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Post by Admin on Nov 6, 2020 21:23:17 GMT
What is the relationship between anarchy and democracy?Should anarchists work for or against democracy? This C4SS Mutual Exchange explores democracy from a variety of different vantage points in order to improve anarchist theory and praxis. store.c4ss.org/index.php/product/anarchy-democracy/Description Mutual Exchange Symposium: Anarchy and Democracy Organized by Cory Massimino Introduction Mutual Exchange is the Center for a Stateless Society’s effort to achieve mutual understanding through dialogue. Following one of the most divisive Presidential elections in recent U.S. American history and a dangerous victor’s contested ascension to power, the political climate is one of intense ideological strife and disagreement. There is no better time to refocus at least some of our efforts on respectful and mutually beneficial discourse. Periodically delving into the weeds of complex theoretical topics to collaboratively experiment with ideas is not only necessary for individual and collective intellectual progress, but is part and parcel of anarchist praxis itself. “Fighting over the definitions of words can sometimes seem like a futile and irrelevant undertaking. However, it’s important to note that whatever language gets standardized in our communities shapes what we can talk and think about,” says William Gillis in his lead essay of our June symposium. Indeed, rather than pointless “infighting” and social posturing, the Center for a Stateless Society hopes to create a platform for free expression that benefits authors and readers alike by productively clarifying our values and principles. Whether or not any sort of resolution, consensus, or agreement results from our ensuing dialogue is, perhaps ironically, not the point. Ten anarchist authors have chosen to participate in an in-depth examination of the idea of “democracy” and how it relates to anarchy. I hope they are able to develop, advance, and popularize their individual ideas, but also set a standard for productive, yet diverse debate that is sorely needed right now. Combining the Greek words demos (“common people”) and kratos (“strength”), democracy means “rule of the commoners.” The philosophical and political debates surrounding democracy extend back 2500 years to Ancient Athens. For much of recent history, many people consider democracy to be a cherished value to protect and spread across the globe, while many others see it as a privilege they hope to someday enjoy. Even others, from all over the political spectrum, see democracy as an enemy to be squashed. This C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium will explore what anarchists have to say about democracy. What is the historical relationship between democracy and anarchy? Is democracy always entwined with the state? What should anarchists think of democratic government? What are truly democratic values and how do they relate to anarchist values? How does democracy relate to market exchange and social organization? How should those interested in social change view democracy? How do causes like feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-capitalism relate to democracy? It is no secret that a President Trump is reigniting debates surrounding democracy and democratic values among many commentators. What will a Trump presidency mean for democracy around the world and how should anarchists react? Moving forward in the 21st century it is imperative that we get to the roots of these nuanced debates so that we are better prepared to build the new world in the shell of the old, while also staying afloat in the stormy seas of authoritarianism, political violence, turbulent geopolitical alliances, and genocide. The June C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium features the Center’s own William Gillis, Kevin Carson, Nathan Goodman, and Grayson English in addition to Shawn Wilbur, Wayne Price, Alexander Reid Ross, Jesse Baldwin, Derek Wittorff, and Jessica Flanagan. Every day this month the Center will publish another entry in our ongoing conversation from one of the ten authors fleshing out their thoughts regarding the above questions and issues. Some essays will remain stand-alone contributions while others will provide back-and-forth commentary between multiple authors. I look forward to seeing these prolific and nuanced writers hash out all their points of disagreement as well as agreement and hope you stay with the Center throughout the entire month to gain both theoretical and practical insights from our symposium.
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Post by Admin on Nov 7, 2020 3:16:44 GMT
"We must move beyond right-libertarian “privatization” and Old Left “nationalization” and instead focus on decentralizing institutions to the local level and democratizing their internal governance. No bosses, no landlords, no bureaucrats!" - Kevin Carson c4ss.org/content/53835
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2020 18:07:44 GMT
Towards An Anarchist Theory of PowerPosted on July 24, 2019 - Federation blackrosefed.org/towards-anarchist-theory-of-power-correa/The following piece by Brazilian anarchist Felipe Corrêa reviews contemporary discussions of power from an anarchist perspective and their contributions to a broader theory of power for utilization in building analysis and strategy. To avoid confusion the article title has been changed to refer to an “anarchist theory of power” but we have preserved the articles use of the phrase “libertarian theory of political power” – as outside the U.S. the term “libertarian” has always historically been associated with anarchism. By Felipe Corrêa Part 1: Ibáñez and Libertarian Political Power In this first article of the series I will use for discussion the article “For a Libertarian Political Power” (“Por um Poder Político Libertário”), by Tomás Ibáñez [*]. In it – a short article, which does not exceed more than a few pages – the author places himself critically in relation to the libertarian approach that had been made the theme. The article by Ibáñez was originally written as a contribution for the seminar “Power and its Negation” (“O Poder e sua Negação”), promoted by the CIRA and the CSL Pinelli, in July of 1983. Until that time, for the author, anarchism was “tied to the rigidity of concepts and proposals created, for the most part, during the 18th and 19th centuries.” And, for him, to discuss the question of power in depth would be a relevant renovation in the theoretical camp of anarchism. The Semantic Problem With Discussions About Power Already at that time Ibáñez identified that “the polysemy a word that has more than one meaning of the term ‘power’ and the breadth of their semantic spectrum constitute the conditions for a dialog of the deaf.” For him, in the discussion about power, the discourses overlap and do not articulate with one another. And this happens because “they deal with profoundly different objects, in the confusion induced by the recourse to another common term: power.” And so the identified need for “our defining the term ‘power’, before we initiate the discussion.” Regardless of such efforts, the author did not believe it to be possible to arrive at an objective and ‘aseptic’ definition of the word “power,” since “it deals with a political term loaded with meaning, always analysed from a precise political location, and of which it is not possible to have a ‘neutral’ definition.” Power From a Triple Definition The first element to start a definition of power is that, within a libertarian perspective, it cannot be considered only in a negative manner: “in terms of negation/denial, exclusion, refusal, opposition, contradiction.” For Ibáñez, power can be defined starting from three interpretations: 1.) as capacity, 2.) as asymmetry in power relations, and 3.) as structures and mechanisms of regulation and control. Let’s see, according to the author himself, how one defines power in each of these meanings. 1. Power as capacity “In one of its senses, probably the most general and diachronically first, the term ‘power’ acts as an equivalent of the expression ‘capacity to’, i.e.: as a synonym for all the effects of which a given agent, animated or not, can be the direct or indirect cause. It is interesting that, from the beginning, power is defined in relational terms, to the extent that, in order for an element to be able to produce or inhibit an effect, it is necessary to establish an interaction.” Thought of in this sense, power could be conceived as ‘having power to’ or ‘having power for’, a capacity for realisation or a potential force that could be applied in a social relation. This places social relations as the premise of this definition of power. That is, interaction between social agents. 2. Power as asymmetry in power relations “In a second sense the term ‘power’ refers to a certain type of relation between social agents, and one is now accustomed to characterising it as an asymmetric or unequal capacity that the agents possess to cause effects on the other pole of a given relationship.” While still anchored in power as capacity, this other meaning allows us to think of the asymmetries of the different social forces that are encountered in a particular social relationship. These forces, always asymmetric and unequal, when in interaction/relation, forge the effects over one or more poles, as each one of them possesses a distinct force and, therefore, a distinct capacity. Again, it affirms power as a relationship between social agents, each one of which has a distinct capacity to cause effects on others. 3. Power as structures and mechanisms of regulation and control “In a third meaning, the term ‘power’ refers to the macro-social structures and the macro-social mechanisms of regulation or of social control. In this sense it speaks of ‘instruments’ or ‘devices’ of power, of ‘centers’ or of ‘structures’ of power, etc.” Conceived of in this way power would constitute the “system” of a given society, with regards to its structures and mechanisms of regulation and of control. It would be the set of rules of a given society, which involves both the taking of decisions for its establishment and to define its control, as well as the actual application of this control. A structuring of society that makes deliberative and executive instances necessary. What Are the Possibilities of a Society Without Power? Departing from these three interpretations, it can be affirmed that “to speak of a society ‘without power’ constitutes an aberration, whether we position ourselves from the point of view of power/capacity (meaning that one would have a society that ‘couldn’t do’ anything?), whether we position ourselves at the level of asymmetric relations (which would mean social interactions without asymmetric effects?), or by positioning ourselves from the point of view of power as mechanisms and structures of macro-social regulation (which would be a system whose elements were not ‘forced’ by the set of relations that define exactly that system itself?).” There is no society without social agents with capacity, and there is no society where all social relations are symmetric – that is, a society in which all social agents have the same capacity to cause effects on others, in all social relations – or without structures and mechanisms of social control and regulation. This allows us to agree with Ibáñez in relation to the absurd which means, taking into account the definitions presented by the author, speaking of society without power, of struggling against power, of ending or destroying power. Ibáñez believes that “power relations are inherently linked to the social fact itself, they are inherent in it, impregnate it, contain it, at the very instant in which they emanate from it.” When dealing with any aspect of the so-called social context, it can be affirmed that in it exist interactions between diverse elements that constitute a given system. For the author, besides this, “there are inevitably certain effects of the power of the system on its elements, exactly as there are also effects of the power between the elements of the system.” That is, power permeates both the relations between elements as well as the relations between the system and elements. To conceive of a society without power means, for the author, to believe in the possibility of the existence of a “society without social relations, without social rules and without processes of social decisions.” That is, it would be to conceive the “unthinkable.” A Libertarian Conception of Power Such arguments allow for the affirmation that “there exists a libertarian conception of power, and it is false that this has to constitute a negation/denial of power.” To deny this fact would necessarily imply a difficulty both in terms of analysis of the reality, and in terms of conception of a strategy. “While this is not fully assumed by libertarian thought,” Ibáñez emphasises, “it will not be capable of initiating the analyses and actions that enable it to have force in the social reality.” And what he argues makes sense if we look at the history of anarchism or even that which was called the “libertarian camp.” Going beyond the semantic assertions – which very often gave/give to the word ‘power’ a State meaning – it seems clear that “libertarian thought” never denied the capacity of social agents, the asymmetries in power relations or the structures and mechanisms of regulation and control. An example that is significantly common in the libertarian tradition. Considering the asymmetric relations of classes in capitalist society and, basing it on the idea of the capacity of the working class, libertarians seek to promote a social revolution in which the force of the dominant class is overridden and which establishes a system of regulation and control founded on self-management and on federalism. Even with this generic example, it can be said that if the dominant class is removed from its condition of domination and gives way to a libertarian structure, even in the future society, this power relation between the dominant class separated from domination and the working class constitutes an asymmetric relation. In this sense it is possible to assume that in fact, historically, there is a libertarian conception of power that – even though it has not been discussed in sufficient depth and has been complicated by a series of factors – possesses elements of relevance to this debate which is now being realised. Domination as a Type of Power When libertarians realize a discourse against power, says Ibáñez, they use the “term ‘power’ to refer in fact to a ‘certain type of power relation’, that is, very concretely, to the type of power that is encountered in the ‘relations of domination’, in the ‘structures of domination’, in the ‘devices of domination’, or in the ‘instruments of domination’ etc. (be these relations of a coercive, manipulative or other nature).” So, for him, domination is a type of power relation, but you cannot define domination as power, as they constitute distinct categories. For the author, you can not encompass in the relations of domination “the relations that link the freedom of the individual to that of groups.” That is, you can not incorporate libertarian relations in to the category of domination. But this seems somewhat obvious. What is not obvious, in fact, is that when you equate power with domination, you assume that power is contrary to freedom. An affirmation with which the author disagrees. “Freedom and power are not really situated according to a relation of simple opposition.” And: “Power and freedom thus find themselves in an inextricably complex relation of antagonism/possibility.” Thus conceived, power could be contradictory to freedom, but could also potentialize its realization. It would be, in fact, the type of power that would determine this relation with freedom. Thus, Ibáñez believes that “libertarians are situated, in reality, against the social systems based on relations of domination (in the strict sense).’ Down with power!’ is a formula that should disappear from the libertarian lexicon and be replaced by ‘Down with relations of domination’. But on this point it is necessary to try to define the conditions that make such a society possible.” Against Domination and for a Libertarian Political Power It can be said, based on this structural argument, that “libertarians are not against power, but against a certain kind of power,” and in their strategies seek to be “builders of a variety of power, which it is convenient (and accurate) for us now to call ‘libertarian power’, or, more precisely: ‘libertarian political power’.” This would mean to assume that libertarians defend a (libertarian) working model of instruments, devices and relations of power. Rest in Link
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2020 18:44:29 GMT
