalized by the mechanical monotony of daily toil, who grope in vain for any enlightenment, constitutes a mindless mob whose blind turbulence threatens the very existence of society itself.

The artificial separation between manual and intellectual labor must give way to a new social synthesis. When the man of science performs manual labor and the man of work performs intellectual labor, free intelligent work will become the glory of mankind, the source of its dignity and its rights.

K. Intelligent and free labor will necessarily be collective labor. Each person will, of course, be free to work alone or collectively. But there is no doubt that (outside of work best performed individually) in industrial and even scientific or artistic enterprises, collective labor will be preferred by everyone. For association marvellously multiplies the productive capacity of each worker; hence, a cooperating member of a productive association will earn much more in much less time. When the free productive associations (which will include members of cooperatives and labor organizations) voluntarily organize according to their needs and special skills, they will then transcend all national boundaries and form an immense worldwide economic federation. This will include an industrial parliament, supplied by the associations with precise and detailed global-scale statistics; by harmonizing supply and demand the parliament will distribute and allocate world industrial production to the various nations. Commercial and industrial crises, stagnation (unemployment), waste of capital, etc., will no longer plague mankind; the emancipation of human labor will regenerate the world.

L. The land, and all natural resources, are the common property of everyone, but will be used only by those who cultivate it by their own labor. Without expropriation, only through the powerful pressure of the worker’s associations, capital and the tools of production will fall to those who produce wealth by their own labor. [Bakunin means that private ownership of production will be permitted only if the owners do the actual work and do not employ anyone. He believed that collective ownership would gradually supersede private ownership.]

M. Equal political, social, and economic rights, as well as equal obligations for women.

N. Abolition not of the natural family but of the legal family founded on law and property. Religious and civil marriage to be replaced by free marriage. Adult men and women have the right to unite and separate as they please, nor has society the right to hinder their union or to force them to maintain it. With the abolition of the right of inheritance and the education of children assured by society, all the legal reasons for the irrevocability of marriage will disappear. The union of a man and a woman must be free, for a free choice is the indispensable condition for moral sincerity. In marriage, man and woman must enjoy absolute liberty. Neither violence nor passion nor rights surrendered in the past can justify an invasion by one of the liberty of another, and every such invasion shall be considered a crime.

O. From the moment of pregnancy to birth, a woman and her children shall be subsidized by the communal organization. Women who wish to nurse and wean their children shall also be subsidized.

P. Parents shall have the right to care for and guide the education of their children, under the ultimate control of the commune which retains the right and the obligation to take children away from parents who, by example or by cruel and inhuman treatment, demoralize or otherwise hinder the physical and mental development of their children.

Q. Children belong neither to their parents nor to society. They belong to themselves and to their own future liberty. Until old enough to take care of themselves, children must be brought up under the guidance of their elders. It is true that parents are their natural tutors, but since the very future of the commune itself depends upon the intellectual and moral training it gives to children, the commune must be the tutor. The freedom of adults is possible only when the free society looks after the education of minors.

R. The secular school must replace the Church, with the difference that while religious indoctrination perpetuates superstition and divine authority, the sole purpose of secular public education is the gradual, progressive initiation of children into liberty by the triple development of their physical strength, their minds, and their will. Reason, truth, justice, respect for fellowmen, the sense of personal dignity which is inseparable from the dignity of others, love of personal freedom and the freedom of all others, the conviction that work is the base and condition for rights – these must be the fundamental principles of all public education. Above all, education must make men and inculcate human values first, and then train specialized workers. As the child grows older, authority will give way to more and more liberty, so that by adolescence he will be completely free and will forget how in childhood he had to submit unavoidably to authority. Respect for human worth, the germ of freedom, must be present even while children are being severely disciplined. The essence of all moral education is this: inculcate children with respect for humanity and you will make good men….

S. Having reached the age of adulthood, the adolescent will be proclaimed autonomous and free to act as he deems best. In exchange, society will expect him to fulfill only these three obligations: that he remain free, that he live by his own labor, and that he respect the freedom of others. And, as the crimes and vices infecting present society are due to the evil organization of society, it is certain that in a society based on reason, justice, and freedom, on respect for humanity and on complete equality, the good will prevail and the evil will be a morbid exception, which will diminish more and more under the pervasive influence of an enlightened and humanized public opinion.

