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Post by Admin on Feb 17, 2021 19:21:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Feb 19, 2021 18:21:48 GMT
ANARCHISM: AN EVERYDAY PHILOSOPHY“If we switch our mental focus and ground our conception of anarchism in the here and now, then what would our anarchism look like?” abeautifulresistance.org/site/2021/2/17/anarchism-an-everyday-philosophyTHE REAL VS THE IDEAL As an anarchist, I’m accustomed to having my ideas challenged by others on a regular basis. When other people hear that I’m an anarchist, they generally start by telling me why they think anarchism “couldn’t possibly work,” without noticing that they haven’t applied the same standard to the system we all live under right now. We live in a world that is rapidly sliding toward ecological disaster, and our system isn’t even making a serious attempt to address the problem. Even if every country in the world met the targets in the Paris Climate Accords, it still wouldn’t be enough. So, in what sense does our current system work? In effect, they’re making an apples and oranges comparison: our current system is not expected to be ideal, but anarchism is always being judged against an imaginary anarchist utopia. As a result, capitalist democracy is given a pass for being imperfect, but anarchism has to either be absolutely perfect or it couldn’t possibly work. Why do people hold anarchism to this unrealistic standard? It’s because they think of anarchism as a utopian philosophy, not an everyday approach to political power. They compare every anarchist idea to an imaginary future, a hypothetical anarchist society that could only exist after a worldwide revolution. I think this is misguided, and we should be speaking of anarchism as an approach that is immediately relevant in the here and now rather than as an imaginary utopian society. EVERYDAY ANARCHISM If we switch our mental focus and ground our conception of anarchism in the here and now, then what would our anarchism look like? First, it starts from the assumption that the current system has no legitimate authority. It cannot and will not protect us against the forces that threaten us most, and we won’t even ask it to do so. If our communities need protection, we’ll protect them ourselves, as in the many community defense groups that rose up in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Uprising. We’ll keep ourselves and our neighbors safe, and we won’t do so by murdering unarmed people or terrorizing entire communities the way the police do. If a corporation wants to destroy our environment for its own profit, we’ll prevent it from doing so through direct action, as in the many direct actions against the Line 3 pipeline project going on right now. When fascism threatens us, we confront it and destroy it in our own communities, and not by asking the FBI or the police to do it for us. Why? Because we know that the FBI and the police are much more closely aligned with the fascists than they are with us – they always have been, and they always will be, and trying to reform them is a waste of time and effort. If we have decisions to make as a community, we can make them together by meeting and talking things out, just like the community meetings happening behind barricades in autonomous zones all over the world. Anarchism is an everyday attitude to political power, not a purely utopian philosophy. It’s not based on an imaginary perfect system, but on a clear-eyed present-tense understanding. The system of authority and control doesn’t work at all, and we have to look out for each other. If you agree with that simple statement, you may already be an anarchist.
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Post by Admin on Feb 19, 2021 20:18:47 GMT
"The best metaphor for how your brain is truly governed is no government at all. Our brains function much like anarchy. Anarchy is not the same thing as chaos. The word anarchy doesn’t mean “no rules,” it means “no rulers.” This view of Anarchism as merely chaos mirrors the early and also incorrect theory of neuroscience called Equipotential. In the same way a common misconception of Anarchism is that anything goes. But the truth is that Anarchists aren’t against rules, they are just against laws imposed from the top-down." Consciousness is Anarchy What form of government is your brain? subtlesalmon.substack.com/p/consciousness-is-anarchy
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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2021 10:45:43 GMT
ANARCHISM NOT STATE SOCIALISMPosted on February 27, 2021 by winter oak winteroak.org.uk/2021/02/27/anarchism-not-state-socialism/#12by Marion, anarchist since 1982 In this article I am going to give some definitions of anarchism, contrast some different schools of anarchist thought and show that the idea of freedom is essential to all of them, as it seems many anarchists these days do not see free action or free speech as that important or even desirable. I will contrast anarchism with socialism and also say a bit about capitalism. I will give some examples of where anarchism has worked, albeit sometimes temporarily, and where it has turned into authoritarianism or been defeated and why. I will also suggest how an anarchist society could deal with viruses. Anarchism equals no government; this includes no leaders, rulers, laws or prisons, and a stateless society. That is the basic definition of it. Within that, there are various types of anarchism but it always means no government or states. A good definition I have seen, from Lexico dictionary, is ‘belief in the abolition of all government and the organization of society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or compulsion’. Max Nettlau in his book A Short History of Anarchism (1932-34) says about anarchism that it ‘starts from the earliest favourable historic moment when men first evolved the concept of a free life…a goal to be attained only by a complete break from authoritarian bonds and by the simultaneous growth and wide expansion of the social feelings of solidarity, reciprocity, generosity and other expressions of human co-operation’.
