tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-74620534100186329542024-03-14T04:45:47.441-07:00VOID MIRRORRadical Theory,Utopia,Cultural Activism,Social Struggles,Critical Thinking,Revolutionary Ideas and Ephemeral Arts networked by the VOID NETWORK (est.1990/Athens, London, New York, Rio De Janeiro)Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.comBlogger276125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-2875833417209388122016-06-24T06:59:00.001-07:002016-06-24T06:59:12.550-07:00#BREXIT: What the UK Anarchists think about it?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h2 style="background-color: white; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 24.96px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<span style="color: magenta; font-size: large;"># BREXIT 10 point guide for post Brexit resistance as racist right wins EU referendum // text by Workers Solidarity Movement UK</span></h2>
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1. The Brexit vote for the UK to leave the European Union demonstrates that even weak parliamentary democracy is incompatible with escalating neoliberal inequality. In the UK as elsewhere a tiny segment of the population have taken a larger and larger share of total wealth in the last decades. Particularly under austerity almost everyone else has seen their share of the wealth they produce decline massively.<br />
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2. The Remain campaign was headed up by the political class of the neoliberal establishment and backed by model neo liberal corporations like Ryanair. But because the anger against rising inequality was successfully diverted through scapegoating already marginalized people, in particular migrants, the Leave campaign was also lead by wealthy elitist bigots whose variant of neoliberalism looks to the former colonies and the US rather than Europe.<br />
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3. The markets are now punishing the electorate with capital flight. But the racist colonialist nature of the Leave campaign means that rather than capitalism being blamed migrants will again be scapegoated. The impact of continued inequality - on white citizen workers - will be blamed on attacks on migrants not being as cruel and ruthless as ‘required’.<br />
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4. The alternative to fight for isn't yet another referendum but the abolition of a global order built on inequality & market dictatorship.<br />
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5. In the immediate future, the defense of migrants, including those yet to come, is fundamental to opposing the swing to the right post-Brexit.<br />
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6. If the left swings towards a simple economist stance post-Brexit then the racist colonialist nature of that vote will be solidified We must argue on the more apparently difficult grounds of global class solidarity and not on the treacherous path of the narrow self interest of white citizen workers which can only serve a reactionary English nationalism steeped in racism and colonialism.<br />
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7. The fallout from the Leave vote will not just be limited within the borders of the UK will see a but huge boost for racist colonialist movements across EU. The leaders of those movements, like Marine Le Pen have already greeted the Leave vote with joy.<br />
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8. It’s vital to understand this cannot be combatted with liberal platitudes because it is a consequence of the rising inequality economic liberalism has created. We are facing either a transformation to radical direct democracy that will create economic equality or a turn to the authoritarian politics of control needed to enforce sharp divisions in wealth.<br />
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9. Things look grim but then they were already grim as we face into climate change and automation under capitalism. The rise of the far right and colonialist racism is not a natural phenomenon but a consequence of a system in a crisis that is a fundamental product of its own functioning.<br />
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10. We need to take our world back from the patriarchal white supremacist capitalist elite that dominates the planet and dominated both sides of the EU referendum. The transformation we need if we are not to face escalating poverty, war and climate destruction is a total one that eliminates the state and capitalism to create libertarian communism.<br />
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A note on southern Ireland<br />
The text above is written primarily with the UK in mind, including the north of Ireland which continues to be ruled from London and the large population of Irish migrants living in Britain. However there are also enormous implications for people in southern Ireland, in particular those who do not have Irish or UK passports. In the light of the almost complete ban on abortion access people without Irish/UK passports with unwanted or unviable pregnancies may soon find it very much more difficult - if not impossible - to travel to Britain to access abortion services.<br />
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It’s an open secret that the border with the north being often unpoliced meant that it was a route that those without papers could sometimes risk to travel to and from Ireland and the UK, maintaining some physical contact with friends and family. Finally although the virulent anti-Irish racism that was common in Britain up to the 90s had receded as anti-migrant rhetoric increases it may strengthen once more. Indeed some Irish people living in Britain already felt they are in a more hostile environment from the experience of the Leave campaign.<br />
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source: <a href="http://www.wsm.ie/c/10-point-guide-post-brexit-resistance">http://www.wsm.ie/c/10-point-guide-post-brexit-resistance</a>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-37504019373309981502016-01-06T09:32:00.000-08:002016-01-06T09:40:30.733-08:00GENOCIDE, THE BRITISH DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT British Colonials Starved to Death 60 million-plus Indians, But, Why? by Ramtanu Maitra<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The chronic want of food and water, the lack of sanitation and medical help, the neglect of means of communication, the poverty of educational provision, the all-pervading spirit of depression that I have myself seen to prevail in our villages after over a hundred years of British rule make me despair of its beneficence. — Rabindranath Tagore<br />
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If the history of British rule in India were to be condensed to a single fact, it is this: there was no increase in India’s per-capita income from 1757 to 1947.[1]<br />
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Churchill, explaining why he defended the stockpiling of food within Britain, while millions died of starvation in Bengal, told his private secretary that “the Hindus were a foul race, protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due.”[2]<br />
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During its 190 years of looting and pillaging, the Indian Subcontininent as a whole underwent at least two dozen major famines, which collectively killed millions of Indians throughout the length and breadth of the land. How many millions succumbed to the famines cannot be fully ascertained. However, colonial rulers’ official numbers indicate it could be 60 million deaths. In reality, it could be significantly higher.<br />
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British colonial analysts cited droughts as the cause of fallen agricultural production that led to these famines, but that is a lie. British rulers, fighting wars in Europe and elsewhere, and colonizing parts of Africa, were exporting grains from India to keep up their colonial conquests—while famines were raging. People in the famineaffected areas, resembling skeletons covered by skin only, were wandering around, huddling in corners and dying by the millions. The Satanic nature of these British rulers cannot be overstated.<br />
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<b><span style="color: magenta;">A Systematic Depopulation Policy</span></b><br />
Although no accurate census figure is available, in the year 1750 India’s population was close to 155 million. At the time British colonial rule ended in 1947, undivided India’s population reached close to 390 million. In other words, during these 190 years of colonial looting and organized famines, India’s population rose by 240 million. Since 1947, during the next 68-year period, Indian Subcontininent’s population, including those of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, has grown to close to 1.6 billion. Thus, despite poverty and economic depravity in the post-independent Indian Subcontininent, during those 68 years population has grown by almost 1.2 billion.<br />
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Records show that during the post-independence period, the Subcontininent has undergone drought conditions in parts of the land from time to time, but there was no famine, although thousands still die in the Subcontininent annually due to the lack of adequate amount of food, a poor food distribution system, and lack of sufficient nourishment. It is also to be noted that before the British colonials’ jackboots got firmly planted in India, famines had occurred but with much less frequency—maybe once in a century.<br />
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There was indeed no reason for these famines to occur They occurred only because The Empire engineered them, intending to strengthen the Empire by ruthless looting and adoption of an unstated policy to depopulate India. This, they believed would bring down the Empire’s cost of sustaining India.<br />
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Take, for instance, the case of Bengal, which is in the eastern part of the Subcontininent where the British East India Company (HEIC, Honorable East India Company, according to Elizabeth I’s charter) had first planted its jackboots in 1757. The rapacious looters, under the leadership of Robert Clive—a degenerate and opium addict, who blew his brains out in 1774 in the London Berkley Square residence he had procured with the benefits of his looting—got control of what is now West Bengal, Bangladesh, Bihar, and Odisha (earlier, Orissa), in 1765. At the time, historical records indicate India represented close to 25% of the world’s GDP, second only to China, while Britain had a paltry 2%. Bengal was the richest of the Indian provinces.<br />
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Following his securing control of Bengal by ousting the Nawab in a devious battle at Plassey (Palashi), Clive placed a puppet on the throne, paid him off, and negotiated an agreement with him for the HEIC to become the sole tax collector, while leaving the nominal responsibility for government to his puppet. That arrangement lasted for a century, as more and more Indian states were bankrupted to facilitate future famines. The tax money went into British coffers, while millions were starved to death in Bengal and Bihar.<br />
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Clive, who was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1768 and whose statue stands near the British Empire’s evil center, Whitehall, near the Cabinet War Room, had this to say in his defense when the British Parliament, playing “fair,” accused him of looting and other abuses in India:<br />
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Consider the situation which the Victory of Plassey had placed on me. A great Prince was dependent upon my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! By God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation.<br />
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However, Clive was not the only murderous British colonial ruler. The British Empire had sent one butcher after another to India, all of whom engineered looting and its consequent depopulation.<br />
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By 1770, when the first great famine occurred in Bengal, the province had been looted to the core. What followed was sheer horror. Here is how John Fiske in his American Philosopher in the Unseen World depicted the Bengal famine:<br />
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All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying. The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field. . . . The streets were blocked up with promiscuous heaps of the dying and dead. Interment could not do its work quick enough; even the dogs and jackals, the public scavengers of the East, became unable to accomplish their revolting work, and the multitude of mangled and festering corpses at length threatened the existence of the citizens…. [3]<br />
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Was there any reason for the famine to occur? Not if the British had not wanted it. Bengal, then, as now, harvested three crops a year. It is located in the delta of the Gangetic plain where water is more than plentiful. Even if drought occurs, it does not destroy all three crops. Moreover, as was prevalent during the Moghul days, and in earlier time, the surplus grain was stored to tide the population over if there were one or two bad crops.<br />
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But the looting of grains carried out by Clive, and his gang of bandits and killers, drained grain from Bengal and resulted in 10 million deaths in the great famine, eliminating one-third of Bengal’s population.<br />
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It should be noted that Britain’s much-touted industrial revolution began in 1770, the very same year people were dying all over Bengal. The Boston Tea Party that triggered the American Revolution had taken place in 1773. The Boston Tea Party made the Empire realize that its days in America were numbered, and led Britain to concentrate even more on organizing the looting of India.<br />
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<b><span style="color: magenta;">Why Famines Became So Prevalent During the British Raj Days</span></b><br />
The prime reason why these devastating famines took place at a regular intervals, and were allowed to continue for years, was the British Empire’s policy of depopulating its colonies. If these famines had not occurred, India’s population would have reached a billion people long before the Twentieth Century arrived. That, the British Empire saw as a disaster.<br />
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To begin with, a larger Indian population would mean larger consumption by the locals, and deprive the British Raj to a greater amount of loot. The logical way to deal with the problem was to develop India’s agricultural infrastructure. But that would not only force Britain to spend more money to run its colonial and bestial empire; it would also develop a healthy population which could rise up to get rid of the abomination called the British Raj. These massive famines also succeeded in weakening the social structure and backbone of the Indians, making rebellions against the colonial forces less likely. In order to perpetuate famines, and thus depopulate the “heathen” and “dark” Indians, the British imperialists launched a systematic propaganda campaign. They propped up the fraudster Parson Thomas Malthus and promoted his non-scientific gobbledygook, “The Essay on Population.” There he claimed:<br />
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This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society. All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature.<br />
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Although Malthus was ordained in the Anglican Church, British Empire made him a paid “economist” of the British East India Company, which, with the charter from Queen Elizabeth I under its belt, monopolized trade in Asia, colonizing vast tracts of the continent using its well-armed militia fighting under the English flag of St. George.<br />
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Malthus was picked up at the Haileybury and Imperial Service College, which was also the recruiting ground of some of the worst colonial criminals. This college was where the makers of British Empire’s murderous policies in India were trained. Some prominent alumni of Haileybury include Sir John Lawrence (Viceroy of India from 1864-68) and Sir Richard Temple (Lt. Governor of Bengal and later, Governor of Bombay presidency).<br />
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While Parson Malthus was putting forward his sinister “scientific theory” to justify depopulation as a natural and necessary process, The British Empire collected a whole bunch of other “economists” who wrote about the necessity of free trade. Free trade played a major role in pushing through the Empire’s genocidal depopulation of India, through the British Raj’s efforts. In fact, free trade is the other side of the Malthus’ population-control coin.<br />
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By the time the great famine of 1876 arrived, Britain had already built some railroads in India. The railroads, which were touted as institutional safeguards against famines, were instead used by merchants to ship grain inventories from outlying drought-stricken districts to central depots for hoarding. In addition, free traders’ opposition to price control ushered in a frenzy of grain speculation. As a result, capital was raised to import grains from drought-stricken areas, and further the calamity. The rise of price of grain was spectacularly rapid, and grain was taken from where it was most needed, to be stored in warehouses until the prices rose even higher.<br />
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The British Raj knew or should have known. Even if the British rulers did not openly encourage this process, they were fully aware of it, and they were perfectly comfortable in promoting free trade at the expense of millions of lives. This is how Mike Davis described what happened:<br />
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The rise [of prices] was so extraordinary, and the available supply, as compared with well-known requirements, so scanty that merchants and dealers, hopeful of enormous future gains, appeared determined to hold their stocks for some indefinite time and not to part with the article which was becoming of such unwonted value. It was apparent to the Government that facilities for moving grain by the rail were rapidly raising prices everywhere, and that the activity of apparent importation and railway transit, did not indicate any addition to the food stocks of the Presidency . …retail trade up-country was almost at a standstill. Either prices were asked which were beyond the means of the multitude to pay, or shops remained entirely closed.<br />
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At the time, Lord Lytton, a favorite poet of Queen Victoria who is known as a “butcher” to many Indians, was the Viceroy. He wholeheartedly opposed all efforts to stockpile grain to feed the famine-stricken population because that would interfere with market forces. In the autumn of 1876, while the monsoon crop was withering in the fields of southern India, Lytton was absorbed in organizing the immense Imperial Assemblage in Delhi to proclaim Victoria Empress of India.<br />
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How did Lytton justify this? He was an avowed admirer and follower of Adam Smith. Author Mike Davis writes that Smith<br />
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a century earlier in The Wealth of Nations had asserted (vis-à-vis the terrible Bengal droughtfamine of 1770) that famine has never arisen from any other cause but the violence of government attempting, by improper means, to remedy the inconvenience of dearth, Lytton was implementing what Smith had taught him and other believers of free trade. Smith’s injunction against state attempts to regulate the price of grain during the 1770 famine had been taught for years in the East India Company’s famous college at Haileybury.[4]<br />
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Lytton issued strict orders that “there is to be no interference of any kind on the part of Government with the object of reducing the price of food,” and “in his letters home to the India Office and to politicians of both parties, he denounced ‘humanitarian hysterics’.” By official diktat, India, like Ireland before it, had become a Utilitarian laboratory where millions of lives were gambled, pursuant to dogmatic faith in omnipotent markets overcoming the “inconvenience of dearth.”[5]<br />
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<b><span style="color: magenta;">The Great Famines</span></b><br />
Depicting the two dozen famines that killed more than 60 million Indians would require a lot of space, so I limit myself here to those that killed more than one million:<br />
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<b>The Bengal Famine of 1770:</b> This catastrophicfamine occurred between 1769 and 1773, and affected the lower Gangetic plain of India. The territory, then ruled by the British East India Company, included modern West Bengal, Bangladesh, and parts of Assam, Orissa, Bihar, and Jharkhand. The famine is supposed to have caused the deaths of an estimated 10 million people, approximately one-third of the population at the time.<br />
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<b>The Chalisa Famine of 1783-84: </b>The Chalisa famine affected many parts of North India, especially the Delhi territories, present-day Uttar Pradesh, Eastern Punjab, Rajputana (now named, Rajasthan), and Kashmir, then all ruled by different Indian rulers. The Chalisa was preceded by a famine in the previous year, 1782-83, in South India, including Madras City (now named Chennai) and surrounding areas (under British East India Company rule), and in the extended Kingdom of Mysore. Together, these two famines had taken at least 11 million lives, reports indicate.<br />
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<b>The Doji Bara Famine (or Skull Famine) of 1791- 92:</b> This famine caused widespread mortality in Hyderabad, Southern Maratha Kingdom, Deccan, Gujarat, and Marwar (also called Jodhpur region in Rajasthan). The British policy of diverting food to Europe, of pricing the remaining grain out of reach of native Indians, and adopting agriculture policy that destroyed food production, was responsible for this one. The British had surplus supplies of grain, which was not distributed to the very people that had grown it. As a result, about 11 million died between 1789-92 of starvation and accompanying epidemics that followed.<br />
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<b>The Upper Doab Famine of 1860-61:</b> The 1860-61 famine occurred in the British-controlled Ganga-Yamuna Doab (two waters, or two rivers) area engulfing large parts of Rohilkhand and Ayodhya, and the Delhi and Hissar divisions of the then-Punjab. Eastern part of the princely state of Rajputana. According to “official” British reports, about two million people were killed by this famine.<br />
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<b>The Orissa Famine of 1866: </b>Although it affected Orissa the most, this famine affected India’s east coast along the Bay of Bengal stretching down south to Madras, covering a vast area. One million died, according to the British “official” version.<br />
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<b>The Rajputana famine of 1869: </b>The Rajputana famine of 1869 affected an area of close to 300,000 square miles which belonged mostly to the princely states and the British territory of Ajmer. This famine, according to “official” British claim, killed 1.5 million.<br />
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<b>The Great Famine of 1876-78: </b>This famine killed untold numbers of Indians in the southern part and raged for about four years. It affected Madras, Mysore, Hyderabad and Bombay (now called, Mumbai). The famine also subsequently visited Central Province (now called, Madhya Pradesh) and parts of undivided Punjab. The death toll from this famine was in the range of 5.5 million people. Some other figures indicate the number of deaths could be as high as 11 million.<br />
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<b>Indian famine of 1896-97 and 1899-1900:</b> This one affected Madras, Bombay, Deccan, Bengal, United Provinces (now called, Uttar Pradesh), Central Provinces, Northern and eastern Rajputana, parts of Central India, and Hyderabad: six million reportedly died in British territory during these two famines. The number of deaths occurred in the princely states is not known.<br />
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<b>The Bengal Famine of 1943-44:</b> This Churchill-orchestrated famine in Bengal in 1943-1944 killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people.<br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b>Relief Camps, or Concentration camps</b></span><br />
There were several policy-arrows which Adolf Hitler might have borrowed from the British quiver to kill millions, but one that he borrowed for certain in setting up his death camps, was how the British ran the camps to provide “relief” to the starving millions. Anyone who entered these relief camps, did not exit alive.<br />
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Take the actions of Viceroy Lytton’s deputy, Richard Temple, another Haileybury product imbued with the doctrine of depopulation as the necessary means to keep the Empire strong and vigorous. Temple was under orders from Lytton to make sure there was no “unnecessary” expenditure on relief works.<br />
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According to some analysts, Temple’s camps were not very different from Nazi concentration camps. People already half-dead from starvation had to walk hundreds of miles to reach these relief camps. Additionally, he instituted a food ration for starving people working in the camps, which was less than that was given to the inmates of Nazi concentration camps.<br />
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The British refused to provide adequate relief for famine victims on the grounds that this would encourage indolence. Sir Richard Temple, who was selected to organize famine relief efforts in 1877, set the food allotment for starving Indians at 16 ounces of rice per day—less than the diet for inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp for the Jews in Hitler’s Germany. British disinclination to respond with urgency and vigor to food deficits resulted in a succession of about two dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India. These swept away tens of millions of people. The frequency of famine showed a disconcerting increase in the nineteenth century.[6]<br />
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It was deliberate then, and it’s deliberate now.<br />
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______________<br />
1. Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World, London, Verso Books, 2001.<br />
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2. Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, New York: Basic Books.<br />
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3. Davis, op. cit.<br />
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4. Ibid.<br />
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5. Ibid<br />
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6. Bhatia, B.M., Famines in India, A Study in Some Aspects of the Economic History of India, 1860-1945, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963.<br />
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<b><span style="color: magenta;">Dr Ramtanu Maitra</span></b><br />
A specialist on South Asian Affairs who operates out of Washington D.C. Ramtanu Maitra specialises on strategic and infrastructural developmental studies with the focus on South Asia.<br />
He holds a Masters Degree in Structural Engineering and was working as a Senior Project Engineer with the Nuclear Power Services, Secaucus, NJ.<br />
Ramtanu Maitra participated in developing a document, India: An agro-industrial superpower by 2020, in 1981.<br />
He established and published a quarterly journal, Fusion Asia, on science, technology, energy and economics from New Delhi for more than 10 years (1984-1994).<br />
He wrote and published the first feature report on India’s high-energy physics program based in PRL, Ahmedabad. Prepared and published a detailed report on Ganges River Valley Development that was presented at an international conference inaugurated by the late president of India, Shri K.R. Narayanan, then Minister for Planning.<br />
He participated on behalf of Fusion Asia on a feasibility study that also involved the Mitsubishi Research Institute (Tokyo) and the Thai Citizen Forum. Presented papers at a number of international conferences on strategic infrastructures in Bogota, Colombia, Tokyo, Japan, Kolkata, Indore, Madurai, Indore, New Delhi, among other Indian cities.<br />
In 1994, Shri Maitra established New Delhi bureau for Asia Times, a Bangkok-based news daily published simultaneously from Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur and New York.<br />
Presently, he conducts research, analysis, writing on international economic and strategic developments for publications internationally, including: Foresight (Japan); Aakrosh, Agni, Indian Defense and Technology (India); Asia Times Online (Hong Kong); and Executive Intelligence Review (USA).<br />
http://www.sasfor.com/about.html Ramtanu Maitra is a regular columnist with the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), a news weekly published from Washington DC. He writes columns for Asia Times of Hong Kong, Frontier Post of Peshawar and some other newspapers in Asia on South Asian political economy and Asian security. He has written on terrorism in a number of publications in the United States and India. Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-55333635458941914212015-11-26T02:15:00.000-08:002015-11-26T02:16:22.902-08:00"Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us", Paul Verhaeghe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, “make” something of ourselves. You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">source: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/neoliberalism-economic-system-ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic">http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/29/neoliberalism-economic-system-ethics-personality-psychopathicsthic</a></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-5881841344288542282015-09-07T02:09:00.002-07:002015-09-07T02:11:33.915-07:00Building autonomy in Turkey and Kurdistan: an interview with D.A.F.- Revolutionary Anarchist Action<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In May this year, Corporate Watch researchers travelled to Turkey and Kurdistan to investigate the companies supplying military equipment to the Turkish police and army. We talked to a range of groups from a variety of different movements and campaigns<br />