T. The old, sick, and infirm will enjoy all political and social rights and be bountifully supported at the expense of society.

XI. Revolutionary policy. It is our deep-seated conviction that since the freedom of all nations is indivisible, national revolutions must become international in scope. just as the European and world reaction is unified, there should no longer be isolated revolutions, but a universal, worldwide revolution. Therefore, all the particular interests, the vanities, pretensions, jealousies, and hostilities between and among nations must now be transformed into the unified, common, and universal interest of the revolution, which alone can assure the freedom and independence of each nation by the solidarity of all. We believe also that the holy alliance of the world counterrevolution and the conspiracy of kings, clergy, nobility, and the bourgeoisie, based on enormous budgets, on permanent armies, on formidable bureaucracies, and equipped with all the monstrous apparatus of modern centralized states, constitutes an overwhelming force; indeed, that this formidable reactionary coalition can be destroyed only by the greater power of the simultaneous revolutionary alliance and action of all the people of the civilized world, that against this reaction the isolated revolution of a single people will never succeed. Such a revolution would be folly, a catastrophe for the isolated country and would, in effect, constitute a crime against all the other nations. It follows that the uprising of a single people must have in view not only itself, but the whole world. This demands a worldwide program, as large, as profound, as true, as human, in short, as all-embracing as the interests of the whole world. And in order to energize the passions of all the popular masses of Europe, regardless of nationality, this program can only be the program of the social and democratic revolution.
Briefly stated, the objectives of the social and democratic revolution are: Politically: the abolition of the historic rights of states, the rights of conquest, and diplomatic rights [statist international law. Tr.]. It aims at the full emancipation of individuals and associations from divine and human bondage; it seeks the absolute destruction of all compulsory unions, and all agglomerations of communes into provinces and conquered countries into the State. Finally, it requires the radical dissolution of the centralized, aggressive, authoritarian State, including its military, bureaucratic, governmental, administrative, judicial, and legislative institutions. ‘ne revolution, in short, has this aim: freedom for all, for individuals as well as collective bodies, associations, communes, provinces, regions, and nations, and the mutual guarantee of this freedom by federation.

Socially: it seeks the confirmation of political equality by economic equality. This is not the removal of natural individual differences, but equality in the social rights of every individual from birth; in particular, equal means of subsistence, support, education, and opportunity for every child, boy or girl, until maturity, and equal resources and facilities in adulthood to create his own well-being by his own labor.
 
Bakunin Archive | M.I.A.

Mutualism: An interview with Kevin Carson

http://isocracy.org/node/25

Kevin Carson, an American political theorist and a contemporary leader
in discussions concerning mutualism and author of three extremely
important books on co-operation, mutualism and capitalism (Studies in
Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian
Perspective, and The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand). Describing
his politics as being “the outer fringes of both free market
libertarianism and socialism”, he certainly will find a welcoming
audience among our group – which is why he’s been asked several
difficult questions.

The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand is available in html format and
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: A
Libertarian Perspective are both available as PDF files.

Firstly, thank you Kevin for agreeing to this interview with The
Isocracy Network.

Thanks for inviting me.

Could you begin by giving a description of mutualism from the initial
definition offered by the anarchist Proudhon to contemporary examples
and your own involvement in this sort of analysis of political economy?

Well, first of all, it’s important to distinguish between mutualism as a
general form of praxis, and mutualism as a theory. Mutualist practices
(friendly societies and lodges, guilds, arrangements for mutual aid,
etc.) are probably old as the human race. Proudhon, Owen, Warren, et al
simply created a theoretical framework that emphasized such forms of
organization as a building block of society. It’s a bit like the
centipede trying to figure out how it’s been walking all this time, or
the man who was astonished to learn he’d been speaking in prose all
along and didn’t even know it.