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Post by Admin on Jul 13, 2021 23:54:08 GMT
"We’re not left-wingers plus bandannas. We’re not right-wingers plus bowties. We’re anarchists. We don’t fight for your group, we fight for freedom." - William Gillis Everyone Wildly Surprised That Anarchists Are Anarchists William Gillis | @rechelon | Support this author on Patreon | December 9th, 2016 c4ss.org/content/47159
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Post by Admin on Feb 22, 2022 9:53:57 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 5, 2022 15:40:12 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2022 15:24:06 GMT
THE END OF THEIR WORLD IS THE BEGINNING OF OURS Posted on April 8, 2022 winteroak.org.uk/2022/04/08/the-end-of-their-world-is-the-beginning-of-ours/by Crow Qu’appelle Lately, it feels to me like the world is teetering on the precipice of a tremendous collapse. Really, though, this isn’t a new feeling for me. I have long felt a sense of impending doom, and I know that I am not alone in this. The idea that industrial civilization is bound to fail in some disastrous way has long been woven into the fabric of my political analysis, and has informed many of the choices that I have made in my life. Although lately I have embraced the idea of anarchism-without-adjectives, I belong to the green anarchist tradition. I wrote for the Earth First! Journal for years and was their main Canadian distributor. I attended many Earth First! gatherings, and even founded an eco-anarchist collective called Rebel! Rebuild! Rewild!, which was modeled on Earth First! In the green anarchist tradition, there exists a belief that, for ecological reasons, some kind of catastrophic failure of the capitalist system is inevitable. Franklin Lopez, one of the most influential green anarchists of the past twenty years, made a documentary called END:CIV, which predicted the imminent collapse of civilization, as well the long-running YouTube show called “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine”. We believed that the collapse of industrial civilization was only a matter of time. For this reason, we were scornful of attempts to reform the system. The types of activism that we favoured were those that impeded the expansion of the industrial-capitalist death-machine, and efforts that had the potential to develop into autonomous, self-sufficient communities. I still believe that our reasoning was sound. If we want to create a free society, we can’t be dependent upon the industrial capitalist system. This means food sovereignty, which cannot exist without an intact land base. So defending the land that will be our future lifeline is of paramount importance. Many of us see this as a sacred responsibility passed down to us from our ancestors, to be stewards of the Earth, and to protect the integrity of the web of life for the benefit of the generations to come. I still believe this, and in fact this whole COVID coup has only deepened my conviction. True, I have had to accept that much of what I formerly believed about climate change is probably false, but I am still very much convinced that there is a global ecological crisis. Underlying this is a spiritual crisis, stemming from a certain attitude that we have towards the natural world. A society which sees nature only as a resource to be exploited will behave very differently from one which understands itself as existing in symbiosis with a multiplicity of life-forms, all of whom belong to a super-organism and possess an intrinsic worth.
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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2022 15:26:48 GMT
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Post by Admin on Apr 13, 2022 18:37:18 GMT
Our Enemies in Blue by Kristian Williams The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis libcom.org/
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Post by Admin on Apr 25, 2022 13:22:12 GMT
“We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?”
“A revolution on a world scale will take a very long time. But it is also possible to recognize that it is already starting to happen. The easiest way to get our minds around it is to stop thinking about revolution as a thing — “the” revolution, the great cataclysmic break—and instead ask “what is revolutionary action?” We could then suggest: revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations—even within the collectivity—in that light. Revolutionary action does not necessarily have to aim to topple governments. Attempts to create autonomous communities in the face of power (using Castoriadis’ definition here: ones that constitute themselves, collectively make their own rules or principles of operation, and continually reexamine them), would, for instance, be almost by definition revolutionary acts. And history shows us that the continual accumulation of such acts can change (almost) everything.”