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Below is the transcript of our interview with three members of the anarchist group Devrimci Anarşist Faaliyet (DAF, or Revolutionary Anarchist Action) in Istanbul during May 2015. DAF are involved in solidarity with the Kurdish struggle, the Rojava revolution and against ISIS' attack on Kobane, and have taken action against Turkish state repression and corporate abuse. They are attempting to establish alternatives to the current system through self-organisation, mutual aid and co-operatives.<br />
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The interview was carried out in the run-up to the Turkish elections, and touches on the election campaign by the HDP, the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party. Soon after the interview took place, the HDP passed the threshold of 10% of the total vote needed to enter the Turkish parliament.<br />
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The DAF members – who all preferred to remain anonymous – began the interview by talking about the history of anarchism in the region:<br />
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DAF: We want to underline the relationship between the freedom struggle at the end of Ottoman times and the freedom struggles of Kurdistan.<br />
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In Ottoman times anarchists organised workers' struggle in the main cities: Saloniki, Izmir, Istanbul and Cairo. For example [the Italian anarchist, Errico] Malatesta was involved in organizing industrial workers in Cairo. The freedom struggles of Armenia, Bulgaria and Greece had connections with anarchist groups. Alexander Atabekian, an important person in the Armenian freedom struggle, was an anarchist, translating leaflets into Armenian and distributing them. He was a friend of [the Russian anarchist, Peter] Kropotkin and distributed Kropotkin’s anarchist leaflets.<br />
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We are talking about this as we want to underline the importance of freedom struggles and to compare this to the importance of support for the Kurdish struggle.<br />
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Corporate Watch: What happened to anarchists after the Ottoman period?<br />
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DAF: Towards the end of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of the 19th century, Sultan Abdul Hamid II repressed the actions of anarchists in Turkey. He knew what anarchists were and took a special interest in them. He killed or deported anarchists and set up a special intelligence agency for this purpose.<br />
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Anarchists responded by carrying out attacks on the Yildiz Sarayi palace and with explosions at the Ottoman bank in Saloniki.<br />
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The government of the Ottoman Empire didn’t end at the Turkish republic. The fez has gone since but the system is still the same.<br />
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At the beginning of the [Kemalist] Turkish state [in 1923] many anarchists and other radicals were forced to emigrate or were killed. The CHP, Mustafa Kemal's party, didn’t allow any opposition and there were massacres of Kurds.<br />
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From 1923 to 1980 there was not a big anarchist movement in Turkey due to the popularity of the socialist movements and the repression of the state.<br />
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The wave of revolutions from the 1960s to the '80s affected these lands too. These were the active years of the social movements. During this period, there were revolutionary anti-imperialist movements caused by the Vietnam war, youth organizations, occupations of universities and increasing struggle of workers. These movements were Marxist-Leninist or Maoist, there were no anarchist movements.<br />
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In 1970 there was a long workers' struggle. Millions of workers walked over a hundred kilometres from Kocaeli to Istanbul. Factories were closed and all the workers were on the streets.<br />
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CW: Was there any awareness of anarchism in Turkey at all at this time?<br />
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DAF: During these years many books were translated into Turkish from European radicalism but only five books about anarchism were translated, three of which were talking about anarchism in order to criticize it.<br />
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But in Ottoman times there had been many articles on anarchism in the newspapers. For example, one of the three editors of the İştirak newspaper was an anarchist. The paper published [Russian anarchist, Mikhail] Bakunin’s essays as well as articles on anarcho-syndicalism.<br />
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The first anarchist magazine was published in 1989. After this many magazines were published focusing on anarchism from different perspectives; for example, post structuralism, ecology, etc.<br />
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The common theme was that they were written for a small intellectual audience. The language of these magazines was too far away from the people. Most of those involved were connected with the universities or academia. Or they were ex-socialists affected by the fall of the Soviet Union, which was a big disappointment for many socialists. That’s why they began to call themselves anarchists, but we don’t think that this is a good way to approach anarchism, as a critique of socialism.<br />
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Between 2000 to 2005 people came together to talk about anarchism in Istanbul and began to ask: “how can we fight?”. At this time we guess that there were 50-100 anarchists living in Turkey and outside.<br />
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CW: Can you explain how DAF organises now?<br />
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DAF: Now we get 500 anarchists turning up for Mayday in Istanbul. We are in touch with anarchists in Antalya, Eskişehir, Amed, Ankara and İzmir. Meydan [DAF's newspaper] goes to between 15 and 20 cities. We have a newspaper bureau in Amed, distributing newspapers all over Kurdistan. Until now, it is in Turkish but maybe one day, if we can afford it, we will publish it in Kurdish. We send Meydan to prisons too. We have a comrade in İzmir in prison and we send copies to over 15 prisoners.<br />
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A few months ago there was a ban on radical publications in prisons. We participated in demos outside prisons and we managed to make pressure about this and now newspapers are allowed to go into prisons again.<br />
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The main issue for DAF is to organise anarchism within society. We try to socialize anarchism with struggle on the streets. This is what we give importance to. For nearly nine years we have been doing this.<br />
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On an ideological level we have a holistic perspective. We don’t have a hierarchical perspective on struggles. We think workers' struggle is important but not more important than the Kurdish struggle or women’s struggles or ecological struggles.<br />
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Capitalism tries to divide these struggles. If the enemy is attacking us in a holistic way we have to approach it in a holistic way.<br />
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Anarchy has a bad meaning for most people in society. It has a link with terrorism and bombs. We want to legitimize anarchism by linking it to making arguments for struggles against companies and for ecology. Sometimes we try to focus on the links between the state, companies and ecological damages, like the thing that Corporate Watch does.<br />
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We like to present anarchy as an organised struggle. We have shown people on the streets the organised approach to anarchism.<br />
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From 1989 to 2000 anarchism was about image. About wearing black, piercings and Mohicans. This is what people saw. After 2000, people started to see anarchists who were part of women’s struggles and workers' struggles.<br />
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We are not taking anarchism from Europe as an imitation. Other anarchists have approached anarchism as an imitation of US or European anarchism or as an underground culture. If we want to make anarchist a social movement, it must change.<br />
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DAF’s collectives are Anarchist Youth, Anarchist Women, 26A cafe, Patika ecological collective and high school anarchist action (LAF). These self-organisations work together but have their own decision-making processes.<br />
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Anarchist Youth makes connections between young workers and university students and their struggles. Anarchist Women focuses on patriarchy and violence to women. For example, a woman was murdered by a man and set on fire last February. On 25 November there were big protests against violence against women.<br />
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LAF criticises education and schooling in itself and tries to socialize this way of thinking in high schools. LAF also looks at ecological and feminist issues, including when young women are murdered by their husbands.<br />
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PATIKA ecological collective protests against hydro electric dams in the Black Sea region or Hasankey [where the Ilisu dam is being built]. Sometimes there is fighting to prevent these plants from being built.<br />
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26A Café is a self organization focusing on anti-capitalist economy. Cafes were opened in 2009 in Taksim and 2011 in Kadıköy [both in Istanbul]. The cafes are run by volunteers. They are aimed at creating an economic model in the place where oppressed people are living. It’s important to show people concrete examples of an anarchist economy, without bosses or capitalist aims. We talk to people about why we don’t sell the big capitalist brands like Coca Cola. Of course the products we sell have a relation to capitalism but things like Coke are symbols of capitalism. We want to progress away from not-consuming and move towards alternative economies and ways of producing.<br />
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Another self organisation, PAY-DA - 'Sharing and solidarity' - has a building in Kadıköy, which is used for meetings and producing the Meydan newspaper. PAY-DA gives meals to people three times a day. It’s open to anarchists and comrades. The aim of PAY-DA is to become a cooperative, open to everybody. We try to create a bond which also involves the producers in the villages. We aim to have links with these producers and show them another economic model. We try to evolve these economic relations away from money relations. The producers are suffering from the capitalist economy. We are in the first steps of this cooperative and we are looking for producers to work with.<br />
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All of these projects are related to DAF's ideology. This model has a connection with Malatesta’s binary model of organization.<br />
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These are anarchist organizations but sometimes people who aren't anarchists join these struggles because they know ecological or women's struggles, and then at the end they will learn about anarchism. It’s an evolving process.<br />
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As DAF we are trying to organise our lives. This is the only way that we can touch the people who are oppressed by capitalism.<br />
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There is also the Conscientious Objectors' Association, which is organised with other groups, not just anarchists. Our involvement in this has a relation with our perspective on Kurdistan. We organize anti-militarist action in Turkey outside of military bases on 15 May, conscientious objector's day. In Turkey the military is related to state culture. If you don’t do your military duty, you won’t find a job and it's difficult to find someone to marry because they ask if you’ve been to the army. If you have been to the army, you’re a 'man'. People see the state as the 'Fatherland'. On your CV they ask whether you did military service. 'Every Turk is born a soldier' is a popular slogan in Turkey.<br />
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CW: Is Kemalism [the ideology associated with Mustafa Kemal] as strong a force as it used to be?<br />
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DAF: Kemalism is still a force in schools but the AKP has changed this somewhat. The AKP has a new approach to nationalism focused on the Ottoman Empire. It emphasises Turkey's 'Ottoman roots'. But Erdoğan still says that we are 'one nation, one state, one flag and one religion.'. There is still talk about Mustafa Kemal but not as much as before. Now you cannot criticize Erdoğan or Atatürk [the name used for Kemal by Turkish nationalists]. It’s the law not to criticize Atatürk and the unwritten rule not to criticize Erdoğan. The media follows these rules.<br />
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CW: Can you talk about your perspective on the Kurdish freedom struggle?<br />
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Kurdish freedom struggles didn’t start with Rojava. Kurdish people have had struggles for hundreds of years against the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish state.<br />
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Since the start of DAF we have seen Kurdistan as important for propaganda and education.<br />
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Our perspective relates to people’s freedom struggles. The idea that people can create federations without nations, states and empires. The Turkish state says the issue is a Kurdish problem, but for us it is not a Kurdish problem, it’s an issue of Turkish policies of assimilation. It’s obvious that since the first years of the Turkish republic the assimilation of Kurdish people has not stopped. We can see this from the last Roboski massacre [of 34 Kurdish cross-border traders by Turkish F16s on 28 December 2011] by the state during the 'peace process'. We can see this in the denial of Kurdish identity or the repeated massacres. Making people assimilate to be a Turk and making the propaganda of nationalism.<br />
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The AKP [the ruling Justice and Development Party] say they have opened Kurdish TV channels, allowed Kurdish language and that we are all brothers and sisters, but on the other hand we had the Roboski massacre which occurred during their government. In 2006 there was government pressure on Erdoğan at a high level. Erdoğan said that women and children would be punished who go against Turkish policies. Over 30 children were murdered by police and army.<br />
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The words change but the political agenda continues, just under a new government. We do not call ourselves Turkish. We come from many ethnic origins and Kurdish is one of them. Our involvement in conscientious objection is part of this perspective. We want to talk to people to prevent people from going to the army to kill their brothers and sisters.<br />
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After the 2000s there has been an ideological change in the Kurdish freedom struggle. The Kurdish organizations no longer call themselves Marxist-Leninist and Öcalan has written a lot about democratic confederalism. This is important, but our relation to Kurdish people is on the streets.<br />
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CW: Can you talk about DAF's work in solidarity with people in Rojava?<br />
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In July 2012 at the start of the Rojava revolution, people began saying that it was a stateless movement. We have been in solidarity from the first day of the revolution. Three cantons have declared their revolution in a stateless way. We try to observe and get more information. This is not an anarchist revolution but it is a social revolution declared by the people themselves.<br />
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Rojava is a third front for Syria against Assad, ISIS and other Islamic groups. But these are not the only groups that the revolution is faced with. The Turkish republic is giving support for ISIS from its borders. The national intelligence agency of the Turkish republic appears to be giving weapons to ISIS and other Islamic groups. Kurdish people declared the revolution under these circumstances.<br />
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After the ISIS attack on Kobane began [in 2014] we went to Suruç. We waited at the border as Turkish forces were attacking people crossing. When people wanted to cross the border to or from Kobane they were shot. We stayed there to provide protection.<br />
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In October, people gathered near Suruç, and broke through the border. Turkish tanks shot gas over the border at them.<br />
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From 6 to 8 October there were Kobane solidarity demonstrations across Turkey. Kader Ortakya, a Turkish socialist supporter of Kobane, was shot dead trying to cross the border.<br />
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We helped people. Some people crossed the border from Kobane and had no shelter. We prepared tents, food and clothes for them. Sometimes soldiers came to the villages with tear gas and water cannons and we had to move. Some people came through the border searching for their families and we helped them. Other people came, wanting to cross the border and fight and we helped them. We wore clothing that said we were from DAF on it.<br />
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The YPG and YPJ ['People's Protection Units' of Rojava, the YPJ is a women's militia] pushed ISIS back day by day. Mıştenur hill was very important for Kobane. After the hill was taken by the YPG and YPJ some people wanted to return to Kobane. When they went back their houses had been destroyed by ISIS. Some houses were mined and some people have been killed by the mines. The mines need to be cleared, but by who and how? People need new houses and help. We have had conferences and talked about how to help Kobane. There was a conference two weeks ago in Amed.<br />
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CW: What is your position on the elections?<br />
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DAF: We do not believe in parliamentary democracy. We believe in direct democracy. We do not support the HDP in the election, but we have links in solidarity with them on the streets.<br />
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Emma Goldman said that if elections changed anything they would be illegal. There are good people in the HDP who say good things, but we think that the government can’t be good because the election system isn’t equal.<br />
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In Rojava they do not call it an anarchist revolution, but theres no government, no state and no hierarchy, so we believe in it and have solidarity with it.<br />
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Can you tell us about the bombing in Suruç [we asked this final question by email weeks after the original interview<br />
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Over 30 young people who wanted to take part in reconstruction of Kobane were killed by an ISIS attack. This attack was clearly organised by the Turkish State. They did not even do anything to stop it although they got the information of the attack one mounth before. Moreover, after the explosion the Turkish State has attacked Rojava and made operations against political organisations in Turkey. Now there are many operations and political pressures on anarchists and socialists and Kurdish organisations. They are using the explosion as a reason to make this political repression on both the domestic and international levels.<br />
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We have lost our 33 comrades, friends who struggled for the Rojava Revolution against the state's repression, denial and politics of massacre. There are people who are killed by state, ISIS and other powers. But our resistance won't stop, our struggle will continue, as always in history.<br />
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source:<a href="https://corporatewatch.org/news/2015/aug/27/building-autonomy-turkey-and-kurdistan-interview-revolutionary-anarchist-action" target="_blank"> https://corporatewatch.org/news/2015/aug/27/building-autonomy-turkey-and-kurdistan-interview-revolutionary-anarchist-action</a><br />
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FURTHER READING:<br />
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Two interviews—one offering general background on the struggle in Kobanê, the other delving into analytical detail about the geopolitical implications.<br />
<a href="http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/r/kobane/">http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/r/kobane/</a><br />
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Resources on the Rojava Revolution—A broad selection of coverage and reference material<br />
<a href="http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/resources-rojava-revolution-kurdistan-syria">http://anarchism.pageabode.com/andrewnflood/resources-rojava-revolution-kurdistan-syria</a><br />
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An Interview with Revolutionary Anarchist Action (DAF) on Kobanê: “We are Kawa against Dehaks”—Another interview with the DAF<br />
<a href="https://anhsyxia.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/an-interview-with-revolutionary-anarchist-action-on-kobane-we-are-kawa-against-dehaks/">https://anhsyxia.wordpress.com/2014/11/04/an-interview-with-revolutionary-anarchist-action-on-kobane-we-are-kawa-against-dehaks/</a><br />
<br />
DAF Facebook page<br />
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/anarsistfaaliyetorg">https://www.facebook.com/anarsistfaaliyetorg</a><br />
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Revolution Will Win in Kobanê!—a DAF report from Boydê Village on the Syrian border during the first month of the struggle in Kobanê<br />
<a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/article/27457">http://www.anarkismo.net/article/27457</a><br />
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Rojava’s Communes and Councils—An overview of how the structures of direct democracy function in revolutionary Rojava<br />
<a href="http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/kurdistan/west-kurdistan/rojava-s-communes-and-councils.html">http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/kurdistan/west-kurdistan/rojava-s-communes-and-councils.html</a><br />
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The Experiment of West Kurdistan Has Proved that People Can Make Changes—A report by a member of the Kurdistan Anarchists Forum who spent two weeks in Syrian Kurdistan<br />
<a href="http://libcom.org/news/experiment-west-kurdistan-syrian-kurdistan-has-proved-people-can-make-changes-zaher-baher-2">http://libcom.org/news/experiment-west-kurdistan-syrian-kurdistan-has-proved-people-can-make-changes-zaher-baher-2</a><br />
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Bookchin, Öcalan, and the Dialectics of Democracy—On the relationship between the former anarchist Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK<br />
<a href="http://new-compass.net/articles/bookchin-%C3%B6calan-and-dialectics-democracy">http://new-compass.net/articles/bookchin-%C3%B6calan-and-dialectics-democracy</a><br />
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The Kurdish Question: Through the lens of Anarchist Resistance in the Heart of the Ottoman Empire 1880–1923—A deep background on anarchism in the region<br />
<a href="http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michael-schmidt-lucien-van-der-walt-the-kurdish-question-through-the-lens-of-anarchist-resistan#fn5">http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michael-schmidt-lucien-van-der-walt-the-kurdish-question-through-the-lens-of-anarchist-resistan#fn5</a>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-70868468467194165132015-08-25T03:42:00.002-07:002015-08-25T04:11:50.593-07:00"The New Nihilism" by Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It feels increasingly difficult to tell the difference between—on one hand—being old, sick, and defeated, and—on the other hand—living in a time-&-place that is itself senile, tired, and defeated. Sometimes I think it’s just me—but then I find that some younger, healthier people seem to be undergoing similar sensations of ennui, despair, and impotent anger. Maybe it’s not just me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A friend of mine attributed the turn to disillusion with “everything”, including old-fashioned radical/activist positions, to disappointment over the present political regime in the US, which was somehow expected to usher in a turn away from the reactionary decades since the 1980s, or even a “progress” toward some sort of democratic socialism. Although I myself didn’t share this optimism (I always assume that anyone who even wants to be President of the US must be a psychopathic murderer) I can see that “youth” suffered a powerful disillusionment at the utter failure of Liberalism to turn the tide against Capitalism Triumphalism. The disillusion gave rise to OCCUPY and the failure of OCCUPY led to a move toward sheer negation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However I think this merely political analysis of the “new nothing” may be too two-dimensional to do justice to the extent to which all hope of “change” has died under Kognitive Kapital and the technopathocracy. Despite my remnant hippy flower- power sentiments I too feel this “terminal” condition (as Nietzsche called it), which I express by saying, only half- jokingly, that we have at last reached the Future, and that the truly horrible truth of the End of the World is that it doesn’t end.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One big J.G. Ballard/Philip K. Dick shopping mall from now till eternity, basically.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This IS the future—how do you like it so far? Life in the Ruins: not so bad for the bourgeoisie, the loyal servants of the One Percent. Air-conditioned ruins! No Ragnarok, no Rapture, no dramatic closure: just an endless re-run of reality TV cop shows. 2012 has come and gone, and we’re still in debt to some faceless bank, still chained to our screens.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most people—in order to live at all—seem to need around themselves a penumbra of “illusion” (to quote Nietzsche again):— that the world is just rolling along as usual, some good days some bad, but in essence no different now than in 10000 BC or 1492 AD or next year. Some even need to believe in Progress, that the Future will solve all our problems, and even that life is much better for us now than for (say) people in the 5th century AD. We live longer thanx to Modern Science—of course our extra years are largely spent as “medical objects”—sick and worn out but kept ticking by Machines & Pills that spin huge profits for a few megacorporations & insurance companies. Nation of Struldbugs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">True, we’re suffocating in the mire generated by our rule of sick machines under the Numisphere of Money. At least ten times as much money now exists than it would take to buy the whole world—and yet species are vanishing space itself is vanishing, icecaps melting, air and water grown toxic, culture grown toxic, landscape sacrificed to fracking and megamalls, noise-fascism, etc, etc. But Science will cure all that ills that Science has created—in the Future (in the “long run”, when we’re all dead, as Lord Keynes put it); so meanwhile we’ll carry on consuming the world and shitting it out as waste—because it’s convenient & efficient & profitable to do so, and because we like it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Well, this is all a bunch of whiney left-liberal cliches, no? Heard it before a million times. Yawn. How boring, how infantile, how useless. Even if it were all true... what can we do about it? If our Anointed Leaders can’t or won’t stop it, who will? God? Satan? The “People”?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All the fashionable “solutions” to the “crisis”, from electronic democracy to revolutionary violence, from locavorism to solar- powered dingbats, from financial market regulation to the General Strike—all of them, however ridiculous or sublime, depend on one preliminary radical change—a seismic shift in human consciousness. Without such a change all the hope of reform is futile. And if such a change were somehow to occur, no “reform” would be necessary. The world would simply change. The whales would be saved. War no more. And so on.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What force could (even in theory) bring about such a shift? Religion? In 6,000 years of organized religion matters have only gotten worse. Psychedelic drugs in the reservoirs? The Mayan calendar? Nostalgia? Terror?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If catastrophic disaster is now inevitable, perhaps the “Survival- ist” scenario will ensue, and a few brave millions will create a green utopia in the smoking waste. But won’t Capitalism find a way to profit even from the End of the World? Some would claim that it’s doing so already. The true catastrophe may be the final apotheosis of commodity fetishism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this paradise of power tools and back-up alarms is all we’ve got & all we’re going to get. Capitalism can deal with global warming—it can sell water- wings and disaster insurance. So it’s all over, let’s say—but we’ve still got television & Twitter. Childhood’s End—i.e. the child as ultimate consumer, eager for the brand. Terrorism or home shopping network—take yr pick (democracy means choice).