For that matter, there have been important anarchist thinkers like
Kropotkin who emphasized mutual aid and other mutual organizations,
without in any strict sense being mutualists. Cooperatives and mutuals
have been central to the counterinstitution-building of much of the
decentralist Left in the U.S. since the 1960s, but their thought is not
explicitly mutualist either.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of the important examples of
mutualist practice (the cooperative movement, the local currency and
alternative credit movements, etc.) are not explicitly or
self-consciously mutualist in ideology.

Having read Proudhon for some years, his thought is so complex and at
times even seemingly self-contradictory, that I still hesitate to
summarize it. But I’d venture to say, as an approximation, that his
programme centered on 1) abolishing artificial property rights in land
and artificial scarcity of credit, so that the working class could
secure cheap access to the prerequisites of production; and 2)
organizing the economy around associations of producers. Of course
Proudhon was an important founding thinker for anarchism as a whole as
well as for mutualism; so these ideas, in modified form, have heavily
influenced later collectivist, communist and syndicalist variants of
anarchism.

Mutualist praxis was central to the Owenite movement in the UK (e.g.
Owenite craft unions organized cooperative production and distribution
by strikers in their own shops), as well as such things as the Rochedale
cooperatives, the Chartists, and land colonization movements. Owenism,
by way of Christian socialism and guild socialism, probably had a
significant (if indirect) influence on distributism.

In the U.S. mutualism’s primary founder was the Owenite Josiah Warren.
Warrenism, cross-pollinated with J.K. Ingalls’ occupancy-and-use view of
land ownership and William Greene’s mutual banking theories, together
led to the plumbline individualism of Benjamin Tucker. Tucker focused
almost entirely on the abolition of artificial property rights and
privilege in land and credit, assuming that when the legal props to rent
and interest were removed and cheap land and credit were universally
available, the forms of organization would take care of themselves. He
displayed almost no interest whatever in cooperatives, associations for
mutual aid, etc., as such.

Dyer Lum, John Beverley Robinson, and Clarence Swartz, all heavily
influenced by Tucker, supplemented his focus on eliminating monopolies
with some positive speculation on cooperative forms of organization; in
so doing, they represented a partial fusion of Tucker’s version of
individualism with the older cooperativist tradition of Proudhon and
Owen. Lum, in particular, was also friendly to the radical labor
movement and had fairly close ties to the I.W.W.

Would a highly successful large worker’s cooperatives, like the John
Lewis Partnership in the UK, and the Mondragón Corporation in Spain
[centered in Basque Country] serve as evidence that mutualist economics
can and does work in the large scale? Are credit unions evidence that
mutualist economics can replace capitalist banking?

Although I’m quite friendly to both Mondragon and credit unions, and
consider their influence to be decidedly positive, I believe their form
is still distorted considerably by the capitalist milieu within which
they exist. I like Mondragon’s federated system of cooperative
producers, distributors and banks within a single umbrella organization.
But it’s much too centralized a system in my opinion, with worker
representation only effected at the level of the board of directors for
the system as a whole; below the level of the Mondragon system as a
whole, it’s a fairly top-down system of conventional management, with no
significant self-management at the level of individual departments or
factories.

I would greatly prefer local markets with lots of stand-alone
cooperative manufacturing shops on the Emilia-Romagna model, integrated
with cooperative banks in some sort of barter or local currency network
of the sort promoted by Tom Greco.

Most credit unions, unfortunately, have adopted the culture of the
conventional banking industry, and have almost no ideological affinity
for the larger cooperative or counter-economy movement. Of course they
are still greatly preferable to capitalist banks; being controlled by
many small, local depositors, they are far less prone to the excesses of
the capitalist banking system that we’ve seen in recent years.

Proudhon, although arguing that he opposed the idea of individuals
deriving an income through rent and investments, said that he never
wished “to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree” such activities. A
contemporary mainstream economist may argue that Proudhon’s position
here would be particularly utopian in those markets that have high
barriers to entry or other monopolistic features, that a worker’s
cooperative versus an entrenched capitalist enterprise in such a market
would require a miracle on the scale of David vs Goliath for success.

That sounds a bit like Tucker’s pessimistic view of things in his later
years, when he seemed resigned to the idea that the large industrial
trusts had grown to the point that their market power would persist even
after the Four Monopolies were removed.

