Democracy Is Direct

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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Wed Sep 19, 2018 8:10 am

The Mythology of Work

Eight Myths that Keep Your Eyes on the Clock and Your Nose to the Grindstone

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That depends on what you mean by “work.” Think about how many people enjoy gardening, fishing, carpentry, cooking, and even computer programming just for their own sake. What if that kind of activity could provide for all our needs?

For hundreds of years, people have claimed that technological progress would soon liberate humanity from the need to work. Today we have capabilities our ancestors couldn’t have imagined, but those predictions still haven’t come true. In the US we actually work longer hours than we did a couple generations ago—the poor in order to survive, the rich in order to compete. Others desperately seek employment, hardly enjoying the comfortable leisure all this progress should provide. Despite the talk of recession and the need for austerity measures, corporations are reporting record earnings, the wealthiest are wealthier than ever, and tremendous quantities of goods are produced just to be thrown away. There’s plenty of wealth, but it’s not being used to liberate humanity.

What kind of system simultaneously produces abundance and prevents us from making the most of it? The defenders of the free market argue that there’s no other option—and so long as our society is organized this way, there isn’t.

Yet once upon a time, before time cards and power lunches, everything got done without work. The natural world that provided for our needs hadn’t yet been carved up and privatized. Knowledge and skills weren’t the exclusive domains of licensed experts, held hostage by expensive institutions; time wasn’t divided into productive work and consumptive leisure. We know this because work was invented only a few thousand years ago, but human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. We’re told that life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” back then—but that narrative comes to us from the ones who stamped out that way of life, not the ones who practiced it.

This isn’t to say we should go back to the way things used to be, or that we could—only that things don’t have to be the way they are right now. If our distant ancestors could see us today, they’d probably be excited about some of our inventions and horrified by others, but they’d surely be shocked by how we apply them. We built this world with our labor, and without certain obstacles we could surely build a better one. That wouldn’t mean abandoning everything we’ve learned. It would just mean abandoning everything we’ve learned doesn’t work.



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https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-m ... rindstone/
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Thu Sep 20, 2018 3:34 am


https://vimeo.com/277732811


TROUBLE # 14: FIGHTING WHERE WE STAND

In our hyper-alienated and media-saturated societies, struggles for collective liberation are all too often reduced to a contest of ideas. Rather than fighting tooth and nail against conditions of exploitation, oppression and ecological devastation, we often instead find ourselves mired in an endless cycle of argument, critique and debate. But while theory can and should play an important role in informing our actions and helping to build relationships based in trust and mutual understanding… at the end of the day, any meaningful practice of collective autonomy requires the capacity to actually defend territory.

Though they often draw inspiration from one another, struggles for territorial autonomy – if they are to be successful – must be based on local realities. After all… defending a physical space means fighting where we stand. And so the battle to defend a squatted social center in an urban neighbourhood will necessarily look very different from one waged by Indigenous land defenders against the encroachment of pipeline companies through their territories. But though these struggles may assume different forms, they stem from a shared resolve to draw a line in the sand and to defend it… come what may.

In this month’s episode of Trouble, subMedia showcases three ongoing land defence struggles: the Unist’ot’en Camp, located on the unceded Wet’suwet’en territories of so-called “British Columbia”; the autonomous spaces movement in Ljubljana, Slovenia and the eco-defence occupation known as La ZAD, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France.


https://sub.media/video/trouble-14-figh ... us-spaces/
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Fri Sep 28, 2018 8:06 am

OMAR AZIZ, “ABU KAMEL,” 1949-2013: BIOGRAPHY, READINGS, QUOTES

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A short biography of the contemporary Syrian anarchist, Omar Aziz, also known as “Abu Kamel.” This short biographical essay is followed by links to Aziz’s writings, further sources on Syria and quotes. Read more biographies of anarchist figures here.

Omar Aziz

By Javier Sethness

Born on February 18, 1949 in Al-Amara, Damascus, Syria – Died on February 16, 2013 in Harasta Military Hospital, Damascus, Syria

The Syrian anarchist Omar Aziz was born into a privileged family in the capital city of Damascus on February 18, 1949, and he studied economics at Grenoble University in France. Aziz worked in information technology in Saudi Arabia and the U.S., married, and together with his wife Nada raised two daughters and one son.

With the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution against Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, Aziz decided to return to his home country to support the struggle. What began as a popular uprising emerged from within the larger current of the ongoing Arab Uprisings, which by then had overthrown the governments of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. As he departed for Syria, Aziz reportedly told Nada, “I will not respect myself, nor will you respect me, if I stay away from my country at a time when I have so much to offer.”

Aziz, known to his comrades as “Abu Kamel,” assisted with the distribution of relief supplies to communities in Damascus besieged by the Assad Regime while also writing about and organizing to implement a transition toward democratic self-governance in the country. A public intellectual and community organizer, Aziz was clearly inspired by the possibilities of the Revolution. As writer Budour Hassan explains: “at the age of 63, his enthusiasm, ambition, and swashbuckling energy were matched by none of the twenty-somethings on the scene.”

According to Leila al-Shami, “Abu Kamel,” by means of his writings and efforts, “promoted local self-governance, horizontal organization, cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid as the means by which people could emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the state.” Aziz co-founded the first local council in the working-class district of Barzeh, Damascus, in late 2011, thus contributing significantly to the subsequent development of the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), known in Arabic as tansiqiyyat (“councils”), which would be established throughout the liberated regions by self-organized communities. Hassan writes that Abu Kamel anticipated the flowering of democratic self-government in the regions that would be liberated by the Revolution, even as most of the country remained under military rule early on. She asserts that Aziz found inspiration for the council system in Rosa Luxemburg’s writings, whereas in parallel, Joey Ayoub observes that several notable components of the Constitution of the Rojava Cantons, including the emphasis on the right to self-determination and unity among distinct ethnic groups, mirror Aziz’s vision.

Like Walter Benjamin, Aziz distinguishes between the “time of power,” in which the Assad Regime “still manages everyday activities,” and the “time of Revolution,” in which activists and organizers “work daily to overthrow the regime”:

“A revolution is an exceptional event that will alter the history of societies, while changing humanity itself. It is a rupture in time and space, where humans live between two periods: the period of power and the period of revolution. A revolution’s victory, however, is ultimately achieving the independence of its time in order to move into a new era.”


To truly do away with oppression, Aziz believed that revolutionary change must come to permeate all aspects of social relations. Similar to classical anarchist Peter Kropotkin, he celebrated the spontaneous processes of mutual aid engaged in by besieged Syrians—the organization of medical, legal, or food aid among the Revolution’s base communities.

Following the stress placed by so many other anarchists on the importance of popular power as a means of advancing revolutionary social transformation, Aziz saw a need for the protest-based movement in Syria to adopt the strategy of self-organization through councils. He defined the goal of such a participatory political system as allowing participants in the revolutionary movement to “manage their lives independently of the institutions and organs of the state; to provide the space to enable the collective collaboration of individuals; and to activate the social revolution at the local, regional and national level.” In practice, Shami reports, the tansiqiyyat (or LCC’s) would observe and document rights-violations by the regime and opposition forces, organize protests and civil disobedience, and coordinate aid and humanitarian supplies in a non-hierarchical way, thus promoting popular participation, “solidarity amongst the people, a sense of community and collective action.”

Political or Class-Struggle Anarchism?
Whereas it is clear that Aziz favored “the formation [of] local councils with members from diverse cultures who belong to different social division[s],” what is less clear is his class analysis. This reference to “different social division[s]” may allude to the concept of a cross-class alliance, rather than a strategy focused on building working-class power. On the other hand, Aziz does emphasize the importance of collective defense against land-expropriations by the Assad regime. Regardless of this ambiguity on class struggle, in contrast to the more reformist parts of the anti-Assad opposition, Aziz’s vision was uncompromisingly radical on the question of the State. According to his comrade Muhammad Sami al-Kayyal, “Omar Aziz stood for the complete break-up with the state in order to achieve collective liberation without waiting for regime change or for one ruling power to replace another. He believed that communities are capable of producing their own freedoms regardless of political vicissitudes.”