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since the death of the Historical Movement of the Social in 1989 (last gasp of the hideous “short” XXth century that started in 1914) the only “alternative” to Capitalist Neo-Liberal totalitarianism that seems to have emerged is religious neo-fascism. I understand why someone would want to be a violent fundamentalist bigot—I even sympathize—but just because I feel sorry for lepers doesn’t mean I want to be one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I attempt to retain some shreds of my former antipessimism I fantasize that History may not be over, that some sort ofPopulist Green Social Democracy might yet emerge to challenge the obscene smugness of“Money Interests”—something along the lines of 1970s Scandinavian monarcho-socialism—which in retrospect now looks the most humane form of the State ever to have emerged from the putrid suck-hole of Civilization. (Think of Amsterdam in its hey-day.) Of course as an anarchist I’d still have to oppose it—but at least I’d have the luxury of believing that, in such a situation, anarchy might actually stand some chance of success. Even if such a movement were to emerge, however, we can rest damn-well assured it won’t happen in the USA. Or anywhere in the ghost-realm of dead Marxism, either. Maybe Scotland!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It would seem quite pointless to wait around for such a rebirth of the Social. Years ago many radicals gave up all hope of The Revolution, and the few who still adhere to it remind me of religious fanatics. It might be soothing to lapse into such doctrinaire revolutionism, just as it might be soothing to sink into mystical religion—but for me at least both options have lost their savor. Again, I sympathize with those true believers (although not so much when they lapse into authoritarian leftism or fascism)— nevertheless, frankly, I’m too depressed to embrace their Illusions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If the End-Time scenario sketched above be considered actually true, what alternatives might exist besides suicidal despair? After much thought I’ve come up with three basic strategies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) Passive Escapism. Keep your head down, don’t make waves. Capitalism permits all sorts of “life-styles” (I hate that word)—just pick one & try to enjoy it. You’re even allowed to live as a dirt farmer without electricity & infernal combustion, like a sort of secular Amish refusnik. Well, maybe not. But at least you could flirt with such a life. “Smoke Pot, Eat Chicken, Drink Tea,” as we used to say in the 60s in the Moorish Church of America, our psychedelic cult. Hope they don’t catch you. Fit yourself into some Permitted Category such as Neo-Hippy or even Anabaptist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) Active Escapism. In this scenario you attempt to create the optimal conditions for the emergence of Autonomous Zones, whether temprorary, periodic or even (semi)permanent. In 1984 when I first coined the term Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I envisioned it as a complent to The Revolution—although I was already, to be truthful, tired of waiting for a moment that seemed to have failed in 1968. The TAZ would give a taste or premonition of real liberties: in effect you would attempt to live as if the Revolution had already occurred, so as not to die without ever having experienced “free freedom” (as Rimbaud called it, liberte libre). Create your own pirate utopia.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course the TAZ can be as brief & simple as a really good dinner party, but the true autonomist will want to maximize the potential for longer & deeper experiences of authentic lived life. Almost inevitably this will involve crime, so it’s necessary to think like a criminal, not a victim. A “Johnson” as Burroughs used to say—not a “mark”. How else can one live (and live well) without Work. Work, the curse of the thinking class. Wage slavery. If you’re lucky enough to be a successful artist, you can perhaps achieve relative autonomy without breaking any obvious laws (except the laws of good taste, perhaps). Or you could inherit a million. (More than a million would be a curse.) Forget revolutionary morality—the question is, can you afford your taste of freedom? For most of us, crime will be not only a pleasure but a necessity. The old anarcho-Illegalists showed the way: individual expropriation. Getting caught of course spoils the whole thing—but risk is an aspect of self-authenticity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One scenario I’ve imagined for active Escapism would be to move to a remote rural area along with several hundred other libertarian social- ists—enough to take over the local government (municipal or even county) and elect or control the sheriffs & judges, the parent/teacher association, volunteer fire department and even the water authority. Fund the venture with cultivation of illegal phantastice and carry on a discreet trade. Organize as a “Union of Egoists” for mutual benefit & ecstatic plea- sures—perhaps under the guise of “communes” or even monasteries, who cares. Enjoy it as long as it lasts.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I know for a fact that this plan is being worked on in several places in America—but of course I’m not going to say where.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another possible model for individual escapists might be the nomadic adventurer. Given that the whole world seems to be turning into a giant parking lot or social network, I don’t know if this option remains open, but I suspect that it might. The trick would be to travel in places where tourists don’t—if such places still exist—and to involve oneself in fascinating and dangerous situations. For example if I were young and healthy I’d’ve gone to France to take part in the TAZ that grew around resistance to the new airport—or to Greece—or Mexico—wherever the perverse spirit of rebellion crops up. The problem here is of course funding. (Sending back statues stuffed with hash is no longer a good idea.) How to pay for yr life of adventure? Love will find a way. It doesn’t matter so much if one agrees with the ideals of Tahrir Square or Zucotti Park—the point is just to be there.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3. Revenge. I call it Zarathustra’s Revenge because as Nietzsche said, revenge may be second rate but it’s not nothing. One might enjoy the satisfaction of terrifying the bastards for at least a few moments. Formerly I advocated “Poetic Terrorism” rather than actual violence, the idea being that art could be wielded as a weapon. Now I’ve rather come to doubt it. But perhaps weapons might be wielded as art. From the sledgehammer of the Luddites to the black bomb of the attentat, destruction could serve as a form of creativity, for its own sake, or for purely aesthetic reasons, without any illusions about revolution. Oscar Wilde meets the acte gratuit: a dandyism of despair.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What troubles me about this idea is that it seems impossible to distinguish here between the action of post-leftist anarcho-nihil- ists and the action of post-rightist neo-traditionalist reactionaries. For that matter, a bomb may as well be detonated by fundamentalist fanatics—what difference would it make to the victims or the “innocent bystanders”? Blowing up a nanotechnology lab—why shouldn’t this be the act of a desperate monarchist as easily as that of a Nietzschean anarchist?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In a recent book by Tiqqun (Theory of Bloom), it was fascinating to come suddenly across the constellation of Nietzsche, Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, et al. as examples of a sharp and just critique of the Bloom syndrome—i.e., of progress-as-illusion. Of course the “beyond left and right” position has two sides—one approaching from the left, the other from the right. The European New Right (Alain de Benoist & his gang) are big admirers of Guy Debord, for a similar reason (his critique, not his proposals).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The post-left can now appreciate Traditionalism as a reaction against modernity just as the neo-traditionalists can appreciate Situationism. But this doesn’t mean that post-anarchist anarchists are identical with post-fascism fascists!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m reminded of the situation in fin-de-siecle France that gave rise to the strange alliance between anarchists and monarchists; for example the Cerce Proudhon. This surreal conjunction came about for two reasons: a) both factions hated liberal democracy, and b) the monarchists had money. The marriage gave birth to weird progeny, such as Georges Sorel. And Mussolini famously began his career as an Individualist anarchist!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another link between left & right could be analyzed as a kind of existentialism; once again Nietzsche is the founding parent here, I think. On the left there were thinkers like Gide or Camus. On the right, that illuminated villain Baron Julius Evola used to tell his little ultra-right groupus- cules in Rome to attack the Modern World—even though the restoraton of tradition was a hopeless dream—if only as an act of magical self-creation. Being trumps essence. One must cherish no attachment to mere results. Surely Tiqqun’s advocacy of the “perfect Surrealist act” (firing a revolver at random into a crowd of “innocent by-standers”) partakes of this form of action- as-despair. (Incidentally I have to confess that this is the sort of thing that has always—to my regret—prevented my embraing Surrealism: it’s just too cruel. I don’t admire de Sade, either.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, as we know, the problem with the Traditionalists is that they were never traditional enough. They looked back at a lost civilization as their “goal” (religion, mysticism, monarchism, arts-&-crafts, etc.) whereas they should have realized that the real tradition is the “primordial anarchy” of the Stone Age, tribalism, hunting/gathering, animism—what I call the Neanderthal Liberation Front. Paul Goodman used the term “Neolithic Conservatism” to describe his brand of anarchism—but “Paleolithic Reaction” might be more appropriate!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other major problem with the Traditionalist Right is that the entire emotional tone of the movement is rooted in self-repression. Here a rough Reichean analysis suffices to demonstrate that the authoritarian body reflects a damaged soul, and that only anarchy is compatible with real self-realization.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The European New Right that arose in the 90s still carries on its propaganda—and these chaps are not just vulgar nationalist chauvenist anti-semitic homophobic thugs—they’re intellectuals & artists. I think they’re evil, but that doesn’t mean I find them boring. Or even wrong on certain points. They also hate the nanotechnologists!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although I attempted to set off a few bombs back in the 1960s (against the war in Vietnam) I’m glad, on the whole, that they failed to detonate (technology was never my metier). It saves me from wondering if I would’ve experienced “moral qualms”. Instead I chose the path of the propagandist and remained an activist in anarchist media from 1984 to about 2004. I collaborated with the Autonomedia publishing collective, the IWW, the John Henry Mack- ay Society (Left Stirnerites) and the old NYC Libertarian Book Club (founded by comrades of Emma Goldman, some of whom I knew, & who are now all dead). I had a radio show on WBAI (Pacifica) for 18 years. I lectured all over Europe and East Europe in the 90s. I had a very nice time, thank you. But anarchism seems even farther off now than it looked in 1984, or indeed in 1958, when I first became an anarchist by reading George Harriman’s Krazy Kat. Well, being an existentialist means you never have to say you’re sorry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the last few years in anarchist circles there’s appeared a trend “back” to Stirner/Nietzsche Individualism—because after all, who can take revolutionary anarcho- communism or syndicalism seriously anymore? Since I’ve adhered to this Individualist position for decades (although tempered by admiration for Charles Fourier and certain “spiritual anarchists” like Gustave Landauer) I naturally find this trend agreeable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Green anarchists” & AntiCivilization Neo-primitivists seem (some of them) to be moving toward a new pole of attraction, nihilism. Perhaps neo-nihilism would serve as a better label, since this tendency is not simply replicating the nihilism of the Russian narodniks or the French attentatists of circa 1890 to 1912, however much the new nihilists look to the old ones as precursors. I share their critique—in fact I think I’ve been mirroring it to a large extent in this essay: creative despair, let’s call it. What I do not understand however is their proposal—if any. “What is to be done?” was originally a nihilist slogan, after all, before Lenin appropriated it. I presume that my option #1, passive escape, would not suit the agenda. As for Active Escapism, to use the suffix “ism” implies some form not only of ideology but also some action. What is the logical outcome of this train of thought?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As an animist I experience the world (outside Civilization) as essentially sentient. The death of God means the rebirth of the gods, as Nietzsche implied in his last “mad” letters from Turin— the resurrection of the great god PAN—chaos, Eros, Gaia, & Old Night, as Hesiod put it—Ontological anarchy, Desire, Life itself, & the Darkness of revolt & negation—all seem to me as real as they need to be.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I still adhere to a certain kind of spiritual anarchism—but only as heresy and paganism, not as orthodoxy and monotheism. I have great respect for Dorothy Day—her writing influenced me in the 60s—and Ivan Illich, whom I knew personally—but in the end I cannot deal with the cognitive dissonance between anarchism and the Pope! Nevertheless I can believe in the re-paganaziation of monotheism. I hold to this pagan tradition because I sense the universe as alive, not as “dead matter.” As a life-long psychedelicist I have always thought that matter & spirit are identical, and that this fact alone legitimizes what Theory calls “desire”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From this p.o.v. the phrase “revolution of everyday life” still seems to have some validity—if only in terms of the second proposal, Active Escapism or the TAZ. As for the third possibility— Zarathustra’s Revenge—this seems like a possible path for the new nihilism, at least from a philosophical perspective. But since I am unable personally to advocate it, I leave the question open.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But here—I think—is the point at which I both meet with & diverge from the new nihilism. I too seem to believe that Predatory Capitalism has won and that no revolution is possible in the classical sense of that term. But somehow I can’t bring myself to be “against everything.” Within the Temporary Autonomous Zone there still seems to persist the possiblity of “authentic life,” if only for a moment— and if this position amounts to mere Escapism, then let us become Houdini. The new surge of interest in Individualism is obviously a response to the Death of the Social. But does the new nihilism imply the death even of the individual and the “union of egoists” or Nietzschean free spirits? On my good days, I like to think not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No matter which of the three paths one takes (or others I can’t yet imagine) it seems to me that the essential thing is not to collapse into mere apathy. Depression we may have to accept, impotent rage we may have to accept, revolutionary pessimism we may have to accept. But as e.e. cummings (anarchist poet) said, there is some shit we will not take, lest we simply become the enemy by default. Can’t go on, must go on. Cultivate rosebuds, even selfish pleasures, as long as a few birds & flowers still remain. Even love may not be impossible...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">SOURCE:<b> The Anvil Review</b><a href="http://theanvilreview.org/" target="_blank"> http://theanvilreview.org/</a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">for further inquiry follow the comments here: <a href="http://anarchistnews.org/content/new-nihilism">http://anarchistnews.org/content/new-nihilism</a> and here: <a href="http://www.anarchistnews.org/content/new-nihilism-forum-topic-comment-section">http://www.anarchistnews.org/content/new-nihilism-forum-topic-comment-section</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>a comment at the essay by Emile:</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>THE FOURTH OPTION NOT MENTIONED BY WILSON</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">i kind of like this author's [peter lamborn wilson’s] writing style with its nuance of coolness and humour, and have the feeling that it's been on anarchistnews.org before (it was evidently written in july, 2014).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">meanwhile, my gut reaction is rejection of this boring and repeated insistence that change in the world is something we are going to see. 'here it comes, folks, ... things are starting to move in the right direction, ... we're on our way now, ... put your shoulder behind it and we'll take it the full hundred yards down to touchdown.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">surely this impression that we have to see change happening is our ego talking. how about "life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans" [john lennon]. what about that sort of change? ... where we're blind-sided by it?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">are we not too much the puppet of our own intention? "i want this to happen and it is not happening,... here' comes my childhood-tantrum".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">there are quite a few references to nietzsche here, but none to ‘amor fati’, love of fate;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it. -- Nietzsche, 'Ecce Homo'</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">it is only a cheap form of anti-authorianism that rejects all imposition of authority except one’s own. “this revolution or transition has to start happening now, damn it, or i am going to have to give up on this world”.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in true anarchist style, nietzsche sees the world in terms of a ceaseless, goal-less Becoming, as in the ‘transforming relational activity continuum of modern physics’;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such a world is not in the state of ‘becoming’ in the sense of working its way towards a goal outside of it, in which case, it’s current state would be deficient relative to that goal, kind of like a sinful world that is in the process of being redeemed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">no doubt, most of us are not keen on even ‘trying on’ this amor fati because we don’t want to ‘get comfortable’ with ‘not caring’ whether anything changes in the way we want to see it change. we don’t want to lose our Atman individuality and dissolve into pure Brahman holeness.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But, maybe its possible to be ‘both at the same time’ so it could be interesting to follow along with Nietzsche and see what he’s up to with the Amor fati thing, per this guided tour by ulfers and cohen;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Amor fati is the embrace of the world that is as it is—eternally Becoming—not as it “should” be, for there is no “should,” no imperative that it be, or be transformed into, something other than it is. Put differently, Amor fati is the embrace of a world that is an implicate order of freedom and necessity: of freedom in that it is free from any “should” that would judge it to be deficient, and from any goal that “should” be attained, and of necessity because the lack of a goal to be achieved allows the world its “must,” its having to be what it is, not what it is made by an authority beyond the perimeters of the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">... In other words, fate, as Nietzsche interprets it, is the emblem of his insight that there is nothing—nihil—outside the transitoriness of the world of eternal Becoming. Fate, then, is the name for a totally immanent, perpetually transitory world that is not subject to the finality of a goal outside of it, the achievement of which would redeem the “guiltiness” of Becoming. Amor fati is the embrace of the world that is as it is—eternally Becoming—not as it “should” be, for there is no “should,” no imperative that it be, or be transformed into, something other than it is. Put differently, Amor fati is the embrace of a world that is an implicate order of freedom and necessity: of freedom in that it is free from any “should” that would judge it to be deficient, and from any goal that “should” be attained, and of necessity because the lack of a goal to be achieved allows the world its “must,” its having to be what it is, not what it is made by an authority beyond the perimeters of the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In particular, it can be said that Nietzsche’s appeal to love of fate is the consequence of his thesis of the “death of God,” love of a supreme center of the value of Being that guaranteed meaning to a meaningless world of Becoming—the authority beyond the limits of the world. The fate of Amor fati “frees” us, then, to a world of radical immanence, a world beyond the dualism of immanence and transcendence. Nietzsche characterizes this world as whole in the sense of an interconnectedness or web-like structure Nietzsche describes as Verhängnis (literally a “hanging together”), a word that also means “fate.” Given that the world of interconnectedness (Verhängnis) is its own fate (Verhängnis), it is beyond any outside determinism because there is no outside to the whole. Given a radically holistic world, there is no outside to its Verhängnis, and thus we must be what we are: Verhängnis. As Nietzsche puts it succinctly: “One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness [Verhängnis], one belongs to the whole, one is the whole.” -- Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen. Nietzsche's Amor Fati – The Embracing of an Undecided Fate. Poiesis – A Journal of the Arts and Communication. 2002. (English)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">whether or not we can ‘get into it’, there is this suggestion here that everything finds its meaning and value in everything else in a relational web-structure. this is a shift from where we are when we are impatient for change to start rolling out in the direction we want it to. because that has to be coming from our ego, and our confidence that we know what’s good for the world and we want to help ‘bring it on’. but in a ‘web-of-life’ situation, we are the pushing and pulling we are situationally included in. we are the evolving world. we are the agents of transformation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">meanwhile, we tend to think of ourselves as little ants who can’t make a mark on world change unless we can band together and have a whole lot of ants pulling or pushing together in the same direction. and if that’s no happening then we feel like giving up on changing the world, and when that happens, its like the world is drifting along without us and is impervious to our attempts to change it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">this is the nihilism that nietzsche warns about. it comes from ‘the death of God’ in a simple sense of leaving the world and life ‘meaningless’ since there is nothing above it all to give it meaning. however, the death of a source of meaning that lies beyond the world of becoming could mean that the ‘meaning’ or ‘value’ is inside the world in the evolutionary web-of-life itself. in this case, whatever is unfolding is unfolding the way it must.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">so, ... we go [in our understanding of ourselves] from being an ant amongst ants who need to band together to construct a future state of the world that we know is a ‘good’ state, ... to abandoning the notion that the world needs to go to some state that is improved over where it is and understanding ourselves as being co-evolver of the world, ... then we are never ‘out of the game’ and never rendered ‘useless’. instead of seeing ourselves as ‘doers of deeds’ that must somehow make a mark on the world, we see ourselves ‘as the world’, as agent of transformation flow features in the fluid world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">nietzsche was on the same wavelength as emerson on this;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Whilst a necessity so great caused the man to exist, his health and erectness consist in the fidelity with which he transmits influences from the vast and universal to the point on which his genius can act. The ends are momentary: they are vents for the current of inward life which increases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know that all ends are momentary, that the best end must be superseded by a better. But there is a mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and rest in his acts: the tools run away with the workman, the human with the divine.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Method of Nature’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">dealing with the frustration of our ego in this way, is not amongst the options given by wilson, but it clearly seems to be one that was actually exercised by nietzsche, who felt that the sort of change he was looking for; i.e. the tranvaluation of all values, ... was a couple of centuries away which would be punctuated by a bad bout of nihilism before we had cultivated the amor fati antidote.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">it’s not that this transition isn’t possible. indigenous anarchist infants are brought up with this web-of-life worldview foundation. but the challenge in getting back into it after being raised a Western civilized kid, is enormous. while it is more difficult than the three options that wilson mentioned, it is not impossible and it is therefore worth mentioning it as a fourth (and preferred) option.</span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-6117956750431048632015-07-09T07:18:00.000-07:002015-07-09T07:18:37.334-07:00The International Freedom Battalion of Rojava and participation from greece<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is a response of the Revolutionary Union for Internationalist Solidarity (from greece) and the International Freedom Battalion's full statement upon the announcement of it's creation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>R.U.I.S.' solidarity response:</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Revolutionary Union for Internationalist Solidarity is a formation for struggle with the aim to practice solidarity in the international field of armed conflicts on the the side of the classes of the oppressed who fight towards social liberation from the domination of states and of capital.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Solidarity in practice should bear characteristics of a common struggle at every critical point, a struggle which creates the world of revolution and which through its radical character, breaks the boundaries of tyranny, of oppression and of exploitation.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Specially, in responding to the call-out of MLKP for international solidarity we decided to take part with commitment to the necessities of the social struggle in Kurdistan.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are there to offer our services to the struggle and to learn from the multi-faceted and resourceful living revolutionary process.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We recognise in this struggle:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-Its fundamental class character</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-Its anti-fascist and anti-imperialist character</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">-Its social liberation character</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Along with the multiform reinforcement of the revolutionary forces in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and the wider Middle East, the Revolutionary Union for Internationalist Solidarity aims to open up a path of solidarity from Greece, which will not only attempt to realise the vision of Internationalist Revolutionary Solidarity, but will also pursue the coordination and collaboration beyond the local boundaries.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even though we have formulated our own political programme towards libertarian communism, we recognise the fundamental value of a broad collectivisation based on a broad range of conditions while at the same time each participant maintains their autonomy.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">FOR THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> R.U.I.S. April 2015</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>The International Freedom Battalion's full statement upon the announcement of it's creation:</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “The Middle East has been a bloodbath because of imperialist vampires and exploiters. These same forces brought together the ISIS so that people in the region would bow down to occupation and oppression. The ISIS gangs massacre Christian, Êzîdî, Assyrian, and Muslim peoples. Gangs sell women and children in slave markets and organise massive executions in ways that resemble the centuries-long strategies of their imperialist masters.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The organised peoples’ resistance against these forces’ desire to destroy their languages, faiths, lives, and identities has been led by the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG-YPJ) and was successful in places such as Kobanê, Şengal, Til-Hemis, and Serekaniyê.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Rojava revolution came to the fore of global politics and the YPG-YPJ resistance is admired and supported by impoverished masses. With international fighters, Rojava became today’s Bekaa and Palestine. The Rojava Revolution is the Paris Commune under German siege, Madrid during the Spanish civil war, and Stalingrad during the 2nd Imperitalist War (WW2).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Rojava revolution has upset the balance of power in neighboring countries, especially Turkey, and has become the heart of world revolution and the beacon of resistance for oppressed peoples.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a women’s revolution, Rojava has strengthened women’s will and become the symbol of struggle against patriarchy and global bigotry.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Revolutionaries across the world have turned their attention to Rojava and never hesitated to fight and die for victory here in order to expand the revolution.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Revolutionary forces in Turkey and different parts of the globe have come to Rojava in order to strengthen the revolution and expand the war to the lands they came from.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We fight in Rojava, die as martyrs and carry the banner of resistance…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We fight at the frontline against imperialism and bigots in the region…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We confront the ISIS gangs’ brutal attacks on the revolution…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We live the revolution and feel it in our veins and cells…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are the people in Kurdistan who made the Rojava revolution, the workers, oppressed people, women and internationalist revolutionaries who fight under the banner of the YPG-YPJ…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are Spanish, German, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Armenian, Laz, Circassian, and Albanian…</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We are the revolutionary forces and organisations that have come together from different parts of the world to form the INTERNATIONALIST FREEDOM BRIGADE.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All oppressed people, workers, laborers, women, youth, religious groups, ecologists, anti-imperialists, anti-fascists, anti-capitalists, democrats and revolutionaries of the world; we call on you to fight under the banner of the INTERNATIONALIST FREEDOM BRIGADE in order to defend the Rojava revolution and expand it to establish people’s fraternity in the Middle East and rest of the world…”</span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-83571868847465034072015-05-05T04:14:00.002-07:002015-05-05T05:28:05.194-07:00A World Without Police by PETER GELDERLOOS<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In two previous essay, I discussed <b><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/09/the-nature-of-police-the-role-of-the-left/" target="_blank">the role of the Left in protecting the police </a></b>through cautious reformism, and the effectiveness of a pacified, falsified—in a word disarmed—history of the Civil Rights movement to prevent us from learning from previous struggles and achieving a meaningful change in society.<br />