I think such a view neglects the extent to which capital-intensiveness
is a source of high overhead cost and inefficiency, and is only made
artificially profitable by the state’s subsidies and protections. In
fact production as such has become far less capital-intensive over the
past three decades, with the old mass-production core outsourcing
increasing shares of total production to flexible manufacturing networks
and job-shops, and some of them retaining little more than control over
marketing and “intellectual property.” The development of cheap,
small-scale CNC tools in the 1970s meant that the capital outlays
required for manufacturing imploded by one or two orders of
magnitude. That was the beginning of a long shift from older
mass-production industry to Emilia-Romagna, the Toyota supplier network,
the job-shops of Shenzhen and Shanghai, etc.

The process continues even further in the same direction with the
desktop manufacturing revolution of recent years: cheap, homebrew CNC
machines scalable to the small shop and garage.

When physical capital costs are so low, most of the financial role of
the old industrial core is becoming redundant. And with small-scale
production driven by local orders on a lean, demand-pull, JIT basis,
marketing is similarly redundant.

“Intellectual property” is the main surviving buttress to the old
corporate walls, and it’s becoming increasingly unenforceable.

A follower of Henry George would argue in the realm of natural resources
it would be impossible for success and that land-rents should be
socialised. How would you respond to these claims?

I’m quite friendly to George, and think the lines between individualism
and Georgism are a lot less harsh than (say) Tucker would have believed.
But I believe a great deal of rent could be eliminated simply by
removing subsidies to economic centralization and positive externalties
created by taxpayers–not to mention by removing state enforcement of
title to vacant and unimproved land. If as much urban infrastructure as
possible were funded by user fees, and cities broken up into lots of
mixed-use neighborhoods in which residential areas had their own
miniature “downtown” cores, differential rent would be far less
significant. I think a majority of George’s aims could be achieved by
Tucker’s means, or even by a throughgoing application of Rothbard’s means.

With examples of worker’s self-management in the former Yugoslavia, and
modelling by economists such as Jaroslav Vanek and Benjamin Ward, it has
been shown in some cases (especially in critical infrastructure) it is
advantageous for labor-managed firms, in their objective of increasing
income per worker, to either lay-off workers or – like a monopolistic
capitalist firm – to reduce productivity and thus derive monopoly
profits. How would a contemporary version of mutualism prevent these
problems?

It’s been a long time since I read Vanek’s work on worker-managed
economies, but my immediate reaction is that there’s probably no
fool-proof set of governance rules. When the firm is controlled by
capital-owners, they’ll behave in such a way as to maximize returns on
capital; when it’s controlled by managers, as in most large Western
corporations, they’ll maximize benefits to management at the expense of
both labor and capital. At least in a worker-managed firm, the decisions
will reflect the interests of a bare majority, which can’t be said of
the other two mechanisms. Beyond that, I think the answer to the kind of
behavior you describe lies in exit as much as in voice: the lower the
capitalization requirements and the lower the barrier to entry for most
forms of production, and the lower the cost threshold for comfortable
subsistence, the less catastrophic changes in employment will be. I’d
like to see an economy where a much larger share of total consumption
needs are met through production for subsistence or barter in the
household/informal sector, and the average time spent in wage employment
is much less than at present.

That would mean a significantly larger share of the population would be
self-employed than at present, a very large share would work hours that
we would regard as “part-time,” household arrangements for pooling wages
and hoarding labor-time would be much more resilient, and even
wage-earners would tend to accept as normal prolonged periods of
unemployment during which they lived off subsistence resources while
waiting for a job to their liking.

Pro-capitalist neoliberals, such as George Reismann, Roderick T. Long
have criticised your advocacy of mutualism. Reisman and Long both argue
that you do not support John Locke’s ownership of landed property that
has been mixed with labour or, to use the peculiarly U.S. vernacular,
“homesteading”. It seems that both this critics have fundamentally
misunderstood Locke’s concept of land ownership, which recognises a
public cost for exclusion and use in addition to the right of added
value. How do you respond to these criticisms?