In this sense, we can glean that Abu Kamel advanced an anarchist political critique of the Assad regime and organized to prefigure an emancipated future, but his strategy for social transformation does not appear to be specifically anarcho-syndicalist, platformist, or especifist, as it does not appear to explicitly identify the workers and peasants as the actors who will bring about the Revolution. This is at least what we can gather from his first paper on the councils, where he may be endorsing the idea of a cross-class alliance, though we know he wrote another paper on the councils, which has yet to be translated into English.

Yet even this preliminary conclusion may be mistaken: Hassan reports that it was “working-class communities who first embraced his ideas” in Syria, whereas al-Shami clarifies that Aziz “helped found four local councils in the working-class suburbs of Damascus before his arrest,” including one in Daraya, an agricultural town in which would subsequently blossom one of the most moving experiments in democratic self-governance from the Syrian Revolution.

Abu Kamel’s Arrest and Death
On November 20, 2012, Aziz was arrested by the Regime mukhabarat, or secret police, and held in an intelligence-detention facility in Mezze, Damascus. According to a Human Rights Watch investigation, his 4-by-4 meter cell reportedly contained over 80 other detainees in it. Following his transfer to Adra Prison on the outskirts of Damascus, Aziz’s condition deteriorated quickly. In accordance with the testimony of a fellow inmate survivor, Aziz lost at least thirty pounds during his three months of incarceration, when he was subjected to poor food and psychological torture, whereby authorities would lie and tell him that his family members were also imprisoned with him. Diagnosed previously with hypertension, or high blood pressure, Aziz was transferred to Harasta Military Hospital in the morning of February 16, 2013, and died there the same day, likely due to stroke or heart attack. Yet after more than seven years of brutal counter-insurgency and the outright extermination of an estimated 100,000 political prisoners, we know that the Assad Regime often employs such euphemisms as “heart failure” or “respiratory arrest” to cover up its responsibility for the mass-murder of detainees through starvation, disease, torture, and other abuses. Thus, as with Ricardo Flores Magón, another imprisoned anarchist martyr, while in the case of Aziz, we are unsure if the comrade died due to outright political assassination, medical neglect, or both, it was certainly Abu Kamel’s political incarceration in Adra Prison which took his life away.


Continues: http://blackrosefed.org/omar-aziz-biogr ... gs-quotes/
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Sat Oct 27, 2018 8:50 pm

Against nationalism - Anarchist Federation

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The absence of Western imperialism does not bring peace, and national liberation does not lead to self-determination, an impossibility in the capitalist world. This is due to the very nature of the nation-state, which is imperialist by nature.

All nation-states are imperialist

‘Imperialism’ has a long history, with its forms and varieties stretching back as far as the forms and varieties of the state and class society. As the word describes many different projects by many different states in various periods, we have to clarify what it means in the context of advanced capitalist society. The Roman Empire was different to the British Empire; contemporary imperialism is different still. This does not mean imperialism isn’t something we can identify. Still, we have to define more precisely the phenomenon we are describing.

The power of the classical empires of the ancient world stemmed from the conquest of land and the mobilisation of its resources. The continuity between state control of land and Imperial power made their imperialism the archetype; its most basic and transparent form.

The ‘foreign policy’ of contemporary capitalist nation states seems a world away. But in the modern world, imperialism is as embedded in the working of states as at any time in history. The functioning and nature of imperialism changed along with the economic organisation of the society it was part of. As the form of the state in an agrarian slave society is different to that of a developed capitalist society, so too is the imperialism of that state. But despite the multitude of changes the world has since undergone, the state remains the actor of contemporary imperialism. This may seem a strange comment in a world where the leading powers are liberal democracies which send innumerable functionaries to innumerable meetings, summits, forums and international organisations. Nonetheless, imperialism is absolutely vital to the functioning of capitalist societies, and its success is inseparable from the success of leading powers.

The pressures of capitalism transformed the imperialism which preceded and nurtured it. The wave of speculative investments which flooded out of Europe from the 1850s as capital sought profitable investment led to an intensification of imperialist activity, with states impelled to protect and regulate the interests of capital within their national bounds. This would intensify after the 1870s. The direct British government of India after the mutiny put its interests in jeopardy is one early example (previously it had been ruled by a British company), and the ‘scramble for Africa’ from the 1880s to the First World War represented the definitive transformation of the ‘informal Imperialism’ of earlier decades to a system of direct rule in which Imperialist powers carved up the world between them.

As we know, this system broke apart following the Second World War and during the period of decolonisation through the second half of the Twentieth century. However, the essential dynamic by which states act to the benefit of capital within the country in question by the manipulation of geopolitical inequalities remains as an essential part of the makeup of the capitalist world.

The state must act to further the interests of the capital – what is often called the ‘business interests’ – of the country over which it has jurisdiction. Within the country in question it nurtures capitalism, it enshrines the property laws it requires in order to exist, it opens spaces of accumulation for capital, it rescues capital from its own destructive tendencies (sometimes against the protests of particular capitalists) and manages class struggle through the combination of coercion and co-option: it can and does smash strikes, but it also grants unions a role in managing the workforce and thus creates a pressure-valve for class struggle. The state is the ‘collective capitalist’; it is the guarantor and underwriter of the capitalist system.

This function also extends to ‘foreign policy’. The state negotiates access for domestic companies to resources, investment, trading and expansion abroad. The success of this process brings profits flowing back into the country in question and by enriching its business and the ‘national economy’, the state secures the material basis of its own power: it increases its own resources, wealth and ability to project itself. It is therefore not simply a puppet of ‘corporate interests’, but is an interested party in its own right.

At the same time the state must seek to avoid its own domination, it must marshal its resources – military, diplomatic, cultural and economic – to maintain its own international position. There is constant struggle - whether at the roundtable with ‘international partners’ discussing trade policy or at arms in international ‘hotspots’ and ‘flashpoints’ – to ensure that the ‘national interest’ is advanced abroad and defended at home. These interests are furthered by maintaining, defending and manipulating inequalities which exist within capitalism across geographical space. For example, these asymmetries are today often expressed through phenomena such as regional monopolies, unequal exchange, restricted capital flows, and the manipulation of monopoly rents. Imperialism is about the mobilisation of these differences to the benefit of the economy of the state in question – meaning the capital within it. This is the normal functioning of the world economy, and is visible for example in US mobilisation of the International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation to the benefit of US financial industries or in Chinese manoeuvres in sub-Saharan Africa. States must participate in this system of constantly shifting balances of power irrespective of intentions, as those unable to ward off or manage these pressures will be totally dominated by them.

War comes to have an obvious function. Imperialist interventions can occasionally be motivated by specific quantitative gains, such as the exploitation of a specific resource. More often, however, the question is one of geopolitical strategy and outflanking other power blocs in order to maintain regional or international power. Resources are usually seen in strategic terms, not in terms of simple exploitation. If exploitation of Iraqi oil had been the US’ sole aim in the Persian Gulf, it would have been far cheaper and easier to leave Saddam in power and negotiate access. The question was one of militarily controlling this strategic resource, hence the invasion of Iraq. Control of Middle Eastern oil, which has a continued shelf-life beyond that of rival reserves, would grant the US effective control over the world economy, and specifically the economies of China, Russia, Japan and Europe, with their rival financial and manufacturing industries.

Similarly, the occupation of Afghanistan had little to do with exploiting particular resources, and everything to do with controlling a strategic point in the Caucasus and projecting into the spheres of influence of Russia and China. Afghanistan was occupied by the British and Russians for similar strategic reasons. The war in Vietnam ran the risk of damaging short – term capital accumulation, but nonetheless formed part of a grander imperial strategy which stood to benefit the interests of US capital by securing the leading global role of the US and making the ‘free world’ safe for investment and exploitation.