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The police are a racist, authoritarian institution that exists to protect the powerful in an unequal system. Past and present efforts to reform them have demonstrated that reformism can’t solve the problem, though it does serve to squander popular protests and advance the careers of professional activists. Faced with this situation, in which Left and Right unwittingly collude to prolong the problem, the extralegal path of rioting, seizing space, and fighting back against the police makes perfect sense. In fact, this phenomenon, denounced as “violence” by the media, the police, and many activists in unison, was not only the most significant feature of the Ferguson (and Baltimore) rebellion and the solidarity protests organized in hundreds of other cities, it was also the vital element that made everything else possible, that distinguished the killing of Michael Brown from a hundred other police murders. What’s more, self-defense against state violence (whether excercized by police or by tolerated paramilitaries like the Klan) is not an exceptional occurrence in a long historical perspective, but a tried and true form of resistance, and one of the only that has brought results, <a href="http://www.akpress.org/dixie-be-damned.html" target="_blank">in the Civil Rights movement and earlier.</a><br />
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What remains is to speak about possibilities that are radically external to the self-regulating cycle of tragedy and reform. What remains is to speak loudly and clearly about a world without police.<br />
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We don’t want better police. We don’t want to fix the police. On the contrary, we understand that the police work quite well; they simply do not work for us and they never have. We want to get rid of the police entirely, and we want to live in a world where police are not necessary.<br />
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Far from being a naïve position, I believe it is the only one that can withstand serious scrutiny, whether in the form of a comprehensive historical analysis of the role and evolution of police and the effectiveness of reform movements, or of an examination of the breadth of possibility that human societies have already demonstrated.<br />
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No one can effectively argue that the police are necessary in an absolute sense. They are a relatively recent invention, as far as institutions go. The only question is what kind of society needs police, and whether that kind of society makes the systematic murders, torture, beatings, and surveillance worth it.<br />
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Restorative-Justice-Healing-Foundations-Everyday/dp/1881798313" target="_blank">Dennis Sullivan and Larry Tifft</a> have compiled a great deal of information on societies that use various forms of conflict resolution in which an organization such as the police has no place. From the Diné (Navajo) to the Semai, there are dozens of societies—all of them impacted to varying degrees by Western colonialism—that have practiced restorative or transformative justice, dealing with cases of conflict or social harm without ever having to be so brutal as to lock people up in cages or create an elite body designed to surveille people or mobilize organized violence against those who transgress set laws. They compare neighboring societies that face similar socio-economic conditions but use different strategies for dealing with harm, as well as Western societies that make minimal usage of policing and judicial apparatuses.<br />
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A pattern that becomes immediately evident is that police and prisons are only necessary in societies that are based on exploitation and inequality. The police are not an instrument fit to protect a society; on the contrary they are an instrument fit to protect an elite, parasitical class from society. Any society with a minimal practice of cooperation and solidarity can protect itself from individuals who would harm others. A hierarchical, militarized force such as the police, or an institution like the prison designed to remove conflict and transgression from the social sphere, only makes sense where there is a parasitical social class that exists in antagonism with the rest of society, and needs to manage social norms of right and wrong and monopolize violent force in order to preserve its power. Such a class also needs a justice mechanism, such as courts and a legislative body, to formalize its conception of right and wrong, and a propaganda mechanism, whether a state religion or mass media, to ensure that the exploited majority identify with their masters and reproduce the norms of the elite. When a normal person speaks out against throwing rocks at the police or destroying businesses, they are expressing values that originate at the top of the social pyramid.<br />
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Of course it gets more complicated when you realize that interests are always subjective, and people often get more out of identifying with a larger community, no matter how fictitious, than they do out of having food to eat or a roof over their heads. In the end, everyone from the CEO to the news anchor to the taxi driver or homebum with conventional ideas all participate in reproducing the same system, and they probably all sincerely believe in the positions they espouse, but some clearly have more influence than others, and can be identified as originators of certain aspects of the present system.<br />
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Therefore, we are not speaking for the masses when we assert that the police and the prisons exist to control them, but we should also not shy away from espousing a radical position just because it will be unpopular. We need to have faith that a great many people might eventually come to support radical positions regarding the police. Many people already support parts of these positions intuitively or implicitly, and the reason that more people don’t, at least not expressly, is that so few people currently dare to declare the police an intractable enemy of freedom or to openly advocate a world without police. At this juncture, the last thing that we need is for more people to espouse tepid, inane suggestions for reform that are completely untenable and unrealistic. But as long as proposals for meager reform are taken seriously, that’s what we’ll get.<br />
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We can’t get rid of police brutality without getting rid of the police, and we can’t get rid of the police without getting rid of an entire system based on exploitation, oppression, and hierarchy. There is no easy, band-aid solution to this problem, and bandying them about only perpetuates the problem. Foregrounding difficult, far-reaching changes does not mean, however, fixating an abstract gaze on a pre-designed future and blinding ourselves to immediate problems. On the contrary, we need to focus on how we fight now for a better world, and part of that means avoiding forms of action that make real changes even more improbable.<br />
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As I argued in <b><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/19/learning-from-ferguson/" target="_blank">Part II</a></b>, most of what was achieved in the Civil Rights movement in terms of short-term changes was achieved when people armed themselves, took over their streets, and fought back without worrying about ruling class taboos against lower class violence. If we fight for total social transformation without proposing naïve reforms, those in power will trip over themselves trying to buy us off with quick fixes and opportunities to participate in the system.<br />
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This in fact is how most social movements in history have gone down. Whatever improvements have been won were actually won by those who fought for radical positions, using uncompromising methods and aggressive tactics, though the victories were claimed by the reformers, who tend to be a combination of dissident members of the ruling structures, opportunists who wish to climb the social ladder, and sincere people who have been duped by a discourse of pragmatism. Their own methods are too sedate to shake things up and force a change, in fact their timidity demonstrates to authority that they are ultimately a loyal opposition undeserving of repression. They must ride the coattails of the radicals in order to be in position when the rulers realize that some change is necessary in order to avoid an actual revolution. The reason that these movements always stop after an incomplete reform, and that the most ineffective sectors of these movements tend to get the credit, is because the reformers have a tendency to throw the radicals under the bus, helping the State eliminate them in exchange for access to power in its newly reformed configuration. After all, who better to discern what reform will best fool the people on bottom than someone who has recently come up from the bottom?<br />
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I previously mentioned that a police apparatus cannot exist without a hierarchical society, a prison system, a justice system, and some kind of culture industry, whether religious or mediatic. All of these institutions defend a ruling structure against the conflicts generated by its antagonistic position towards society. Modern democracies go a step further, however; if conflict with society is inevitable, why not manage it rather than trying to suppress it?<br />
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In Ferguson, the managers of social conflict were in large part those activists who preached nonviolence and denounced the rioters, as I mentioned in <b><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/09/the-nature-of-police-the-role-of-the-left/" target="_blank">Part I</a></b>. But there is an important kind of management I neglected to mention.<br />
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Those of us who are critical of the mass media may have a hard time explaining the sympathetic position that <b><a href="http://time.com/3605606/ferguson-in-defense-of-rioting/" target="_blank">Time Magazine</a></b> or<b><a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/smashy-smashy-nine-historical-triumphs-to-make-you-rethink-property-destruction-20141021" target="_blank"> Rolling Stone </a></b>occasionally took with the rioters. Of course, a couple articles hardly make up for thousands of syndicated columns objectively refering to rioters as some kind of pathological parasite, radio hosts calling looters “idiots” and worse, TV spots spreading fear about savage hordes of demons and outside agitators, days long NPR marathons urging peaceful protest, and so on. Nonetheless, the phenomenon is curious as well as significant. In the case of Rolling Stone, we could suppose that this old establishment rag is afraid of all the ground it has lost in the risqué news niche to dynamic newcomers like Vice; however the explanation would be insufficient.<br />
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The seemingly subversive behavior of a few outliers is hardly unprecedented. In the recent<b><a href="http://www.akpress.org/we-are-an-image-from-the-future-the-greek-revolt-of-december-2008.html" target="_blank"> insurrection in Greece</a></b>, a large part of the media expressed sympathy with the rioters, albeit in a very formulaic way. In the media lens, young students were justifiably protesting in the streets after the police murder of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos, anarchists were hijacking the event to burn police stations, and immigrants were taking advantage of the situation to loot stores. None of these characterizations are based on fact. Millions of young people and old, Greeks and immigrants, participated in the uprising, in a variety of ways. Many students looted, many immigrants walked along with protests. A frequently expressed sentiment was that participation in the insurrection blurred all of these pre-established identities, in which case the media operation clearly intended to reassert them. With all three subjects, the media caricature refers to a prefabricated figure that the entire population was already familiar with—the socially concerned student, the pyromaniac anarchist, the criminal immigrant—that only ever existed on the glowing screen, because it was the media themselves that created it. That’s the brilliance of the media: they rarely have to verify their claims, because they operate within a virtual universe that they themselves have created.<br />
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In the Greek example, it is obvious why the media would sympathize with student rioting: to discourage non-students from participating or identifying with the uprising; and to establish a limit of acceptable tactics, implicitly criminalizing the looting and the attacks on police stations. After all, the intensity of street fighting over three uninterrupted weeks was forcing the government to consider calling in the military. They were willing to tolerate burning barricades and illegal protests if things didn’t go further.<br />
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Likewise, when people start to bring guns to protests as in Ferguson, there will be those among the forces of law and order who begin to see the wisdom in tolerating the smashing of banks. It’s noteworthy that the media only begin to stomach property destruction when talk of shooting back begins to resonate throughout society. And though within the confines of American dialogue, it feels like a breath of fresh air that Time Magazine would sympathize with rioters, it is a more or less calculated move that functions to limit the growth of resistance. Even if the editors of a magazine are not scheming consciously and explicitly about how to maintain social control, they are still individuals with a vested interest in the current system. People fighting fiercely for their freedom, unlike those who compulsively walk in circles or stage die-ins, often force a recognition of their humanity and win a limited sympathy from their enemies. They also make the existence of a social conflict undeniable. In such a case, people in power may come to accept tactics that they had previously condemned, to acknowledge errors they had previously denied, but their condemnation of forms of rebellion that are irreversibly destabilizing will only crystalize. People can be permitted to blow off steam, even in illegal ways, but they cannot be permitted to blunt or sabotage the instruments of the State. And when the police confront an armed population, they are suddenly much less effective.<br />
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Another way that exceptional dissent might manifest is in the realm of discourse and research. I am by no means the first person to express the idea that the police should be abolished, nor is this idea entirely strange in acceptable discourse among people who are much better dressed than I am. However the elaboration of these discourses must be couched in certain ways to signal their usefulness to the State, and their separation from communities in struggle.<br />
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If we assert that it is not permitted to speak of a world without police, this is only true if we understand the police as one function in an interlocking system of domination, and the abolition of the police means the abolition of that entire system. Otherwise, there is a great deal of research and debate that maps out the possibilities of prison abolition or an end to policing as we know it. But what is the actual meaning and effect of this discourse?<br />
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I would start by arguing that the vast majority of those who conduct this theoretical labor have good intentions. But we also know what they say about good intentions, and the paving stones on the road to hell are not nearly as substantial as the ones being thrown at cops in Ferguson and elsewhere. With this facile figure of speech, I actually mean to suggest a different criterion for evaluating our actions.<br />
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I gladly admit that the information produced by academics or activists who theorize about prison abolition or a world without police is thought-provoking and useful. I have cited a few examples of it in this essay. But just as we must ask why Time Magazine would sympathize with rioters, we should ask why there exist paid positions for people to study prison abolition. Either capitalism isn’t a totality, or the prisons and the police are not an integral part of power, or power benefits somehow by studying its own abolition.<br />
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I believe the answer lies between the second and the third possibilities. Even though the abolition of prisons is not a likely future, from the present vantage, democratic capitalism increases its chances for survival by exploring contingency plans for extreme cases, and by giving opponents employment opportunities. The advantage is increased if “prisons” or “police” can be discursively transformed from an integral element of a whole system into a particular appendage that can be discarded or modified. And there are few methods of discourse more suited to carrying out this transformation than the academic—which favors specificity and an analysis of parts over wholes—and the activist—which tends towards single-issue messaging that favors the myopic over the radical.<br />
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Someone in the academy or in the world of professional activism can study the police for all the right reasons, personally holding a global analysis of the integral role of police within a greater whole, but the institutional formulae of applying for grants, publishing articles, and claiming concrete improvements all modulate those individuals’ activity to favor a piecemeal worldview and to direct discourse at other power-holders.<br />
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It may sound like a platitude but I believe experience in struggle bears it out: you cannot abolish that with which you dialogue. State authority above all thrives on being present in every social conversation. A conversation with employers, legislators, grant-writers, or experts about the abolition of the police necessarily assumes the replacement of one form of policing with another.<br />
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The modern prison was born out of<b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish" target="_blank"> the abolition of the scaffold.</a></b> Community policing was a survival mechanism after the defeats and the unpopularity of the police <b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Our-Enemies-Blue-America-Revised/dp/0896087719" target="_blank">caused by the struggles of the ’60s. </a></b>The danger is real.<br />
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Even without a far-reaching reform that allows the powerful to regenerate their methods for accumulating power, radical discourses in professional channels present other problems. One I have already hinted at can be thought of as misdirection.<br />
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Let’s imagine an organization that focuses on prison abolition. Their employees are sincere, dedicated activists, some of them proven veterans of past struggles. Nearly all of them are college graduates, and some might be academics; otherwise they stay in close contact with the experts who produce facts that make it easier to argue for prison abolition in polite circles. They produce many valuable materials that can be useful for supporting prisoners or changing people’s opinions about the prison system, and they may even have a pilot project on a couple blocks in a specific neighborhood, designed to decrease reliance on the prison industrial complex.<br />
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Taken individually, all of these things are great. We need more people who are talking about a world without prisons. But the ideas that this hypothetical organization spreads, how do they direct people’s attentions, particularly in a moment of social rebellion?<br />
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When such an organization, with paid staff, non-profit status, cred, but also rules to play by and bills to pay, proclaims that “We need to abolish the police and the prisons,” what is the practical implication? “Therefore this organization should receive more grants and this law should not be passed,” or “therefore these people who took up arms against the police deserve our support”? Clearly, it’s not the latter.<br />
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A professional approach to tackling the social problems underscored by Ferguson rarely returns people’s energies and attentions to the streets, where real change is created. True, most of the time, we don’t have something like Ferguson going on, so a patient, gradualist method seems to make sense. However, the conservatism of the professional approach often leads activists to play a pacifying role when a moment of intense struggle arises, as we abundantly witnessed this August and again in November. All across the country, even where they refrained from denouncing rioters, activist organizations called for vigils and speak-outs, when it was clear that the time for mere words had passed. Directly or indirectly, these mobilizations allowed a middle-class constituency to monopolize the social response and prevent rioting, at a time when an unprecedented number of people were ready to fight back.<br />
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What’s more, the assumptions are all wrong. Ferguson is only exceptional in its extension, not in its spirit. Not a month goes by when someone does not shoot back at the police in America. Most of the time, however, they are a lone shooter, they often kill themselves or die in the act, and the media always publish unsavory details about their personal lives, true or invented. They also portray the cops as heroes, no matter what kind of people they actually were, and they never entertain the possibility that the shooters were justified, as they always do when it’s cops doing the murdering (actually, this is too charitable a description; many media outlets assert from the beginning that the killing was justified, not even allowing a debate). The recent shooting of the two cops in NYC fits the pattern perfectly, but earlier cases like that of Christopher Monfort in Seattle, Eric Frein in Pennsylvania, or Christopher Dorner in LA also apply. None of this should be surprising. There is a certain schizophrenia in a society that glorifies the police and suppresses or distorts any honest conversation about what people actually experience at the hands of police and what sort of countermeasures are adequate or justified. If large numbers of alienated people feel entirely alone in their brutalization and dehumanization by police, collective resistance becomes impossible. The only people to express an active negation of the police will be individuals who reach a certain limit and then snap. By the very nature of the problem they are not going to be the stable ones, especially if mental health is defined as an infinite capacity to accomodate misery.<br />
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In Ferguson, rioters spraypainted the QT with the phrase, “free Kevin Johnson”, referring to a black man from an aggressively gentrifying St. Louis suburb who is on death row since 2008. Johnson shot to death an infamous bully of a cop who refused to help his kid brother as he lay dying from a heart condition. There is a direct connection between what are portrayed as isolated outbursts of senseless violence, and the massive rebellions that force society to at least stop and pay attention. I don’t, however, see the professionals making this connection. Typically they are either silent or help pathologize the lone wolves. The tragedy is, such incidents are only isolated as long as people in power AND people in social movements continue to actively isolate them.<br />
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Recognizing the basic legitimacy of these acts isn’t to glorify the shooters as heroes. There is something sad in any death, no matter who the victim is, and we’re in dire straits when the only available means of resistance that people think they have are directly suicidal. The point is, there is a direct connection between the systematic brutality of police and the appearance of people who shoot back. Denying it only maintains the schizophrenic condition that forces us to pathologize a sensible human response to systematic abuse, preserves our psychological loyalty to a system that treats us like fodder, and prevents the development of collective measures.<br />
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There have been attempts in the US to develop and spread methods of resistance to police that are collective, that brook no compromise, and that are less dangerous, less suicidal, than the method of the lone gunmen. The best known is probably the “black bloc.” And though it is clearly an imperfect tool, the bloc typically faces blanket denunciations by people who make no attempts to propose alternatives. In NGO-land, the trope that has been circulated is that the black bloc is the domain of young white men. Never mind that there are many testimonials by women, queer, and trans people attempting to counter this lie (and at great personal risk, since it requires speaking about personal involvement in an illegal activity); never mind that American anarchists have learned about the tactic not only in Europe but also in<b><a href="https://violentanarchists.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/mexico-city-riots-december-2012/" target="_blank"> Latin America,</a></b> where <b><a href="http://www.crimethinc.com/blog/2013/07/27/the-june-2013-uprisings-in-brazil-part-1/" target="_blank">it is widely popular</a></b>. The denunciations cannot be taken seriously as criticisms because they do not rely on realistic portrayals of the black bloc, they are formulated to silence rather than to engage, and they do not propose any alternatives for seizing space or collectively fighting back against police.<br />
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The extent to which this trope has been circulated by the corporate media reveals just how liberatory the thinking behind it truly is.<br />
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But the black bloc is just one possibility among many, and while it helps demonstrators protect themselves in rowdy street confrontations, it does not suggest to most people the vision of another world. Talking about a world without police in the here and now, without paving the way for our own co-optation is a big order to fill. Fortunately, the conversation is already ongoing.<br />
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We have the examples of societies that thrived without police, which I mentioned towards the beginning of the essay. Those stories belong to other cultures. I don’t think Westerners should use them as models or as ideological capital, but I think we should recognize their existence, to break the stranglehold that Western civilization has over definitions of human nature and human possibility, and we should also recognize that those other forms of being were violently interrupted by processes of colonization that are still ongoing. They are not marginal, idyllic stories of “primitive” societies with no bearing on modern reality, they are histories of peoples who are still struggling for survival. If, in the worlds we dream of, there is no room for them to reassert themselves independent of our designs, then whatever we create will only be a continuation of the thing we are fighting against.<br />
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More appropriate as inspiration for our own action are a number of stories of struggle in Western or westernized countries in which people created police-free zones on the ground. After all, a holistic critique of the police means that by the very nature of the problem, we cannot ask government to institute the needed changes. Real steps towards a world without police can be found in the riots in Ferguson and other cities around the country where people surpassed their self-appointed leaders and actually fought back, rather than just manufacturing yet another spectacle of symbolic dissent. The riots in Ferguson were not only important in an instrumental way, forcing all of society to consider the problem; they also suggested the beginnings of a solution as neighbors came together in solidarity, building new relations amongst themselves, and forcefully ejecting police from the neighborhoods they patrol.<br />