To be frank, I can’t say with any degree of confidence what Reisman
understands about anything. But I think Long acknowledged Locke’s
Proviso and explicitly characterized his own position as “non-Proviso
Lockeanism.” I’m not a Georgist myself, although I’d be well-disposed to
a local property rules system based on some form of common ownership and
community collection of rent. In any case, justifiably or not, when
answering Lockean critics I tend to tacitly work from the premise that
“Lockean” means “non-Proviso Lockean.” And for the most part, I think a
radical and consistent application of non-Proviso Lockean rules would go
most of the way toward achieving the aims of the Tucker-Ingalls land theory.

… all the fruits it naturally produces, and beasts it feeds,
belong to mankind in common, as they are produced by the spontaneous
band of nature: … Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that
nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and
joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his
property… For this labour being the unquestionable property of the
labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to,
at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
John Locke: Of Civil Government – Second Treatise

For that matter, over time I’ve come to see the bounderies between the
Tucker-Ingalls and non-Proviso Lockean systems as less distinct, and to
perceive some practical problems with the Tucker system (at least the
more radical variant–he seems to promote different versions of the
system at different times). At times Tucker himself seemed to concede
the existence of house-rent, but to argue that the nullification of
titles to vacant land would (through market competition) cause the
land-rent component of rent to disappear and overall rent to fall to the
value of rent on buildings. Now, to me, that seems to imply that Tucker
wasn’t necessarily (at least at times) dead-set against absentee
ownership in principle. That variant of his land theory, at least, seems
to imply that the important thing was to eliminate large-scale absentee
title to vacant and unimproved land.

In any case, I tend to think that doing so would go a long way to
eliminating landlord rent through market competition.

Another critic, Walter Block argues that you are actually some sort of
Marxist because you use the labour theory of value for deriving a theory
of exploitation. It would seem that (a) Block is unaware that Adam Smith
and David Ricardo also used the labour theory of value and (b) using it
to calculate a rate of exploitation is hardly the same as using it as an
anchor to exchange values.

I think the Austrians also, for the most part, exaggerate the extent to
which marginalism/subjectivism is a radical departure from classical
labor and cost theories. It’s closer to the truth to say that
marginalism provides a mechanism for explaining the tendency that
Ricardo et al described. The marginalist/subjectivist claim that
“utility determines value” is true in a technical sense, if you add the
qualification “at any point in time given the snapshot of supply and
demand in the spot market.” But it’s not true in the ordinary way we use
those words. If you allow changes in supply over time to enter the
picture, then supply alters until the utility of the marginal unit
reflects the cost of producing it–i.e., exactly what Ricardo said.

It makes far more sense to treat marginalism as a complement or
fulfillment to classical political economy, rather than as supplanting it.

Politically, where do you think mutualists should align themselves.
Should they spend their efforts in building cooperative organisations,
like Proudhon’s advocacy of dual power? Or is there some mileage to be
made in being involved in existing political organisations, such as the
Labour Party – Cooperative Party groups in the U.K.? What about in the
United States; is the Libertarian Party salvageable?

I think by far the most important, and the most interest, of our tasks
is actually building the kind of society we want, and doing so so far as
possible without regard to the state. But there’s something to be said
for putting external pressure on the state, and participating in
political coalitions to remove as much state interference with our
activities as possible. Of course the primary emphasis of such
coalition-building should be forming pressure groups, rather than
attempting to become part of a governing coalition.

A lot of this parallels Daniel DeLeon’s disputes with the anarchists in
the I.W.W. DeLeon argued that “building the structure of the new society
in the shell of the old” (i.e. building industrial unions to serve as
organs of self-management) would not be enough by itself. So long as the
capitalists controlled the state and its armed force, and the
significant minority of people whose class interest was tied up with it,
there was the danger of the “Iron Heel” being brought to bear against
counter-organizations. On the other hand, political victory alone wasn’t
sufficient; he gave the example of threats by Jay Gould to organize a
national capital strike and lockout if the socialists ever captured the
national government. Workers, DeLeon argued, should be focused on
building counter-institutions, but also be prepared to seize the
commanding heights of the state long enough to dismantle them and
prevent them from being used against themselves.