"Infamously anarchists, marxists and conservatives all use the word 'liberal' as a slur — probably the most frequent one that rolls off our tongues — and yet we each mean wildly different things by it." - William Gillis c4ss.org/content/49534Our Wildly Different Diagnoses Of “Liberalism” William Gillis | @rechelon | Support this author on Patreon | July 9th, 2017 Infamously anarchists, marxists and conservatives all use the word “liberal” as a slur — probably the most frequent one that rolls off our tongues — and yet we each mean wildly different things by it. To an anarchist the foremost characteristic of liberalism is shortsightedness. Liberals embrace state power and other problematic means to achieve some ameliorations in the short term at the cost of future victories. The watchword of liberals might as well be “good enough” and their slogan John Maynard Keynes’ famous line “in the long run we’re all dead.” Liberals are uninterested in the fundamental dynamics or historic consequences, they’ll do what they need to do to get a few million more people shitty health insurance ASAP even if that means compromising in deeply dangerous ways. Most of our modern world is the consequence of such thinking. Instead of wildcat and general strikes up and down the production chains, labor got into bed with the state, getting a few bureaucratic unions like the AFL-CIO established as a second wing of capital and conceding almost all means of substantive pressure. Instead of doing the hard work of (re)building alternative community organizations or consumers cooperatives to negotiate and secure terms of health care and basic needs for all, liberals took the quick fix of getting employers or the state to secure these services, making people even more dependent upon and subservient to them. Rather than building grassroots consumer reporting and mobilizing capacity to hold producers accountable liberals happily ceded this role to the state and centralized regulatory institutions like the American Medical Association which were promptly captured by the biggest powers in their respective industries and enacted prohibitive barriers to competition, securing an oligarchical system. Liberals cut corners. They look for apparent quick fixes on a global scale and rarely consider the possibility of unintended consequences from such hamfisted solutionism. This inevitably leads them to prefer political or statist solutions over the harder path of decentralized and persistent activism from the bottom up. Liberals sell activists out — they appropriate and subsume active struggles into codified “compromises” with terrible terms that become deadweight burdened on future generations. Their hearts are sometimes arguably in the right place, but only in a cavalier and dismissive way that does immense damage. Anarchists, in contrast, are far more pessimistic but also far more audacious. We know there aren’t easy simple solutions. We know that building a better world, a profoundly different world not overwhelmingly characterized by relations of domination and rulership but liberation and solidarity, will take time and continual effort on countless fronts. That our progress towards liberation will never be measured in terms of a simple variable like how many seats in a legislature our team has, but rather in billions of variables, billions of considerations. Culture, narratives, technology, infrastructure, habits, all the way down to our interpersonal relations, our everyday lives. Anarchists embrace grappling with such complexities. We resist writing anything off, accept no limited horizon to our considerations or our desires. Thus to anarchists “liberals” are the opposite of radicals because they don’t strike at the roots of power itself. In this sense we see both marxists and conservatives as just another flavor of liberalism. Yet when a marxist uses the term “liberal” they often mean someone who is insufficiently extreme — perhaps burdened by conscience or hesitation at using any and all force against political enemies, someone who is idealistic rather than brutally “practical.” In this use “liberal” is another way of saying “coward”, someone who shies away from What Needs To Be Done, rather than someone who shies away from recognizing complexities and the need to delve further. Usually — it is assumed — this cowardice arises because of a class position that is invested in the appearance of care but not anything that might risk their own privilege. In this picture anyone who balks at the prospect of using mass murder, mass imprisonment or just the social democratic police state in some rube goldberg strategy to achieve a freer world is a “coward.” Similarly anyone concerned with the particular “hows” of economic coordination or how to assure their “transitory state” / “dictatorship of the proletariat” withers away is revealed as a liberal, a nebbish egghead coward, corrupted by privilege or false class consciousness. The conservative use of “liberal” follows the same brutish narrative of cowardice, except of course the teams are assigned a little differently. What Needs To Be Done to save everything good in the world is suppress The Gays or The Muslims, and “liberals” are thus fifth column betrayers with their weirdly abstract or ethical considerations. Of course the teams that conservatives identify with and against don’t align with the true oppressors and underdogs in any sane analysis of institutional power differences, but there are clearly parallels with many marxists. Especially those marxists that agree with the fascistic premise that power relations are inescapable and freedom is an impossibility. We all see “liberal” as denoting a certain cowardice, yet the cowardice that anarchists diagnose is at odds with that diagnosed by marxists and conservatives. Anarchists see liberals as intellectual and ethical cowards of halfassed analyses and strategies — cowards even of the heart, settling for the most tepid of desires and ideals. But marxists and conservatives tend to see liberals as cowards in the war against their own conscience, cowards in the traditional sense of someone without the stomach for warfare. These are irreconcilable diagnoses. To the marxist and conservative we anarchists are the very apex of liberalism — a focus on individuals, freedom, ethics, “abstract” underlying dynamics and a rejection of simplistic notions of social conflict. Whereas to the anarchist, marxism and conservatism are themselves extreme variants of liberalism. If the myopic technocracy of Vox is deeply characterized by a gravitation towards simplistic and immediate “solutions” that ultimately work against systemic change, then the simplistic narratives of war, shortsighted embrace of dictatorship, centralization and vertically structured apparatuses of control that both marxists and conservatives fall into are surely just the intensification of such liberalism. While the internal differences to be found between marxists and conservatives are not trivial — we anarchists clearly critique “liberalism” from the opposite side of it. The failures of our world are not the result of an effete timidity when it comes to hurting other people or a nerdy inquiry into root dynamics and the externalities of approaches. We didn’t get global warming because too many people thought too far ahead about possible dangers. Centuries of colonialism and genocide are not the fault of anyone being too adverse to bloody team sports. There is, of course, a place for fighting back, for action. And there are real enemies and threats to liberation. But strength to act is almost utterly irrelevant compared with the consideration needed to act well. The last thing we need is something as immediatist, as quintessentially liberal, as a warrior perspective. Humanity is in no short supply of brute guts and it never has been, it is in short supply of vision and audacity. It is in this respect that liberals are truly mewling cowards. And it is in this respect that marxists and conservatives, for all their bluster, are far less radical than even liberals.
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Post by Admin on Nov 9, 2020 23:13:43 GMT
"In Lavoie’s framework, democracy isn't expressed through a state or through elections to decide what such a state will do. Instead, democracy occurs through open discourse, debate, contestation, and interaction among citizens." - Nathan Goodman c4ss.org/content/49379Anarchism as Radical Liberalism: Radicalizing Markets, Radicalizing Democracy Nathan Goodman | @dissentingleft | Support this author on Patreon | June 16th, 2017 This piece is the ninth essay in the June C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium: “Anarchy and Democracy.” Classical liberalism emerged as a radical ideology, challenging the status quo of monarchy, mercantilism, religious tyranny, and the ancien regime. The liberals promoted two ideals, markets and democracy, as alternatives to the old despotisms. Yet markets and democracy seemed to be at odds, leaving liberals advocating a middle of the road compromise between the two. Left-liberals favored a broader role for democracy and a narrower role for markets, while right-liberals (more often called conservatives or libertarians) favored a broader role for markets and a narrower role for democracy. Across the spectrum, they agreed that democracy and markets were at odds to at least some extent. This left an opening for radicals to propose radicalizing the commitment to one liberal ideal by abolishing the other. Most famously, socialists proposed abolishing the market and replacing it with radical democratic control over the economy. Anarchists joined in as well. Many anarcho-communists joined the call to embrace radical democracy by jettisoning markets. On the opposite extreme, many anarcho-capitalists proposed radicalizing our commitment to markets by abolishing democracy. Tell me what democracy looks like Economist Don Lavoie, in his essay “Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order1,” proposes a different way of defining democracy and markets, so that they are complementary rather than at odds. The tension between democracy and markets stems from viewing democracy as involving votes on either how a coercive government will be run or direct votes on social outcomes (such as resource distributions). When activities operate through the market, they are to some degree immunized from interference by democratic states, and they do not have their outcomes determined directly through votes by community members. Lavoie proposes an alternative definition, in which democracy is characterized by openness. Moreover, Lavoie proposes an approach that does not treat democracy as a centralized process. “Our politics needs to move beyond the model of the exercise of some kind of unified, conscious democratic will and understand democratic processes as distributed throughout the political culture,” he explains. He argues that this definition more closely describes the celebrated features of glasnost that liberalized the Soviet Union towards the end of its reign. Pro-democracy activists in that context were not primarily fighting for electoral participation, but for openness. Lavoie writes: “What I think we should mean by democracy is the distinctive kind of openness in society which the Soviet system crushed, and which began to recover under the banner of glasnost. Glasnost is the making public of things. The Russian word translates better into “openness” than it does into “democracy.” Some Western defenders of democratic governments have complained about the common translation into “democracy” on the grounds that openness is not the same thing as the holding of periodic elections, so that the glasnost movement should not be called a democratic movement at all. I suspect, on the contrary, that the movement captures the underlying essence of democracy better than our Western democratic institutions do.” In a move that evokes the best of both F.A. Hayek and the Ostroms, Lavoie then argues that “Like the market, a democratic polity exhibits a kind of distributed intelligence, not representable by any single organization which may claim to act on society’s behalf.” The distinctive features of democracy are not embodied in “the conscious will of a representative organization that has been legitimated by the public,” but are instead characterized by “the discursive process of the distributed wills of the public itself.” In Lavoie’s framework, democracy is not something expressed through a state with a monopoly on the use of force, or through elections to decide what such a state will do. Instead, democracy occurs through open discourse, debate, contestation, and interaction among citizens. To borrow a concept from the Ostroms, democracy rightly understood is polycentric rather than monocentric. At protest marches, leftist activists often chant “Tell me what democracy looks like!” to which their comrades respond “This is what democracy looks like!” In a sense, they are right. Protests reflect people with various views expressing their opinions in the open. They reflect a society in which contestation is possible to at least some degree. And it is telling that even formally democratic states send police officers to bludgeon, beat, and otherwise violently repress protesters and the journalists who report on them. If democracy is characterized by openness, then the ballot box is not the epitome of democracy. Instead, democracy is defined by those who, from the bottom up, contribute to an open society. People who film police and expose their crimes do this. Journalists who investigate powerful people, debate ideas, and keep the free press alive embody democracy. Tell me what democracy looks like? It looks like whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, and Daniel Ellsberg making the state’s previously secret crimes public. Political Culture and Anarchism Lavoie applied his understanding of democracy as openness to shed new light on the work of anarcho-capitalist theorists such as Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, and Bruce Benson. While these thinkers are correct to note that markets and other non-state institutions can provide law, the question of what sort of law will be provided depends upon the political culture. Questions of political culture have all too often been ignored by our fellow radical libertarians. As Lavoie writes: “Liberals cannot resolve the issue of whether a legal system could be supplied by a free market because the issue depends on what is happening in the political culture, in the ongoing discourses about mutual rights and obligations, which individualist liberalism, in both limited-government and anarchist versions, utterly ignores. Radical liberals have been so intent on establishing a universal system of individual rights that they have failed to address the cultural conditions in which socialized individuals would demand this or that kind of legal services. To say we should leave everything to be “decided by markets” does not, as radical liberals suppose, relieve liberalism of the need to deal with the whole realm of politics. And to severely limit or even abolish government does not necessarily remove the need for democratic processes in nongovernmental institutions.” Lavoie makes an excellent point here, and one that underscores the need for what Charles W. Johnson has called “thick libertarianism2.” As Johnson notes, the thin core of libertarianism tells us something important: namely that aggression is wrong, and that force is only justified in defense of persons or property. But there are related “thick” commitments that are important for instantiating the non-aggression principle in the real world. Lavoie’s work shows us that some of these thick commitments are likely to relate to openness and political culture. The anarchism I advocate entails abolishing the state. But that is not all it entails. Instead, my anarchism is a radicalization of liberalism: both liberalism’s commitment to markets and its commitment to democracy. Markets enable individuals to freely associate, provide incentives that align our self-interest with the interests of others, and coordinate social cooperation among diverse individuals with dispersed knowledge. Democracy, or a society characterized by openness, empowers individuals to debate, share their knowledge, persuade one another, and learn from one another. As Lavoie shows us, democracy and markets do not need to be at odds. Instead, they can represent two sides of the same coin, two mechanisms for a society to engage in decentralized processes of experimentation and error correction. Anarchism is democracy radicalized, not in the sense of direct democracy, federated worker cooperatives, or council communism, but in the sense of an open society freed from the shackles of the state. References (1) Lavoie, Don. “Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order: Notes on the Nature of Politics in a Radically Liberal Society.” Social Philosophy and Policy 10, no. 2 (July 1993): 103–20. doi:10.1017/S0265052500004167. (2) Johnson, Charles. “Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin.” Foundation for Economic Education, July 1, 2008. fee.org/articles/libertarianism-through-thick-and-thin/. Mutual Exchange is C4SS’s goal in two senses: We favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to C4SS’s audience. Online symposiums will include essays by a diverse range of writers presenting and debating their views on a variety of interrelated and overlapping topics, tied together by the overarching monthly theme. C4SS is extremely interested in feedback from our readers. Suggestions and comments are enthusiastically encouraged. If you’re interested in proposing topics and/or authors for our program to pursue, or if you’re interested in participating yourself, please email C4SS’s Mutual Exchange Coordinator, Cory Massimino, at cory.massimino@c4ss.org.