However, when faced with these practices, leftists often draw questionable conclusions. Following the logic of support for national liberation struggles, and the need to discover a proxy to support, leftists will often cheer-lead the regimes of states which are subject to the machinations of Western Imperialism. However, ‘national oppression’ has nothing to do with class struggle, and the support for regimes which are active in the suppression of ‘their’ workers and the persecution of minorities in the pursuit of ‘anti-imperialist’ politics is completely reactionary. It also fails to understand imperialism, which is a consequence of a world capitalist system. States and national capitals which have an uneven relationship with larger powers will also have different asymmetric relations with other powers. The ‘victims’ of Western Imperialism have their own agendas, and imperialist policies of their own. Iran and Venezuela, for instance, certainly do; Venezuela in advancing its interest by expanding its sphere of influence around Latin America, and Iran in doing the same in Iraq, Lebanon, Africa and elsewhere.

Imperialism does not simply emanate from a handful of big powers, oppressing smaller countries and extending their reach across the world. Undoubtedly there are imperialist policies that are much more successful than others. But the nation-state has imperialism in its very blood. Even if a state wished to stay ‘civilised’ and avoid the dynamics of imperialist competition and conflict, it would be forced to defend itself against attempts to prey on this weakness by other powers, using methods of greater or lesser directness. As a result, states with less capacity to project themselves align with those with more, using a logic that a child could understand.

More: http://libcom.org/library/against-nationalism
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Sat Nov 03, 2018 10:22 am

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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:58 am

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/11/ac ... ledgement/

Activist begins Tinder date with land acknowledgement
ANDERS YATES

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TORONTO – Upon seeing one another in-person for the first time at local dive bar Scrungie’s, internet activist Dillon Sanders introduced himself to his date Rebecca Holder by way of a ceremonial acknowledgement of the traditional caretakers of the land on which they were meeting.

“Toronto is in the ‘Dish with One Spoon Territory,’” Sanders carefully explained to his date, who had previously been made aware of this fact on many occasions. “The Dish With One Spoon is a treaty between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee,” he continued, taking extreme care to over-pronounce the names of each nation.

Land or territory acknowledgements are an increasingly popular way to begin gatherings where people wish to recognize the continuing history of indigenous peoples in North America, and can also be used by white people to feel like they are the good guys without actually engaging in any sort of concrete action.

“I was debating between starting with the acknowledgement or opening with a pronoun check-in,” explained Sanders. “Since we both have our pronouns on our profiles I figured I could skip it,” he added. “Then again gender is fluid and constantly shifting so maybe that was a mistake. I go by he/him and last I checked she used she/her but I should really ask each time I see her. I mean them.”

“Every time I go on a Tinder date it feels like an empty ritual devoid of any real potential to change to my life,” said Holder, “So when he did that land acknowledgement it seemed to fit right in,” adding “I still think it’s nice to do them though. It gets me out of the house.”

While typically used before ceremonies or public events in order to pay lip service to a large array of complex issues that actually require far more attention, Sanders has found that land acknowledgements can be worked into almost any context. “I usually do one at the counter before I order my morning coffee, one for the bus driver when I’m doing my commute, one for my dog before I take off her leash at the dog park,” he explained. “As a white person in Canada it’s my duty to try to educate people and make them feel a bit bad at the same time.”

After their date, Holder mentioned that there was unlikely to be a second one. “As soon as he saw the sealskin purse I bought from an Inuit artist in Labrador he just yelled ‘That’s not vegan!’ and ran off.”





American Dream » Wed Jul 11, 2018 7:15 am wrote:
Monsieur Dupont

Revolutionary organisations and individual commitment



Some advice to revolutionaries from Monsieur Dupont.

You don’t have to join anything – set your own terms of engagement with the milieu.

Only give that which you feel comfortable giving.

Never tolerate moral pressure to participate in ‘actions’. In response to activist holy-joes say, ‘we should do nothing’ to establish different grounds.

The revolution does not rest on your conforming to a set ‘consciousness’, so don’t feel bound by orthodoxies or demand it of others.

All groups only really survive on the work of one or two individuals, so if you do make any contribution at all you are doing more than most – and always speak as yourself and not as the group.

It is possible to be pro-revolutionary and lead a normal life; don’t run away to Brighton; don’t adopt an extremist personality; don’t confuse pop/drug/drop-out culture with revolution.

If you try and ‘live’ your politics you will separate yourself further from other people, thereby limiting shared experiences and perspectives.

Try and commit yourself for the long term but at a low level intensity, understand that early enthusiasm will fade as everything you do falls on deaf ears and ends in failure.

Remember the role of the pro-revolutionary milieu is not to make revolution but to criticise those attempts that claim to be revolutionary – in other words: push those who are politicised towards a prorevolutionary consciousness.

Just because in the future you will become disillusioned and burnt out, and you will think prorevolutionaries are tossers, it doesn’t follow that revolution is hopeless.

Remember that revolution does away with revolutionaries, it does not canonise them.

Begin by criticising all cliques. If you are on a demonstration and you look around and everyone is dressed the same as you and they are all the same age then there is something wrong – expect there to be hidden agendas and personal fiefdoms.

Groups should only exist to achieve a stated short-term purpose. All groups that have existed for more than five years have outlived their usefulness.

Don’t get sucked into single issue campaigns unless you personally want a particular reform; revolution cannot be conjured from animal rights, legalisation of cannabis, peace, etc.

There is a cyclical tendency in groups to ‘build up’ to big anti-capitalist events – resist this, consider why groups are so keen on spectaculars, then think of the day after May Day.

When someone makes a statement, think to yourself: who is speaking, what do they really mean – what do they want from me?

Many pro-revolutionaries have decent jobs and come from comfortable backgrounds and then lie about it/adopt prole accents, etc. They’ve got a safety net, have you? Don’t give too much.

Don’t look for ideological purity, there is no such thing. If it suits you, if you have a reason, then participate all you want as an individual in any reformist political group or institution, so long as you do not attach to it a ‘revolutionary’ importance. Your pro-revolutionary consciousness must be kept separate from all personal and political activity.

There is no need to go looking for ‘events’ – they will find you. In this way your effectiveness will be magnified because you will be ready and you will act in a certain way which the people around you can learn from, eg, solidarity, ‘us and them’, and ‘all or nothing’ perspectives, etc.

If it helps, think of it this way: you are an agent from the future; you must live a normal life in the circumstances in which you find yourself. Maybe you never talk to anyone about all of what you think but that doesn’t matter because when the situation arises you will be in place to tell everything that is appropriate because that precisely is your (and nobody else’s) role. All the time you are getting ready to make your contribution, one day you will do something, and you have no idea what it is, but it will be important.


https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... commitment






American Dream » Sat Oct 08, 2011 12:23 pm wrote: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Jam ... itics.html

Jamie Heckert

Maintaining the Borders: identity & politics


Identity is the process of creating and maintaining borders, creating different kinds of people. This keeps the world packaged in tidy little boxes. These boxes, in turn, are necessary for the violence and domination of hierarchical societies. There cannot be masters or slaves, bosses or workers, men or women, whites or blacks, leaders or followers, heterosexuals or queers, without identity.

Social movement [1], both past and present, often attempts to use identity as a tool of liberation. Movement based on gender, sexual orientation, class, ethnic and ability identities all have some success in challenging hierarchy and oppression. By no means do I mean to diminish the impact of past and present activism. Personally, my life would have been much more difficult before feminist and gay liberation/equality movement arose. I argue that identity politics is inherently limited in its ability to challenge hierarchy because it depends upon the same roots as the system it aims to overthrow. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”[2]

Does that mean we should all be the same?