What we need is a primary focus on institution building, without
entirely neglecting the need for a political movement to run
interference for the counter-institutions.

What’s more, there’s the very real danger an authoritarian state might
make a concerted effort to stamp out the counter-economy through (for
example) the kinds of totalitarian surveillance Richard Stallman
described in “The Right to Read,” intensified licensing and zoning to
suppress low-capital producers, etc. It’s a waste of effort and probably
corrupting to seriously run our people for Congress or the White House.
But it’s perfectly sensible to carry out propaganda against legislation
like the DMCA, to support lobbying campaigns organized by groups like
the Electronic Frontier Foundation and NORML, etc.

Proudhon argued that through a society of contracts between individuals,
a federal structure could arise. This of course must presume that
individuals have the capacity to engage in uncoerced contractual
arrangements. What other political requirements do you think have a
particular priority in breaking down authoritarian elements in statist rule?

Well, it could be that the authoritarian elements of statist rule will
persist on paper right up to the point at which they become irrelevant.
But in my opinion it’s at least worth a shot to pressure the state from
outside, and form ad hoc alliances to pressure the state, in order to
minimize its interference and fend off attempts at intensified
interference. That includes local efforts against licensing and zoning
that impede household microenterprise and micromanufacturing, local
pressure to defend peaceful squatters and vagrants, pressure against the
regulatory suppression of self-organized mutual-aid efforts, pressure at
the national level against further expanding “intellectual property”
law, and so forth.

Kevin, thank you for your time and views

Tip: SMYGO: News &
Views for Anarchists & Activists

The Emissions Trading Scheme looks likely to pass, with both wings of the coercive government “Bird of Prey” agreeing to foist this new “Mark of the Beast” tax on the unsuspecting Australian public.

Sad, in so many, many ways.

First, it comes just as news breaks of the scale of fraudulent scientific “research” into climate change.  See here and here and here and here.

Second, there were allegations in the Senate today that Dr Clive Spash’s work on alternatives to a carbon tax had been censored by the CSIRO.  The CSIRO just happens to report to “Red” Carr (noted left-wing zealot).  See here and here and here.

Third, no one seems to have made the OBVIOUS alternative suggestion: If climate change threatens to kill our children, and human production/consumption is causing this supposedly deadly over-heating, surely the most efficient, immediate, effective and equitable solution would be to raise interest rates around the world to 10%.

This simple measure would (a) reward savers (b) encourage capital accumulation and allow for further research and investment in alternative energy production (c) with 100% certainty reduce consumption and therefore emissions (unlike the hare-brained ETS scheme which gives back with one hand what it “taxes” with the other) (d) be equitable in the sense that it would minimise the govt’s ability to selectively impose the tax on its enemies and provide carbon credits to its favourites.

Ahhh….but that’s the very reason why it couldn’t ever be considered!

Because this whole scam is about putting in place a “Mark of the Beast”-style universal tax that will have every industry running to the govt begging them for favours.  Giving tribute to Satan’s Spawn is what it’s all about.  Bow down slaves and beg for life.  Or else.

Fourth, the only Parliamentary idiot who made sense today was Senator Barnaby Joyce.   He correctly (a) accused Labor of Leninist-style censorship (it’s true!) (b) stated openly that the ETS is a scam to create more gambling chips for corrupt venal bankers and brokers (c) stated that this huge bureaucratic nightmare is simply a wealth-transfer scheme to suck $s from every ordinary Australian to Sydney and Melbourne “elites” (read: PARASITES).  This is the real reason for this bizarre new tax.  The bwankers desperately need another paper scam if the liquidity demands currently being considered by APRA do get imposed on the counterfeiting bwankers.  The bankers are looking at fleecing another sheep if they can’t make more profits through excessive monetary embezzlement.

Yet, irony of ironies, Joyce was the “victim” of ABC employee and (apparently) govt-spokeswoman Virginia Trioli’s “crazy face” accusation, which effectively labelled him (and anyone else questioning the efficacy of the ETS) as insane.  See here, here, here and here. 

She’s still employed by the ABC, despite this massive insulting faux pas.  If you or I did this when interviewing Senator Wong, daughter of Mao, I’m sure we’d never have a career in media EVER AGAIN.