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Post by Admin on Nov 11, 2020 20:39:05 GMT
In August, Facebook purged a number of anarchist news organizations and left-wing activists from the site under the guise of a larger ban targeting far-right extremists and QAnon conspiracy theorists. Following the ban, a group of anarchists created their own social media server called Kolektiva Social on Mastodon, a decentralized, non-corporate social media alternative. The server, dubbed an 'instance' in Mastodon-speak, has since amassed over 2,100 users and continues to grow from an influx of left-leaning activists who feel they are targeted by larger social media platforms. Just last month, without warning or explanation, Instagram disabled the account of the Pacific NorthWest Youth Liberation Front, a decentralized network of youth collectives committed to taking direct action toward 'total liberation.' In response, the group encouraged people to find them on Kolektiva Social and on their blog. Anarchist filmmaker and Kolektiva Social collective member Franklin Lopez tells Mic, “Folks saw a need for a social media platform that was not rife with censorship, shadow banning, and data tracking [...] This would be a platform that belongs to us, that is ad free, where we don't track users’ habits or keep any of their data except for what they publish themselves.” So far, the server’s discourse is productive and the environment is friendly. Mastodon, home to over 3 million accounts and growing, borrows from Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook by allowing for 500-word character limits in an interface reminiscent of Twitter, while each community moderates its own content. The platform was founded by German developer Eugen Rochko in 2017 with funds from crowdfunding site Patreon. It is attractive for anarchists partially because it mirrors the type of decentralized, non-hierarchical society they hope to build. Each instance within Mastodon acts as its own community, and disparate instances can link up and share content, or 'federate,' with each other. Inside Kolektiva, the social media platform built by anarchists and activistsBy Ella Fassler November 10, 2020 www.mic.com/p/inside-kolektiva-the-social-media-platform-built-by-anarchists-activists-42617028
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Post by Admin on Nov 16, 2020 20:28:17 GMT
Book Review: How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st CenturyPost on: November 14, 2020 Doug Enaa Greene When it comes to fighting for socialism, strategy is everything. Here we present a review of Erik Olin Wright’s immensely popular “How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century,” and discuss the pitfalls of trying to “erode” capitalism. www.leftvoice.org/book-review-how-to-be-an-anti-capitalist-in-the-21st-centuryIneeded a break from my normal routine, so read Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century. This was published last year and was one of the last books Wright wrote before dying of cancer. Wright himself was a sociologist, Analytical Marxist, and a democratic socialist. Also by all accounts, he seemed to be a decent human being, so all my criticisms here are not about him, but rather his book. The one thing I will give praise to Wright for is that he is a remarkably clear writer unlike many Analytical Marxists whom I find to be obscurantist and boring. So the book itself is actually very easy to follow and Wright does a decent job of explaining his key ideas (many are popularized from his work Envisioning Real Utopias). I finished it in a single sitting. That being said, Wright’s book is about what’s wrong with capitalism, that a democratic socialist alternative would be better and how to get there. I think that Wright is wrong on all these questions. For one, his argument against capitalism and in favor of socialism is a moral critique, based upon the ideals of democracy, equality, and solidarity. Certainly moral cases can be made that capitalism is unjust and exploitative, but that only takes you so far. We can also make moral appeals to change it (or mitigate its excesses), but the Marxist case against capitalism is based on the fact that the system itself contains internal contradictions that lead it to crisis and breakdown. In other words, there is a material necessity to the struggle for communism. If the working class doesn’t overthrow it, then the end result will be barbarism. All of that is ignored by Wright in favor of a nebulous moral critique. In terms of Wright’s alternative, there is a lot of discussion of the role of UBI, cooperatives, new technologies, and different forms of direct democracy in forming a democratic socialist society. However, like many Analytical Marxists, Wright seems to be envision quite a large role for the market and the law of value in socialism. In societies lacking a central plan, the law of value of dominates the economy. While socialism cannot end the dominance of the law of value at a stroke, its dominance can be ended with the institution of a planned economy that will produce results to fulfill human needs. As we can see from the examples of Yugoslavia and China, a market socialist economy does not do that. In fact, there is an utter lack of discussion of how to overcome the domination of the law of value or the role of a planned economy in socialism. This hostility to a revolutionary planned economy is only be expected from Analytical Marxists like Wright who accept many of the premises of classical economics with their preference for markets. Nor is Wright’s proposed transition to democratic socialism any better. He envisions “eroding capitalism” through developing “democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations” in the cracks in the system to eventually overcome the prerogatives of capitalism. However, Wright also believes that it is necessary to supplement this strategy “from below” with one “from above” by utilizing the state to open up space and develop anti-capitalist forms of organization. Yet on both counts of his strategy, Wright falls short. For one, his strategy of eroding capitalism seems to be analogous to how the bourgeoisie developed in the cracks of feudalism by building up their economic and social power before achieving power. However, this option is not available to the working class. For one, whereas the bourgeoisie could create new forms of economic organization in the womb of feudalism and eventually burst the old order asunder, workers cannot create a new social system before taking power. Ultimately, cooperatives cannot overcome the dominant power of the market. The creation of a socialist economic order is something that happens after the seizure of power. Another point is that Wright’s outside/inside strategy on the state seems to rely upon Nicos Poulantzas’ ideas on a transition to socialism. Poulantzas believed that it was possible for the dominated classes to establish beach-heads or influence within the state apparatus. After creating beach-heads, the dominated classes would use them intensify the existing contradictions inside the state, while at the same time, mobilizing the masses outside of the state to develop new forms of self-government in order to challenge the existing state in order to begin the transition to socialism. However, Poulantzas was honest enough to recognize that this strategy would likely fail due to the preponderance of power by the ruling class over the state apparatus. Wright’s strategy seems to be based upon developing beach-heads of a sort and then gradually expanding them. In no case does he discuss the possibility of resistance by the bourgeoisie to his proposed transition. Somehow capitalism is eroded without the capitalists being aware or even doing anything about it! He invokes the example of Chile with its democratic road to socialism that was drowned in blood, but leaves the reader with no real idea of how to defeat the armed power of the bourgeois state. For that matter, Wright does not discuss of the role of imperialism. Perhaps we should not be so quick to dismiss – as Wright does – the Leninist thesis that the bourgeois state is not something to be eroded, but utterly broken. Wright’s view of the fragmentation and tangled location of class position appears refreshing and avoiding reductionism, but ultimately he denies the role of the working class as an agent for change. His analysis of class departs from Marx with its focus on exploitation in the workplace and borrows from mainstream sociology by qualifying class based upon qualities such as “skills” along with relation to the means of production. By erasing the role of the working class, Wright opens the door to reformist and class collaborationist avenues for change. Wright’s proposed strategy to erode capitalism avoids none of the reformist pitfalls that have plagued the left for the last century. For all his clarity of writing, the ideas and strategies he proposes will do more to confuse than provide meaningful answers in regards to “what is to be done.” Wright’s theoretical departure from central Marxist positions on class, the state, and the transition to socialism results in the practical dead end of opportunism.
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Post by Admin on Nov 17, 2020 20:12:57 GMT
"Without the state tipping the scales, competition against each other in a race to destroy the Earth for the momentary glories of capital accumulation is supplanted by people working in concert to achieve joint success." - Joseph Parampathu How the State Enables EcocideJoseph Parampathu | November 16th, 2020 c4ss.org/content/53920In the first year of constant quarantine, rocked by worldwide social unrest, extreme tropical weather, and widespread government ineptitude, the complete inability and unwillingness of the ruling classes to make any substantive changes is clear. There will not be any relief and there is no reckoning. Commoditizing living animals has created the perfect conditions for zoonotic diseases to mutate and spread, but harm reduction measures to deal with the pandemic have obfuscated this risk, instead touting the animal agriculture industry as a “vital industry” necessary to the economic interests of the capitalist class. Forget sacrificing your ethics, the time has come to put yourself on the altar and pray you make the perfect gift to the market — or at least that shell of a market reflected in financial exchanges. When we face the very real consequences of generations of ecocide, we have to ask ourselves: how can we ever hope to take on this grand challenge, as long as the state exists? At every opportunity for working people to take control over their environments and end the resource grabs that leave them with toxic dumps in their backyards, the state intervenes to protect moneyed interests from being held accountable to self-managed communities. When the local factory’s fumes cause your children to develop respiratory diseases, the transnational water privatizer takes your water rights, and the farm conglomerate poisons your soil, the state ensures that you stay embroiled in prolonged legal battles and legislative processes until you have nothing worth saving. Anarchists often face the question: but how can we stop climate change without bold, dramatic action? The answer is we cannot. Bold, dramatic action has never come from the state, and it never will. The moneyed class, in their ignorance, still thinks they can extract the last remaining resource wealth and get away unscathed. They fantasize of escaping Earth and leaving the planet (and you with it) as a reverse colony for their continued enrichment. And the state is not just going to let them do it, it’s going to help them — using your resources. Whether or not you are aware of it, the capitalist class knows that they are at war with you. They are prepared to use the full force of the state to control the last remaining resources on Earth. If the pandemic has made anything clear, it is that they are so wrapped up in their own fantasies of grandeur that they will not make the necessary changes to their lifestyles or social structures to move beyond capitalism. There is no gentle transition from liberal democracy to democratic socialism, or at least, if one were hypothetically possible it has now become, on a practical level, too late. There is no magic green technology or silver bullet coming to prevent mass extinction. What we see clearly is that the capitalist class would rather remove you from existence than reduce their obscene standard of living. Eliminating the state is necessary to weakening the power of the capitalist class. While direct confrontation may strike the final blow to the state, the most subversive actions remain in non-participation in the state. By working outside the state to strengthen parallel and autonomous lines of community we weaken the state’s power over us. Without workers and resources to exploit, the state, like its capitalist masters, has no power to do anything. Ensuring that we use our independent networks to do what the state will never do, we can meet the challenges of ecocide and climate catastrophe directly through reorganizing our communities and restructuring the way we interact with the environment. The rich, by their existence, destroy the resources of the world through the inefficiencies of exploitation. Communities organized to provide for their own management are necessarily accountable to their own people and have a stake in ensuring the continued long-term availability of their own resources. Cooperation in mutual aid strengthens bonds by ensuring dual value. Without the state tipping the scales, competition against each other in a race to destroy the Earth for the momentary glories of capital accumulation is supplanted by people working in concert to achieve joint success. There is still a path forward that can reverse ecocide, but it runs through our own decisions in how we manage our societies, not how we interact with the state.
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Post by Admin on Nov 18, 2020 23:59:31 GMT
An Anarchist FAQ – The Symbols of Anarchywww.infoshop.org/an-anarchist-faq-the-symbols-of-anarchy/1 What is the history of the Black Flag? 2 Why the red-and-black flag? 3 Where does the circled A come from? Introduction Anarchism has always stood deliberately for a broad, and at times vague, political platform. The reasoning is sound; blueprints create rigid dogma and stifle the creative spirit of revolt. Along the same lines and resulting in the same problems, Anarchists have rejected the “disciplined” leadership that is found in many other political groupings on the Left. The reasoning for this is also sound; leadership based on authority is inherently hierarchical. It seems to follow logically that since Anarchists have shied away from anything static, that we would also shy away from the importance of symbols and icons. Yet the fact is Anarchists have used symbolism in our revolt against the State and Capital, the most famous of which are the circled-A, the black flag and the red-and-black flag. This appendix tries to show the history of these three iconic symbols and indicate why they were taken up by anarchists to represent our ideas and movement. Ironically enough, one of the original anarchist symbols was the red flag. As anarchist Communard Louise Michel put it, “Lyon, Marseille, Narbonne, all had their own Communes, and like ours [in Paris], theirs too were drowned in the blood of revolutionaries. That is why our flags are red. Why are our red banners so terribly frightening to those persons who have caused them to be stained that colour?” [The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, p. 65] March 18th, 1877, saw Kropotkin participate in a protest march in Berne which involved the anarchists “carrying the red flag in honour of the Paris Commune” for “in Switzerland federal law prohibited public display of the red flag.” [Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin, p. 137] Anarchist historians Nicolas Walter and Heiner Becker note that “Kropotkin always preferred the red flag.” [Peter Kropotkin, Act for Yourselves, p. 128] On Labour Day in 1899, Emma Goldman gave lectures to miners in Spring Valley, Illinois, which ended in a demonstration which she headed “carrying a large red flag.” [Living My Life, vol. 1, p. 245] According to historian Caroline Waldron Merithew, the 300 marchers “defied police orders to haul down the ‘red flag of anarchy.'” [Anarchist Motherhood, p. 236] This should be unsurprising as anarchism is a form of socialism and came out of the general socialist and labour movements. Common roots would imply common imagery. However, as mainstream socialism developed in the nineteenth century into either reformist social democracy or the state socialism of the revolutionary Marxists, anarchists developed their own images of revolt based upon those raised by working class people in struggle. As will be shown, they come from the revolutionary anarchism most directly associated with the wider labour and socialist movements, i.e., the dominant, mainstream social anarchist tradition. As Nicholas Walter put it: “[The] serious study of anarchism should be based on fact rather than fantasy, and concentrate on people and movements that actually used the word. However old and wide the ideas of anarchism may be . . . no one called himself an anarchist before [Proudhon in] 1840, and no movement called itself anarchist before the 1870s . . . The actual anarchist movement was founded . . . by the anti-authoritarian sections of the First International . . . This was certainly the first anarchist movement, and this movement was certainly based on a libertarian version of the concept of the class struggle.” [The Anarchist Past and other essays, pp. 60-1] Unsurprisingly, the first anarchist symbols reflected the origins and ideas of this class struggle movement. Both the black and red-and-black flags were first used by revolutionary anarchists. The black flag was popularised in the 1880s by Louise Michel, a leading French communist-anarchist militant. From Europe it spread to America when the communist-anarchists of the International Working People’s Association raised it in their struggle against capitalism before being taken up by other revolutionary class struggle anarchists across the globe. The red-and-black flag was first used by the Italian section of the First International and this had been the first to move from collectivist to communist-anarchism in October 1876. [Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892, p. 111] From there, it spread to Mexico and was used by anarchist labour militants there before being re-invented by the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists in the 1930s. Like anarchism itself, the anarchist flags are a product of the social struggle against capitalism and statism. We would like to point out that this appendix is partly based on Jason Wehling’s 1995 essay Anarchism and the History of the Black Flag. Needless to say, this appendix does not cover all anarchists symbols. For example, recently the red-and-black flag has become complemented by the green-and-black flag of eco-anarchism (the symbolism of the green should need no explanation). Other libertarian popular symbols include the IWW inspired “Wildcat” (representing, of course, the spontaneity, direct action, solidarity and militancy of a wildcat strike), the “Black Rose” (inspired, no doubt, by the demand of striking IWW women workers in