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<b><a href="http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works#toc42" target="_blank">Christiania</a></b> is an autonomous neighborhood of Copenhagen that has been squatted since 1971. The area, with nearly a thousand inhabitants, organizes itself in assemblies, maintains its own economy and infrastructure, cleans up its trash, produces bicycles and other items in collective workshops, and runs a number of communal spaces. They also resolve their own conflicts, and with the exception of some aggressive incursions and raids, Christiania has been a police-free zone for most of its existence. Initially, the Danish government opted for a soft strategy, hoping that Christiania would eventually fall apart on its own. In the same era,<b><a href="http://www.eroseffect.com/books/subversion.html" target="_blank"> the autonomous movement i</a></b>n the Netherlands and Germany was fighting major battles to defend their squatted spaces, sometimes defeating the police in the streets or burning down shopping malls in retribution for evictions. In context, the Danish approach made sense. However, Christiania thrived. Some suspect that the government was behind the crisis that threatened the autonomous neighborhood’s existence in 1984 when a motorcycle gang moved into the police-free zone to begin selling hard drugs (soft drugs have always been widely used in Christinia, while addictive drugs are vehemently discouraged).<br />
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Earlier in Christiania’s history, there had been a fierce debate about how to deal with the problem of drugs. Over intense opposition, a part of the neighborhood decided to request police assistance, but they soon found that the cops were arresting the users of non-addictive drugs and ignoring or even protecting the proliferation of hard drugs. After that, Christiania decided to keep the police out, and their autonomy was well established by the time the motorcycle gang moved in. The gangsters thought they had picked an easy target: a neighborhood of hippies who not only disavowed making use of the police, they actively kept the police out. These drug-pushers, however, had fallen for capitalist mythology, which presents us all as isolated individuals, vulnerable to organized delinquents, and therefore in need of the greatest protection racket of them all, the State. Christiania residents banded together, exercising the same principle of solidarity that was at work in all the other aspects of their lives, fought back, and kicked the motorcycle gang out, using a combination of sabotage, public meetings, pressure, and direct confrontation.<br />
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It is no coincidence that the same tools and capacities that allow us to fight back and free ourselves from policing are also the ones we need to protect ourselves from the forms of harm that capitalist democracies prosecute under the rubric of “crime”. Crime and police are two sides of the same coin. They perpetuate each other, and they each rely on a vulnerable, atomized society. A healthy society would have no need for police, no more than it would lock people in cages and hide its problems out of sight rather than deal with the conflicts and deficiencies that led to an act of harm being committed in the first place.<br />
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The mutual relationship between police and crime was exquisitely revealed during <b><a href="http://www.politicalmediareview.org/2009/06/teaching-rebellion-stories-from-the-grassroots-mobilization-in-oaxaca/" target="_blank">the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006.</a></b> In June of that year, police viciously attacked the massive encampment staged annually by striking teachers. But the teach ers fought back tooth and nail, quickly joined by many neighbors. They pushed police out of Oaxaca City, which remained autonomous for five months along with large parts of the countryside. People built barricades, which became an important space for socialization as well as self-defense, and they organized topiles, an indigenous tradition that provided volunteers to fight back against police and paramilitaries as well as to look out for fires, acts of robbery, or assault.<br />
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The defenders of Oaxaca soon learned that the police were releasing people from their prisons on the condition that they go into the city to commit crimes. In protecting their neighborhoods against these acts, the topiles did not function like Western police forces. They patrolled unarmed, they were volunteers, and they did not have a prerogative to arrest people or impose their will, the way cops do. Upon coming across a robbery, arson, or assault, their function was not only that of first responders, but also to call on the neighbors so everyone could respond collectively. With such a structure, it would be impossible to enforce a legal code against an activity with popular participation. In other words, the topiles could stop a stranger who was robbing the store of a local, working class person (as were many of the neighborhood stores in Oaxaca), but they couldn’t have stopped the neighbors themselves from looting a store they already had an antagonistic, classist relationship with, as was the case in Ferguson.<br />
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People in Oaxaca also had to defend themselves from police and paramilitaries, and they did so for five months. The topiles and many others were unarmed. They had to fight back with rocks, fireworks, and molotov cocktails, many of them getting shot in the process. Their bravery allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live in freedom for five months, in a police-free, government-free zone, experimenting with the self-organization of their lives on social, economic, and cultural levels. All the beautiful aspects of the Oaxaca commune are inseperable from their violent struggle against police, involving barricades, slingshots, molotov cocktails, and thousands of people who faced down armed opponents, over a dozen of them giving their lives in the process. In the end, the Mexican state had to send in the military as the only way to crush this flourishing pocket of autonomy.<br />
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If we learn from examples like Christiania, Oaxaca, and Ferguson itself, we can fight for a world without police and everything they represent, beginning here and now by creating blocks, neighborhoods, or even entire cities that are at least temporarily police-free zones. Within these spaces we can finally experiment and practice with solutions to all the other interrelated forms of oppression that plague us.<br />
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There is something beautiful about people finding the courage to fight back against a more powerful enemy, and people also flourish in surprising ways when they liberate space and take the power to organize their own lives. Neither of these things can be overemphasized. But neither should we romanticize. In the streets of Ferguson and other liberated spaces, much of the ugliness that infuses our society rears its head. But dealing with what had previously been invisible or normalized is an inevitable part of any healing process, and our society is nothing if not sick. Calamities like uprisings and riots can be important catalysts in processes of social healing, and liberated spaces, by forcefully casting aside the previous regime’s norms and relationships, that only functioned to reproduce and invisibilize all the ongoing forms of harm, can give us the opportunity to create new, healthier patterns, and engage in conversations that previously had been impossible. Empowering ourselves to fight back against those who have traumatized us, like the police, can be an important step in upsetting oppressive relations, healing from trauma, and restoring healthy social relations.<br />
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This is, however, a dangerous proposition. Fighting back against the police, especially shooting back at them, as was happening in Ferguson, is not a safe activity. Change is never safe. And if we can successfully overcome the police to create a liberated zone, the State will eventually send in the military. Are the soldiers still loyal enough, after these last wars, to open fire on us? Has enough been done to encourage dissension in the ranks, or is the government firmly in control? There is only one way to find out.<br />
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It is understandable that many people would not want to face the extreme risks involved with uprooting the oppressions that grip our society. There is nothing wrong with being afraid, so long as you have the courage to admit it. Some people, however, do a great disservice by muddying the waters with myopic proposals that have no hope of making an actual difference.<br />
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In the streets, we need to learn how to seize space, to make sure that those who fight back are never isolated, to make collective responses possible so no one has to react in an individual, suicidal way again, and to build a struggle that has room for young and old, for the peaceful and the bellicose, for those who know how to fight and those who know how to heal. It will be a long process, and in the meantime, there is a great need to speak loud and clear about a world without police, so everyone will know there is another way, beyond the false alternatives of obedience or ineffectual reform.<br />
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Peter Gelderloos has participated in various initiatives to support prisoners and push the police out of our neighborhoods. He is the author of several books, including <b><a href="http://ardentpress.com/anarchy-works/" target="_blank">Anarchy Works</a></b> and<b><a href="http://leftbankbooks.bigcartel.com/product/the-failure-of-nonviolence-from-the-arab-spring-to-occupy-by-peter-gelderloos" target="_blank"> The Failure of Nonviolence.</a> </b><br />
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<b>He is a comrade and friend of Void Network from 2007 until today</b><br />
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source: <b>http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/29/a-world-without-police/</b>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-81506069276796635452015-04-26T08:00:00.000-07:002015-04-26T08:05:20.279-07:00Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situation-ism, Utopia. by Michael Lowy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Michael Lowy</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Morning Star: Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situation-ism, Utopia.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Introduction by Donald LaCoss (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When members of the surviving old guard of surrealism declared the movement over in October 1969 in Le Monde, there were many dissenters. International adherents to the idea that surrealism is a state of mind rather than a historical movement affirmed their continued loyalty to its revolutionary principles. Lowy locates these at the intersection of Marxism and anarchism, a mix that aims to pose a counterweight to capitalist rationalism and disenchantment (Max Weber) by re-enchanting the world. Myth, poetry, art created in a spirit of revolt by the unleashing of the forces of dream and the unconscious – these have been liberatory gestures and practices that are common to the subjects of Lowy’s engaging essays, from Benjamin to Debord, from Pierre Naville to Vincent Bouonore and Claude Cahun.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is well known that Andre´ Breton, the founder and leader of the surrealist movement, embraced revolutionary Marxism in the “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1930; at the same time, the founder of the surrealist movement, who insisted that “language has been given to man so that he may make surrealist use of it” was unlikely, from the start, to adhere to any party line. Lowy characterizes Breton’s Marxism as “libertarian,” a mix of the revolt against Western civilization and bourgeois norms of morality and normality, combined with the explosive force of poetry (Lautre´amont, Rimbaud) and the English gothic novel. When Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico in 1938, the important text they co-authored was the call “For an Independent Revolutionary Art,” which asserts the anarchist ideal of absolute freedom for artists. Breton conceived of this freedom as dialectical in the sense that artists were called to break away from the confining circles of rationality, decorum, and the “beautiful.” Breton was a Hegelian as much as a Marxist. In place of the old hegemonic myths (surrealists excoriated their civilization which had put in place the “myth of money”), they proposed the “morning star” that they linked to the mythical rebellion of Lucifer. Myth without religion – surrealist texts and exhibitions were well-known for proposing a new pantheon, many of its notables drawn from the figures of alchemy and the tarot which Carl Jung had already exposed as allegories of self-transcendence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The ideal of freedom, which Lowy links to surrealism’s revolutionary romanticism, is the common thread that runs through all the essays. When allied with real political activism, surrealism is a force to be reckoned with, as the chapters on Claire Cahun and Guy Debord show. Cahun had joined the surrealist movement in 1932; two years later she penned the defense of revolutionary poetry, Les paris sont ouverts (“The bets are on”) in which she advocated the use of poetry for “indirect action,” leaving the reader open to draw his/her own conclusions. Literature will be most effective, she argued, if it is subversive and not propagandistic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The next chapter in Cahun’s life – which many readers will discover for the first time in these pages – is a source of astonishment for all those who hear of it. When the German forces occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, Cahun and her life-companion Suzanne Malherbe put theory into action. Under the cover of appearing as harmless older women they circulated subversive anti-Nazi texts to the occupying soldiers, signing their names as the “Nameless Soldier.” In some cases they even produced anti-fascist photomontages whose source material was the Nazi magazine Signal. Their texts – hidden inside newspapers and magazines, deposited in Nazi mailboxes, left on parked cars or attached to fences – called on soldiers to desert or kill their officers. Remarkably, the two women operated for four whole years before they were eventually denounced by an informer. Only the end of the war saved them from the death sentence that had been meted out to them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Guy Debord is another artist who put the arsenal of language and art in the service of revolution. Today, as Lowy acknowledges, the father of “situationism” is often dismissed as a superficial critic of mass media, or as a mere litterateur. Just as Cahun’s work is now being rediscovered, Lowy urges us to take another look at Debord, whose concept of the “society of the spectacle” was nothing less than a critique of “the whole economic, social, and political system of modern capitalism.” Situationism, he argues, lies at the base of the most audacious dreams and aspirations of ‘68. Debord’s nostalgic turn away from modernity was intended as an explosive and subversive force that had much in common with surrealism. Once again, the strategies are textual – Debord’s lengthy screenplay In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (a palindrome that roughly translates as “we wander in darkness and are consumed by fire”) cannibalizes existing texts and films and infuses them with new meaning.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The dark side of romantic rebellion that Lowy identifies in all his subjects is also linked with revolutionary pessimism, which is the core subject of the book’s longest and most central chapter on Pierre Naville, whose landmark essay “Revolution and the Intellectuals,” written in 1925–26 and read by the surrealists even before its publication in 1928, gave the impetus for the alliance between surrealism and Marxism. Lowy recounts that it was Naville’s infiuence that led Breton and other surrealists to join the Communist party in 1927. “Revolutionary pessimism” in Naville’s formulation meant an active, revolutionary engagement, a spirit akin to Goethe’s Mephistopheles (who describes himself as “the spirit that always negates”). In this chapter Lowy charts a clear course through the internal debates between different factions of the surrealists as they interfaced with different factions of the Communist Left in France and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Along the way, Naville, who had embraced the Trotskyist Left Opposition, fell out of favor with Breton, who actually excoriated him in the dramatic turn toward Marxism that runs through the Second Manifesto of Surrealism in 1930. A reconciliation finally took place in 1938 when Naville facilitated the meeting between Trotsky and Breton.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Naville’s concept of organized, revolutionary pessimism impressed Walter Benjamin, who published the epochal essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of European Intelligence” in February 1929. Benjamin correctly estimated the vast infiuence that surrealism would come to exert; in the opening lines of his essay, he compares himself to the observer of the vast energy generated downstream from what had appeared, in France, as a mere trickle. In a continuation of that metaphor, Benjamin writes that surrealism “harnessed the forces of intoxication for the revolution,” although he criticizes its “undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication” and the neglect of “the methodical and disciplinary preparation for revolution” (Selected Writings, Vol. II, Harvard University Press, 1999: 217). Thinking is for him a narcotic of the first order, and its “profane illumination” should make it possible for the “revolutionary intelligentsia to overthrow the intellectual predominance of the bourgeoisie and to make contact with the proletarian masses” (217). (Unfortunately the editor, has left out the more detailed chapter on Benjamin that appeared in the original French edition, so that the discussion of his important writings on surrealism is limited to some remarks in the Naville chapter.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For those already interested in surrealism and its infiuence, many of these chapters provide welcome information on the fate of the surrealists, and Surrealism, after WWII. A final chapter on “the surrealist international since 1969” gives a historical account of the more recent surrealist publications, among them the Bulletin de liaison surre´aliste and Surre´alisme (Vincent Buonore, who with several French and Czech Surrealist friends put together La Civilisation surre´aliste in 1976, gets a chapter to himself). Today there are surrealist groups in Paris, Prague, Stockholm Madrid, Chicago, and Sa˜o Paulo, along with half a dozen new journals devoted to surrealism.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">An appealing feature of this volume is the presence of art work by many of Lowy’s international surrealist friends, as well as some of his own drawings. Several of these amplify the themes of the book – Guy Girard’s “Rosa Luxemburg in front of the Tour St. Jacques” from 1993 imagines her in the context of Breton’s peregrinations in Paris with their multiple references to alchemy and the marvelous (Nadja) while Jean-Pierre Guillon’s “Couronne´e de Commune” from 1980 works as an illustration of Benjamin’s statement about revolution and intoxication.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The art work also comprises many contributions by women surrealists – the Prague surrealist Eva Svankmajerova and the Canadian Marie S. (alias “Ingatta”) whose “illuminated envelopes” are beguiling contributions to mail art. By themselves, these point to a salient aspect of present-day surrealism – the presence of impressive women artists and writers. A whole chapter is dedicated to the surrealist artist Ody Saban, a welcome supplement to the French edition.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unlike the usual art “movements” destined to replace one another, Lowy argues, surrealism is a transhistorical cultural innovation like Romanticism. Its marginality is also its force, since its aims are necessarily subversive. The dominant metaphor continues to be that of the “starred mole,” a mythical creature who burrows underground, creating passageways and connections that eventually lead to the collapse of the superficial and visible world above. Lowy’s engaging book invites us to the positive labor of “re-enchantment,” providing models for active engagement and stimulus for further reading.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2010 Inez Hedges</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Northeastern University</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">i.hedges@neu.edu</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">source: <a href="http://sdonline.org/53/morning-star-surrealism-marxism-anarchism-situation-ism-utopia/">http://sdonline.org/53/morning-star-surrealism-marxism-anarchism-situation-ism-utopia/</a></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Morning Star: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situation-ism, Utopia. by Michael Lowy</span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">YOU CAN READ AND FREE DOWNLOAD THE BOOK HERE:</span></b><br />
<a href="http://zinelibrary.info/files/Lowy%20-%20Morning%20Star%20-%20Surrealism,%20Marxism,%20Anarchism,%20Situationism,%20Utopia.pdf"><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">http://zinelibrary.info/files/Lowy%20-%20Morning%20Star%20-%20Surrealism,%20Marxism,%20Anarchism,%20Situationism,%20Utopia.pdf</span></a><br />
<br />Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-44461447490902336442015-04-05T04:54:00.000-07:002015-04-05T04:54:27.805-07:00No System but the Ecosystem: Earth First! and Anarchism by Panagioti Tsolkas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
There is a clear case to be made for the connection between ecology
and anarchism.1 Many philosophers, academics, and radicals have
elaborated this over the past two centuries2. But reviewing the history
of this theoretical relationship is not the goal here. The movement
surrounding anarchism in the past 200 years has certainly included its
fair share of theory, yet what has rooted anarchist ideas so deeply in
human society is the prioritization of action. It is this action-based
relationship between the ecological movement and anarchism that we
explore.<br />
How has anarchism inspired and shaped ecological action in recent
history, and how might it continue to? The experience of Earth First!
over three-and-a-half decades embodies the most critical aspects of this
question.<br />
While Earth First! (EF!) has never considered itself to be explicitly
anarchist, it has always had a connection to the antiauthoritarian
counterculture and has operated in an anarchistic fashion since its
inception3. In doing so, it has arguably maintained one of the most
consistent and long-running networks for activists and revolutionaries
of an anarchist persuasion with the broader goal of overturning all
socially constructed hierarchies.<br />
In Oppose and Propose: Lessons From Movement for a New Society, which
covers an under-acknowledged antiauthoritarian history, author Andrew
Cornell makes a case about MNS carrying the legacy of nonhierarchical
radical activism from the civil rights and anti-war era of the ’60s into
the anti-nuke era of the ’80s. Cornell points to MNS essentially
carrying the torch just long enough to spark what would become the
global justice movement of the late ’90s.<br />
A similar case can be made for Earth First!, particularly within the
decade between the formal end of MNS and the 1999 uprising against the
World Trade Organization in the streets of Seattle. Except rather than
formally calling it quits, as MNS did in ’89, EF! stuck around,
stumbling through several waves of internal strife and state repression
to continue into its 35th year as a decentralized,
horizontally-organized, anticapitalist, antistate force to be reckoned
with.4<br />
As many anarchist-oriented projects come and go, it is worthwhile to
explore how and why those efforts that persist over decades are able to
do so. Even more importantly, in this time of global urgency surrounding
an escalation of overlapping ecological crises (extinction, extraction,
climate change, etc.), and the recuperation of environmentalism by a
“green” industrial economy, the story of Earth First!—for all its
imperfections and baggage—has crucial lessons for ecological
revolutionaries.<br />
When Earth First! had its first peak of notoriety in the mid-to-late
’80s, it was swarmed by academics and journalists looking to study its
motivations, culture and worldview. Countless research papers and
several books surfaced to explore the movement from its infancy to its
initial split. The split, as it has thus-far been presented in the vast
majority of the published history, was between the original
narrowly-focused faction advocating explicitly for wilderness
protection, and an opposing faction oriented towards a broader analysis
focused on challenging the capitalist system along with its pillars of
patriarchy, racism and other forms of domination.<br />
While the latter faction got tagged with the label of being “the
anarchists,” there are plenty of examples of anarchism being a
significant inspiration to both camps. The cause of the split was a
divide between folks with a strongly US-flavored individualist tendency,
à la Ed Abbey,5 and the more classically socialistic
mass-movement-types who might best be represented by the organizing of
Judi Bari.6 On one side was the group rallying around the iconic
identity of the “rebellious redneck,” attempting to capture rural
support in a practical, populist style.7 The other is often credited
with a familiarity with the theoretical writings of Murray Bookchin,
originator of the theory known as social ecology and its political
program, libertarian municipalism.8 Many of this second group came with
the stigma of being “urbanites.”<br />
The record shows the black-clad socialist-leaning end of the
anarchist spectrum as victors over the cowboy-hat-and-belt-buckle rugged
individualists, with a climax at the 1990 EF! Rendezvous, resulting in a
burned American flag and a changing of hands for the movement’s
mouthpiece, The Earth First! Journal. At this time the EF! Journal
shifted hands from co-founder Dave Foreman’s control to a formal
editorial collective. This ushered in a stronger sentiment of autonomy
and decentralization in the minimalist structure of EF!, as there was no
longer a central figure associated with its primary means of
communication.<br />
Yet there are also plenty of examples showing overlap between the two
factions since day one. For example, the frequent use of the pen-name
Leon Czolgosz—the anarchist assassin of US President McKinley—appeared
prominently throughout EF! Journals in the early-to-mid ’80s, and Dave
Foreman’s co-authorship of Ecodefense with the ghost of famed IWW
organizer “Big Bill” Haywood, who was exiled from the US to Russia along
with Emma Goldman in 1917.<br />
While Foreman became a lightning rod in the debate, particularly
highlighting his increasingly conservative views on immigration, his
initial anarchist tendencies that inspired the founding of EF! are
present in passages throughout his autobiography, Confessions of an
Eco-Warrior.9<br />
Unfortunately, most of the well-documented and published research on
EF! ends around the time of this split. Books like Coyotes and Town Dogs
by Susan Zakin, Green Rage by Chris Manes, Eco-Warriors by Rik Scarce,
and essays by academics like Giorel Curran10 and Bron Taylor11 all taper
off in the mid ’90’s. Even books that were published more recently,
such as Treespiker (2009), written by EF! co-founder Mike Roselle, lose
track of the EF! movement by the early ’00s.<br />
Others have opted to ignore EF!’s role in the ecology movement
completely, such as the documentary film by Mark Kitchell A Fierce Green
Fire, released in 2013, and the 2011 book Deep Green Resistance,
co-authored by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Aric McBay.<br />
Kitchell’s film is an excellent historical overview of the
environmental movement and the influence that direct action has had on
it, including features on Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd and the seldom talked
about Love Canal hostage-taking incident12 that sparked the modern
concept of environmental justice. But the film fails to even mention the
undeniable impact that EF! had in the trajectory of the movement.<br />
The Jensen, et al, Deep Green Resistance (DGR) book, which inspired a
parallel organizational effort, also left EF! out of their narrative.
While there is much content of interest, Deep Green Resistance
essentially presents a revisionist history of ecological struggles,
painting DGR as the only radical option in the environmental movement,
and further indicating the strong Maoist influences that anarchists have
suspected of the organization since its inception.<br />
For these reasons alone, an EF! movement overview from a grassroots
perspective, particularly highlighting the past decade-and-a-half, is
much needed.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Thoughts on EF! Strategy and Context</b></span><br />
EF! has often been lumped in with non-violent movements, even though
“nonviolence” has never been a guiding tenet (with the exception of a
very few EF! groups.)<br />
The most often discussed example of this was in the midst of
anti-logging campaigns in Northern California, where famed organizer
Judi Bari made headway in bridging the interests of working class
loggers and anti-corporate environmentalists by convincing EF!ers in the
region to swear off tree spiking, and embrace a rhetoric of
non-violence.<br />
But the larger debate has manifested in a much more general way, most
visible in the chosen tactics of EF! affinity groups. The overwhelming
number of EF!-affiliated actions involve classically executed civil
disobedience, where EF!ers establish blockades or occupations in which
people depend on the police to react with a certain amount of restraint
and caution in the process of evictions, resulting in quite predictable
arrests. Often, small-scale property damage and disruptions of the less
civil sort also occur publicly, but these tend to be peripheral to the
planned actions.<br />
This approach can seem strange for people who live in countries where
engagement with the state tends to occur on much different terms.
Perhaps it is this reason that organizing under the EF! banner has been
seen primarily in “first world” countries.<br />
EF! affinity groups have shown that blockades can be an effective
form of resistance because they take a financial toll on industrial
opponents, not only in the form of forced work stoppages, but also in
significant costs associated with increased security and insurance
premiums and most of all, the expense of dealing with negative public
relations.<br />
There are other important aspects of this form of resistance as well.