Identity is also the answer to the question, “who am I?”. This is different from answering, “what kind of person am I?”. Labels like “woman”, “white” and “heterosexual” tell us about someone’s position in various hierarchies. These positions, these identities, are significant to how a person thinks of themselves. But, they don’t answer the question, “who am I?”. Each of us is unique, both similar and different to everyone else in various ways. Working to eliminate identity in the hierarchical sense (e.g. some animals are more equal than others) isn’t the same as eliminating identity in the individual sense (e.g. I’ll still be Jamie). When I talk about the problems with identity, I mean the “boxes” rather than individuals.

Let me use “sexual orientation” as an example. Supposedly people can be put into three boxes, depending on whether they fancy women, men or both. While this is a popular idea, it seems to cause an awful lot of suffering. People worry a lot about their image, and try very hard to make sure that others realise “what” they are. We also worry about “what” other people are — are they like me or are they different? Some people are so unhappy and anxious about these things that they attack others, either physically or verbally. Even people who think of themselves as heterosexual can be attacked. Finally, people suffer when they desire others of the “wrong” gender, or if they worry that others think they do. One alternative is that we all try to be “equal opportunity lovers” and fancy everyone. Those who succeed could then feel superior to those whose desires are less politically correct. Another alternative is that we try to give up thinking of people (including ourselves) in terms of sexual orientation and instead recognise that everyone’s sexual desires are complex and unique. This would mean being yourself rather than a heterosexual, a queer or whatever, and to recognise people as people instead of members of categories. We could never all be the same, even if we tried!

What is wrong with political identity?

Identity separates people. It encourages us to believe that “we” are different from “others”. Identity can also encourage conformity. How else do I show that I am one of us other than conforming to the accepted codes prescribed to that identity? This construction of similarity and difference exists whether we are talking about traditional identity politics groups like “disabled people” or political identities like “environmentalists”. This separation of us from them has serious consequences for political movement.

Identity encourages isolation. Political ghettos cannot exist without political identity; and their existence reinforces it. Not only are the “activists” separated from the “non-activists”, but within a broad political ghetto, anarchists, feminists, and environmentalists (amongst others) often see themselves as involved in separate struggles. People who consider themselves politically active are separated both from each other and from others who do not share an “ctivist” identity. Effective movement for radical social change cannot be based on such divisions.

Identity reduces social phenomena to individuals. Concepts like anarchism and racism are social. They are not embodied by individuals as terms like “anarchist” and “racist” suggest. Rather, they exist as ideas, practices and relationships. In most societies, racism is inherent in our institutionalised relationships and ways of thinking. We can and should be critical of racism, but to attack people as “racists” can only further alienate them from our efforts. [3] Besides, it is a dangerous fantasy to believe that “racists” can be separated from those of us who are non-racist. Likewise, anarchism exists throughout every society. Every time people co-operate without coercion to achieve shared goals, that is anarchy. Every time someone thinks that people should be able to get along with each other without domination, that is anarchism. If we only see racism in “racists”, we will never effectively challenge racism. If we only see anarchism in “anarchists”, we will miss out on so many desperately needed sources of inspiration.

Identity encourages purity. If we believe that concepts like feminism can be embodied in individuals, then some people can be more feminist than others. This leads to debates about “real feminists” and how feminists should act (e.g. debates regarding feminism and heterosexuality). Feminist purity allows for hierarchy (e.g. more or less and thus better or worse feminists) and encourages guilt (e.g. asking yourself “should real feminists think/act like this?”).

Political identity simplifies personal identity A related problem for feminist identity, for example, is that it demands we focus on one aspects of our complex lives. Feminist movement has often been dominated by white middle-class women who have a particular perspective on what is a “women’s issue”. Many women have had to choose between involvement in a woman’s movement that fails to recognise ethnicity and class issues, or in black or working class politics that did not acknowledge gender. But, the alternative of specialised identity politics could get very silly (e.g. a group for disabled, transgender, lesbian, working-class women of colour). Likewise, if I describe myself as a feminist, an anarchist, and a sex radical, I am suddenly three different people. However, if I say I advocate feminism, anarchism and radical sexual politics I am one person with a variety of beliefs. [4]

Identity often imagines easily defined interests. Feminism is often presented as for women only; men are perceived to entirely benefit from the gender system. Many men do clearly benefit from the gender system in terms of institutionalised domination. If we perceive interests as inherently stemming from current systems, we fail to recognise how people would benefit from alternative systems. If we want to encourage and inspire people to create a very different form of society, we should share with each other what we see as beneficial. We must recognise that different value systems (e.g. domination versus compassion) result in very different interests.

Identity discourages participation. If people are worried that they might be excluded through labelling (e.g. racist or homophobic), they won’t feel welcomed and won’t get involved. Likewise, people do not get involved if they believe that it is not in their interests. If we pepetuate the idea that feminism is for women, men will never see how it could also be in their interests to support feminism. Or they might support feminism, but feel guilty for their male privilege. Either way, men are not encouraged to be active in feminist movements. Radical social change requires mass social movement. Identity politics, by definition, can never achieve this. Political identities, like “environmentalist”, can likewise become a basis for minority politics.

Identity creates opposition. By dividing the world up into opposing pairs (e.g. men/women, heterosexuals/queers, ruling class/working-class, whites/blacks), identity creates opposite types of people who perceive themselves as having opposing interests. This opposition means that people fail to recognise their common interests as human beings. The opposition of two forces pushing against each other means that very little changes.

Identity freezes the fluid. Neither individual identity (the “who am I?” kind) nor social organisation are fixed, but are in constant motion. Political identities require that these fluid processes are frozen realities with particular characteristics and inherent interests. In failing to recognise the nature of both identity and society, political identity can only inhibit radical social change.

It may not be perfect, but can’t it still be a useful strategy?

It is a very good strategy if you don’t want to change things very much. Identity politics fits in nicely within the dominant neo-liberal ideology. Groups created around oppressed identities can lobby the state for civil rights. This idea of trying to protect individuals without changing relationships or systems of organisation is compatible with the individualistic basis of capitalism and representative “democracy”.

I would never argue that a strategy has to be “perfect” to be useful, but it must be consistent with its aims. Ends and means can only be separated in our minds. If the aim is to reduce or eliminate hierarchical social divisions (e.g. gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, class), a strategy which depends upon those very divisions can never be successful.

If political identity is such a poor strategy, why is it so common?

On a personal level, political identity makes us feel part of something larger at the same time that it makes us feel special were different. In the short-term, this can be very successful defence mechanism. For example, I’m sure I would have been a lot more damaged by the sexist and homophobic environment in which I grew up if I had not been able to convert stigma into pride. However, feeling yourself to be different and separate from other people is not a successful long-term strategy, either psychologically or politically.

What’s the alternative to political identity?

If borders are the problem, then we must support and encourage each other to tear down the fences. Two crucial tools for dismantling borders are systematic analyses and compassionate strategies.

We should recognise oppression is not simply a practice of individuals who have power over those who do not. Instead, we could see how forms of organisation (including institutions and relationships) systematically produce hierarchies and borders. People will only see an interest in getting more involved if they realise that their individual problems — anxiety, depression, exhaustion, anger, poverty, meaningless work,unsatisfying sex lives, etc — are not unique, but are systematically produced. Furthermore, their action will only be effective if they work to reduce all forms of hierarchy and domination. Constructs including gender, sexuality, capitalism, race and the nation state are interdependent systems. Each system of domination serves to reinforce the others. This doesn’t mean we have to solve every problem instantly, but we must recognise that all issues are human issues. At the same time, we must not imagine that a particular system of domination (not even capitalism!) is the source of all others.

Radical politics is rarely appealing because it focuses on the evils of the world. This offers little that is hopeful or constructive in people’s daily lives. If we want to see widespread social movement for radical change, we have to offer people something they value. Listening to people’s concerns, caring about their problems and encouraging and supporting them to develop systemic solutions requires compassion. Offer people a better quality of life instead of focusing so much on depressing aspects of our current society.