Lawrence, 1912, for not only bread, but for roses too) and the ironic “little black bomb” (among others). Here we concentrate on the three most famous ones. 1 What is the history of the Black Flag? As is well known, the black flag is the symbol of anarchism. Howard Ehrlich has a great passage in his book Reinventing Anarchy, Again on why anarchists use it. It is worth quoting at length: “Why is our flag black? Black is a shade of negation. The black flag is the negation of all flags. It is a negation of nationhood which puts the human race against itself and denies the unity of all humankind. Black is a mood of anger and outrage at all the hideous crimes against humanity perpetrated in the name of allegiance to one state or another. It is anger and outrage at the insult to human intelligence implied in the pretences, hypocrisies, and cheap chicaneries of governments . . . Black is also a colour of mourning; the black flag which cancels out the nation also mourns its victims the countless millions murdered in wars, external and internal, to the greater glory and stability of some bloody state. It mourns for those whose labour is robbed (taxed) to pay for the slaughter and oppression of other human beings. It mourns not only the death of the body but the crippling of the spirit under authoritarian and hierarchic systems; it mourns the millions of brain cells blacked out with never a chance to light up the world. It is a colour of inconsolable grief. “But black is also beautiful. It is a colour of determination, of resolve, of strength, a colour by which all others are clarified and defined. Black is the mysterious surrounding of germination, of fertility, the breeding ground of new life which always evolves, renews, refreshes, and reproduces itself in darkness. The seed hidden in the earth, the strange journey of the sperm, the secret growth of the embryo in the womb all these the blackness surrounds and protects. “So black is negation, is anger, is outrage, is mourning, is beauty, is hope, is the fostering and sheltering of new forms of human life and relationship on and with this earth. The black flag means all these things. We are proud to carry it, sorry we have to, and look forward to the day when such a symbol will no longer be necessary.” [“Why the Black Flag?”, Howard Ehrlich (ed.), Reinventing Anarchy, Again, pp. 31-2] Here we discuss when and why anarchists first took up the black flag as our symbol. There are ample accounts of the use of black flags by anarchists. Probably the most famous was Nestor Makhno’s partisans during the Russia Revolution. Under the black banner, his army routed a dozen armies and kept a large portion of the Ukraine free from concentrated power for a good couple of years. On the black flag was embroidered “Liberty or Death” and “The Land to the Peasant, The Factories to the Workers.” [Voline, The Unknown Revolution, pp. 607-10] In 1925, the Japanese anarchists formed the Black Youth League and, in 1945, when the anarchist federation reformed, their journal was named Kurohata (Black Flag). [Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, pp. 525-6] In 1968, students carried black (and red) flags during the street fighting and General Strike in France, bringing the resurgence of anarchism in the 1960s into the view of the general public. The same year saw the Black Flag being raised at the American Students for a Democratic Society national convention. Two years later the British based magazine Black Flag was started and is still going strong. At the turn of the 21st century, the Black Flag was at the front of the so-called anti-globalisation protests. Today, if you go to any sizeable demonstration you will usually see the Black Flag raised by the anarchists present. However, the anarchists’ black flag originated much earlier than this. Louise Michel, famous participant in the Paris Commune of 1871, was instrumental in popularising the use of the Black Flag in anarchist circles. At a March 18th public meeting in 1882 to commemorate the Paris Commune she proclaimed that the “red flag was no longer appropriate; [the anarchists] should raise the black flag of misery.” [Edith Thomas, Louise Michel, p. 191] The following year she put her words into action. According to anarchist historian George Woodcock, Michel flew the black flag on March 9, 1883, during demonstration of the unemployed in Paris, France. An open air meeting of the unemployed was broken up by the police and around 500 demonstrators, with Michel at the front carrying a black flag and shouting “Bread, work, or lead!” marched off towards the Boulevard Saint-Germain. The crowd pillaged three baker’s shops before the police attacked. Michel was arrested and sentenced to six years solitary confinement. Public pressure soon forced the granting of an amnesty. [Anarchism, pp. 251-2] August the same year saw the publication of the anarchist paper Le Drapeau Noir (The Black Flag) in Lyon which suggests that it had become a popular symbol within anarchist circles. [“Sur la Symbolique anarchiste”, Bulletin du CIRA, no. 62, p. 2] However, anarchists had been using red-and-black flags a number of years previously (see next section) so Michel’s use of the colour black was not totally without precedence. Not long after, the black flag made its way to America. Paul Avrich reports that on November 27, 1884, it was displayed in Chicago at an anarchist demonstration. According to Avrich, August Spies, one of the Haymarket martyrs, “noted that this was the first occasion on which [the black flag] had been unfurled on American soil.” By January the following year, “street parades and mass outdoor demonstrations, with red and black banners . . . were the most dramatic form of advertisement” for the revolutionary anarchist movement in America. April 1885 saw Lucy Parsons and Lizzie Holmes at the head of a protest march “each bearing a flag, one black, the other red.” [The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 145, pp. 81-2 and p. 147] The Black Flag continued to be used by anarchists in America, with one being seized by police at an anarchist organised demonstration for the unemployed in 1893 at which Emma Goldman spoke. [Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol. 1, p. 144] Twenty one years later, Alexander Berkman reported on another anarchist inspired unemployed march in New York which raised the black flag in “menacing defiance in the face of parasitic contentment and self-righteous arrogance” of the “exploiters and well-fed idlers.” [“The Movement of the Unemployed”, Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, p. 341] It seems that black flags did not appear in Russia until the founding of the Chernoe Znamia (“black banner”) movement in 1905. With the defeat of that year’s revolution, anarchism went underground again. The Black Flag, like anarchism in general, re-emerged during the 1917 revolution. Anarchists in Petrograd took part in the February demonstrations which brought down Tsarism carrying black flags with “Down with authority and capitalism!” on them. As part of their activity, anarchists organised armed detachments in most towns and cities called “Black Guards” to defend themselves against counter-revolutionary attempts by the provisional government. As noted above, the Makhnovists fought Bolshevik and White dictatorship under Black Flags. On a more dreary note, February 1921 saw the end of black flags in Soviet Russia. That month saw Peter Kropotkin’s funeral take place in Moscow. Twenty thousand people marched in his honour, carrying black banners that read: “Where there is authority there is no freedom.” [Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, p. 44, p. 124, p. 183 and p. 227] Only two weeks after Kropotkin’s funeral march, the Kronstadt rebellion broke out and anarchism was erased from Soviet Russia for good. With the end of Stalinism, anarchism with its Black Flag re-emerged all across Eastern Europe, including Russia. While the events above are fairly well known, as has been related, the exact origin of the black flag is not. What is known is that a large number of Anarchist groups in the early 1880s adopted titles associated with black. In July of 1881, the Black International was founded in London. This was an attempt to reorganise the Anarchist wing of the recently dissolved First International. In October 1881, a meeting in Chicago lead to the International Working People’s Association being formed in North America. This organisation, also known as the Black International, affiliated to the London organisation. [Woodcock, Op. Cit., pp. 212-4 and p. 393] These two conferences are immediately followed by Michel’s demonstration (1883) and the black flags in Chicago (1884). Thus it was around the early 1880s that anarchism and the Black Flag became inseparably linked. Avrich, for example, states that in 1884, the black flag “was the new anarchist emblem.” [The Haymarket Tragedy, p. 144] In agreement, Murray Bookchin reports that “in later years, the Anarchists were to adopt the black flag” when speaking of the Spanish Anarchist movement in 1870. [The Spanish Anarchists, p. 57] Walter and Heiner also note that “it was adopted by the anarchist movement during the 1880s.” [Kropotkin, Act for Yourselves, p. 128] Now the question becomes why, exactly, black was chosen. The Chicago “Alarm” stated that the black flag is “the fearful symbol of hunger, misery and death.” [quoted by Avrich, Op. Cit., p. 144] Bookchin asserts that anarchists were “to adopt the black flag as a symbol of the workers misery and as an expression of their anger and bitterness.” [Op. Cit., p. 57] Historian Bruce C. Nelson also notes that the Black Flag was considered “the emblem of hunger” when it was unfurled in Chicago in 1884. [Beyond the Martyrs, p. 141 and p. 150] While it “was interpreted in anarchist circles as the symbol of death, hunger and misery” it was “also said to be the ’emblem of retribution'” and in a labour procession in Cincinnati in January 1885, “it was further acknowledged to be the banner of working-class intransigence, as demonstrated by the words ‘No Quarter’ inscribed on it.” [Donald C. Hodges, Sandino’s Communism, p. 21] For Berkman, it was the “symbol of starvation and desperate misery.” [Op. Cit., p. 341] Louise Michel stated that the “black flag is the flag of strikes and the flag of those who are hungry.” [Op. Cit., p. 168] Along these lines, Albert Meltzer maintains that the association between the black flag and working class revolt “originated in Rheims [France] in 1831 (‘Work or Death’) in an unemployed demonstration.” [The Anarcho-Quiz Book, p. 49] He went on to assert that it was Michel’s action in 1883 that solidified the association. The links from revolts in France to anarchism are even stronger. As Murray Bookchin records, in Lyon “in 1831, the silk-weaving artisans . . . rose in armed conflict to gain a better tarif, or contract, from the merchants. For a brief period they actually took control of the city, under red and black flags — which made their insurrection a memorable event in the history of revolutionary symbols. Their use of the word mutuelisme to denote the associative disposition of society that they preferred made their insurrection a memorable event in the history of anarchist thought as well, since Proudhon appears to have picked up the word from them during his brief stay in the city in 1843-4.” [The Third Revolution, vol. 2, p. 157] Sharif Gemie confirms this, noting that a police report sent to the Lyon prefect that said: “The silk-weavers of the Croix-Rousse have decided that tomorrow they will go down to Lyon, carrying a black flag, calling for work or death.” The revolt saw the Black Flag raised: “At eleven a.m. the silk-weavers’ columns descended the slops of the Croix-Rousse. Some carried black flags, the colour of mourning and a reminder of their economic distress. Others pushed loaves of bread on the bayonets of their guns and held them aloft. The symbolic force of this action was reinforced by a repeatedly-shouted slogan: ‘bread or lead!’: in other words, if they were not given bread which they could afford, then they were prepared to face bullets. At some point during the rebellion, a more eloquent expression was devised: ‘Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant!’ — ‘Live working or die by fighting!’. Some witnesses report seeing this painted on a black flag.” [Sharif Gemie, French Revolutions, 1815-1914, pp. 52-53] Kropotkin himself states that its use continued in the French labour movement after this uprising. He notes that the Paris Workers “raised in June [1848] their black flag of ‘Bread or Labour'” [Act for Yourselves, p. 100] Black flags were also hung from windows in Paris on the 1st of March, 1871, in defiance of the Prussians marching through the city after their victory in the Franco-Prussian War. [Stewart Edwards, The Communards of Paris, 1871, p. 25] The use of the black flag by anarchists, therefore, is an expression of their roots and activity in the labour movement in Europe, particularly in France. The anarchist adoption of the Black Flag by the movement in the 1880s reflects its use as “the traditional symbol of hunger, poverty and despair” and that it was “raised during popular risings in Europe as a sign of no surrender and no quarter.” [Walter and Becker, Act for Yourselves, p. 128] This is confirmed by the first anarchist journal to be called Black Flag: “On the heights of the city [of Lyon] in la Croix-Rousse and Vaise, workers, pushed by hunger, raised for the first time this sign of mourning and revenge [the black flag], and made therefore of it the emblem of workers’ demands.” [Le Drapeau Noir, no. 1, 12th August 1883] This was echoed by Louise Michel: “How many wrathful people, young people, will be with us when the red and black banners wave in the wind of anger! What a tidal wave it will be when the red and black banners rise around the old wreck! “The red banner, which has always stood for liberty, frightens the executioners because it is so red with our blood. The black flag, with layers of blood upon it from those who wanted to live by working or die by fighting, frightens those who want to live off the work of others. Those red and black banners wave over us mourning our dead and wave over our hopes for the dawn that is breaking.” [The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel, pp. 193-4] The mass slaughter of Communards by the French ruling class after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871 could also explain the use of the Black Flag by anarchists at this time. Black “is the colour of mourning [at least in Western cultures], it symbolises our mourning for dead comrades, those whose lives were taken by war, on the battlefield (between states) or in the streets and on the picket lines (between classes).” [Chico, “letters”, Freedom, vol. 48, No. 12, p. 10] Given the 25 000 dead in the Commune, many of them anarchists and libertarian socialists, the use of the Black Flag by anarchists afterwards would make sense. Sandino, the Nicaraguan libertarian socialist (whose use of the red-and-black colours we discuss below) also said that black stood for mourning (“Red for liberty; black for mourning; and the skull for a struggle to the death” [Donald C. Hodges, Sandino’s Communism, p. 24]). Regardless of other meanings, it is clear that anarchists took up the black flag in the 1880s because it was, like the red flag, a recognised symbol of working class resistance to capitalism. This is unsurprising given the nature of anarchist politics. Just as anarchists base our ideas on actual working class practice, we would also base our symbols on those created by that self-activity. For example, Proudhon as well as taking the term “mutualism” from radical workers also argued that co-operative “labour associations” had “spontaneously, without prompting and without capital been formed in Paris and in Lyon. . . the proof of it [mutualism, the organisation of credit and labour] . . . lies in current practice, revolutionary practice.” [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, pp. 59-60] He considered his ideas, in other words, to be an expression of working class self-activity. Indeed, according to K. Steven Vincent, there was “close similarity between the associational ideal of Proudhon . . . and the program of the Lyon Mutualists” and that there was “a remarkable convergence [between the ideas], and it is likely that Proudhon was able to articulate his positive program more coherently because of the example of the silk workers of Lyon. The socialist ideal that he championed was already being realised, to a certain extent, by such workers.” [Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism, p. 164] Other anarchists have made similar arguments concerning anarchism being the expression of tendencies within working class struggle against oppression and exploitation and so the using of a traditional workers symbol would be a natural expression of this aspect of anarchism. Similarly, perhaps it is Louise Michel’s comment that the Black Flag was the “flag of strikes” which could explain the naming of the Black International founded in 1881 (and so the increasing use of the Black Flag in anarchist circles in the early 1880s). Around the time of its founding congress Kropotkin was formulating the idea that this organisation would be a “Strikers’ International” (Internationale Greviste) — it would be “an organisation of resistance, of strikes.” [quoted by Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin, p. 147] In December 1881 he discussed the revival of the International Workers Association as a Strikers’ International for to “be able to make the revolution, the mass of workers will have to organise themselves. Resistance and strikes are excellent methods of organisation for doing this.” He stressed that the “strike develops the sentiment of solidarity” and argued that the First International “was born of strikes; it was fundamentally a strikers’ organisation.” [quoted by Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872-1886, p. 255 and p. 256] A “Strikers International” would need the strikers flag and so, perhaps, the Black International got its name. This, of course, fits perfectly with the use of the Black Flag as a symbol of workers’ resistance by anarchism, a political expression of that resistance. However, the black flag did not instantly replace the red flag as the main anarchist symbol. The use of the red flag continued for some decades in anarchist circles. Thus we find Kropotkin writing in the early 1880s of “anarchist groups . . . rais[ing] the red flag of revolution.” As Woodcock noted, the “black flag was not universally accepted by anarchists at this time. Many, like Kropotkin, still thought of themselves as socialists and of the red flag as theirs also.” [Words of a Rebel, p. 75 and p. 225] In addition, we find the Chicago anarchists using both black and red flags all through the 1880s. French Anarchists carried three red flags at the funeral of Louise Michel’s mother in 1885 as well as at her own funeral in January 1905. [Louise Michel, Op. Cit., p. 183 and p. 201] Anarchist in Japan, for example, demonstrated under red flags bearing the slogans “Anarchy” and “Anarchist Communism” in June, 1908. [John Crump, Hatta Shuzo and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan, p. 25] Three years later, the Mexican anarchists declared that they had “hoisted the Red Flag on Mexico’s fields of action” as part of their “war against Authority, war against Capital, and war against the Church.” They were “fighting under the Red Flag to the famous cry of ‘Land and Liberty.'” [Ricardo Flores Magon, Land and Liberty, p. 98 and p. 100] So for a considerable period of time anarchists used red as well as black flags as their symbol. The general drift away from the red flag towards the black must be placed in the historical context. During the 1880s the socialist movement was changing. Marxist social democracy was becoming the dominant socialist trend, with libertarian socialism going into relative decline in many areas. Thus the red flag was increasingly associated with the authoritarian and statist (and increasingly reformist) side of the socialist movement. In order to distinguish themselves from other socialists, the use of the black flag makes perfect sense as it was it an accepted symbol of working class revolt like the red flag. After the Russian Revolution and its slide into dictatorship (first under Lenin, then Stalin) anarchist use of the red flag decreased as it no longer “stood for liberty.” Instead, it had become associated, at worse, with the Communist Parties or, at best, bureaucratic, reformist and authoritarian social democracy. This change can be seen from the Japanese movement. As noted above, before the First World War anarchists there had happily raised the red flag but in the 1920s they unfurled the black flag. Organised in the Kokushoku Seinen Renmei (Black Youth League), they published Kokushoku Seinen (Black Youth). By 1930, the anarchist theoretical magazine Kotushoku Sensen (Black Battlefront) had been replaced by two journals called Kurohata (Black Flag) and Kuhusen (Black Struggle). [John Crump, Op. Cit., pp. 69-71 and p. 88] According to historian Candace Falk, “[t]hough black has been associated with anarchism in France since 1883, the colour red was the predominant symbol of anarchism throughout this period; only after the First World War was the colour black widely adopted.” [Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, vol. 1, p. 208fn] As this change did not occur overnight, it seems safe to conclude that while anarchism and the black flag had been linked, at the latest, from the early 1880s, it did not become the definitive anarchist symbol until the 1920s (Carlo Tresca in America was still talking of standing “beneath the red flag that is the immaculate flag of the anarchist idea” in 1925. [quoted by Nunzio Pernicone, Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel, p. 161]). Before then, anarchists used both it and the red flag as their symbols of choice. After the Russian Revolution, anarchists would still use red in their flags, but only when combined with black. In this way they would not associate themselves with the tyranny of the USSR or the reformism and statism of the mainstream socialist movement. 