For one, it allows an opportunity to attract a broader base of public
support. Even in places and times where militant revolutionary sentiment
is not present, EF!’s style of resistance allows space for a larger
spectrum of allies, particularly from impacted local communities and
mainstream environmentalists who are receptive to the need for direct
action. In many cases, these groups may lack the courage, skills or
privileges that allow for effective action, but will contribute towards
campaigns in many other ways: food, supplies, monetary assistance, and
so on.<br />
And perhaps most importantly, the civil disobedience style of action
that EF! is most known for allows deeper relationships of affinity to
form through shared experiences of public confrontation. Time and again,
we have heard stories of these relationships in the streets or the
backwoods giving birth to stronger affinity groups capable of greater
organized attacks that do not rely on civility and expectations of
arrest, as in the case of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), which grew
almost simultaneously in the 1990s from the anti-roads occupations in
the UK and anti-logging blockades in the US.<br />
Ironically, another example of the issues surrounding nonviolence
rhetoric can be seen in the guidelines adopted by the organized factions
of the ELF.<br />
The connections between EF! and the ELF are quite clear. Though the
organizing of each occurred independently, we still see much crossover
in culture and attitude, including strategy, tactics and philosophy. Yet
while the ELF presents a more militant approach, they also take the
rhetoric of nonviolence more seriously than EF! has, articulating a
definition of violence (essentially, direct impacts to living beings)
and a position against engaging in it. All printed materials produced by
ELF cells, their support groups and their press offices stress not
intentionally harming living things. This language did not come from
EF!, but from the animal liberation movement, specifically the Animal
Liberation Front (ALF).<br />
It’s at this juncture where we can see another significant cross-pollination between the modern anarchist movement and EF!<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Earth First! and Animal Liberation</b></span><br />
Since the earliest days of EF!, there have been both staunch vegans
and committed hunters involved. But there has been sufficient
commonality, and a shared rejection of anthropocentrism, to avoid much
conflict. As a result, the nuances and contradictions—such as
prioritization of sentient animals over the integrity of whole
ecosystems13—have gone unexplored, perhaps in an attempt not to upset
the tenuous dynamic.<br />
But there are some noteworthy challenges over the last couple of
decades. As Judi Bari’s anti-capitalist analysis increased EF!’s appeal
to crowds of college students and anarcho-punks, the prominence of
animal liberation activists co-mingling with EF!ers increased.<br />
And just as Bari herself didn’t fit the label of the
urban-dwelling-university-Marxist, neither did some of the anarchists
who brought animal liberation into EF! circles. The most prominent of
these was Rod Coronado, a Native American of the Pascua Yaqui Nation,
who participated in EF! gatherings during the ’80s and gained notoriety
for acts of sabotage that sunk half the Icelandic whalers fleet costing
them $2 million, in addition to an arson at Michigan State University
which caused $125,000 worth of damage and destroyed 32 years of fur
industry research as part of the ALF’s “Operation Bite Back.”<br />
Coronado’s roots in the animal liberation movement are illustrative
of the movement itself. Coronado got started by sabotaging trophy
hunters with other anarchists while visiting the UK. Similar hunt
sabotages in the ’70s are how the ALF began. His specific involvement in
these actions make up a large part of the initial cross-pollination
between anarchism, animal liberation and Earth First!<br />
Through the ’90s and ’00s, these overlapping movements became a
prominent force in direct action struggles. In the US, the FBI
identified each of them as constituting significant “terrorist” threats,
though none had actually caused bodily harm, only economic damage.<br />
While the ambitious direct action culture surrounding the ALF can be
credited with lending inspiration and courage to radical
environmentalism, and EF! specifically, valuable questions should also
be asked about this relationship. Such as:<br />
Does the philosophy of animal liberation contradict biocentrism by
prioritizing sentient animals over plants, mountains, rivers, etc.?<br />
Does this philosophy create limitations on EF!’s long-term biocentric
goals by encouraging rigid guidelines on violence and sentience?<br />
Does it lessen EF!’s connection to land-based communities by
dismissing the interests of animal farmers and hunters that are often at
the forefront of threats from industrial expansion?<br />
These are subjects with plenty of gray areas. Yet, these topics have
also been increasingly divisive among those engaged in eco-resistance.
The divisions have been fueled in large part by DGR co-author Lierre
Keith’s other book, The Vegetarian Myth. Unfortunately Keith’s
authoritarian attitude and anti-transgender position have stifled what
could have been a much more productive discussion resulting from her
book.<br />
Yet it is possible to explore disagreements between animal liberation
philosophy and EF!’s biocentrism, while continuing to deepen
commitments to fighting together on common goals.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>A Review of Insurrectionist Tendencies in Earth First!</b></span><br />
The rise of insurrectionary anarchism has been one of the most
frequent crossovers between EF! and the anarchist movement over the past
decade.<br />
At the 2013 Earth First! Rendezvous in North Carolina, a small
pamphlet addressed to Earth First! was circulated under the title “The
Issues Are Not the Issue: A letter to Earth First! from a Too-Distant
Friend,” credited to the pseudonym ST (an author affiliated with
CrimethInc.) A discussion group accompanied the pamphlet on the topics
addressed by the writer, who acknowledged that “none of this [was]
particularly new,” hearkening back primarily to the essay “Earth First!
Means Social War,” a popular but rambling piece of prose published by
the EF! Journal in 200714. The “Issues” essay can be summed up as: EF!
spends too much effort on organized campaigns and not enough on
fomenting general revolt.<br />
While there is merit to this idea, the critical tone is played out.
At its worst, it’s dangerous to those aiming to sustain an ecological
resistance—not dangerous as in exciting (as are many of CrimethInc.’s
rants15) but dangerous as in potentially dragging EF! back through the
mud, which played a negative role in periods of stagnation and
repression, and worse, paved the way for blunders like the development
of the cult of DGR.<br />
The sentiment in “Issues” actually predates the “EF! Means Social
War” article by seven or eight years. ST makes a vague reference to
similar critiques that surfaced earlier in British EF! circles. These
references point to another essay, called “Give Up Activism,” which
circulated as a pamphlet, and was later published, ironically, in the
Earth First! Journal.<br />
In the following years, the influence of Green Anarchy (GA), both as
an ideology and a publication, also coming to the US via the UK, began
reshaping Earth First! The GA movement and its magazine contributed
significantly to developing the theory that surrounded EF!’s basic
tenets. But it also included GA folks attending EF! gatherings to
convince other participants to abandon activism and organizing, which
people affiliated with Green Anarchy view as perpetuated by a civilized
mindset.16<br />
Green Anarchy attempted to narrow the definition of direct action to
militant acts of sabotage, either carried out by underground groups or
by mobs, opposing any efforts at publicly organized resistance, calling
it “Leftist.” While many insurrectionary anarchists might balk at a
claim that they are influenced by GA, they would be hard-pressed to deny
its influence.<br />
“Issues,” “Social War,” and Green Anarchy were all also predated by
another similar trend and its accompanying publication, Live Wild Or Die
(LWOD). Like the others, it was militant, anarchist, anti-Left, and
anti-civilization. It was also well-circulated at EF! gatherings. Rumor
has it that it may have actually been edited and produced by anonymous
collective members of the EF! Journal. Unlike the others, it wasn’t
trying to coax people away from organized campaigns, sustained road
blockades, and Earth First!’s unique activist culture in general, but
rather hoped to accentuate these.<br />
In the years following the circulation of LWOD, when EF! was at its
peak, the Earth Liberation Front flared up across the US—often in tandem
with public ecodefense campaigns. Much of the anti-globalization
movement that gridlocked urban streets during the trade summits of this
time also descended from regional EF! campaigns. Not to mention Ted
Kaczynski, dubbed the Unabomber by the government for his targeting of
university professors involved in questionable technological research,
made use of LWOD’s published target list, as well as drawing inspiration
from articles in the EF! Journal.<br />
In comparison, a couple years into the publication of Green Anarchy
magazine, the ecological movement experienced a lull accompanied by the
most severe repression it had experienced. Unfortunately, folks had
created a movement that was learning how to skin roadkill, dream of
insurrection, and cheer for indigenous uprisings in faraway lands, but
was too ideologically isolated and marginal to effectively withstand the
wave of FBI repression that hit among key players in the rising
ecological resistance efforts of the mid-2000s.<br />
The median age range of participants in EF! dropped by nearly a
decade in those years. By the 2007 Round River Rendezvous (EF!’s annual
summer gathering in the US), also the year “EF! Means Social War” was
published, there was hardly a person over thirty in attendance. The
following year, at the Rendezvous in Indiana, there was a well-attended
discussion led by young anarchists out of the insurrectionist milieu on
whether or not EF! should continue to exist at all. Earth First! endured
two hard blows over the last ten years: many newer activists became
convinced it wasn’t as cool as it had been in the ’90s; and many older
activists became convinced that affiliation with it wasn’t worth the
surveillance and repression.<br />
As a result, with the exception of a few groups and campaigns across
the US and UK, very few were using the Earth First! banner. In its
place, myriad groups became more prominent, further fragmenting what was
left of EF!. Examples include Cascadia Forest Defenders and Mountain
Justice in the early 2000s; Root Force and Rising Tide in the mid-2000s;
and Tar Sands Blockade and Appalachia Resist! in the last few years.<br />
While most of the local or issue-specific manifestations that
spiraled out of EF! were tamer and media-friendly, most noteworthy
Rising Tide, an opposite effect also occurred. A glimpse of this could
be seen in the short-lived Root Force project. Root Force, birthed
through the EF! Journal in 2006, sought a more targeted movement
strategy focusing on stopping the expansion of key global infrastructure
projects. The project was modeled on Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty
(SHAC), an animal liberation campaign targeting companies affiliated
with vivisection giant Huntingdon Life Science (HLS), which successfully
applied pressure via direct action to sever contracts that supported
the operation of HLS.<br />
Inspired largely by Derrick Jensen’s Endgame books, Root Force’s
ambitious, militant rhetoric resulted in a semi-vanguardist organizing
approach that soon faded into a scaled back effort, and eventually
became just a website offering anti-infrastructure news, strategy and
analysis.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Enter Deep Green Resistance</b></span><br />
While tension between EF! and Deep Green Resistance (DGR) has
primarily concerned criticism of DGR’s rigid structure, represented most
clearly by a mandated rejection of transgender people,17 there is
something deeper.<br />
In several ways, EF!ers participated in allowing DGR to develop, some
even subtly nurturing it in hopes that it might be able to fill the
niche that was left by what appeared to be EF!s fading, perhaps pushing
the no-compromise envelope even further than EF! had been able to.18<br />
But that’s no longer the case—EF! no longer appears on its way out,
and DGR does not appear to be growing, at least not outside of Facebook.
Still, seeing the success that DGR enjoyed momentarily leaves one
guarded of critiques like the ones in “Issues.”19 Not because EF! is too
thin-skinned to be criticized, but because the organizing that appears
in the vacuums that we leave is, at least in part, on us.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>A Voice for the Underground and for Caged Warriors</b></span><br />
One of the things that sets EF! apart from other eco-groups is the
consistent vocal support for incidents of ecological armed struggle
around the world, including the US.<br />
While most environmental groups have generally shied away from
militant actions, dismissed them—or worse, falsely accusing them of
being done by state provocateurs—EF! has consistently stood up for
militant underground groups’ actions, celebrating their attacks and
publishing their communiqués.<br />
Since the inception of the Earth Liberation Front, which appeared in
the early ’90s, first in the UK, then in the US, it has always had ties
to EF!. Essentially, EF! operated as an aboveground support network and
mouthpiece for ELF actions. The same can be said to an extent for the
ALF, though it was initiated in the late ’70s, prior to the existence of
EF!, and has always maintained a larger base of support among the
mainstream animal rights movement.<br />
In the wake of the Green Scare—a phrase used to describe a series of
events in which both underground and aboveground Earth and animal
liberation activists were arrested and accused of terrorism—the stories
of individuals from active cells of the ELF have become public
knowledge. The relationship between the ELF and EF! was exposed by these
cases to be very strong, with direct connections between people who
were involved simultaneously in major EF! blockades, the EF! Journal and
some of the most notorious instances of ELF sabotage.<br />
One take on this situation is that this relationship was too close,
and that people involved in underground actions should have avoided the
aboveground movement entirely. But a more realistic assessment of the
Green Scare is that while many major ELF actions seemed to be undertaken
by superheroes of fictional proportions, they were actually carried out
by small groups of normal people, just like anyone else. In many cases,
they may have once stood next to us at a campfire or protest.<br />
We now know that many of those indicted for ELF crimes knew each
other from their participation in aboveground direct action campaigns or
participation on the Earth First! Journal collective, where they built
enough trust and respect for each other to undertake attacks that caused
over a hundred million dollars in damages to corporate and government
targets in over 1,000 reported actions in the US alone.<br />
The largest of known ELF cells, what the media referred to as “The
Family,” operated with more than a dozen active members, torching a
lumber company headquarters, a US Forest Service office, genetic
engineering test sites, a ski resort and a slaughterhouse, among others.
Members of the cell were only arrested after it had disbanded and one
of the members with a heroine addiction, Jake Fergusen, became a
government informant.<br />
Despite the wave of indictments, grand juries, new laws aimed at
Earth and animal activists, and accusations of terrorism, the ELF
continue their strikes to this day, claiming recent actions in the US
and in several other countries, including Russia, Mexico, Indonesia,
England and Germany.<br />
In communiqués from ELF cells in these other countries, it has not
been uncommon in the last few years that an action will be claimed by
both the ELF and another explicitly anarchist group, most commonly an
ad-hoc faction of the Federation of Informal Anarchists (or FAI in the
Italian acronym).<br />
There are countless peasant and indigenous groups who choose the path
of armed self-defense and rebellion around the world that get direct
support from people involved with EF! or coverage in the pages of the
EF! Journal and Newswire. Even considering strategic and ideological
differences, EF! continually offers these groups a public voice to
amplify the feelings of urgency and anger that their actions express,
particularly in the moments when members of these groups have been
captured by the state.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Eco-Prisoner Support</b></span><br />
While prisoner support has been a long-standing tradition of
anarchists worldwide, EF! is one of the few environmental groups to
acknowledge the existence of ecological political prisoners. It has been
a source of support for many ecologically oriented prisoners over the
past 30 years by publishing addresses and stories to encourage
correspondence and circulating the EF! Journal to prisoners around the
world.<br />
In the past decade, the numbers of these prisoners has spiked,
resulting from the increase of state resources and policies directed at
labeling ecological saboteurs as terrorists. This is done partly at the
behest of industrial corporations profiting from creating ecological
crisis, as we have seen in the agenda of the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC).20<br />
This repression is not only targeting underground activists. For
example, ALEC is responsible for creating and lobbying for laws to
generalize the criminalization of dissent, such as the Animal Enterprise
Terrorism Act (AETA21) which sent six members of the SHAC group to
prison on charges related to their aboveground organizing.<br />
While this sentiment is very strong in the US, we are seeing it
spread to other countries as well, such as in the Il Silvestre cases of
Swiss and Italian eco-anarchists accused with the legal language of
terrorism for planning to attack a nanotech laboratory owned by IBM. The
trend has also spread to Latin America, where environmentalists are
working with indigenous groups to resist industrialization.<br />
The practice of political prisoner support has also seen friction
between Earth First! and anarchists on several occasions. In one
example, the long-standing Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) Federation was
hesitant to accept eco and animal prisoners onto their national listing
of prisoners to support, starting with the imprisonment of Rod Coronado
in the mid-90s. When the Green Scare hit in 2005, this tension
resurfaced and ultimately, the culture of the ABC network shifted, with
many supporters of eco-prisoners taking active roles in the
organization.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Eco-Liberation Against Oppression</b></span><br />
While EF! gained a reputation in the ’80s as beer-swilling macho
guys, in part rightly so, there is certainly more to the story. The
women involved at that time also speak of a powerful feminist
presence.22 And there is ample evidence that expressing active
solidarity with indigenous and land-based communities has been a
priority for many EF!ers since day one.23<br />
Still, along with much of the early environmental conservation
movement, EF! came out of largely white, middle-class, single-issue
oriented activism. That’s left a lot of baggage to unpack. EF! has had
rocky moments in its history, namely with xenophobia and racist
misanthropic ranting about population control.<br />
Today, the movement’s most prominent organizers have worked to
confront that history as well as more recent manifestations of similar
attitudes, and worked to strengthen EF!’s affinity with marginalized
communities and individuals with whom they share basic values.<br />
In the past decade, groups like Trans’ and Women’s Action Camp (TWAC)
and Rising Tide, both beginning as offshoots of EF!, continue to have
much crossover with the organization. These groups represent an
important piece of EF!’s recent history, and they also point to the
likely future of EF! and the broader ecological resistance movement.<br />
TWAC formed as a pro-feminist, queer-and-trans-positive space outside
of the patriarchy and gender norms that often surfaced at EF!
gatherings and actions. Beginning in 2004, TWAC was initially an “all
womyn’s24 affinity groups and action camp” established in forest defense
campaigns in the Pacific Northwest. In the following years, the name
TWAC appeared and spread from the Pacific Northwest to Florida, with
TWAC-oriented affinity groups also appearing at all recent EF!
gatherings.<br />
Along with providing more inclusive spaces for discussion and action
trainings, TWAC actions can also be credited with pushing back the
boundaries of conventional activist media strategy, coordinating actions
that use the language of anti-oppression prominently. In a way, this
has succeeded in demystifying public discourse around liberatory
language.<br />
Rising Tide also surfaced in the mid 2000s, first in the UK, then in
the US. The US group, which started as the Earth First! Climate Caucus
in 2006, soon became Rising Tide North America (RTNA), including
contacts in Mexico and Canada. The group focuses primarily on supporting
environmental justice struggles of communities on the front lines of
issues related to climate change and carbon extraction, with a secondary
focus on exposing false solutions to climate change, in particular the
market-based approach of making carbon offsets into a capitalist
commodity.<br />
Some initial concerns were raised regarding Rising Tide drawing
people and energy from EF!. While that did happen to a certain extent,
there have also been benefits, including increased movement building and
organizing experience with frontline communities. Rising Tide reaches
people that EF! has historically had less successful relations
with—namely the environmental justice movement, led by people of color
and low-income folks. Today, there may be more people from EF!
organizing as Rising Tide than EF!<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Disappointment with DGR</b></span><br />
When Deep Green Resistance (DGR) came on the scene, it was not
uncommon to hear EF!ers expressing high hopes that they would bring new
energy and strategic thinking … and boy was that a let down!<br />
The people at the top of DGR consistently disrespect potential allies
in transgender, anarchist25 and animal rights circles, then preach ad
naseum against “horizontal hostility” (meaning the denigration of other
activists’ efforts) whenever they were challenged.<br />
In 2013, the EF! Journal Collective adopted a position explicitly
taking issue with the persistent anti-transgender attitude of Keith and
Jensen, and the policies they enforce for DGR, using their influence as
renowned authors. DGR’s position against trans people stems from
adherence to a theoretical trend of second wave feminism. This view
thinks that if gender is a social construct designed to repress women,
any expression of gender is therefore an affront to women. While EF! has
long held a critique of patriarchy, seeing it as having cleared a path
for industrialism, it takes more than the absence or presence of a penis
to maintain patriarchy. The controlling and dominating behavior
exemplified by DGR’s authority figures is a far greater concern than the
fabricated threat of transgender people against a particular sect of
feminism.<br />
Thankfully the debate surrounding DGR has presented another
opportunity for today’s anarchist and ecological resistance movements to
clarify and strengthen its position of solidarity with trans people.
Making strides towards the queering of activist counter culture has
become a priority for many EF! organizers.<br />
Despite the disappointment with DGR, the primary reason that people
were drawn to it—a desire for deeper strategic thinking— remains largely
unsatisfied. Sadly, DGR has lost all the credibility it may have had.
Even Aric McBay, the primary author of the strategy sections in the book
upon which the movement is based, parted ways with the organization,
citing frustration with the group’s anti-transgender policy.26<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>An Image from the Future of Ecological Resistance</b></span><br />
Around the world, both ecological consciousness and rebellion against
the state are becoming more the norm. In the last year, uprisings in
Turkey, Brazil, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Ferguson28 (to name but a few)
have at times dominated news’ headlines. Two years prior, capitol
squares were occupied in Spain and Greece, riots occurred in England,
and First Nations’ blockades erupted across Canada. Even glimmers of
revolt in the belly of the US Empire, with the Occupy encampment on Wall
Street, an attempt at a general strike to shut down Oakland’s ports,
and over 400 Occupy-related direct action camps in public spaces across
the country. And shortly before that, of course, was the Arab Spring.<br />
This news was often side-by-side with stories of the rise of the
global hydraulic fracking industry; the nightmare of expanding and
exporting tar sands oil; the boom in pipeline construction and
subsequent spills or explosions; poisoned water from mining disasters;
outrage against Monsanto’s biotech mega-farms; failure after failure in
UN and other international bodies’ attempts at addressing the crises
surrounding climate change, etc.<br />
The relations between these uprisings and these harsh ecological
realities have been peripheral at best (except for Turkey, where the
rebellion was spurred from the clearing of trees in a public park). But
the potential for drawing out these connections is staring us in the
face. The vast majority of Earth First! campaigns stem from a microcosm
of the same power dynamics that tend to spark rebellions around the
world: greed, corruption, land and power grabs, resource control, and
brutal repression that often fan the flames of resistance.<br />
Earth First!, with all its affiliates and offshoots, clearly has a
contribution to make in that discussion, but there are other places
outside of EF! worth a look as well, especially regarding the
relationships between mass movements and affinity groups, and more
specifically, aboveground and underground participants.<br />
The following is only a brief glimpse of some recent campaigns and
social struggles that deserve the attention of movement strategists.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Anti-Gold Mining Resistance in Greece</b></span><br />
Over the last 10 years,
opposition to the construction and expansion of gold mining operations
in northern Greece has shown instructive examples of community-led
militancy. Villages in the mining region, in particular Skouries, have
led the struggle with a series of road blockades, conflicts with the
police and large-scale acts of sabotage. Part of the recent history of
the anarchist movement’s relations to anti-gold mining struggles goes
back to an underground action in the late 1990s by Nikos Maziotis, a
well-known figure today who was arrested in 2011 in connection to the
armed anarchist group Epanastatikos Agonas.29 Along with underground
support, the effort to stop the gold mines has generated widespread
support, connecting itself with the mass movement opposing the greed and
corruption associated with social cuts and austerity measures being
pushed by the European Union.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>The ZADists of France </b></span><br />
Out of a decades-long effort by local farmers
to stop an airport from clearing around 4000 acres of farms and
forests, an anarchist-led occupation of the land turned into an
inspiring model of ecological resistance. ZAD, a play on the airport
project’s acronym, was a village-scale squat. After a series of eviction
attempts in 2012 – 2013, where farmers would arrive at the protest camp
using their tractors to prevent excavators from destroying the squatter
camps, the project was delayed. The spirit of the ZAD has since been
revived in an occupation of a site slated for dam construction. The most
recent occurrence at this site was the murder of a ZADist during a
confrontation with police attempting an eviction, which sparked an
international outpouring of solidarity actions.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Defending Land from Coal Mining in Germany and Scotland </b></span><br />
Once again,
a long-term community-led struggle gives way to anarchist land defense
camp offering a glimpse of the potential for militant ecology. In two
recent cases, the Hambach forest occupation in Germany and the Mainshill
camp in Scotland, anarchist and environmental organizers showed an
ability to embrace a wide range of tactics in resisting coal, an issue
which has become a worldwide hot button over the past decade due to the
climate crisis. In the case of Mainshill, a compiled list of action
between 2009 – 2010 includes a dozen acts of sabotage intermixed with
roadblocks, home demos and community organizing. The Hambach campaign,
which is fighting the largest coal mining operation in Europe, has seen a
similar range of tactics.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Fifteen Years of Resistance to Shell in Ireland </b></span><br />
Before pipeline
resistance became all the rage in North America, the folks from the
Rossport area of County Mayo, Ireland, were setting the stage. A mix of
community activists who trace their roots to anti-colonial Irish
struggle and young anarchist climate justice organizers combined to
inspire on ongoing opposition to pipeline and refinery construction
which has been able to embrace acts of sabotage in broad-daylight
against surveying and construction materials, amidst months of ongoing
daily road blockades, all the while expressing solidarity with Shell’s
worldwide opposition, namely those resisting the oil and gas industry in
the Niger Delta.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Anti-Road Forest Defense: Khimikhi in Russia </b></span><br />
Amazing accounts of a
forest defense in 2010 against a road between Moscow and St. Petersburg
boasted of blockades, tree spiking and arson to construction equipment,
where anti-fascist groups got involved to confront the fascist thugs
brought in to support the development company’s security. The resistance
seemed to climax at a solidarity protest in which masked anarchists
trashed the local city hall building—in the middle of the day—where the
construction was approved.<br />
<br />
<span style="color: yellow;"><b>Anti-Pipeline Fights in Canada </b></span><br />
The last several decades of
collaboration and crossover between anarchists, ecologists and
Indigenous communities in the occupied territory of Canada has offered
inspirational guidance to the direction of a revolutionary, militant,
non-authoritarian environmental movement. While there has been many
examples to cite, especially amidst the anti-2010 Winter Olympics
campaign and the 2012 explosion of Idle No More organizing, a specific
case which stands out is the fracking resistance in Elsipogtog, where
Mi’kmaq warriors from the First Nations in what is known as New
Brunswick fought against plans with a full spectrum of tactics,
including the confiscation and arson of company equipment, along with
barricades where cops cars were set on fire during a stand-off in 2013.<br />
<br />
There are many more examples as well, all around the world,30 of
underground actions effectively running concurrent with aboveground
movements—some with explicit ecological aims, others with general
anti-system rage. Most of these actions go underneath the radar of
people not reading the dozens of communiqués posted online at
international anarchist and insurrectionary sites like ContraInfo or
325.NoState. (Worth noting is that for every person arrested in relation
to underground activity, actions multiply in their honor.)<br />
While few, if any, of these groups embrace a strict policy relating
to the use of violence, their actions tend to target property, not
people.<br />
The skills, experience and culture of groups such as EF!, who
straddle the line of aboveground and underground action, can play a
significant part in creating contexts where things like anti-industrial
blockades and office occupations occur in tandem with generalized
uprisings, providing inspiration and social space for militant attacks
and strategic sabotage to also take place.<br />
It’s not exactly a new formula for subverting society. And contrary
to common sentiment among cynical US anarchists, it’s not something that
only happens outside the US. That is illustrated by a 2013 document
leaked by the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and Pennsylvania
State Police.31 In the document, a presentation intended to profile
groups seen as threats to fracking companies, the JTTF creates a
timeline of regional opposition to fracking in which several EF!
blockades and tree sits are interspersed with a drive-by shooting and
multiple alleged attempts at incendiary device attacks on fracking
sites, between July 2012 and May 2013.<br />
The future of ecological resistance is not something that needs an
elaborate blueprint, rigid structure or dizzying intellectual dogma.