“The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called “engaged withdrawal,”mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community. One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular resistance have taken precisely this form. They have not involved challenging power head on (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some—often even uglier—variant of the very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities.”
“If you have the power to hit people over the head whenever you want, you don’t have to trouble yourself too much figuring out what they think is going on, and therefore, generally speaking, you don’t. Hence the sure-fire way to simplify social arrangements, to ignore the incredibly complex play of perspectives, passions, insights, desires, and mutual understandings that human life is really made of, is to make a rule and threaten to attack anyone who breaks it. This is why violence has always been the favored recourse of the stupid: it is the one form of stupidity to which it is almost impossible to come up with an intelligent response. It is also of course the basis of the state.”
“If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee humiliations, resentments, hatreds, in the end, the destruction of communities. What is seen as an elaborate and difficult process of finding consensus is, in fact, a long process of making sure no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored.”
“Residents of the squatter community of Christiana, Denmark, for example, have a Christmastide ritual where they dress in Santa suits, take toys from department stores and distribute them to children on the street, partly just so everyone can relish the images of the cops beating down Santa and snatching the toys back from crying children.”
“In other words if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. One can see how this worked at its starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the story of an army of Greek mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers, and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest.” “Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify, and reproduce, the mess we have today? And anyway, even if we’re wrong, we might well get a lot closer.”
“... one must oneself, in relations with one's friends and allies, embody the society one wishes to create.”
“It's as if the endless labour of achieving consensus maska a constant inner violence - or, it might perhaps be better to say, is in fact the process by which that inner violence is measured and contained - and it is precisely this, and the resulting tangle of moral contradiction, which is the primal fornt of social creativity.”
“The result has been strangely paradoxical: anthropological reflections on their own culpability has mainly had the effect of providing non-anthropologists who do not want to be bothered having to learn about 90% of human experience with a handy two or three sentence dismissal (you know: all about projecting one’s sense of Otherness into the colonized) by which they can feel morally superior to those who do.”
“... most Amazonians don't want to give others the power to threaten them with physical injury if they don't do as they are told. Maybe we should better be asking what it says about ourselves that we feel this attitude needs any sort of explanation.”
― David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
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Post by Admin on May 1, 2022 2:15:32 GMT
Anarcho-transcreation www.barnesandnoble.com/w/anarcho-transcreation-mirna-wabi-sabi/1140611622This book addresses the 'why' and the 'how' of the practice of anarcho-transcreation - when fidelity to the original text is incompatible with a literal translation, and where languages and cultures are inescapable from geopolitics. "Flip-over", bilingual, non-fiction style - with an anarchist, decolonial, feminist and anti-capitalist approach.
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Post by Admin on May 13, 2022 15:43:27 GMT
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Post by Admin on May 29, 2022 20:17:22 GMT
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Post by Admin on Jun 7, 2022 16:48:07 GMT
ANARCHIST ANTI-CAPITALISM: PRODUCING VS. AUTHORING abeautifulresistance.org/site/2022/5/30/on-producing-versus-authoringFor at least 2 centuries, the alienating division of labor within capitalism is discussed among political writers. We may not always use Marxist jargon, but we, as the so-called working class, experience this alienation every day. Yet, first-hand accounts and diverse narratives are overshadowed by the writings of communist icons. Marxist theory is often equated with a well-grounded criticism of the capitalist system, as opposed to working people’s lived experiences and knowledge. I am here to dispute that, for it is clear to me that anti-capitalism was and is not exclusive to Marxist thinkers, and Marx did not ‘coin’ the ‘concept’ of anti-capitalism. The first time I was properly confronted with the issue of 'anti-capitalism equals communism’ was in Budapest, about a decade ago. I was there to present my DIY zine project, which was as a tool for overcoming the framework of intellectual elites being unwilling to perform the manual labor required of a print publication. Naively, I described the DIY approach as a disruption of capitalism. The space was historically anti-fascist and of Jewish resistance, and it surprised me