2 Why the red-and-black flag? The red-and-black flag has been associated with anarchism for some time. Murray Bookchin placed the creation of this flag in Spain: “The presence of black flags together with red ones became a feature of Anarchist demonstrations throughout Europe and the Americas. With the establishment of the CNT, a single flag on which black and red were separated diagonally, was adopted and used mainly in Spain.” [The Spanish Anarchists, p. 57] George Woodcock also stressed the Spanish origin of the flag: “The anarcho-syndicalist flag in Spain was black and red, divided diagonally. In the days of the [First] International the anarchists, like other socialist sects, carried the red flag, but later they tended to substitute for it the black flag. The black-and-red flag symbolised an attempt to unite the spirit of later anarchism with the mass appeal of the International.” [Anarchism, p. 325fn] According to Abel Paz, anarchist historian and CNT militant in the 1930s, the 1st of May, 1931, was “the first time in history [that] the red and black flag flew over a CNT-FAI rally.” This was the outcome of an important meeting of CNT militants and anarchist groups to plan the May Day demonstrations in Barcelona. One of the issues to be resolved was “under what flag to march.” One group was termed the “Red Flag” anarchists (who “put greater emphasis on labour issues”), the other “Black Flag” anarchists (who were “more distant (at the time) from economic questions”). However, with the newly proclaimed Republic there were “tremendous opportunities for mass mobilisations” which made disagreements on how much emphasis to place on labour issues “meaningless.” This allowed an accord to be reached with its “material expression” being “making the two flags into one: the black and red flag.” [Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, p. 206] However, the red-and-black flag was used by anarchists long before 1931, indeed decades before the CNT was even formed. In fact, it, rather than the black flag, may well have been the first specifically anarchist flag. The earliest recorded use of the red-and-black colours was during the attempted Bologna insurrection of August 1874 where participants were “sporting the anarchists’ red and black cockade.” [Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864-1892, p. 93] In April 1877, a similar attempt at provoking rebellion saw anarchists enter the small Italian town of Letino “wearing red and black cockades” and carrying a “red and black banner.” These actions helped to “captur[e] national attention” and “draw considerable notice to the International and its socialist programme.” [Nunzio Pernicone, Op. Cit., pp. 124-5 and pp. 126-7] Significantly, another historian notes that the insurgents in 1874 were “decked out in the red and black emblem of the International” while three years later they were “prominently displaying the red and black anarchist flag.” [T. R. Ravindranathan, Bakunin and the Italians, p. 208 and p. 228] Thus the black-and-red flag, like the black flag, was a recognised symbol of the labour movement (in this case, the Italian section of the First International) before becoming linked to anarchism. The red-and-black flag was used by anarchists a few years later in Mexico. At an anarchist protest meeting on December 14th, 1879, at Columbus Park in Mexico City “some five thousand persons gathered replete with numerous red-and-black flags, some of which bore the inscription ‘La Social, Liga International del Jura.’ A large black banner bearing the inscription ‘La Social, Gran Liga International’ covered the front of the speaker’s platform.” The links between the Mexican and European anarchist movements were strong, as the “nineteenth-century Mexican urban labour-movement maintained direct contact with the Jura branch of the . . . European-based First International Workingmen’s Association and at one stage openly affiliated with it.” [John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860-1931, p. 58 and p. 17] One year after it was founded, the anarchist influenced Casa del Obrero Mundial organised Mexico’s first May Day demonstration in 1913 and “between twenty and twenty-five thousand workers gathered behind red and black flags” in Mexico City. [John Lear, Workers, Neighbors, and Citizens, p. 236] Augusto Sandino, the radical Nicaraguan national liberation fighter was so inspired by the example of the Mexican anarcho-syndicalists that he based his movement’s flag on their red-and-black ones (the Sandinista’s flag is divided horizontally, rather than diagonally). As historian Donald C. Hodges notes, Sandino’s “red and black flag had an anarcho-syndicalist origin, having been introduced into Mexico by Spanish immigrants.” Unsurprisingly, his flag was considered a “workers’ flag symbolising their struggle for liberation.” (Hodges refers to Sandino’s “peculiar brand of anarcho-communism” suggesting that his appropriation of the flag indicated a strong libertarian theme to his politics). [Intellectual Foundations of the Nicaraguan Revolution, p. 49, p. 137 and p. 19] This suggests that the red-and-black flag was rediscovered by the Spanish Anarchists in 1931 rather than being invented by them. However, the CNT-FAI seem to have been the first to bisect their flags diagonally black and red (but other divisions, such as horizontally, were also used). In the English speaking world, though, the use of the red-and-black flag by anarchists seems to spring from the world-wide publicity generated by the Spanish Revolution in 1936. With CNT-FAI related information spreading across the world, the use of the CNT inspired diagonally split red-and-black flag also spread until it became a common anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist symbol in all countries. For some, the red-and-black flag is associated with anarcho-syndicalism more than anarchism. As Albert Meltzer put it, “[t]he flag of the labour movement (not necessarily only of socialism) is red. The CNT of Spain originated the red-and-black of anarchosyndicalism (anarchism plus the labour movement).” [Anarcho-Quiz Book, p. 50] Donald C. Hodges makes a similar point, when he states that “[o]n the insignia of the Mexico’s House of the World Worker [the Mexican anarcho-syndicalist union], the red band stood for the economic struggle of workers against the proprietary classes, and the black for their insurrectionary struggle.” [Sandino’s Communism, p. 22] This does not contradict its earliest uses in Italy and Mexico as those anarchists took it for granted that they should work within the labour movement to spread libertarian ideas. Therefore, it is not surprising we find movements in Mexico and Italy using the same flags. Both were involved in the First International and its anti-authoritarian off-spring. Both, like the Jura Federation in Switzerland, were heavily involved in union organising and strikes. Given the clear links and similarities between the collectivist anarchism of the First International (the most famous advocate of which was Bakunin) and anarcho-syndicalism, it is not surprising that they used similar symbols. As Kropotkin argued, “Syndicalism is nothing other than the rebirth of the International — federalist, worker, Latin.” [quoted by Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin, p. 176] So a rebirth of symbols would not be a co-incidence. Thus the red-and-black flag comes from the experience of anarchists in the labour movement and is particularly, but not exclusively, associated with anarcho-syndicalism. The black represents libertarian ideas and strikes (i.e. direct action), the red represents the labour movement. Over time association with anarcho-syndicalism has become less noted, with many non-syndicalist anarchists happy to use the red-and-black flag (many anarcho-communists use it, for example). It would be a good generalisation to state that social anarchists are more inclined to use the red-and-black flag than individualist anarchists just as social anarchists are usually more willing to align themselves with the wider socialist and labour movements than individualists (in modern times at least). However, both the red and black flags have their roots in the labour movement and working class struggle which suggests that the combination of both flags into one was a logical development. Given that the black and red flags were associated with the Lyon uprising of 1831, perhaps the development of the red-and-black flag is not too unusual. Similarly, given that the Black Flag was the “flag of strikes” (to quote Louise Michel — see above) its use with the red flag of the labour movement seems a natural development for a movement like anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism which bases itself on direct action and the importance of strikes in the class struggle. So while associated with anarcho-syndicalism, the red-and-black flag has become a standard anarchist symbol as the years have gone by, with the black still representing anarchy and the red, social co-operation or solidarity. Thus the red-and-black flag more than any one symbol symbolises the aim of anarchism (“Liberty of the individual and social co-operation of the whole community” [Peter Kropotkin, Act for Yourselves, p. 102]) as well as its means (“[t]o make the revolution, the mass of workers will have to organise themselves. Resistance and the strike are excellent means of organisation for doing this” and “the strike develops the sentiment of solidarity.” [Kropotkin, quoted by Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism: 1872-1186, p. 255 and p. 256]). 3 Where does the circled-A come from? The circled-A is, perhaps, even more famous than the Black and Red-and-Black flags as an anarchist symbol (probably because it lends itself so well to graffiti). According to Peter Marshall the “circled-A” represents Proudhon’s maxim “Anarchy is Order.” [Demanding the Impossible p. 558] Peter Peterson also adds that the circle is “a symbol of unity and determination” which “lends support to the off-proclaimed idea of international anarchist solidarity.” [“Flag, Torch, and Fist: The Symbols of Anarchism”, Freedom, vol. 48, No. 11, pp. 8] However, the origin of the “circled-A” as an anarchist symbol is less clear. Many think that it started in the 1970s punk movement, but it goes back to a much earlier period. According to Peter Marshall, “in 1964 a French group, Jeunesse Libertaire, gave new impetus to Proudhon’s slogan ‘Anarchy is Order’ by creating the circled-A a symbol which quickly proliferated throughout the world.” [Op. Cit., p. 445] This is not the earliest sighting of this symbol. On November 25 1956, at its foundation in Brussels, the Alliance Ouvriere Anarchiste (AOA) adopted this symbol. Going even further, a BBC documentary on the Spanish Civil War shows an anarchist militia member with a “circled-A” clearly on the back of his helmet. Other than this, there is little know about the “circled-A”s origin. Today the circled-A is one of the most successful images in the whole field of political symbolising. Its “incredible simplicity and directness led [it] to become the accepted symbol of the restrengthened anarchist movement after the revolt of 1968” particularly as in many, if not most, of the world’s languages the word for anarchy begins with the letter A. [Peter Peterson, Op. Cit., p. 8]
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Post by Admin on Nov 19, 2020 18:56:08 GMT
"Authority, hierarchy, power differentials, and artificial property rights create irrationality and conflicts of interest. Let’s abolish them & let people work out for themselves what they want to replace them with. Whatever works will be good." - Kevin Carson Decentralized Economic Coordination: Let a Hundred Flowers BloomKevin Carson | Support this author on Patreon | June 15th, 2020 c4ss.org/content/52947This is a lead essay in the C4SS Mutual Exchange Symposium: "Decentralization and Economic Coordination." The related readings and list of all other articles can be found in the introduction here. The calculation problem, as stated by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, has been central to most libertarian arguments against non-market or non-price forms of economic coordination. The Misesian variant, argued in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth and Socialism, is based on the role of factor input pricing in allocating inputs among competing uses. We choose between factors of production, so the argument goes, and decide which ones to economize on, by comparing their prices. We decide which uses to put them to by comparing the economic value produced to the cost of the input. Hayek’s version of the calculation argument is based on complexity: i.e., the sheer volume of information to be processed. Market prices allocate thousands of different resources among thousands of different kinds of production, in ways that a central planning bureaucracy could not cope with. I will state up-front that I am an agnostic on the question of whether non-market forms of coordination could be as or more effective than market pricing. I am also an agnostic on the question of whether economic coordination or rational decision-making could exist at all without market pricing, although I am somewhat inclined to say yes. So if you’re looking for a definitive statement on the comparative efficiency of market and non-market coordination, or an endorsement of some specific coordination mechanism, you’ve come to the wrong place. I will, however, examine various aspects of the problems stated by Mises and Hayek that strike me as particularly interesting or relevant to issues of economic coordination. To start with Mises: If his argument from input pricing is valid, it proves too much. For one thing, no particular set of property rights rules is self-evident. There is a wide range of possible property rulesets. The choice between these rule-sets is logically prior to the functioning of the market price mechanism and the determination of market-clearing prices. One might argue, in Coasean fashion, that the particular set of property rules doesn’t matter so long as they’re tradeable; regardless of how they’re drawn, the market will cause them to gravitate into the most efficient hands. But different rule sets allocate income streams to different actors — which means they vary widely in their incentive effects, depending on how property rights are drawn. The distribution of income and incentives to produce are vastly different, depending on whether (for example) title to arable land is vested in the cultivators or in an enclosing landlord. To say that the specific assignment of property rights doesn’t matter so long as they’re tradeable is as ridiculous as saying it doesn’t matter whether I have a right to not be killed or someone else has a right to compensation for not killing me. And it’s meaningless to say that market prices reflect value because, depending on how the ruleset assigns property, prices for a given thing might work out to any number of possible values. Economists adhering to the neoclassical or marginalist paradigm under any such hypothetical rules would defend all prices and incomes as reflective of the value created. The prior question is whether the property rights rules themselves are designed, relatively speaking, to reflect real cost more or less accurately. Indeed, it’s a tautology under any allocation of property rights to say that “wealth rewards value creation,” because value itself is defined as what anyone can charge for anything. According to marginal productivity theory, the marginal productivity of anything is what it adds to the final price of goods or services. So if you can fence off something required for production and charge a toll for access to it, whatever the toll adds to the price people pay for stuff is the “marginal productivity” of the “services” that you “contribute” to production. On the other hand if we define value creation in terms of the direct production of use value — the human activity involved in converting physical materials into new forms, or thinking up new and better ways of doing this — then it’s clear that (as we will see below) our present system of property rights does the exact opposite of rewarding the actual effort and thought involved in creating use value. After all, it’s Elon Musk who became a billionaire from Tesla, not any of his factory workers or engineers. It’s a situation directly analogous to the middle ages, when it was the feudal landlord’s control of access to land, rather than actually producing turnips, that made him rich. So it would be more accurate to say that the rational allocation of factor inputs between competing alternative