So we have a left-wing zealot play-acting as a journalist, laughing at anyone genuinely questioning this bizarre new tax – and she’s still employed.  We have this “crazy” Senator being the only one making any sense today in the Senate.  We have a new “Mark of the Beast” tax that makes no sense, will not do anything other than create a massive new bureaucracy and trading chips for bwankers and brokers.  We have not actually addressed pollution and “climate change” (remember: the big polluters have received massive tax credits for no reason other than politican influence).  We still have massive depletion of the world’s resources through debt-created over-consumption.

We are run by madmen.  And madwomen (most of whom appear zealots or lesbians – or both).

Finally, just on the very legitimate point that – perhaps – gays and lesbians should (generally) not be chosen to form long-term public policy, see this controversial research by Hans Hermann-Hoppe.

Then look at Wong, and half of the Labor Cabinet.

I rest my case. 

We are run by a pack of sociopathic zealots intent on controlling every aspect of our lives, incapable of addressing our real (very real) environmental problems and who will undoubtedly feed off our children like cannibals.

Death, come swiftly…

Here are some Simon Jester stickers/labels for you all to use.

Simon Jester Labels pdf

Simon Jester Labels Open Office

Thanks to simonjester.org for ideas and image.

Everyone knows that middle-aged sexual predators lurk in chatrooms, posing as insecure tweens looking for a friend; or friend other insecure tweens on MySpace; or that if you don’t lock up your wireless network tight, terrorists are going to tap into it and turn your naivete into massive-scale crime; or that that email with the suspicious subject line is a virus that’s going to delete all your files (even if you do have a Mac); and that if you don’t forward this message of holiday cheer to 42 people by midnight, an axe murderer will sneak into your room at 3 am and— ZZSWAR9ARG7Z

You get the point.  There are dangers hiding behind every hyperlink.

I don’t mean to be flippant (no, that’s a lie; I do, but it’s strictly rhetorical)—the Internet can be a scary place, and scary people use it.  I’m all for parental controls and spam queues.  What I’m not for is the underlying premise beneath Internet fear-mongering—because it’s not always just “Stranger Danger.”

Some of the outcry against danger (or obscenity, or perversion, etc, et al) comes with a call to action that frightens me more than any technological boogeyman—if the Internet is dangerous because it’s so open, because anyone can do, really, anything, why not regulate?

In 1993, SF author Bruce Sterling (“Junk DNA,” remember?) wrote an article called “A Short History of the Internet,” which you can find in its entirely online, and which I highly recommend.  For my part, I’ll focus on just a few key facts, some of the points from the reading assignment for today’s American Studies lecture on “The Internet Revolution.”  So:

1. The very openness and decentralization of the Internet that makes it “dangerous” was built into its most basic structure—from the perspective of a Cold War scientist, you see, a communication network would have to be as decentralized as possible in order to still function after a nuclear holocaust wiped out God-knew-where in the United States.  With this in mind, the less authority—the better (sounds strange for a military-government program, doesn’t it?).

2. And after decades of evolution, that’s what we still have: no authority.  Sterling asks:

Why do people want to be “on the Internet?”  One of the main reasons is  simple freedom.   The Internet is a rare example of a true, modern, functional  anarchy.   There is no “Internet Inc.”   There are no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, no stockholders.  In principle, any node can speak as a peer to any other node, as long as it obeys the rules of the TCP/IP protocols, which are strictly technical, not social or political.

Sixteen years after those words hit shelves in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and that’s still true: it’s simple science fact, and no less amazing for it.

Online, you are what you type, upload, or post—identities are fluid.  It’s true that might mean a fifty-year-old man staring at a glowing screen in his basement could pretend to be a junior high girl on a some Edward Cullen fan site, but it also means that young Peter Wiggin can blog and be seen by the world as an elder statesman.

It’s freedom to be creative without the stigma of age, sex, race, or anything else that might lead someone to prejudge you before looking at your work or ideas: online, you are your ideas.