We should also recognise that people positioned in more privileged categories may in some ways suffer. At the very least, people who feel a strong need to dominate and control must suffer deep insecurities, the results of competition and hierarchy. Insecurity, domination and control are not conducive to fulfilling and meaningful relationships with other people. Attacking people in “privileged” positions does little to dismantle these systems. It also gives entirely too much credit to people in those positions — they are both products and producers of systems, just like the rest of us.

To radically reorganise our society, we should aim to both diminish systematic domination and suffering and encourage systematic compassion. Just as apparently disconnected and often incoherent forms of domination can reinforce and maintaining each other, so too can a compassionate organisation of society become systematic and self-sustaining.

Encouraging people to be more comfortable with sexuality in general has been a key focus of my own political efforts. But, sexuality is only one area in which a compassionate and systematic approach has much more radical potential than politicising identity.

Find sources of suffering, whatever they are, and support and encourage people to find ways of relating to themselves and others that reduce that suffering. Help build compassionate, co-operative institutions (e.g. social centres, support/discussion groups, mediation services, childcare support, food not bombs). Tell people when you admire or appreciate their efforts. Support people trying to change their environments (e.g. workplace resistance). Offer alternatives to people who are involved in or considering authoritarian positions (e.g. military, police, business management).

Demonstrating the pleasures and benefits of co-operative, compassionate organisation offers a strong threat to the world of borders and guards. I suspect that fragmented groups, anti-whatever demonstrations, unfriendly, exclusive meetings and utopian “after the revolution” lectures will never be quite as enticing to people outside the activist ghetto.

Further Reading

Anonymous (1999) “Give Up Activism” in Reflections on June 18th. http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/activism.htm

Begg, Alex (2000) Empowering the Earth: Strategies for Social Change Totnes, Green Books.

CrimethInc. (2002) “Definition of Terms” in Harbinger (4). http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/harbing ... nition.php

CrimethInc. (2002) “Why We’re Right and You’re Wrong (Infighting the Good Fight)”in Harbinger (4). http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/harbing ... ghting.php

Edwards, David (1998) The Compassionate Revolution: Radical Politics and Buddhism. Totnes, Green Books.

Heckert, J. (2004) “Sexuality/Identity/Politics” in J Purkis and J Bowen (eds) Changing Anarchism: Anarchist Theory and Practice in a Global Age. Manchester, Manchester University Press. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=etb2 ... CA4Q6AEwAg

hooks, b. (2000). Feminism is for Everybody: passionate politics. London, Pluto Press.

LeGuin, U. (1999/1974). The Dispossessed. London, The Women’s Press.
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 06, 2018 6:48 pm

Introducing Commune

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For a life worth living.


We are a year into the death, the real death, of liberalism. Or maybe two years? It was never more than our fair-weather friend, an often treacherous ally to the radicals who did the heavy lifting for social change it claimed for itself, in the labor and women’s movements, in struggles for civil rights that were for much more than rights, and struggles against the war that were against much more than war. Though liberalism’s death warrant was sealed long ago, when the capitalism for which it has long served as management team ceased to expand, we were surprised by the rapid progress of the disease. In any case, the shameful circumstances of its demise underscore how little we should mourn.

Examining the corpse, we can discover neither the exact moment when it expired, nor the precise cause of death. Donald Trump is one name for it, unsurprisingly. Ripping the mask off, Trump exposed the right as a bundle of impulses: resentment, fear, acquisitiveness. But liberals cannot remove the mask, they are all mask, nothing beneath. As Trump grew stronger, they grew weaker and more bewildered. The discourse of civil rights, in some regard the crown jewels of American liberalism, became the property of Nazis and assorted white nationalists, who took the streets in ever-larger numbers under the banner of diversity, free speech, and tolerance for difference, a white rainbow of would-be school shooters, frustrated rapists, internet trolls, and other all-too-human monsters. Comparing Hillary’s deployment of feminism to Obama’s antiracism shows the diminishing returns that liberalism has been receiving from its claim to the legacy of the left. What choice then but to depart into fantasies about Russian bots, to hope for deliverance by the CIA? Liberalism died, we might say, having seen its own shadow in an administration ready to use the detention centers and police machinery it had been happy to build. Good riddance.

We speak of the United States as we write from there, most of us. The scenario we describe is not limited to that wheezing empire, however. Centrisms die across the globe. The collapse of liberal, of Keynesian, of “progressive” social compacts is a feature of our age. Even the social democratic redoubt of Scandinavia now drifts and lurches rightward, ethnic and economic nationalisms calling like twin magnets. In the wealthy nations, the course is common enough. Without economic development, there are no possibilities for the social progress that we once found routine. The appeals to liberalisms left and right, to the norms and conventions of a century’s official politics, grow all the more desperate as the possibilities of such politics vanish. Everywhere morbid symptoms bloom. In the place of conservatism, we witness the rise of a white revanchism bent on rolling back the reforms of eras past until Jim Crow walks a landscape devoid of labor unions, until women are driven back to the kitchen, queer people back to the closet, trans people out of restrooms. On the left, we must admit, congruent nostalgias dominate. The politics of the thirties and sixties, a workers’ movement and a technocratic social democracy, rise up like phantoms. They rise up into a world which lacks the affordances of those moments almost entirely; they feel solid and familiar to the exact extent that they are airy impossibilities.


“In the place of conservatism, we witness the rise of a white revanchism bent on rolling back the reforms of eras past until Jim Crow walks a landscape devoid of labor unions, until women are driven back to the kitchen, queer people back to the closet, trans people out of restrooms.”


What then might we expect from conventional politics? Wider swings, ever more volatile, as the center which has already ceased to hold now ceases to exist. We will not be surprised if the next Democratic candidate is to the left of any in our lifetimes, the next Republican after that a contender who makes Trump seem mild. Neither will prove victorious in the sense of providing a political direction. Volatility itself will hold sway, and will not be seized at the ballot box. There is a reason that nearly one hundred million people did not vote in the last US presidential election. One might take that as a sign of ruin, apathy, political defeat. We take it as the opposite. It is a political truth of the moment. All the data agree: non-voters are poorer, younger, less white than their voting peers. In main they are less likely to own homes and tend to lack other forms of investment in the value of property, of stability, of the status quo. This situation can only intensify; our world produces such alienations as if it cannot wait to end.

In the interim, there is much to be hopeful about. Ours is the most rebellious era since the sixties, arguably more so if that era could be weighed separately from its mythologies. These rebellions have at their center, as ever, youth: not only unbound from the dream of the good life past eras might have offered, but vehement, deservedly angry, and smarter in all the ways it is necessary to be smart. They have proved wrong the hand-wringing thinkpieces trumpeting their indifference, their technology-induced illiteracy, their narcissism. There is indeed much to understand about the sensibilities and sensitivities of our time, but none of it can get anywhere by beginning with open or implicit paternalism. These would-be teachers and generational worriers should instead make themselves students of the world, since they seem incapable of registering what many of those who actually resist already have correctly recognized: capitalism can’t be made more tolerable under present conditions, couldn’t be saved even if we wanted to, and won’t be voted away. Commune starts here, from these practical recognitions. We start as one must by dancing on a grave or two. We start by recognizing the hopelessness of left nostalgias. We start by taking direction from the struggles of today with their blockades and occupations and makeshift barricades, their broken glass and ad hoc organization, from multigenerational struggles that have at their center a youth who confront a world uglier and less hospitable to flourishing than anything in the past seventy years. We start because we believe in a way out.


More: https://communemag.com/introducing-commune/
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Tue Nov 06, 2018 7:47 pm

TIERRA Y LIBERTAD: CALIFORNIA’S PROP 10 AND THE FIGHT TO BUILD TENANT POWER

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Why are Anarchists Supporting an Election Campaign?