uses requires a properly designed property rules system. And given this criterion, the actual definition of property rules under capitalism is one of the most sub-optimal conceivable. The property rights system that’s prevailed under the past few centuries of capitalism is not only an illustration of the fact that capitalist property rights did not emerge spontaneously from a state of nature without the intervention of a state, but an illustration of the perverse effects when property rights are badly drawn. Under the prevailing capitalist model, land and natural resource inputs — which are naturally scarce and costly — are artificially abundant and cheap, as a result of the propertied classes’ access to looted and enclosed land and resources. Capitalism, over the past few centuries, has mostly followed an extensive growth model based on the addition of more material inputs, rather than an intensive one based on making more efficient use of existing inputs. This is why corporate agribusiness is so inefficient in terms of output per acre, compared to small-scale intensive forms of cultivation: it treats land as a free good. So Latin American haciendas hold almost 90% of their ill-gotten land out of cultivation, while neighboring land-poor peasants must resort to working for them as wage laborers. And the U.S. government actually pays farmers to hold land out of use, so that sitting on unused arable land becomes a real estate investment with a guaranteed return. Over the past century or so, the socialization of corporate inputs has become the primary expense of the state. The state subsidized the railroad and interstate highway networks, built the civil aviation system at taxpayer expense, gives oil and other extractive industries priority access to public lands, fights wars for oil, and uses the Navy to keep sea lanes open for oil tankers and container ships (See Carson, Organization Theory, pp. 65-70). Capitalist industry follows a model based on subsidized waste and planned obsolescence, in order to avoid idle capacity. The very accounting models used by corporate management and econometricians treats the expenditure of resources as the creation of value. On the other hand capitalist property rights make ideas, techniques, and innovations artificially costly, erect barriers and toll-gates against their adoption, and make cooperation artificially difficult. Intellectual property causes gross price distortions, so that owners can charge monopoly rents for the replication of information (songs, books, articles, movies, software, etc.) whose marginal reproduction cost is zero. And in the case of copying new designs for physical goods or techniques for producing them, the majority of a product’s price often comes from embedded monopoly rents on patents rather than actual material and labor costs. Copyrights on scientific research and patents on new inventions also impede the “shoulders of giants” effect, by which technological progress results from ideas being aggregated or combined in new ways. For example, according to Johann Soderberg (Hacking Capitalism), further refinement of the steam engine came to a near stop until James Watt’s patent expired. Patents enable transnational corporations to control who is and is not allowed to produce. As a result, they’re able to offshore production to independent contractors in low-wage countries, retain a legal monopoly on the right to sell the product, and charge enormous markups over actual production cost. Yet another input which is artificially expensive, as a result of capitalist property rules, is credit. In his 1825 pamphlet Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, Thomas Hodgskin debunked the “labor fund” argument (i.e., that employers advance the necessities of life to their workers from a fund of savings accumulated from past abstention, and hence are entitled to a return for their sacrifice) by arguing that in actuality different groups of workers engaged in production constantly advance each other their necessities of life, along with material inputs and prerequisites of production, out of their own output. The capitalist’s wealth isn’t the source of these necessities and inputs, but only a property claim on the right to supply inputs produced by others. Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them, and appropriates to himself the produce of both. With as niggard a hand as possible he transfers to each a part of the produce of the other, keeping to himself the large share. Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted him for subsistence. He is the middleman of all labourers…. Credit, in a rational system, could be organized cooperatively by the workers themselves as a system of horizontal flows, advancing each other from their output with no previous stock of wealth required. But capitalist law restricts the supply of credit to those with preexisting stocks of accumulated wealth, enabling them to extract rents from the supply of credit. (Oddly enough the bulk of right-libertarians of the “hard money” variety object, not to the restriction of the credit function to those with stocks of wealth, but to the “insufficiency” of credit in some cases in the form of fractional reserve banking.) One specific example of the irrationality of this credit system has emerged from the coronavirus pandemic. In discussions of the inability of tens of millions of newly unemployed people to pay their rent, the parasitic nature of landlordism has arisen (and rightly so). In response, landlords and their apologists complain that they acquired their rental properties as investments, and depend on rent payments to pay their own mortgages. Any interruption in the constant flow of rental payments will cause the landlords to default on their debt. But stop and think about what this reveals. If the tenants’ rent is going directly to paying the mortgage on a property, with the landlord acting only as a middleman who receives the money from tenants and in turn passes it on to the bank — and extracting a fee for the “service” of standing between tenant and bank — that says a lot about how irrationally our credit system is organized. Similar irrationalities result from the way ownership and governance rights are drawn for the business firm. Because governance authority is vested in a hierarchy of managers who (at least theoretically) represent a class of absentee shareholders, rather than in those whose efforts and distributed knowledge are actually needed for production, the firm is riddled with information and incentive problems and fundamental conflicts of interest. For example, although most improvements in efficiency and productivity result from workers’ distributed knowledge of the work process and the human capital they’ve built up through their relationships on the job, they have a rational incentive to hoard knowledge because they know any contribution they make to productivity will be expropriated by management in the form of bonuses, and used against them in the form of speedups and downsizing. And even though workers’ knowledge of the production process is the primary source of efficiency improvements, management cannot afford to trust workers with the discretion to use that knowledge because their interests are fundamentally at odds with those of management. With information flow so grossly distorted by authoritarian hierarchy, management lives in a bubble and is forced to reduce its reliance on workers’ knowledge, simplifying the work process from above to make it more “legible” (see James Scott, Seeing Like a State) through dumbed-down Taylorist work rules. And management is forced to devote enormous resources to internal surveillance and enforcement of discipline, compared to self-managed enterprises. Mises dismissed Oskar Lange’s market social model as “playing at capitalism,” because enterprise managers would be risking capital that they themselves did not own or stand to lose. So they would be rewarded on the upside for returns on investment without suffering personal consequences for losses. But corporate managers under American capitalism are playing at markets every bit as much as the managers in Lange’s proposed model. Shareholders are the residual claimant of the enterprise only in theory, and even then actual legal ownership is vested in a fictional person distinct from any or all shareholders, either severally or collectively. In reality, corporate management has the same relation to the corporation’s capital (which it claims to be administering in the name of the shareholders) that the Soviet bureaucracy had over the means of production it claimed to administer in the name of the people: That is, it’s a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a large mass of capital which it has absolute discretion over, but did not itself contribute and does not personally stand to lose. In this environment, corporate managers’ standard approach is to hollow out long-term productive capacity and gut human capital in order to massage the short term numbers and game their own compensation, leaving the consequences to their successors after they move on. Murray Rothbard argued that the Soviet planned economy was able to survive only because planners had the Western market economies and their prices as reference points for assigning prices internally. So even though the transfer prices assigned by Gosplan and by enterprise managers were unsatisfactory, as a result of not reflecting the immediate spot conditions of the Soviet Union, they were at least able to work after a fashion because they were indirectly tied to market prices somewhere. But under corporate capitalism, the great majority of intermediate goods in the production process are specific to the products produced by a particular enterprise, so that there is no market for them. DoohickeyCo may buy steel on the market, but it manufactures its doohickeys from widgets which are made out of that steel to a design specific to their particular model of doohickey. So the corporate bureaucracy assigns internal transfer prices to the widgets, so they can be “sold” from one division of the corporation to another, in exactly the same way a Soviet planner would have: through indirect reference to external market prices (the prices of the steel, labor, electricity and so on that went into their construction). In short, if any environment could be seen as conducive to “calculational chaos,” it’s the environment created in the capitalist economy Mises and Hayek defended. In every one of these cases, a more “socialistic” set of property rules — commons-based land and resource governance, free information, worker ownership and management of the enterprise — would result in more rationality than we have now. In every case, property rights are assigned not only to someone other than those with the most stake in increasing efficiency, but to someone whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of actual producers and whose wealth and income derive from extracting rents from them. As Kropotkin wrote in Words of a Rebel, Political economy — that pseudo-science of the bourgeoisie — does not cease to give praise in every way to the benefits of individual property… [yet] the economists do not conclude, “The land to him who cultivates it.” On the contrary, they hasten to deduce from the situation, “The land to the lord who will get it cultivated by wage earners!” [Iain McKay, ed., Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology] So if it’s correct that inputs cannot be allocated efficiently without a rationally designed property system, then Mises’s economic calculation argument is an indictment of the very capitalist system he sought to defend. As a secondary matter, Mises’s own understanding of what was entailed by markets in factor inputs or producer goods was less than coherent. He argued that syndicalism would result in calculational chaos because there would be no market in the means of production. And his standard for whether an economy was sufficiently market-oriented for economic calculation was the existence of a stock market. So he conflated markets in actual producer goods with markets in firm equity, even though it’s perfectly possible to have a market in raw materials and machinery without a stock market. At any rate, it seems plausible at least that a market economy with well-designed property rules — say, with commons-based resource governance, community land trusts, worker-managed firms, and public services set up as stakeholder cooperatives — would function quite efficiently compared to the existing capitalist system. As to whether market pricing is necessary to rationally allocate resource inputs at all, I find Mises’s categorical assertion less than persuasive. For one thing, although Mises frames his calculation argument around the need to assign values to basic factor inputs for any calculation to take place at all, he lets it slip that his argument shades considerably into Hayek’s argument based on complexity or the volume of information. Mises himself conceded, in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, that inputs could be rationally assigned (“with more or less accuracy”) between alternative uses, and the effects of changes in the production process assessed, without market prices in a household economy. “…It is possible throughout to review the process of production from beginning to end, and to judge all the time whether one or another mode of procedure yields more consumable goods.” This, however, is no longer possible in the incomparably more involved circumstances of our own social economy. It will be evident, even in the socialist society, that 1,000 hectolitres of wine are better than 800, and it is not difficult to decide whether it desires 1,000 hectolitres of wine rather than 500 of oil. There is no need for any system of calculation to establish this fact: the deciding element is the will of the economic subjects involved. But once this decision has been taken, the real task of rational economic direction only commences, i.e., economically, to place the means at the service of the end. That can only be done with some kind of economic calculation. The human mind cannot orientate itself properly among the bewildering mass of intermediate products and potentialities of production without such aid. It would simply stand perplexed before the problems of management and location…. …[T]he mind of one man alone — be it ever so cunning, is too weak to grasp the importance of any single one among the countlessly many goods of higher order. No single man can ever master all the possibilities of production, innumerable as they are, as to be in a position to make straightway evident judgements of value without the aid of some system of computation. So in fact calculation in kind or “in natura” is not logically impossible, as one might gather from the framing of the calculation argument, but becomes a practical problem depending on the volume of information. There are two implications here. The first is that, if it is indeed a practical problem of the volume and complexity of information, then the advances in cybernetic technology since Mises wrote (he wrote Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth over twenty years before the first crude vacuum tube computers were built) quite plausibly have some bearing on the possibility of processing that information. In that case it strikes me as likewise plausible that, starting with some ranking of factor inputs in terms of relative scarcity, based on calculations in kind from the previous year’s experience of production, a computerized planning system could achieve some approximation of rationality in allocating inputs between uses. The second is that the practical issue of calculation is not absolute or qualitative, but one of degree. If we have a household economy in which non-money calculations are clearly possible on the one end of the spectrum, and at the other end a centrally planned economy where it is either impossible or done with a large degree of calculational chaos, the closer the actual state of affairs approaches to the former rather than the latter, the more relatively feasible non-money calculation will become. But as Iain McKay argued in the Anarchist FAQ (), even communist anarchists by and large consider central planning grossly inefficient, and expect most production to be organized within communes, agro-industrial villages, and the like. As such, removing the assumption of a central planning body automatically drains Mises’ critique of much of its force — rather than an “the ocean of possible and conceivable economic combinations” faced by a central body, a specific workplace or community has a more limited number of possible solutions for a limited number of requirements. Moreover, any complex machine is a product of less complex goods, meaning that the workplace is a consumer of other workplace’s goods. If, as Mises admitted, a customer can decide between consumption goods without the need for money then the user and producer of a “higher order” good can decide between consumption goods required to meet their needs. In terms of decision making, it is true that a centralised planning agency would be swamped by the multiple options available to it. However, in a decentralised socialist system individual workplaces and communes would be deciding between a much smaller number of alternatives. Moreover, unlike a centralised system, the individual firm or commune knows exactly what is required to meet its needs, and so the number of possible alternatives is reduced as well (for example, certain materials are simply technically unsuitable for certain tasks). At this point let me once again restate my agnosticism regarding the comparative efficiency of market pricing of factor inputs and other ways of processing and conveying economic information. I simply regard with skepticism any claims that non-money economic coordination is impossible. And as I’ll argue at greater length below, I doubt that any particular economic model — whether based on market, non-market, or any particular form of coordination — will serve as a monolithic template around which society is organized. So much for Mises. If some shadow of doubt has fallen across his framing of the calculation problem in terms of how value is assigned to basic inputs, then even more doubt falls, a fortiori, on Hayek’s framing in terms of volume and complexity of information. So the question of the comparative efficiency of prices and other coordination mechanisms, as conveyors of large volumes of information, becomes one which is highly technology-dependent. And in regard to this issue, I believe that the advocates of non-market coordination mechanisms are correct that more recent generations of cybernetics technology are at least capable of coordinating a working economic system on a rational, functional basis. Whether non-market coordination can process the volume and complexity of data equally well with market pricing is a different question — one on which, again, I am agnostic. It does seem that there is an increasing set of technical possibilities for non-market coordination. A number of projects use blockchain ledgers for coordination, like Ethereum and Sensorica. While such projects still involve some market elements in assigning value to their production flows, they also to varying degrees use open value accounting systems to assign value based on other judgements as well. In The Ethical Economy: Rebuilding Value After the Crisis, Adam Arvidsson and Nicolai Peitersen survey the possibilities for a model of economic valuation that takes ethical issues into account in ways not done by traditional market pricing methods. Monika Hardy is another person who’s devoted considerable interest to the use of blockchain and other digital mechanisms to coordinate productive activities outside the market. I am not only an agnostic on the question of which particular forms of coordination are more efficient. I also refrain, as a matter of principle, from prescribing any particular form of coordination or privileging it over alternative forms. I consider myself an anarchist without adjectives, and I think it’s a near certainty that post-state, post-capitalist society will be an anarchy without adjectives. Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, as the saying goes. Like David Graeber, I am open to whatever expedients that groups of people come up with and agree to, dealing with one another as equals. However, I will venture a few predictions. I think we can assume that a hundred flowers will, in fact, bloom. There will be an eclectic, ad hoc mix of expedients for ownership and coordination, growing out of the diverse collection of seeds of the future society that are sprouting among us right now. And I believe that markets will almost certainly be one of them, simply because eliminating them would require the establishment of some uniform organizing model that would prohibit or crowd them out as a matter of principle. And I don’t believe post-capitalist society will be organized according to any such template. It will be an emergent phenomenon. At the same time, I believe market exchange and prices will be a much, much smaller part of the mix than they are now. It strikes me as extremely likely that, in the face of failing state- and employer-based social safety nets, and as rising unemployment and underemployment make direct production for use a necessity, people will increasingly aggregate into larger primary social units like extended family or multi-family compounds, cohousing units, micro-villages and the like. These social units will provide mechanisms for the pooling of risk and costs, along with whatever outside incomes some members bring in, and their members will meet a large share of their consumption units through commonly owned workshops and gardens. Their guarantees of food, shelter, and support against infirmity will be something like the “irreducible minimum” offered by hunter-gatherer groups, as described by Bookchin in The Ecology of Freedom. In this case, a great deal of production will take place outside the cash nexus, and what market does still occur seems likely to involve mostly machinery and other large-scale producer goods beyond the capability of such communities, natural resources, and the exchange of surpluses between the communities. And stipulating that market exchange will exist as some part of the mix, I think it’s safe to say that the property rules will be far from capitalistic. In the case of land, as Graeber argued, it’s hard to imagine the population respecting anyone’s property claim to a large tract of land they fenced off, being willing to work it for them for wages or pay rent to live on it, rather than just ignoring their claim and living on it and cultivating it for themselves. It’s also hard to imagine an anarchist population reacting to something like a Nestle pumping huge volumes of water out of an aquifer in any other way than forcibly dismantling their operation and telling them never to come back. The nature of money and credit, likewise, will almost certainly be quite different. Ancap visions of a society in which money is a commodity with a market value — whether precious metals or bitcoin — rather than a simple denominator of value, strike me as especially fanciful. The function of providing credit or liquidity to facilitate the exchange of ongoing production outputs is entirely a matter of flows, and there is no rational basis for requiring the possession of stocks of wealth to issue such flows. And it strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that groups of workers exchanging their outputs would willingly rely on the possessor of stocks of wealth to issue credit to facilitate their exchange, and pay interest, when they could simply advance credit to each other as ongoing flows without any backing. So in conclusion, I’ll just say I don’t know if an economy could function without money prices and exchange. I don’t know if non-money coordination would be as efficient as money exchange. I don’t know what mix between money and non-money forms of coordination would sort itself out, if people and groups of producers were free to sort it out among themselves. What we do know is that authority, hierarchy, power differentials, and artificial property rights create irrationality. They create conflicts of interest. They incentivize information hoarding and conservation of effort. So let’s abolish those things, and let people work out for themselves what they want to replace it with. Whatever works will be good. Mutual Exchange is C4SS’s goal in two senses: We favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunities for conversation about issues that matter to C4SS’s audience. Online symposiums will include essays by a diverse range of writers presenting and debating their views on a variety of interrelated and overlapping topics, tied together by the overarching monthly theme. C4SS is extremely interested in feedback from our readers. Suggestions and comments are enthusiastically encouraged. If you’re interested in proposing topics and/or authors for our program to pursue, or if you’re interested in participating yourself, please email editor@c4ss.org or emmibevensee@email.arizona.edu. cybernetics, economic calculation problem, economic planning, globalization, Hayek, market socialism, mises, oskar lange, prices, technology,
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Post by Admin on Nov 20, 2020 14:09:05 GMT
PANDEMICS, COERCION, AND THE CURRENT LIMITS OF ANARCHISMabeautifulresistance.org/site/2020/11/19/pandemics-social-coercion-and-the-current-limits-of-anarchismCOVID-19, which at the time of this writing has so far infected almost 57 million people and killed 1.36 million, has proven itself to be a crisis for every government in the world, particularly for Liberal Democracies. In fact, the more “liberal” the society, the harder hit the population. The United States, for example, which for all its countless faults maintains some rather “progressive” stances on human rights not seen elsewhere (the complete freedom of movement, for example, and its lack of a national identification requirement), accounts for almost 20% of the world’s cases (despite having only 4% of the world’s population). And though much of this unbalanced infection rate will no doubt be scapegoated on the outgoing President rather than something core to the United States, other Liberal Democracies with more social programs and better leadership haven’t really done much better. France, for example, with only 0.8% percent of the world’s population makes up almost 4% of the world’s infections. The United Kingdom (also with 0.8% of the world’s population) has had 2.7% of the world’s infections. On the other hand, China, which has 18% of the world’s population and where the first cases of the virus were reported, comprises less than 1/7th of one percent of the world’s cases. China is not a Liberal Democracy at all: in fact, its one-party, top-down system is quite authoritarian, with many restrictions on personal freedoms and intricate surveillance systems to keep the population in check. China’s heavy-handed actions to suppress the spread of the coronovirus—including quarantines, mass confinement and testing, and harsh penalties for those who tried to travel outside of quarantined areas—are absolutely terrifying to the liberal, anarchist, or progressive mind. Unfortunately, they also worked. The Chinese government’s response echoes the response of Communist Cuba to the HIV/AIDS crisis in previous decades. Cuba managed to control the spread of HIV better than any country in the world by building walled communities and forcing HIV+ people into them and forbidding them to leave. (As terrifying as such an obvious violation of human rights is, however, it’s important to note some people willingly infected themselves to get in.) As a leftist (an “anarcho-communist,” or more properly an “autonomous Marxist”), I must admit that my first inclination upon looking at the successes of authoritarianism in combating disease is to look quickly away. I’m sure most others reading this are feeling something similar, or perhaps already searching for counter-evidence to these paragraphs. I already did, by the way, but go ahead if you need to. I can wait. ANARCHISM, COERCION, AND POWER-OVER Open borders, freedom of movement, individual rights, de-centralization, democracy: these are all supposed to be the “good values,” values which build not just more tolerant societies but safer and healthier societies. Especially for leftists of the anarchist variety, these ideals serve as articles of faith in a kind of political religion, a belief in the right of humans not to be forced into behaviors, the ability of humans to survive without authority and hierarchy, and the utopian world-to-come without rulers, masters, laws, or leaders. For those brave enough to look at the evidence, however, COVID-19 seems to prove all these beliefs ultimately just faith. Marxists, or anarchists who temper their anarchism with Marxist critique, tend to have an easier time grappling with this apparent paradox, since within both tendencies it is permissible to consider authority and rulership as a potential good. Whether that is the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or more indigenous, pre-Christian European, and other forms of hierarchy, the need for authority as an intervention in times of crisis presents no problem nor crisis of faith. The problem for anarchism (of the “pure” variety, that is: anti-hierarchy, anti-state) is that the success of authoritarian measures to save people’s lives (and not just the economy or political regimes) cannot be merely dismissed. More so, it’s difficult to come up with an alternative solution to this recent crisis from an anarchist framework that does not replicate authoritarian state measures. Excluding the more blind-faith answers (“COVID-19 would not happen in an anarchist world,” etc), or the very common reaction during the crisis by anarchists arguing that people must “obey the law,” one solution I have seen suggested by anarchist friends is that a pandemic could be managed through social pressure and coercion, rather than central law and police actions. However, social pressure and coercion are exactly the purpose of laws: they cause people to avoid doing certain actions in order to avoid becoming seen in the eyes of others as a criminal or wrong-doer. That is, laws have a hegemonic affect on the actions of people on the social level (because it causes them to restrain from actions) in order to avoid societal punishment. Whether that punishment is carceral (prison, fines) or social (ostracism, exile, shame), the goal and affect is still coercion: that is, “power-over.” We see how this repetition of power-over plays out in online “cancel culture,” where shaming, guilt, insults, and mass social pressure are used against a person deemed to have acted or spoken wrongly. While no guns or prisons are employed in such events, they are nevertheless fully manifestations of coercion, and often times (at least in every case I have ever witnessed) appear more similar to schoolyard ganging or “popular girl” or “jock” hazing events. At best they force the target into hegemonic submission to the collective will, but more often leave a traumatized and resentful victim eager to seek later vengeance on their oppressors. THE OBSCURED AESTHETIC TURN That is to say, the anarchist solution isn’t actually all that different from more authoritarian paradigms, with the exception that the acceptance of power-over is obscured by an aesthetic turn. In such an aesthetic turn, power-over, coercion, and authority are still core needs of humanity, but they are no longer admitted to being those things. Instead, they become justified as manifestations of collective will, democratic processes, self-governance, community responsibility, social contracts, or other nicer and more beautiful ways of speaking about coercion of the few by the majority. The danger of the obscurity of this aesthetic turn is that anarchism then becomes mere repetition of the state. Hierarchy, authority, and coercion continue, but they now manifest veiled behind social capital, charisma, or privileged oppression identity traits. Instead of clear rulers and heads-of-state making decrees about what is best for society and directing punishment for those who transgress, it becomes popular or identity-correct writers, bloggers, or activists organizing the masses towards coercion, “right action,” and punishment. That is, anarchism increasingly repeats not just the structure, discipline, and punishment of the state, but also repeats the same trick of obscurity that Liberal Democracy itself affects. As a “progress” or “advancement” over earlier feudal and aristocratic modes of government, Liberal Democracy claims to be less hierarchical and exploitative specifically because of its enshrinement of human and civil rights. Yet, anyone with half an eye can notice that for all its claims of enlightenment, Liberal Democratic nations start an awful lot of wars, imprison an awful lot of people, and yet despite all this seem to do a really poor job of preventing needless deaths from pandemics. SAVING ANARCHISM FROM ITSELF Just because anarchism repeats the same obscurantist aesthetic turn as Liberal Democracy doesn’t mean that anarchism should be abandoned. Rather, it just needs to be a bit more honest with itself and its shortcomings. Coercion is still coercion, whether or not that is affected with guns and prisons or mass shaming or ostracization of undesirables (or put in a more aesthetically-anarchist way, “people whose behavior harms the community”). And belief is still belief, whether or not that belief is faith in an invisible one-God who is the source of all goodness or the capacity of humans to accurately and justly govern their own behavior. Being honest that anarchism doesn’t actually offer any non-coercive solutions to global crises like pandemics, climate change, and ideological violence doesn’t need to invalidate anarchism. Rather, admitting that much of the current anarchist thinking embraces coercion and power-over will allow anarchists to have more mature and broader conversations about what kind of power-over and coercion is best in times of crisis. To do so, though, anarchists will probably need to give more sober attention to some of their declared enemies, including Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, and especially autonomous Marxists. All three traditions have already grappled deeply with the problems of power-over, coercion, and the non-exploitative uses of naturally-arising hierarchies (not the hierarchies of divine right of kings, but rather the hierarchies of “who is responsible for this? or “who is best capable of dealing with this situation?”). And beyond these sources, there is a stronger current that anarchists would do well to look at: those of religious communities. While the Enlightenment conceit of “no gods no masters” is deeply inscribed into anarchism, anarchism itself was born of magical lodges in Europe and forged in the romanticist pagan revivals. While it has since abandoned most of its original curiosity for spiritual traditions, it is no hypocrisy to look again in these directions not just for less exploitative uses of hierarchy and authority, but also for cultural, moral, and spiritual frameworks that would help affect the sorts of “non-coercive” coercion it posits as key to utopian society. The question anarchists should probably be asking—and one that they might only be able to answer after consulting such sources—is “how do we compel humans to act responsibly towards each other and the earth?” Liberal Democracy answers this question through laws, education, and the prison system. Authoritarian states answer this question through direct violence, even more prisons, and state control of human activity. Anarchism currently answers this question through shaming, ostracizing, cancelling, and social and sometimes physical violence (often directed upward, but just as often directed laterally and sometimes down). Missing in all these solutions is the question of religion. Religion is not merely the worship of gods, spirits, saints, or prayer and rituals, but also the entire cosmological framework by which people see the world. From such cosmologies comes value sets, moralities, taboos, and entire codes of action which define for individuals and groups what is acceptable behavior in society and what is transgressive. A religion which believes one gender is superior to another, for instance, will create completely different behavior in its adherents than one that believes genders are equal. The same goes of course for skin color or sexuality, but also for non-human questions, such as “how should trees and rivers be treated?” An animist or a pagan religion, for instance, in which the world is full of persons that are not just humans, will compel in its adherents a completely different set of behaviors than one which believes the earth and all within it was created by God for humans to use. In a pandemic situation, for example, or any of the other inevitable natural crises which are increasing on account of climate change and industrial society, a religious framework such as animism which treats infections and diseases as entities, not just invisible inconveniences, might compel people to treat viruses as sacred entities whose will to destroy must be countered by personal rituals (hand washing, wearing masks) rather than shaming others or shouting at politicians and capitalist pharmaceutical giants to save us. If that religious framework also holds sacred the health of others—even strangers—it might discourage in individuals the kind of behavior which authoritarian governments fought by means of state violence, Liberal Democracies fought ineffectively with staggered restrictions, and anarchists tried to fight with shame, guilt, and general moralizing about “community responsibility.” If it seems strange or somehow dishonest to look towards religious frameworks and engage in the work of creating a new one, I can only here remind anarchists (as well as atheist Marxists reading this, who should remember that the creation of the Worker bears mystical trappings) that anarchism is itself a created philosophy. There was no anarchism before the 19th century, though like many other modern ideas (for instance, identity, capitalism, race, homosexuality) we tend to project our current political co-ordinates back into history and find therein evidence that they are eternal. Not only was there no anarchism, but there was no Marxism either, and both were consciously created as a means of offering liberatory systems to govern humanity better than what was on offer. To create a new religious-political framework, then, is merely to do exactly the same thing, except this time in an even more conscious effort to avoid the need for coercion, violence, and hopefully also the state.