Blogger and SF writer Cory Doctorow’s name (which I feel I mention every other post) is almost synonymous with Internet freedom.  Publishing his novels under a Creative Commons license for free distribution online (DRM-free, I might add), Doctorow could almost be a character from one of his own books—Alan/Adam/Albert/Avi, for example, from Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, spends the time he’s not brooding about his troubled childhood as the eldest son of a mountain and a washing machine, setting up a free, open, wireless network for the people of his local town.

(I did say almost a character.)  In any case, he practices what he preaches, and in all his books shows just how cool our world is.  I’m going to have to quote Makers again– we’re living in the “weirdest and best time” in the history of the world.  Witness the astonishing success of modern anarchy:

“No one needed to draw a map of the Web,” Kurt said, “It just grew and people found its weird corners on their own.  Networks don’t need centralized authority, that’s just the chains on your mind talking.”

I have to give my professor credit—revolution was a good title for the lecture.  Even after our first Revolution, observers (read: Alexis de Tocqueville) noticed a tension in American society between liberty and equality, freedom and democracy.  Oftentimes, they clash (see any debate on social welfare programs—the object is equality of outcome, but at the expense of freedom to use and dispose of one’s property, money).

But no political arguments in this post about liberty and equality: the anarchy of the Internet is one of the only places where you don’t really have to choose.

I remember when I first realized that the notions I had regarding politics and social affairs could most closely be called Anarchy.  I was in one of my Spanish literature class (to my delight my second major, Spanish, was filled with all the exciting peripheral fight-the-power ideas that I had been so disappointed to learn that my original major, English, lacked), taught by my favorite professor, an Argentine.  He lectured about three recent political structures:

1st – The Nation/The People - The Nation is ruled by a government that represents the will of The People.  Top-down.

2nd – The Leader/The Masses - Coming from Argentina my professor was especially familiar with Peronism and this form of organization.  The Leader is one who sweeps to power through the overwhelming support of The Masses .  Not empowered by the national sovereignty such as Rousseau talked about…but instead representing a more coarse group outside the structure of government, one that fills government with its exploding will.  Also top-down.

3rd – The Multitudes/Sporadic Potential – He said this was what truly excited him.  The Multitudes combine to create Sporadic Potential which in turn affects the direction of decisions and policies.  Bottom-up. 

Many in my class, especially one young woman, were furious about his teachings.  She called him a communist.  But what I realized was that his political leanings were something even more taboo, which he was understandably loathe to openly admit – an anarchist.  And for the first time I understood Anarchy and it slotted completely into my misgivings about power, government, corruption and subjection.  It all made so much sense then…although this realization made me distressed and uncomfortable at first. 

 As I read further I came to realize that Anarchy had been developed over centuries, and was not as scary as I had once thought.  It seemed that above all other political theorists, the Anarchists had the most beautiful vision of human potential, the most heartrending devotion to what so many others scoff at.

The following conversation stems from an excellent post on one of my favorite blogs on WordPress, Speak Now Peace Works.  It was specifically in response to the post Positively Deviant, which talks about the success observed when ideas come from within groups instead of from outsiders providing guidance, however well-intentioned. 

It was a good opportunity to try and elaborate further on what, for me at least, Anarchy is.  It also raises some very difficult questions that an ideal conception of the world with sporadic, independently-functioning beings would have to address.  But those are the topics for further posts…

• That is why I am mostly an Anarchist!

People can solve their own problems, if we give them a chance. The human brain is more amazing than any machine could ever be…

I believe in bottom-up solutions always and hope that these ideas catch fire throughout the world!

Great to see you have been writing a lot lately, this is one of my favorite stops while my brain is fried from staring at reports and contracts, ugh…

A York based founder member of the YAG, Tom C, has started a blog for York based anarchists and activists. Turpins Tidings deals with ‘politics, Life and football from an anarchists viewpoint’ and it joins a rapidly growing collection of Yorkshire based anarchist blogs & websites, including…

Leeds Class War

The Common Place

Barnsdale Brigade

Yorkshire Anarchist Federation

Sheffield AFed

Project Sheffield

Reclaim the Earth Centre!

Things are looking up in Cyber-Yorkshire, now lets get organised in the real world.