As anarchists, we’re obviously not interested in campaigning for political candidates. As a national organization, Black Rose/Rosa Negra has been critical of the renewed focus by many left groups in the US to revive left electoral strategies,“inside-outside” or otherwise, that views electoral victories as a complement or means to movement building. But our position is not based on a moral stance around engagement with the state – rather we see left electoralism as an ineffective strategy that actively undermines movement building. Trying to get politicians elected means participating in running the state and taking part in the management of capitalism – the state’s ultimate purpose. If we are going to create a revolutionary movement, it must be independent of the capitalist class and the institutional forces aligned with the state such as political parties. You can’t run the police department that protects the property of the landlords at the same time as trying to redistribute housing to workers – you have to choose a side. Throughout history, movements have foundered when faced with this contradiction. Believing politicians will save us requires either a deep commitment to reformism or forgetting our past mistakes.

A ballot proposition is different from electing a politician. We are not trying to participate in the state. We are forcing ahange in the law. Despite our complete lack of respect for the law, it shapes our world. Changing the law is one of the many ways that we can exercise our power to change the world we live in. This is something anarchists have been doing for generations – from the campaign for an eight hour day, to the votes on abortion legalization in Ireland and Argentina this year.

One argument against voting in any election is that it legitimizes the state. That may be true to some extent, but many other tactics that we use also legitimize the state, from suing the police for violating our civil rights, to public sector workers organizing to get better working conditions from the state, to putting pressure on the state to use environmental regulations to block pipelines and mines. The state will continue to function whether or not working class and oppressed people grant it legitimacy. It relies on the capitalist class and on its own repressive force much more than on whether we as individuals acknowledge its power and authority.


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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Fri Nov 09, 2018 4:43 am

https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2018/1 ... t-fascism/

Our Grief Is a Starting Point in the Fight against Fascism

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The following essay appeared on Truthout on November 6, 2018, at https://truthout.org/articles/our-grief ... t-fascism/.

* * *

Daily, and sometimes hourly, we are assaulted by the latest losses. It isn’t simply that time and the news cycle have sped up due to so-called communication technologies. It’s that we’re in the crosshairs of history.

That history is being written on bodies — bodies that are piling up; sometimes our bodies, or those of people we love. It is etched onto place-names as our morbid shorthand — Charleston, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh. That history transforms ballot boxes into the equivalent of coffins in countries like Brazil.

History seems to be happening to us, an increasingly out-of-control and inevitable narrative that doesn’t end well, yet may end soon. For among other things, we are in a climate where even the climate itself is targeting humanity for disappearance.

There is little need, of course, to make any sort of accounting of the weight of this world. Already, in even gesturing at the enormity of this moment, we feel the fear and depression creeping in, the sorrow and hopelessness taking hold.

We’ve been taught by past rebels, to paraphrase Joe Hill, not to mourn but instead to organize. Today, though, given the magnitude of the new forms of domination that we face, there’s a palpable sense of despair about the possibility of organizing. All the weapons in our arsenal appear useless, outdated, futile. And even if we wanted to mourn, we come up against another contemporary conundrum: the loss of traditions around grief, of knowing how to grieve well or at all, much less in community with others. We confront our own inability to know how to share and hold our own and each others’ feelings, much less the full range of them.

Yet we must.

Or rather, we don’t have a choice. This crossroads is deeply impacting our hearts, whether we want to admit it or not.

Too many of us desperately try to stuff our emotions into the deepest recesses of our consciousness. Too many have been socialized to believe that feelings, especially those around grief, aren’t acceptable, natural or brave. Increasingly, the highly profitable “care industry” has convinced us that when we experience the worst of losses in our lives, we should “step back” to care for ourselves on an individual level, on our own. Our minds and bodies are turned into pressure cookers, waiting to explode in detrimental ways, further alienating us from each other.

We can, conversely, reclaim our capacity to be fully human in all our messy beauty and specifically, as counter to this messy, ugly time period. We can self-determine to mourn and organize together.

This rebellious mourning begins with more questions than answers, because none of us knows any easy way of this epoch. For instance, as Marko Muir, a longtime anti-eviction organizer and friend in the class-war zone of San Francisco, mused last week, “Is it really hate we are fighting or the system that creates haters with the power to erase us? Is it really hope we are longing for or a collective grieving and a more joyful militancy to fight back against that erasure?”

We can start with the question, Mourn what? To which we might reply, All that’s being stolen from us, and all that we’re told isn’t grievable.

We mourn all the innumerable losses that aren’t necessary to how we’re structured as humans — say, to be born and die in our own good time — but indeed are the logical “collateral damage” of hierarchical forms of social organization — capitalism and states, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, anti-Semitism and settler colonialism, to name just a few. We mourn all that doesn’t garner a marble monument or even a humble tombstone. We mourn all that we shouldn’t have to bear losing and mourning, if we were to inhabit a far more egalitarian, humane world. We mourn all that we love.

And another starting point is, Organize what? To which we might respond, All that we need and desire, toward lives worth living, as direct actions against the structural violences and losses that we are being compelled to suffer.

We must organize everything for everyone, as mutual aid against the disasters that are battering us from all sides. We must organize forms of care and dignity that defy commodification, containment, or social control. That is, all that we can prefigure, empathetically and materially, to remain steadfastly side by side with each other, even or especially if the worst should occur. We must organize all that we love.

Mourning and organizing — not as separate moments, but as an intimate and tender dance. The voluntary conjoining of the two as a renewed promise of social love in how we go about experimenting, in the here and now, with forms of freedom against forms of fascism.

This is not mere hyperbole. It was put into practice last week in the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue murders, for one, when Trump thought he could come to Pittsburgh.

On Tuesday, October 30, 2018, just a few days after the massacre on Saturday, October 27, IfNotNow Pittsburgh, self-described as “part of a larger movement to end of Occupation” in Palestine/Israel, led a coalition of other groups in holding a shiva, a “Jewish ritual of mourning and community healing,” in the streets.

As IfNotNow explained, “Today, President Trump will visit Pittsburgh. We do not need him. We stand with each other and mourn for our dead, and show up to protect each other…. We stand in solidarity with all the communities threatened by white nationalism. That’s why we say ‘Safety in Solidarity.’”

Trump’s motorcade was temporarily thwarted that day from reaching the Tree of Life by hundreds of mourners, in what one newspaper called a simultaneous act of “street protest” and “sitting shiva,” noting that Trump was “turned away by the grief of a city that didn’t want him anywhere near.”

This is but one illustration of the power of collective grief. Or rather, the art of collective grief, when we permit ourselves to make visible and share the wholeness of our emotions, authentically, thus giving meaning to losses such as, in the span of one week, the anti-Black murders in Kentucky and anti-Semitic murders in Pittsburgh, and making them more bearable. When we join hand in heart, noninstrumentally, without any effort to fix or cure what can’t be undone, or pretend the loss didn’t occur, or skip over our grief by leaping into action for the sake of action, but instead be witness to each other’s excruciating feelings as inseparable from how we organize our lives and organizing.

Through that connection, through acts of tangible reciprocal care and active listening to each other’s stories with curiosity, we form interdependent bonds. Those bonds, in turn, become co-teaching moments in how we can and should better safeguard each other, without need of state and capital, police and prisons. We remember we are not alone but instead, deeply have each other.

During a vigil in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the Sunday after the Tree of Life murders, Shira Schwartz, a Ph.D. student in comparative literature and Judaic studies, highlighted the notion of “shemira: to safeguard.” As Schwartz put it, “We have many different forms of shemira in the Jewish tradition…. One example of this is the shemira for dead bodies between the time of death and burial. In this liminal space between death and burial we watch over each other. That is the time-space that we are in now.”

Through such continual practices of collectively mourning our dead and collectively fighting like hell for the living, we’ll increasingly find various possible answers to the many painful questions that we’re being forced to ask these days. Moreover, we’ll increasingly create our own time-spaces, peopled with self-organized and expansive forms of empathy, care, and love. And even if tentatively, such time-spaces will point toward a world in which our unnecessary losses are banished to the dustbin of history.