It’s not some fantastical super hero comic book or bad movie plot (where
you have to share a communal meal in straightjackets with the mates in
your clandestine cell to prepare for the jam, as depicted in the film
The East 32).<br />
In short, we need to continue doing much of what we’ve been doing. We
have the basic elements for fomenting ecological rebellion. It’s the
scale of our opposition that is lacking. As we’ve been seeing in recent
uprisings around the world that can all change very quickly. With this
in mind, the following questions are offered to those desiring to take
steps toward heightened ecological, anti-authoritarian struggle.<br />
<br />
How do we amplify ourselves further? How do we make our actions more easily replicated?<br />
And perhaps most importantly, how to we personally move our
relationships from acquaintances at a protest to co-conspirators in
ecological resistance?<br />
<br />
These are questions that anarchists have grappled with over the
course of the past 150 years in the movement’s modern history—a history
that essentially paralleled the rise of industrialism. Viewed in that
context, the ambitions of Earth First! can easily be seen as a
continuation of anarchist ambitions, as there is little doubt that the
coming generation of struggle for a free society will need to be more
deeply rooted in ecology.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Panagioti Tsolkas </b>has been an EF! organizer and on the EF! Journal’s
Editorial Collective since 2010, though he is currently taking a hiatus.
He has been a part of both Earth First! and anarchist movements in the
US since the mid ’90s. He grew up in a Greek-American immigrant family
and currently lives in the Everglades bioregion of sub-tropical south
Florida. He’s never attended university and believes credibility in
presenting an analysis of a movement should come primarily from lived
experience rather than deskbound study.<br />
Details about EF! gatherings, contact info for local groups, updates
from actions, and general news/analysis can be found at:
<a href="http://earthfirstjournal.org/">earthfirstjournal.org</a><br />
<br />
Posted by Perspectives on Anarchist Theory
(<a href="http://anarchiststudies.org/perspectives/">anarchiststudies.org/perspectives/</a> ) on the Institute for Anarchist
Studies website ( <a href="http://anarchiststudies.org/">anarchiststudies.org</a>).<br />
<br />
<br />
Notes<br />
1 The perspectives presented come from a first-hand perspective. The
author has no credentials in academia. On the contrary, he doesn’t have a
High School diploma.<br />
2 A few familiar, albeit very Eurocentric, examples might include:
Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid; the writings of French geographer Elisee Reclus,
transcendentalists like H.D. Thoreau and Romantics such as William
Blake; Emma Goldman’s naming of her publication Mother Earth; the
earlier experiences of the Diggers, Luddites and other rurally-based
radical movements, and more recently, the writings of Murray Bookchin
who has been explicitly exploring anarchist theory and social ecology
since the 1960s.<br />
3 This is the case particularly in the US, UK and Australia. Although
there is a history of EF!-affiliated activity in other countries,
including Japan, The Philippines, Sierra Leon, Poland, France, the
Netherlands, Iceland, Italy and France, I have found much less
background information in these places to make as clear a case.<br />
4 The Center for Consumer Freedom and the FBI has considered EF! a
primary domestic threat for many years. As recent as Oct 2013, the US
Army has released a manual listing Earth First! as terrorist threat.
Source: <a href="http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2013/10/14/u-s-army-lists-earth-first-as-terrorist-threat-alongside-al-qaeda/">http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2013/10/14/u-s-army-lists-earth-fi...</a><br />
5 Abbey was the author of cult classic The Monkeywrech Gang, a
fictitious book that inspired environmentalists in the ’70s to rally
around sabotage as a tactic, spurring the start of EF! While Abbey was
consistently anti-authoritarian in most of his views, he also dabbled in
some questionable rhetoric regarding immigrants and borders. In
particular, an essay on immigration included in a collection of his
work, entitled One Life At A Time Please, has been frequently referenced
by notoriously bigoted right-wing xenophobes affiliated with the racist
John Tanton network in attempt to maintain a foothold of influence and
credibility in the environmental movement.<br />
6 Bari was best known for her staunch position as an IWW labor
organizer who brought loggers and environmentalists together to fight
the Maxxam corporation, a multinational company which was liquidating
its “assets” (jobs and trees), after getting caught up in the Savings
& Loans scandal. She wrote a popular booklet “Revolutionary Ecology”
calling for a more thorough anti-capitalist analysis from EF! She was
later injured in a car bomb that pointed to FBI involvement, and died in
1997.<br />
7 Ironically, this group was also more deeply embracing of the
hippy-esque spirituality of Deep Ecology, perhaps imagining themselves
capable of tapping into the religious fervor of rural Baptists.<br />
8 This clash manifested in a book, Defending the Earth, which was
co-authored by Bookchin and EF! co-founder Dave Foreman in 1991.<br />
9 Take this example of Foreman’s thoughts on borders and bioregions:
“One of the key concepts of bioregionalism is that modern political
boundaries have no relationship to natural ecological provinces.
Bioregionalists argue that human society—and therefore, politics and
economics—should be based on natural ecosystems. They find affinity with
Indian tribes and with Basque, Welsh, and Kurdish separatists, and have
no sympathy with the modern nation-state, empire, or multinational
corporation.” From Confessions of an Eco-Warrior. (Harmony Books. NYC,
1991. pp. 43)<br />
10 Curran’s 2006 book 21st Century Dissent: Anarchism,
Anti-Globalization and Environmentalism includes several chapters
regarding EF! and its offshoots<br />
11 Taylor’s recently wrote “Resistance: Do the Ends Justify the
Means” published by Worldwatch Institute in their State of the World
2013 book<br />
12 Two government representatives from the EPA were held hostage in
New York, May 1980, by low-income homeowner who were being poisoned from
the dumping of toxic chemicals. Two days later, their demands were met.<br />
13 The most glaring example: are the lives and freedom of mink caged
for fur worth the immediate risk posed to the populations of songbirds
and other small prey by large, sudden releases of predators into an
area?<br />
14 The author of “EF! Means Social War” went on to publish Politics
is Not A Banana in 2009, making the EF! Social War piece seem dry and
textbook-like.<br />
15 The CrimethInc. magazine Rolling Thunder, for example, calls itself “a journal of dangerous living.”<br />
16 This occurred most notably during the EF! Round River Rendezvous
of 2005, in the Mount Hood area of Oregon, ironically the same time and
location where the FBI began Operation Backfire, later known as a
starting point of the Green Scare (see below), by sending a wired
informant to secure evidence against ELF participants.<br />
17 “[M]y group and the other [DGR] chapters were presented with a choice: put up with trans phobia or hit the road.” Source: <a href="http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/how-derrick-jensens-deep-green-resistance-supports-transphobia/">http://www.decolonizingyoga.com/how-derrick-jensens-deep-green-resistanc...</a><br />
18 For example, the EF! Journal published a section of the DGR book
in its pages in 2012, and EF! organizers of the 2012 Winter Rendezvous
in Utah invited discussions from DGR organizers.<br />
19 During the writing of this essay, a new publication inspired by
GA, entitled Blackseed, released a first edition featuring an
all-too-familiar slam of EF!, this time focusing on a hollow position
that EF! is allegedly fortifying the rhetoric of nonviolence to pacify
ecological resistance.<br />
20 ALEC is an alliance of politicians and businesses formed to lobby the government for right wing and capitalist interests.<br />
21 Leaked documents from ALEC show that this law was initially
intended to have an even broader scope as the “Animal and Ecological
Terrorism Act,” but it ended up being tested out on animal activists
first, likely for fear that broadly including environmentalists may have
triggered a stronger backlash.<br />
22 Karen Pickett and Karen Coulter, both prominent organizers
involved with EF! since the early ‘80s, often speak to this at EF!
gatherings.<br />
23 The first EF! action on record involved erecting a monument to
Apache warriors who raided a mining camp. In 1980 Earth First! erected a
monument dedicated to Victorio for his successful raid on Cooney and
the killing of Cooney and his men. It read, in part, “ This monument
celebrates the 100th anniversary of the great Apache chief Victorio’s
raid on the Cooney mining camp near Mogollon, New Mexico, on April 12,
1880. Victorio strove to protect these mountains from mining and other
destructive activities of the white race. The present Gila Wilderness is
partly a fruit of his efforts…<br />
24 The spelling “women” was initially used by the organizers in this
group, though most TWAC organizers have opted to drop the “y” spelling,
as it has come to be associated with anti-trans sentiments of a second
wave feminist trend.<br />
25 Jensen: “The Black Bloc spends more time attempting to destroy
movements than they do attacking those in power…” “The anarchists are
liars. It’s what anarchists do.” Sources: <a href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206">http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_cancer_of_occupy_20120206</a> <a href="http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/blog/insurgent-g/17597">http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/blog/insurgent-g/17597</a><br />
26 McBay: “I find these transphobic attitudes to be disgusting and deeply troubling”. Source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Green_Resistance</a>.<br />
28 As this article goes to print, the US is experiencing a nationwide
response to multiple racist police killings, including riots and road
blockades in many states simultaneously, going on for several months
sparked by the uprising in Ferguson, MO.<br />
29 The case of Epanastatikos Agonas (EA) is one of the clearer recent
examples of the potential for aboveground and underground resistance as
part of a mass revolutionary movement influenced by anarchism. For
instance, as an October 2011 trial date approached for members of EA
facing charges related to a decade of attacks on government and
corporate targets, nearly 3,000 supporters reportedly marched down
central Athens in solidarity with the imprisoned members chanting “The
State is the only terrorists! Solidarity with the guerrilla fighters!”
Their widespread support was visible all over the country in
demonstrations, graffiti, posters and postings on dozens of websites.
The EA members were eventually released on a technicality in 2012, and
fled underground. Maziotis has since resurfaced and been returned to
prison. The Earth First! Journal and newswire covered struggles in
Greece extensively over the last several years.<br />
30 Mexico, China and Indonesia all come to mind as places where
recent militant environmental movements, indigenous struggles and
anarchist groups (above and under ground) have been able to open space
for what may be the future of environmentalism and anti-capitalism.<br />
31 Source:<a href="http://earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2014/02/15/leaked-pennsylvania-jttf-presentation-profiles-earth-first/">earthfirstjournal.org/newswire/2014/02/15/leaked-pennsylvania-jttf-presentation-profiles-earth-first/</a><br />
32 Yes. This scenario really happens in the terrible 2013 eco-terror
thriller film The East. And yes, they call their actions “jams.”<br />
<br />
source: Institute for Anarchist Studies<br />
<a href="http://anarchiststudies.org/2015/03/31/no-system-but-the-ecosystem-earth-first-and-anarchism-by-panagioti-tsolkas-1/" target="_blank">http://anarchiststudies.org/2015/03/31/no-system-but-the-ecosystem-earth-first-and-anarchism-by-panagioti-tsolkas-1/ </a><br />
About the IAS<br />
The Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS), a nonprofit foundation
established in 1996 to support the development of anarchism, is a
grant-giving organization for radical writers and translators worldwide.
To date, we have funded some ninety projects by authors from countries
around the world, including Argentina, Lebanon, Canada, Chile, Ireland,
Nigeria, Germany, South Africa, and the United States. Equally
important, we publish the Anarchist Interventions book series in
collaboration with AK Press and Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, the
online journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, and the new Lexicon
pamphlet series as well as organize the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition
conference and offer the Mutual Aid Speakers List. The IAS is part of a
larger movement to radically transform society as well. We are
internally democratic and work in solidarity with people around the
globe who share our values.<br />
<br />Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-53678944108193102252015-02-06T02:40:00.002-08:002015-02-06T02:40:42.439-08:00"How to Uphold White Supremacy by Focusing on Diversity and Inclusion. Liberalism’s inherent racism." by KYRA a Chinese-Amerikan trans woman working to create space for radical racial justice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Since the civil rights movement, white people have exploited every opportunity to conceal their colonialist legacy and longstanding (ab)use of white supremacist power. They’ve proven time and again that they have no interest in rectifying that history, only in dealing with the fact that they could no longer deny the reality of those injustices. One effective tactic has been to separate white supremacy and colonialism from the way racism is understood and taught through schools, history textbooks, news media, and through any white-controlled institutions. These lessons, of anti-racism as-told-by-white-people, will be familiar to you: that racism is only explicit racial prejudice; that separatism is the essence of Jim Crow (and therefore inclusion is the antithesis to de jure segregation); and that the remedy for a racist society is a colorblind one.</span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">All of these assumptions are grounded in liberalism: the egalitarian principle which works to ignore and erase difference rather than to undo oppression. It strives for a post-feminist, post-queer, post-racial or racially colorblind world. Liberalism as an ideology deems equal rights and equal treatment as a higher priority than material justice, or as an effective means towards it. Its presumptions of equality are false, as individualist equality may be written into law and policy while material inequality thrives. It effectively abstracts and obscures power dynamics along lines of race, class, and gender. The difference between material justice and liberalism is the difference between actually <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/" target="_blank">making reparations</a> for a long history of racism and countries like Austria, Finland, Hungary, France, and now Sweden<a href="http://mic.com/articles/95872/sweden-just-found-the-worst-way-imaginable-to-get-rid-of-racism" target="_blank"> removing all mentions of “race” from their legislation.</a></span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Liberalism is not the opposite of conservatism on a left-right political spectrum, but a set of values that informs various other political ideologies including conservatism and libertarianism. Even the most popular manifestations of feminism and radical political thought (anarchism, communism, and socialism) are their most liberal forms. You can recognize the influence of liberalism in any political philosophy or practice that , consciously or not , focuses on individual equality before social power. What is it that says that ending racism means setting aside our differences and finding commonality? Liberalism. What is it that says that we need love to bring us together and to end the hate which drives us apart? Liberalism. What is it that says to choose unity over disunion? Liberalism. What is it that says racism/sexism/sizeism hurts everyone? Liberalism.<br /><br />All of these ideas value a certain perception of equality at the expense of those who suffer due to social inequality. That’s why you’ll notice this rhetoric so frequently employed to dismiss oppressed people who direct their anger…at their oppressors. Through a white-writing of history (and history textbooks) that erases and minimizes all of the revolts that were necessary for change, liberals are able to demand that protesters remain totally peaceful, pacifist, and nonviolent (by which they mean non-destructive of property) in the face of dehumanization, degradation, and absolute repressive violence (the actual destruction of human life). White liberals and their sympathizers take ideas and quotes from Martin Luther King out of context and use them to shame disruptive protesters as rioters and looters, dismiss more militant activists as spiteful and vengeful, blaming them all for their own conditions.<br /><br />The toxic effects of liberalism are clear in diversity advocacy and its language. Take the reframing of affirmative action as an initiative to promote diversity. Affirmative action was created in recognition of a centuries-long legacy of racism and historically discriminatory hiring/admissions practices. It is remedial in nature, and requires the recognition of past and ongoing wrongs that need to be righted. In stark contrast to this, diversity emphasizes the pragmatic benefits to morale, productivity, and profits. Diversity is the practice of mixing together different bodies within a common organization, and is a prime resource to be capitalized upon by businesses and organizations that are white owned and/or operated. Diversity still benefits those in power by taking advantage of the various experiences and vantage points of different racial/gender/sexual backgrounds. Rather than respecting difference and redistributing power based on it, diversity only “celebrates” difference in order to exploit multiculturalism for its economic value.<br /><br />There is a reason that diversity is consistently promoted as being beneficial to everyone, disregarding who benefits most from various arrangements of diversity. As a dominant mode of thought, we must challenge liberalism if we hope to challenge the structures of domination that it both masks and reinforces, through diversity or otherwise.<br /><br />“Inclusivity” and “exclusivity” are politically meaningless without context and divert attention away from specific power dynamics. In common use, they are assigned inherently positive and negative values without specifying who is being included or excluded. This is why you might see a group proudly promote itself as being more “open” and “inclusive” than a group which is intentionally exclusive to create a safer space for a specific marginalized group. This is because de jure segregation is so strongly associated with racism. Still, segregation is not racist in and of itself. It is racist depending on a history of white supremacy, depending on who is enforcing segregation, and depending on the material impact of said segregation.<br /><br />While after a history of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, fighting for desegregation was obviously necessary, but that progress is not inherent to diversity and inclusion. They are only valuable insofar as they reduce a white stronghold on power. How would racial diversity or the inclusion of men benefit the organizational team behind <a href="http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/" target="_blank">Black Girl Dangerous</a>? What about organizations like the <a href="http://www.twocc.us/" target="_blank">Trans Women of Color Collective</a> or<a href="http://www.incite-national.org/" target="_blank"> INCITE!</a> which could only be opened to more racial diversity through the inclusion of whites? Diversity and inclusion whitewash and undermine the very basis of their value for racial justice and feminism: providing access to resources, representation, and power to identity groups that lack them. Not only is “inclusivity” politically meaningless, but to frame the benefits of stronger representation of marginalized races, genders, etc. within “diversity” gravely strips the progress it provides of its power and political significance. There is then danger in uncritically advocating for—or even just discussing power dynamics in terms of—diversity or inclusivity.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Closed spaces for marginalized identities are essential, especially ones for multiply marginalized identities, as we know from intersectionality (not to be confused with the idea that all oppression is interconnected, as many white women who have <a href="http://www.gradientlair.com/post/64435736292/black-women-womanist-black-feminist-epistemology" target="_blank">appropriated</a> the term as self-proclaimed “intersectional feminists” seem to understand it). Any group, whether organized around a shared marginalized identity or not, will by-default be centered around the most powerful within that group. For example, cisgender white women will dominate women’s groups that aren’t run by or consciously centering trans women and women of color. A requirement for all groups to be fully open and inclusive<a href="http://geekfeminism.org/2013/07/05/when-your-code-of-conduct-has-unintended-consequences/" target="_blank"> invites the derailment and silencing of marginalized voices already pervasive in public spaces</a>, preventing alternative spaces of relative safety from that to form. Hegemony trickles down through layers of identity, but liberation surges upwards from those who experience the most compounded layers of oppression.</span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So why do so many people seeking racial justice, female empowerment, and queer liberation still choose to advocate for “diversity” and “inclusion”? They appeal to liberalism. They prevent oppression from being named. They prevent us from speaking truth to power. They make progress sound friendly to those in power. Companies can tokenize women and people of color throughout their advertising. They can get way more credit than they deserve for being not 100% white men. They can profit from the increases in efficiency and productivity associated with more diversity. All of the above ignore the fact that companies needed to have diversity initiatives to make them less overwhelmingly white in the first place; that white people are the ones in the position of being able to grant access in the first place. When we work for justice and liberation, we can’t accept progress that is conditional on being economically beneficial.</span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The only way to prevent that is to name oppression for what it is; to speak truth to power. If a group is dominated by whites, men, and other privileged classes, don’t let that be reduced to a diversity issue.<br /><br />You may have seen the phrase before and possibly even used it yourself, but if you still focus on inclusion and diversity, you don’t truly understand: assimilation ≠ liberation. When we talk about diversity and inclusion, we necessarily position marginalized groups as naturally needing to assimilate into dominant ones, rather than to undermine said structures of domination. Yes, we need jobs; we need education; we need to access various resources. What we don’t need is to relegate ourselves to the position of depending on someone else to offer us inclusion and access to those resources. Inclusion is something they must give, but our liberation is something we will take. The cost of assimilation is always in the well-being and lives of those who are not close enough to power to be able to assimilate. Another less popular expression of our expression more sharply calls attention to these dangers of uncritical integrationism: assimilation = death.</span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">>>> </span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Kẏra is a Chinese-Amerikan trans woman working to create space for radical racial justice through technology where progress has been limited to liberal white feminism. She serves on the board of directors of the Free Culture Foundation and founded the Empowermentors Collective, a skillshare, discussion, and support network for trans, disabled, and queer people of color who share a critical interest in race, gender, and technology. She Tweets in spurts and bouts <a href="https://twitter.com/kxra" target="_blank">@kxra</a>. </span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-to-uphold-white-supremacy-by-focusing-on-diversity-and-inclusion" target="_blank">https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-to-uphold-white-supremacy-by-focusing-on-diversity-and-inclusion</a></span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: magenta;"><b><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></b></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-67117221630722736352015-01-13T03:19:00.000-08:002015-01-13T03:24:40.266-08:00The West is Manufacturing Muslim Monsters. Who Should be Blamed for Muslim Terrorism? by ANDRE VLTCHEK<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0Eu6CRTKAkwM_aou5XlbHP3oWoPFaO6ddVAVVgHxh8IHTm95cJFj51XRh-JSJkl0JW-tNcPrGG_WOwUthj_FUdWff9JPMbHGETm1hhWTzHYT2yObXgPnd0Ux8i17YZZF4pJ6TZu2MPslH/s1600/Afghanistan_Occupation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0Eu6CRTKAkwM_aou5XlbHP3oWoPFaO6ddVAVVgHxh8IHTm95cJFj51XRh-JSJkl0JW-tNcPrGG_WOwUthj_FUdWff9JPMbHGETm1hhWTzHYT2yObXgPnd0Ux8i17YZZF4pJ6TZu2MPslH/s1600/Afghanistan_Occupation.jpg" height="277" width="400" /></a></div>