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Post by Admin on Nov 21, 2020 20:31:25 GMT
"Changing the law or voting in new politicians will not make the State less inherently oppressive. In order to overcome State oppression, the only option that remains is to overthrow the State." - Kelly Vee c4ss.org/content/37807Five Faces of State OppressionKelly Vee | Support this author on Patreon | May 19th, 2015 Young, I. M. (1990). Five Faces of Oppression. (E. Hackett, & S. Haslanger, Eds.) Theorizing Feminisms, 3-16. “Five Faces of Oppression” by Iris M. Young (1990) attempts to create an objective criteria by which we can judge the existence and levels of oppression of different groups. Young argues that oppression is a structural concept, preserved institutionally. In other words, oppression cannot be fought by replacing the ruler, but by overthrowing the system that keeps the ruler in place. Privilege and oppression are two sides to the same coin. For every oppressed group, a privileged group exists that benefits from their oppression, knowingly or not. Oppression is categorized into five different types: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence (Young, 1990). By breaking down each type of oppression, we can demonstrate the State to be an objectively oppressive institution that fosters and benefits from the oppression of its citizens. Exploitation Marx’s theory of exploitation identifies the injustice of wage labor in that “some people exercise their capacities under the control, according to the purposes, and for the benefit of other people.” (Young, 1990, p. 6). Not only does the State perpetuate the existence of wage labor, but also the State itself relies on other people exercising their capacities under its control, according to its purposes, and for the benefit of the State. The State perpetuates wage labor by making it difficult for people to seek alternatives, such as self-employment. State regulations create barriers to entry through zoning laws, licensing requirements, and special privileges awarded to large corporations with large political lobbies. Because the State makes starting and maintaining a business so difficult, those without large amounts of capital or political power have little choice but to work for those benefiting from the State’s policies. The State also functions using money taken by force from workers in the form of taxation. When workers contract with their employers or earn money by working for themselves, they do not get to profit fully from their labor, having to hand a portion of their income to the State or face legal penalties. The State, therefore, systematically exploits its citizens in the form of expropriation. Without institutionalized theft, the State would not have the means to continue its daily operations. Marginalization According to Young (1990, p. 8), “Marginals are people the system of labor cannot or will not use.” For much of its history, the State has explicitly excluded marginalized people from citizenship through laws that discriminate against the poor, women, children, racial minorities, and the disabled. Although in the United States many of these laws are gone, the social effects of such laws remain. Groups that have historically been legally excluded from citizenship continue to remain in poverty and are most affected by other forms of oppression (Young, 1990). This is not to say, however, that legal marginalization ceases to exist. The elderly, the poor, and the disabled rely on bureaucratic institutions for aid, while laws prevent unregistered charities from feeding the homeless or offering other services to those in need. The State forces children to stay in schools reminiscent of prison until their later teen years. Children cannot make most legal decisions for themselves without being emancipated. The mentally ill are involuntarily hospitalized in prison-like institutions when the State considers them to be a danger to themselves or others. The State deports poor immigrants for failing to fall in line with difficult and discriminatory immigration procedures, treating them as no more than criminals. Even today, the State marginalizes and excludes classes of citizens and treats them as less than people. Powerlessness Powerlessness, according to Young (1990), refers to the inability of an oppressed group to make decisions about their own lives. The State makes decisions daily for its citizens, removing them from the decision-making process, and rendering them powerless. For citizens who want to get involved in the political process, the only options are voting, lobbying, or running for political office. Voting is ineffective and lobbying and running for political office are expensive, so the average citizen has little ability to affect political decisions. Those who run for political office are an economic elite. Politics is a career for the haves, not the have-nots. Even political activism takes a person away from their job, making the opportunity cost of getting involved much too high for the average worker. Voting takes very little time itself, but educating oneself on the options takes a substantial amount of time, making rational ignorance much more cost-effective. Government-hired bureaucrats, not elected officials, make many political decisions that affect citizens. Citizens have no say in who the FCC hires or who is in charge of the FDA. They must simply hope for the best. Violence Violence is perhaps the most obvious and easy to detect face of oppression. The State thrives on violence against its own citizens and the citizens of other countries. The State relies on violence and coercion to enforce its laws by creating a monopoly of force in the form of police and military. Through violence and the threat of violence, the State maintains its policies, which exploit, marginalize, and render powerless the State’s subjects. Police officers are above the law, killing unarmed citizens without any form of recourse. Police get away with murder, assault, corruption, and other crimes in a system of justice designed to protect those in power. Rarely are police examined with legal scrutiny despite rampant misconduct. The State places citizens who commit nonviolent crimes in cages where they are subject to rape and other violence by their fellow inmates and by prison guards. Prisons do nothing to reform prisoners, making them more likely to continue to commit crimes and end up back in prison. State violence also rears its ugly head in wartime. Even if war were ever justified, civilian casualties are an inevitable result of military action. The U.S. government spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year on the military, despite not having declared a war since 1942. The military gives people with a passion for killing a legal outlet, and fosters a community where sexual assault runs rampant. Cultural Imperialism Cultural imperialism refers to “the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm.” (Young, 1990, p. 12). The State relies on a dominant nationalist culture to legitimize its practices. Through propaganda and popular culture, the State generates loyalty among its citizens. One of the most obvious cases of the United States’ cultural imperialism is Cold War era propaganda that made acceptable massive increases in State power such as McCarthyism. After the Cold War, the U.S. continues to use propaganda to generate support for war and other rights violations. In the last four years, the U.S. government paid the NFL 5.4 million dollars to honor soldiers at football games. The culture of patriotism is a culture that places decision-making power in the hands of rich, old white men in Washington. Cultural imperialism makes every other face of State oppression possible. Patriotism, or loyalty to the government, leads average citizens to accept their own exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, and violence. Overcoming State Oppression Perhaps the most important takeaway from Young’s essay is the notion that oppression is structural. In other words, oppression is rooted in unquestioned cultural norms and practices, not individual choices. Young says, “We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in major economic, political, and cultural institutions.” (1990, p. 4). The State systematically reproduces oppression in all its faces, and we must oppose it as an institution. Changing the law or voting in new politicians will not make the State less inherently oppressive, as the State relies on exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, violence, and cultural imperialism to thrive. In order to overcome State oppression, the only option that remains is to overthrow the State.
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Post by Admin on Nov 23, 2020 18:53:33 GMT
AN INTERVIEW WITH RAOUL VANEIGEMwww.anarchistnews.org/content/interview-raoul-vaneigemen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raoul_VaneigemWhat encounters have been decisive in your life? And why? No doubt those that, landing on fertile ground, responded to an existential need, to a gap that had to be filled. In no particular order: Zola’s Germinal, Zweig’s Le combat avec le démon, Nietzsche, Marx, Hölderlin, Shelley, Nerval, Jarry, Artaud, and Surrealism. Later on: Voline, Coeurderoy, Ciliga, Ida Mett, Victor Serge, Montaigne, and Jan Valtin. And finally: Fourier.(9) Who were the fellow travelers whose perspectives have been valuable to you? How about Siné,(10) who in his own way shared your commitments for a long time? Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, Attila Kotànyi, and Mustapha Khayati. I didn’t know Siné very well, but I appreciated his intransigent battle against the idiot-making machine (so well oiled by Nazism and Stalinism), which is now running at full speed. Can you give examples of people who you think everyone could be inspired by? For example: Subcommandante Marcos (now Galeano), who was a spokesperson (and not a leader) of the Zapatista movement? Or Noam Chomsky, who shares with you the dual career of politically engaged intellectual? Or Greta Thunberg, who, at the local level, rebelled against the destruction of our ecosystems? There are no valuable lessons to be drawn from people if they haven’t at first abolished the cult of personality. The Zapatistas never failed to remind people that they weren’t a model, but an experiment. I have never read Chomsky’s writings. I don’t know which green-dollar capitalist manipulations Greta Thunberg has been exposed to, but the various insults hurled at adolescents who want to save the earth and free it from the grasp of profit-making has revealed the extent to which spinelessness has affected those who pride themselves on being intellectuals and even – this is the height of ridiculousness – philosophers. For the most part, sociologists dwell on official assessments while disdaining the poetry around them that aspires to change the world. Dear young Marx, you who wrote “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, it is now a question of transforming it!” I feel I’m in better company with the insurgents of everyday life who, confused though they may be, agitate for change all over the world. Among them a new way of thinking is awakening. It will imprint its radical novelty on people’s mindsets and customs as long as it keeps to its fundamental principles: no leaders, no self-proclaimed representatives, no political or labor-union machines; self-organization and absolute priority given to humanity and solidarity.
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Post by Admin on Dec 14, 2020 14:57:42 GMT
Charles Dickens, The Angry Anarchist.
"Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world." Oliver Twist.
Described by the historian and essayist Peter Gay as 'The Angry Anarchist', Charles Dickens was forced to leave school at the age of 10, to work ten hours a day, seven days a week in 'Warrens Boot-Blacking Warehouse' following the incarceration of his father to a debtors' prison – this was to support his family and pay for his own lodgings. The harsh working conditions and every character that he met along the way, kind and cruel, made a lasting impression on Dickens and fed directly into his fiction and essays - he later wrote that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age"
He became admired not only as a novelist but also as a social critic, and in Oliver Twist, he dissects the weaknesses of human nature. The social canvas of the novel, which includes the poor underclass of London and the criminal justice system designed to contain it, allows Dickens to explore what happens when humans are reduced to the basest conditions. As the story of a poor orphan and, more generally, the downtrodden, Oliver Twist is filled with Dickens' thoughts about the role of class in English society. The author is highly critical of the institutions that protect the upper classes while leaving the poor to starve and die.
Throughout the book, Dickens raises questions about how society organises itself and treats its worst-off members - I wonder what he would make of today's cityscapes, where thousands of empty luxury apartments stand as testament to greed and corruption, as people sleep on the streets once more.
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Post by Admin on Feb 4, 2021 20:33:46 GMT
very good article on why anarchists shouldn't just blindly accept government orders during the pandemic "As anarchists, there are principles we return to as guiding stars in the dark night of the unknown, and these include freedom, autonomy, consent, and a deep belief in the ability of people to self-organize for their maximum benefit as individuals and as communities. No one knows one’s needs better than they do themselves, and truly, most people have self-preservation instincts that cause them to select behaviors that lead to their own safety and survival, as well as that of those they care for. "At the outset of the pandemic, when information was scant, we very much witnessed people making choices to distance themselves from crowds and gatherings they did not believe were essential, while they also began efforts to support and care for those who might be more vulnerable to a circulating respiratory illness that did not have well established treatment courses within the medical field. "While we welcome information and data, even that which is unpleasant, that describes the continually unfolding circumstances, we also believe that people need to be trusted to analyze that information. The current paradigm has the state and their selected technocratic experts filtering the available data and only highlighting that which supports the policy decisions they already decided to implement without any public input. Information and analysis that can be considered “good news” has been largely ignored by the state and their technocrats, while also being blacked out by the media. “Experts” can always be found to justify horrors. Indeed, we would likely be hard pressed to find a case in recent history in which massive crimes against humanity did not come packaged with a stamp of approval from some consortium of experts whom everyone else was asked to blindly trust. The Covid19 pandemic is no different, and as anarchists we just ask that you remember that debate, critique, and dissent are all essential components of societies that value liberation and autonomy. We ask that whatever you decide about the efficacy of lockdown measures, that you recognize no situation, no matter how dire it may seem, warrants edicts from on high that use the threat of force and violence to accomplish their aims. "Our steadfast commitment to human autonomy, and to our belief that no authority is valid without the consent of those it is exercised over, is what makes anarchism a thing apart from other political philosophies. We will not abandon this commitment, and hope that you will not either." On the Anarchist Response to the Global Pandemicmtlcounterinfo.org/on-the-anarchist-response-to-the-global-pandemic/
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