* * *

Cindy Milstein is author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, coauthor of Paths Toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of the anthologies, Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism and Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief. Long engaged in anarchistic organizing, social movements and autonomous and popular education spaces, Cindy is currently a collective member of the Institute for Advanced Troublemaking, which holds an anarchist summer school. Cindy is honored, when called on, to be a death doula.

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission.

Art by Micah Bazant, made with Jews for Racial & Economic Justice NYC, in a style tribute to Jewish art hero Ben Shahn.
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Thu Nov 15, 2018 11:41 am

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INTERVIEW: BUILDING BLACK WORKING CLASS COUNTER-POWER IN SOUTH AFRICA


LM: Since you have said “no” to a worker’s party, what is the alternative, according to you?

WM: It is to continue to work to build working class power in the country, but what we as anarchists, with the program of anarchism, would specifically build is “counter power.” This is power that is counter the hegemonic power, essentially a power against, and outside and counter to, the power of the ruling class – and its states and corporations.

For us this means very specific things. It’s about building the power of the working class to challenge the ruling class, and its capacity to reconstruct society from below at some point in the future. And the organs of counter power would include revolutionary (syndicalist) trade unions and community groups and other formations. By “working class” we do not include here just blue-collar workers. All people who work for others for wages and lack power are workers, no matter their jobs, and besides workers the working class includes workers’ families, as well as the unemployed and, generally, the poor.

At the same time, the working class organisations of counter power must not only be fighting organisations, but must also be organisations of education as well. We need a radical education including the ability to critically analyse that which is around you, not just society but also yourself, and your organisation as well.

This is about building a revolutionary popular “counter culture” that also deals with ideas, and with issues like what we mean by “revolution” or “democracy,” and the ideals we want for the future society, helping set in practice, now, in the development of our organisations, these ideals. So counter power and counter culture are linked fundamentally.

By “democracy” as an aim, we speak of a radical democracy, a direct democracy, where the people that form part of a particular project, community, factory, are involved in key decisions and are aware of the decisions, and share in the benefits that accrue from putting the decisions into action.

To get to a directly democratic society in all spheres, we need a revolutionary transformation in all spheres. But to get to a revolutionary transformation, we need to develop direct democracy right now in the organisations of counter power. And we also need to develop a revolutionary attitude, a revolutionary understanding and consciousness. At the end of the day, the ability of organs of counter power to develop towards revolutionary transformation is determined by the development of a revolutionary counter culture, of revolutionary consciousness.

LM: Thank you, very comprehensive. You say “revolutionary transformation,” but are we just smashing the state here? How do reforms and immediate struggles fit? And what, specifically, is meant by “revolutionary transformation”?

WM
: Anarchism aims at a revolutionary transformation of society, and by this, we mean a complete overhaul of the way that society is governed and organised, to “revolutionize” the economic, social and political arrangements. Anarchism is not about chaos, or a lack of rules: it asks for a different set of rules, a different order. We do not mean changing the people at the top of society, or the nationalization of industry by the state: this still means a ruling class controlling an unequal system.

We mean a society where the means of production are commonly owned, a society that is self-managed and democratized, with no hierarchies, no oppression, and no ruling class. It means a self-managed, socialist society, egalitarian and democratic, with collective ownership and individual freedom.

This is what we mean by revolution.

But to get there you need to build working class revolutionary counter power to the point where it can take over society, replace the state and capital. This means building a mass base.

So in the process of developing counter power, you need to attract people to your organisations. That means being able to win reforms in the day-to-day, using day-to-day struggles, based on direct action, not elections and lobbying, so as to improve people’s lives: to battle for higher wages, better housing conditions, and access to better conditions from capital and the state.

Being anti-statist does not necessarily mean that you do not use the battle for reforms within the revolutionary struggle. The idea is that the reforms are not the be-all and end-all of the struggle, and that the counter power remains autonomous, outside and against the state, and that fights for reforms are won through direct action by autonomous movements, and linked to the struggle to build revolutionary counter-power and counter-culture.

Reform struggles help to develop revolutionary capabilities, and lead to a sense of encouragement, and the victories and defeats in day-to-day struggles are educational tools not just for the popular organisations as a whole, but for the individuals within the organisations.

Victories help develop a sense of confidence in oneself as a militant in the organisation, as an organizer, and in the organisation itself. Defeats can be educational if we decide to study them as sites of critical analysis. Revolution is the goal, the end, and reforms are necessary, not decisive or ultimate, but steps on the road to revolutionary transformation.

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Warren McGregor of ZACF.


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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Wed Nov 21, 2018 3:26 am

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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Mon Dec 10, 2018 10:10 am

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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Wed Dec 12, 2018 4:06 pm

Cindy Milstein started this thread and she fits well here:




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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 18, 2018 6:09 pm

http://www.pmpress.org/content/article. ... 8190856612

Gabriel Kuhn

Who are the main killers of football?

In the summer of 2014, I was contacted by a fellow from St. Petersburg who was working on a book about sports and politics. He wanted to do an interview about Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics. I replied to his questions by email. Over the following years, I was reassured that the Russian book would be out soon. Eventually, contact came to a halt. With the new edition of Soccer vs. the State ready to be shipped, I decided to publish my answers here.

*

What was the goal you set before starting to work on Soccer vs State? What was the result?

I think you have to go back to the origins of the book in order to answer these questions. In 2005, I wrote a pamphlet called Anarchist Football (Soccer) Manual, which I distributed through Alpine Anarchist Productions, a DIY publishing outfit I had founded a few years earlier. I got the idea for the pamphlet after I had attended various anarchist meetings and gatherings in the US in the early 2000s. Many people there seemed to really enjoy playing football, but it seemed that very few of them knew much about the game and its history. Maybe it was European snobbishness on my part, but growing up in Austria I had always been passionate about football, both as a player and a spectator, and I felt I should write something about soccer’s social and cultural significance that radical soccer fans in the US might find useful.

The pamphlet became quite popular, and when I started working with PM Press in 2007, we decided to do an updated and extended version as a book. So I revised the text and added various documents, interviews, articles, and images in order to explore certain themes more deeply and give the project a stronger international scope. This is what turned into Soccer vs. the State.

I guess the main goal with the book was the same I had with the pamphlet: to provide radicals who love football with relevant information about the history, politics, and culture of the game. At the same time, the ambitions with a book are higher than with a pamphlet. Soccer vs. the State is still an introduction of sorts, but I would like to think that it contains information that is news even to the seasoned radical football fan. The chapter on grassroots football, for example, or the interviews about soccer in Africa or Oceania are far from common knowledge even in radical football circles.

What was the result? Most importantly, I got in touch with many great people who are interested in similar issues and who are active in alternative football clubs or radical supporter groups. Many of these contacts were already established when I was working on the book, and plenty more followed after its release. Writing can often be a rather isolated experience, so this was something I greatly appreciated. The book has also been translated into Japanese, and a Portuguese edition was released during the World Cup in Brazil, which I got a kick out of. There is also a French book based on Soccer vs. the State, and individual chapters have been translated into Polish, Italian, and German. Since I mentioned the international scope I wanted to give the book, it will come as no surprise that I’m very happy about the positive international reception.

In your book we can find stories about football players with left-wing or socially-oriented attitudes. Socrates, Ippig, Lucarelli, and so on. Do you know any players of our days who can be in this series?

I’ve been thinking about this for a few days now (ever since I got your question), and I really can’t think of anyone. I guess Lucarelli and Oleguer were the last outspoken leftists among prominent professional players. My theory about the lack of such players is that the professional football environment has no place for them. Either they are weeded out as rebels and troublemakers early on in their careers, or they quit because they can’t cope with the authoritarian structures, the political hypocrisy, the corporate involvement, and the ever-present bigotry. Hence, you end up with many players who simply follow the rules, and then with some who might satisfy the public’s and the media’s need for “bad boys”, such as Mario Balotelli, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, or Kevin-Prince Boateng, but who, despite being interesting and even inspirational characters, resemble self-centered rock stars more than political agitators.