that this did not necessarily mean the audience had heard of or knew something about anarchism. When the term “anti-capitalist” was spoken, “pro-USSR” was heard, and all the transgenerational trauma of the Soviet invasion of Hungary flooded in. At the time, the discussion seemed clear-cut enough to me, “sure, communism is not our goal either”, but being critical of capitalism was such a trigger, that there was no opening to explain any anarchist principles. In my work today, this issue persists from the opposite side of the spectrum — an approach to anti-capitalist thought is perceived as inadequate if it does not reference Marxists. Either theorizing critically about capitalism is too communistic, or not communistic enough. Clearly, the discussion is still not as clear-cut as I assume it to be, so I decided to cut through it, specifically as it relates to publishing. The issue of division of labor was discussed in print (and about print) throughout much of the 19th century, and is still a relevant discussion today. In removing the distinction between producing and authoring, we remove (to the best of our abilities) the capitalist division of labor. This rationale comes from the idea that industrialized mass production, as a tool for maximum profit within an expanding capitalist system, has the self-production of goods as its antithesis. To do-it-yourself is, therefore, not only an anti-capitalist statement but also a tool to address alienation. In this sense, DIY zines are not utopic objects made 100% by hand. These are publications which can be created at home, without industrial grade machinery. Which means, they do not set out to be identical, profitable, or printed and distributed in a corporate scale. Even though it is impossible to live completely outside this current industrial/economic system, an imperfect attempt to do something yourself is enough to raise a critical consciousness around how this paradigm is made to be alienating and inescapable. Now, “alienation” and “division of labor” sound like Marxist jargon, and many anti-capitalist theorists do use them as such. I do not. Alienation in a Hegelian sense is not something experienced specifically by the proletariat in capitalism, it is part of an existential process which makes us human. Let’s not get into who qualified as human under Hegel’s unhinged German-centricness, but let’s highlight that the word within the Hegelian framework is an unavoidable step towards liberation, rather than a specific abusive practice by the bourgeoisie. “[T]he self that has an absolute significance in its immediate existence, i.e. without having alienated itself from itself, is without substance, and is the plaything of those raging elements.” (Phenomenology of the Spirit, pp. 295) When it comes to ‘division of labor’ as a particular source of alienation, Tocqueville had noticed it of the United States and written about it in the mid 1830s: “In proportion as the principle of the division of labor is more extensively applied, the workman becomes more weak, more narrow-minded, and more dependent.” (Democracy in America, pp. 627) Through the brazen frenchness of his writing, critical snippets of this emerging economic paradigm can be seen — capitalism as a paradigm shift rather than an improvement from aristocracy. This division of labor as it pertains to art and authoring is discussed in more detail in the book What Is Art, where Tolstoy exclaims: “the laborers produce food for themselves and also food that the cultured class accept and consume, but that the artists seem too often to produce their spiritual food for the cultured only — at any rate that a singularly small share seems to reach the country laborers who work to supply the bodily food!” (1897). This anti-capitalist approach towards art and publishing through doing away with borders between classes and their labor is further highlighted by Lucy Parsons, who invites her readers to “make of what [they] choose” (1905, Salutation), and that freedom will only come to be “when labor is no longer for sale” (1905, What Freedom Means).
The list of political theorists throughout the 19th century which occupied themselves with discussing the problems of capitalism might be longer than the list of those who did not. Marx was one who provided a detailed framework, but there were other methods and approaches to dealing with capitalism being discussed by a whole era of thinkers. None of them were perfect, and few of those registered were as detailed as Marx’s, but the absence of perfection and details does not mean worthlessness.
Anarchism, in particular, proposes something other than resorting to the imposition or enforcement of guidelines. In fact, this is what Lenin described as the “historical sin of Tolstoyism!” — Tolstoy’s disinterest in ruling was seen as a rejection of politics. As a novelist, however, his passion for subverting the arbitrary morality and norms of the aristocracy was far from apolitical; his method was moving hearts and minds through literature, and I would argue that Lenin not only learned from that, but took advantage of what Tolstoy achieved in Russian society through his work. Anarchist anti-capitalist publishing is a legacy, a valuable resource passed on through generations, for approaching persistent global socioeconomic issues. Anarchist anti-capitalist writing has the power to form an undercurrent of public discourse which renders authority and force obsolete.
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