Sport, especially football, was a weapon to subdue the working masses 100 years ago. Today all the same. TV screens with green football grounds help to fight the monotony of everyday life. Do you agree with this?

There is no denying that football serves as an opiate of the masses. It’s one of the strongest such opiates. In this sense, leftist critics of sport – from Terry Eagleton to Noam Chomsky – are right. But being an opiate is not the only quality that football has. Football is also beautiful and artistic, it encourages social learning, collaboration, and sportsmanship, and it gives people joy and pleasure. Furthermore, football attracts masses, and masses always become a threat to rulers when the latter lose control over them. Under the right circumstances, football can play an important part in people’s uprisings, just as it can be a tool of oppression under the wrong circumstances. Many examples have confirmed this, from the role of football in apartheid South Africa to soccer-celebrations-turned-anti-government-protests in Iran to the involvement of Ultras in the Arab Spring.

What is modern football for you?

I mainly associate the term with the hypercommercialization of the game: kick-off hours that serve the interests of TV stations rather than those of fans; stadiums that look like shopping malls; outrageous salaries and transfer sums; overpriced merchandise, and so on. From that angle, I’m all behind the slogan “Against Modern Football”. What’s problematic with the slogan is that it evokes the image of a romantic football past in which everything was better. That is not the case. Certain things might have been better – for example, a collective working-class experience and a closer relationship between players and fans – but not all. The traditional football audience was also predominantly male, sexist, homophobic, and often racist. This is nothing we need to bemoan.

The problem is not that things are changing in the world of football; the problem is how they are changing and at what cost. Having a more inclusive audience is fine. But it doesn’t justify alienating football’s traditional supporter base that, after all, has turned football into what it is today. For the sport to remain the people’s game it needs to be changed by the people, not by businessmen and their administrative cronies.

Who are the main killers of football?

People who have no or only very little interest in the game beyond making money off of it: media moguls, billionaire owners, corporate sponsors, and the like. But also the players, club officials, and regular fans who jump through the hoops and make no effort to stop these shenanigans.

We saw big protests and riots in Brazil before and during the 2014 World Cup. But we haven’t seen similar protests and general disconnect in Russian society during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, even though they were more corrupt and more expensive. Why?

This is a tough question to be asked by a Russian editor. I will be walking on very thin ice here, since the readers of your book will know much more about the situation in Russia than I do. All I can give is an outsider’s perspective – the readers will have to decide how much sense it makes.

Basically, I believe that we have been witnessing one of the ironies of the nation-state reality: the more liberal a state is the stronger the protests on the streets can be, since they are met by less repression and imply fewer risks. The Sochi Games would have deserved the same protests as the World Cup in Brazil – perhaps even stronger ones – but it seems that the Russian government keeps a close watch on the country’s population and tries to crush any resistance at the moment of its inception. In other words, the protests in Brazil proved perhaps that, despite all of the problems in the country, there is at least more space for political action than in Russia. Or perhaps the answer to your question simply is that no one wanted to protest in Russia – but, as I said, your Russian readers will have a much clearer picture of this than me.

In any case, it is quite likely that concerning big sports events we will see a development similar to that of WTO or G8 summits: the events are moved to places with levels of security high enough to keep any mass protests from emerging. The next two Men's Football World Cups will be held in Russia and Qatar. This fits the picture. And it requires resistance movements to be creative. Then again, in these cases it might not be so difficult to be creative: We are talking about World Cups, so why shouldn’t the protests be worldwide?

Do you remember your first football match? I mean like a visitor in the stadium.

Actually, no. I must have been very young. I grew up in a small village along the Austrian-German border and saw a lot of amateur games as a kid. The stadiums I went to where in Innsbruck, where my grandfather took me to see Wacker at the old Tivoli, and in Munich, where my uncle would take me to Bayern games in the Olympic Stadium. Today, both teams have moved to new arenas lacking any soul or character. It’s a sign of the times.

Have you ever criticized the fact that sport is not anarchic, that all tournaments lead to competition? In other words, sport is weapon of capitalism.

I’ve had plenty of discussions about this. In fact, it was a Russian fellow who really stressed this fact when I talked about football at the Baltic Anarchist Meeting in Tallinn in 2012. He was adamant that football could never be emancipatory because it always implied competition. I suppose I have a more relaxed attitude. Testing one’s abilities is a very natural thing for humans to do, and one way of doing this is to compare your abilities with those of others. You only know whether you’re a fast runner or not if you run alongside other people. That’s already competition.

Likewise, most of the games we play derive their enjoyment from competition. Knowing that you can win or lose is what makes them exciting. Take a game as simple as rock-paper-scissors. It would not be very satisfying to shape your hand in the form of a rock, paper, or scissors if it wasn’t for beating an opponent. But I think such forms of competition are rather harmless. They simply add a bit of entertainment and diversion to our lives.

The far bigger problem than winning and losing is the status attached to it. This is where a capitalist mentality really kicks in. Winners gain wealth, power, and admiration, while losers remain poor, have no access to power, and are ridiculed. Everything is infected by this, and it corrupts the fairly innocent nature of competitive games. Let’s return to playing rock-paper-scissors: Suppose the subway is late and we play a few games with a friend while we’re waiting. We probably have a bit of fun and time will pass faster. But do we even remember who won once we sit on a subway train? Will anyone give us a better job because of it, put our photo in a newspaper, or offer us a million-dollar advertising contract? No. And that’s how it should be with all games. Football included. Once winners receive no particular social rewards and losers no particular social punishment, competition in sports is no major problem. It’s only a simple element of playing games.

What is the most interesting DIY-football project that you have seen?

Such questions are always difficult to answer because by mentioning one project you’re doing injustice to all the ones that are left unmentioned. There must also be plenty of great projects that I have never heard of. But, personally, I have always been very impressed by the Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls of Bristol. They’ve been around for a long time, are involved in various great social projects, and have a very good standing in their community. They’ve been a huge inspiration for the alternative sports club 17 SK that we founded in Stockholm a few years ago. It is a much smaller project but based on similar principles. I’m getting a lot of joy out of it.

Interview conducted August 2014. Posted December 2018.
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Re: Democracy Is Direct

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 27, 2018 7:41 am

Ten Lessons from the Yellow Vests

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Social movements are, by their very nature, plural phenomena. There are numerous agents and forces at work, which far surpass any simple calculations, or reductions to blanket statements such as “this movement is X.” In short, there is never simply “a movement.” Instead, there are competing contingents, a struggle of forces and multiple fronts. While it can be useful, as a form of pragmatic shorthand, to refer for instance to “the yellow vests movement,” we need to begin by recognizing that this expression is a placeholder for an extremely complex series of movements.

In the case of the yellow vests, this is particularly important because they do not share a single political agenda or come from a common political party or union. This has been used to vilify the movement because there are right-wing, including extreme right-wing, elements involved. Purists denigrate anyone who would dare to participate when there is such a mishmash of political positions. However, this is one of the complicated aspects of popular working-class movements like this one. While there is clearly a common enemy—the neoliberal state and its persistent decimation of the lives of working-class people—there is not a shared agenda regarding the precise model for a new political order.

Instead of being used as a facile moral justification for withdrawing in horror before the remarkable stupidity of the masses or the vile presence of fascists who are presented as moral monsters rather than subjects of the system in place, this should instead be seen as a real challenge and opportunity to mobilize the radical educational tools of the extreme Left to help teach people about the real material sources of their oppression. The anti-populism of the intellectual and political purists will lead nowhere but to the moral grandstanding of those intent on ostentatiously parading their theoretical and ethical superiority to the ignorant masses, while actually demonstrating, above all, their own profound ignorance regarding how collective education works under capitalism’s ideological state apparatuses. Given the nature of the propagandist system within which we live, it should come as absolutely no surprise that there are so many people who correctly identify the source of their problems in the elite ruling class but have been duped into embracing faulty solutions.


https://itsgoingdown.org/ten-lessons-fr ... low-vests/
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