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<tr align="left"><td class="tr-caption">photos from Afghanistan in 70s, before CIA promoting Islam fundamentalists</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A hundred years ago, it would have been unimaginable to have a pair of Muslim men enter a cafe or a public transportation vehicle, and then blow themselves up, killing dozens. Or to massacre the staff of a satirical magazine in Paris! Things like that were simply not done.<br /><br />When you read the memoirs of Edward Said, or talk to old men and women in East Jerusalem, it becomes clear that the great part of Palestinian society used to be absolutely secular and moderate. It cared about life, culture, and even fashion, more than about religious dogmas.<br /><br />The same could be said about many other Muslim societies, including those of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Indonesia. Old photos speak for themselves. That is why it is so important to study old images again and again, carefully.<br /><br />Islam is not only a religion; it is also an enormous culture, one of the greatest on Earth, which has enriched our humanity with some of the paramount scientific and architectural achievements, and with countless discoveries in the field of medicine. Muslims have written stunning poetry, and composed beautiful music. But above all, they developed some of the earliest social structures in the world, including enormous public hospitals and the first universities on earth, like The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco.<br /><br />The idea of ‘social’ was natural to many Muslim politicians, and had the West not brutally interfered, by overthrowing left-wing governments and putting on the throne fascist allies of London, Washington and Paris; almost all Muslim countries, including Iran, Egypt and Indonesia, would now most likely be socialist, under a group of very moderate and mostly secular leaders.<br /><br />***<br /><br />In the past, countless Muslim leaders stood up against the Western control of the world, and enormous figures like the Indonesian President, Ahmet Sukarno, were close to Communist Parties and ideologies. Sukarno even forged a global anti-imperialist movement, the Non-Allied movement, which was clearly defined during the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, in 1955.<br /><br />That was in striking contrast to the conservative, elites-oriented Christianity, which mostly felt at home with the fascist rulers and colonialists, with the kings, traders and big business oligarchs.<br /><br />For the Empire, the existence and popularity of progressive, Marxist, Muslim rulers governing the Middle East or resource-rich Indonesia, was something clearly unacceptable. If they were to use the natural wealth to improve the lives of their people, what was to be left for the Empire and its corporations? It had to be stopped by all means. Islam had to be divided, and infiltrated with radicals and anti-Communist cadres, and by those who couldn’t care less about the welfare of their people.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Almost all radical movements in today’s Islam, anywhere in the world, are tied to Wahhabism, an ultra-conservative, reactionary sect of Islam, which is in control of the political life of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other staunch allies of the West in the Gulf.<br /><br />To quote Dr. Abdullah Mohammad Sindi:<br /><br />“It is very clear from the historical record that without British help neither Wahhabism nor the House of Saud would be in existence today. Wahhabism is a British-inspired fundamentalist movement in Islam. Through its defense of the House of Saud, the US also supports Wahhabism directly and indirectly regardless of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Wahhabism is violent, right wing, ultra-conservative, rigid, extremist, reactionary, sexist, and intolerant…”<br /><br />The West gave full support to the Wahhabis in the 1980s. They were employed, financed and armed, after the Soviet Union was dragged into Afghanistan and into a bitter war that lasted from 1979 to 1989. As a result of this war, the Soviet Union collapsed, exhausted both economically and psychologically.<br /><br />The Mujahedeen, who were fighting the Soviets as well as the left-leaning government in Kabul, were encouraged and financed by the West and its allies. They came from all corners of the Muslim world, to fight a ‘Holy War’ against Communist infidels.<br /><br />According to the US Department of State archives:<br /><br />“Contingents of so-called Afghan Arabs and foreign fighters who wished to wage jihad against the atheist communists. Notable among them was a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, whose Arab group eventually evolved into al-Qaeda.”<br /><br />Muslim radical groups created and injected into various Muslim countries by the West included al-Qaeda, but also, more recently, ISIS (also known as ISIL). ISIS is an extremist army that was born in the ‘refugee camps’ on the Syrian/Turkish and Syrian/Jordanian borders, and which was financed by NATO and the West to fight the Syrian (secular) government of Bashar al-Assad.<br /><br />Such radical implants have been serving several purposes. The West uses them as proxies in the wars it is fighting against its enemies – the countries that are still standing in the way to the Empire’s complete domination of the world. Then, somewhere down the road, after these extremist armies ‘get totally out of control’ (and they always will), they could serve as scarecrows and as justification for the ‘The War On Terror’, or, like after ISIS took Mosul, as an excuse for the re-engagement of Western troops in Iraq.<br /><br />Stories about the radical Muslim groups have constantly been paraded on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, or shown on television monitors, reminding readers ‘how dangerous the world really is’, ‘how important Western engagement in it is’, and consequently, how important surveillance is, how indispensable security measures are, as well as tremendous ‘defense’ budgets and wars against countless rogue states.<br /><br />***<br /><br />From a peaceful and creative civilization, that used to lean towards socialism, the Muslim nations and Islam itself, found itself to be suddenly derailed, tricked, outmaneuvered, infiltrated by foreign religious and ideological implants, and transformed by the Western ideologues and propagandists into one ‘tremendous threat’; into the pinnacle and symbol of terrorism and intolerance.<br /><br />The situation has been thoroughly grotesque, but nobody is really laughing – too many people have died as a result; too much has been destroyed!<br /><br />Indonesia is one of the most striking historical examples of how such mechanisms of the destruction of progressive Muslim values, really functions:<br /><br />In the 1950s and early 1960s, the US, Australia and the West in general, were increasingly ‘concerned’ about the progressive anti-imperialist and internationalist stand of President Sukarno, and about the increasing popularity of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). But they were even more anxious about the enlightened, socialist and moderate Indonesian brand of Islam, which was clearly allying itself with Communist ideals.<br /><br />Christian anti-Communist ideologues and ‘planners’, including the notorious Jesuit Joop Beek, infiltrated Indonesia. They set up clandestine organizations there, from ideological to paramilitary ones, helping the West to plan the coup that in and after 1965 took between 1 and 3 million human lives.<br /><br />Shaped in the West, the extremely effective anti-Communist and anti-intellectual propaganda spread by Joop Beek and his cohorts also helped to brainwash many members of large Muslim organizations, propelling them into joining the killing of Leftists, immediately after the coup. Little did they know that Islam, not only Communism, was chosen as the main target of the pro-Western, Christian ‘fifth column’ inside Indonesia, or more precisely, the target was the left-leaning, liberal Islam.<br /><br />After the 1965 coup, the Western-sponsored fascist dictator, General Suharto, used Joop Beek as his main advisor. He also relied on Beek’s ‘students’, ideologically. Economically, the regime related itself with mainly Christian business tycoons, including Liem Bian Kie.<br /><br />In the most populous Muslim nation on earth, Indonesia, Muslims were sidelined, their ‘unreliable’ political parties banned during the dictatorship, and both the politics (covertly) and economy (overtly) fell under the strict control of Christian, pro-Western minority. To this day, this minority has its complex and venomous net of anti-Communist warriors, closely-knit business cartels and mafias, media and ‘educational outlets’ including private religious schools, as well as corrupt religious preachers (many played a role in the 1965 massacres), and other collaborators with both the local and global regime.<br /><br />Indonesian Islam has been reduced to a silent majority, mostly poor and without any significant influence. It only makes international headlines when its frustrated white-robed militants go trashing bars, or when its extremists, many related to the Mujahedeen and the Soviet-Afghan War, go blowing up nightclubs, hotels or restaurants in Bali and Jakarta.<br /><br />Or do they even do that, really?<br /><br />Former President of Indonesia and progressive Muslim cleric, Abdurrahman Wahid (forced out of office by the elites), once told me: “I know who blew up the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. It was not an attack by the Islamists; it was done by the Indonesian secret services, in order to justify their existence and budget, and to please the West.”<br /><br />***<br /><br />“I would argue that western imperialism has not so much forged an alliance with radical factions, as created them”, I was told, in London, by my friend, and leading progressive Muslim intellectual, Ziauddin Sardar.<br /><br />And Mr. Sardar continued:<br /><br />“We need to realize that colonialism did much more than simply damage Muslim nations and cultures. It played a major part in the suppression and eventual disappearance of knowledge and learning, thought and creativity, from Muslim cultures. Colonial encounter began by appropriating the knowledge and learning of Islam, which became the basis of the ‘European Renaissance’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ and ended by eradicating this knowledge and learning from both Muslim societies and from history itself. It did that both by physical elimination – destroying and closing down institutions of learning, banning certain types of indigenous knowledge, killing off local thinkers and scholars – and by rewriting History as the history of western civilization into which all minor histories of other civilization are subsumed.”<br /><br />From the hopes of those post-WWII years, to the total gloom of the present days – what a long and terrible journey it has been!<br /><br />The Muslim world is now injured, humiliated and confused, almost always on the defensive.<br /><br />It is misunderstood by the outsiders, and often even by its own people who are frequently forced to rely on Western and Christian views of the world.<br /><br />What used to make the culture of Islam so attractive – tolerance, learning, concern for the wellbeing of the people – has been amputated from the Muslim realm, destroyed from abroad. What was left was only religion.<br /><br />Now most of the Muslim countries are ruled by despots, by the military or corrupt cliques. All of them closely linked with the West and its global regime and interests.<br /><br />As they did in several great nations and Empires of South and Central America, as well as Africa, Western invaders and colonizers managed to totally annihilate great Muslim cultures.<br /><br />What forcefully replaced them were greed, corruption and brutality.<br /><br />It appears that everything that is based on different, non-Christian foundations is being reduced to dust by the Empire. Only the biggest and toughest cultures are still surviving.<br /><br />Anytime a Muslim country tries to go back to its essence, to march its own, socialist or socially-oriented way – be it Iran, Egypt, Indonesia, or much more recently Iraq, Libya or Syria – it gets savagely tortured and destroyed.<br /><br />The will of its people is unceremoniously broken, and democratically expressed choices overthrown.<br /><br />For decades, Palestine has been denied freedom, as well as its basic human rights. Both Israel and the Empire spit at its right to self-determination. Palestinian people are locked in a ghetto, humiliated, and murdered. Religion is all that some of them have left.<br /><br />The ‘Arab Spring’ was derailed and terminated almost everywhere, from Egypt to Bahrain, and the old regimes and military are back in power.<br /><br />Like African people, Muslims are paying terrible price for being born in countries rich in natural resources. But they are also brutalized for having, together with China, the greatest civilization in history, one that outshone all the cultures of the West.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Christianity looted and brutalized the world. Islam, with its great Sultans such as Saladin, stood against invaders, defending the great cities of Aleppo and Damascus, Cairo and Jerusalem. But overall, it was more interested in building a great civilization, than in pillaging and wars.<br /><br />Now hardly anyone in the West knows about Saladin or about the great scientific, artistic or social achievements of the Muslim world. But everybody is ‘well informed’ about ISIS. Of course they know ISIS only as an ‘Islamic extremist group’, not as one of the main Western tools used to destabilize the Middle East.<br /><br />As ‘France is mourning’ the deaths of the journalists at the offices of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo (undeniably a terrible crime!), all over Europe it is again Islam which is being depicted as brutal and militant, not the West with its post-Crusade, Christian fundamentalist doctrines that keeps overthrowing and slaughtering all moderate, secular and progressive governments and systems in the Muslim world, leaving Muslim people at the mercy of deranged fanatics.<br /><br />***<br /><br />In the last five decades, around 10 million Muslims have been murdered because their countries did not serve the Empire, or did not serve it full-heartedly, or just were in the way. The victims were Indonesians, Iraqis, Algerians, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Iranians, Yemenis, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians, and the citizens of Mali, Somalia, Bahrain and many other countries.<br /><br />The West identified the most horrible monsters, threw billions of dollars at them, armed them, gave them advanced military training, and then let them loose.<br /><br />The countries that are breeding terrorism, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are some of the closest allies of the West, and have never been punished for exporting horror all over the Muslim world.<br /><br />Great social Muslim movements like Hezbollah, which is presently engaged in mortal combat against the ISIS, but which also used to galvanize Lebanon during its fight against the Israeli invasion, are on the “terrorist lists” compiled by the West. It explains a lot, if anybody is willing to pay attention.<br /><br />Seen from the Middle East, it appears that the West, just as during the crusades, is aiming at the absolute destruction of Muslim countries and the Muslim culture.<br /><br />As for the Muslim religion, the Empire only accepts the sheepish brands – those that accept extreme capitalism and the dominant global position of the West. The only other tolerable type of Islam is that which is manufactured by the West itself, and by its allies in the Gulf – designated to fight against progress and social justice; the one that is devouring its own people.<br /><br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">*Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Against-Western-Imperialism-Vltchek/dp/6027005823" target="_blank">“Fighting Against Western Imperialism”</a>. ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: <a href="http://www.plutobooks.com/display.asp?K=9780745333878" target="_blank">On Western Terrorism</a>. His critically acclaimed political novel <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0977459071/counterpunchmaga" target="_blank">Point of No Return</a> is re-edited and available. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1409298035/counterpunchmaga" target="_blank">Oceania</a> is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745331998/counterpunchmaga" target="_blank">“Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”</a>. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his <a href="http://andrevltchek.weebly.com/" target="_blank">website</a> or his <a href="https://twitter.com/AndreVltchek" target="_blank">Twitter</a>.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/09/who-should-be-blamed-for-muslim-terrorism/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/09/who-should-be-blamed-for-muslim-terrorism/</a> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-53809512009486045352014-12-15T19:07:00.001-08:002014-12-15T19:07:18.348-08:00"The End of Money" by Daniel Pinchbeck <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The current economic crisis may be another bump on capitalism’s always dizzying terrain, or it may signal epochal changes. The crisis of the financial markets has taken on gargantuan proportions.<br /><br /> This spring saw the emergency sale of Bear Stearns, the fifth largest financial institution on Wall Street, to JP Morgan for a paltry sum by “Master of the Universe” standards, including its flashy corporate headquarters and thousands of employees. Even this sale only came about because the US Federal Reserve agreed to cover the risks of exposure to creditors, pushing the financial costs onto US taxpayers. Despite this bailout and other interventions in the supposed “free market,” the financial system is still reeling. Credit liquidity has disappeared, causing shockwaves in student loans and other areas.<br /><br />With the increase in fuel prices and contracting supply of basic resources such as food and water, many commentators think far worse is still to come. Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse (New Society Press) argues that the United States is headed for an imminent economic meltdown that will be as devastating as the fall of the USSR in the 1990s: “Try to form a picture in your mind: it is a superpower, it is huge, it is powerful, and it is going to come crashing down,” he writes. “You or me trying to do something about it would have the same effect as you or me wriggling our toes at a tsunami.”<br /><br />“Life without money is unthinkable”<br /><br />According to Orlov, an engineer and peak oil theorist, the causes of this crash include ideological gridlock, the entrenched corruption of our corporate state, the massive debt piled on by heedless US policies, and our utter dependence on a rapidly diminishing supply of fossil fuels. Predicting mass bankruptcy, hyperinflation, and resource shortages, Orlov recommends stockpiling items that can be bartered on the black market, such as razors, condoms, and liquor, strengthening local communities, and learning how to grow your own food. “For most people in the US, rich or poor, life without money is unthinkable,” he notes. “They may want to give this problem some thought, ahead of time.”<br /><br />While the fire-sale of Bear Stearns was being arranged, I was at the Left Forum at Cooper Union in New York, an annual gathering of Leftist academics and organizers from around the world. The Left Forum featured over 100 panels on a range of subjects, from water privatization, CIA torture, to the leftward shift of South America, and many other topics. I had been invited to speak on a panel about indigenous cultures, consciousness, and social transformation – the only place at the Left Forum where social movements were even summarily discussed in relation to indigenous cultures who live “with” the earth, and not “on” it, as my fellow panelist, Tiokasin, a radio host at WBAI and a Lakota, put it, and non-ordinary states of awareness were given a nod.<br /><br />During a panel on the “Decline of the Dollar,” I was struck by a comment from David Harvey – an eminence grise among Leftist academics, the esteemed author of Limits to Capital and other works – who noted that Wall Street bonuses in January amounted to an astounding $36 billion, despite the heedless actions of the traders and investment houses that caused the implosion of the financial markets. At the same time, due to the subprime mortgage meltdown, over a million people have already seen their homes foreclosed, with nearly two million more foreclosures coming in the near-future, leading to more than three million US citizens deprived of their largest and most central asset. What Harvey noted is that, if we ignore the “fetishized mystical language” of the financial elite, “The loss of assets of those three million people is where those $36 billion of bonuses came from.”<br /><br />Apparently, another 8 million-plus homes-more than 10 percent of the homes owned in the US-are now valued at less than the outstanding mortgages owed. What this means is that many of those mortgage-holders may soon find it more sensible to walk away from their property – sending their keys back to the mortgage-issuers as “jingle mail” – rather than continue to cover their exorbitant debt. As a chain-reaction, this will increase the devaluation of US property.<br /><br />At the same time, the next phase of the current economic crisis will extend to other forms of personal debt, such as credit cards. While the US and European Central Banks continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial institutions that created this disaster through predatory lending practices, they have done little for the millions of poorer people facing insolvency.<br /><br />As another Leftist economist noted on the same panel, one can only feel “a sense of awe” at the lack of real protest about what is taking place.<br /><br />In 2006, I published my second book, 2012 : The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which studied the prophesies of indigenous people indicating we are in a time of massive transformation – the transition from the “Fourth World” to the “Fifth World” according to the Hopi. Based on my book, I often find myself looking over my shoulder, wondering if current events fit the prophetic timetable of the Mayan Calendar. Although the validity of Carl Johan Calleman’s scholarship has been called into question by John Major Jenkins and others, it is interesting that Calleman predicted the current year (November 2007 – November 2008) to be the year of Tezcatlipoca – sinister deity of black magic and the jaguar – marked by economic collapse, war, and other threats.<br /><br />On the one hand, I found many reasons for taking “2012” seriously as a threshold of some type of tremendous transition in human culture and consciousness, based on my research, my own synchronicities as well as esoteric and intuitive experiences. On the other hand, studies of the current state of global society insist that massive and accelerating change is unavoidable in all areas of life. The future of humanity is imperiled if we do not transform our social practices and fundamental paradigm within the next years.<br /><br />Such a hypothesis is reinforced by many recent developments, from the sudden disappearance of honeybees and Chinook salmon to the comment made by a famous financier to a friend, later recounted to me, that currency will have no value in a few years, and the only thing that will be worth anything will be land. One of the depressing aspects of the Left Forum, along with the average age of the audience being well above fifty, was the palpable ambience of failure and defeatism in the crowd. Certainly, the last thirty-five years have been a miserable period for radicals in the US, who have watched the oligarchy consolidate power, instituting elements of a police state, and holding tight control of the mass media.<br /><br />Crucial ideas and possibilities can vanish completely for a time – even for an entire generation – before they return with a new force and impetus, to start a new turn on the spiral. This has been the case with shamanic exploration of non-ordinary consciousness, which has made a resurgence in recent years in a wiser and more mature form than in the 1960s. Similarly, it is possible that the moment has arrived when a populist radical movement could reconstitute itself, and this could happen at a rapid pace. Radical movements often burst forth when theorists, sociologists, and academics least expect it. They arise when masses of fed-up people begin to seek direct redress against a system that has exploited and enslaved them.<br /><br />That our financial system is fixed to reward a miniscule subset of the global population, the “ruling elite” who control the financial sector, is a realization that could begin to permeate the mass consciousness. Social awareness can only increase as the destructive delusions of the dominant ideology become more obvious. With the intermeshed networks of contemporary life, a new realization could spread rapidly, along with techniques to confront a system that has failed to protect the poor and the planet. The incredible mismanagement of the earth’s precious resources – the squandering of oceans, forests, animals, and air – is an indictment against the current order and its leaders. The continuity of this system is a direct threat to future generations. Although it seems unstoppable and unassailable, this system is also quite frail, utterly dependent on petroleum, on the effectiveness of constant media indoctrination, and on increasingly complicated technologies.<br /><br />While most mainstream commentators and even some of the critics at the Left Forum argue that the current implosion of the financial markets is one of the periodic crises of capitalism that eventually gets resolved through institutional measures and bailouts, it actually may be far more than that. This may be neither a crisis of “liquidity” nor even one of insolvency, but a crisis of money itself- in other words, a crisis of faith in the entire belief system of capitalism, which has functioned as a displacement of religion, with money substituting for the banished god. As Karl Marx noted in his 1844 Manuscripts, money is “the visible divinity” in a capitalist world:<br /><br />“By possessing the property of buying everything, by possessing the property of appropriating all objects, money is thus the object of eminent possession. The universality of its property is the omnipotence of its being. It therefore functions as almighty being. Money is the pimp between man’s need and the object, between his life and his means of life. But that which mediates my life for me, also mediates the existence of other people for me. For me it is the other person.”<br /><br />When I reread some of Marx last year, for the first time since school, I was startled to encounter the tremendous depth of spiritual insight in his work. The radical essence of his thought has been obscured by the course of history, and by the desire to deny, suppress, and evade it, ever since.<br /><br />Marx saw that the revolutions of the 18th Century enshrined the rights of the bourgeois individual to compete against others, rather than realizing man as a “species-being” who can only attain freedom through his communion with other men: “None of these so-called rights of man goes beyond the egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society, as man separated from life in the community and withdrawn into himself, into his private interest and his private arbitrary will. They see, rather, the life of the species itself, society, as a frame external to individuals, as a limitation of their original independence,” he wrote in “The Jewish Question.” Freedom was defined negatively, creating a social reality in which each individual had to struggle against others to preserve and increase their private domain.<br /><br />As David Korten, Bernard Letaier, and others have written recently, our basic financial system in itself creates artificial scarcity, and induces competition and sociopathic behavior patterns that lead inexorably to disregard of the environment and mistreatment of others. When a bank gives out a loan to someone, they are not creating the extra money that the individual has to make as interest accrues. When they examine that person’s credit, they are checking to see if that person has the capacity to compete effectively in the marketplace and come up with the accrued interest, which is imaginary capital at the outset. The individual then struggles against others to retrieve the money he owes. Similarly, publicly traded corporations must maximize profits to satisfy shareholders, and this forces an institutional disregard for environirierital safeguards and humane practices.<br /><br />Over the last decade, the deregulation of the financial system “acted like psychotropic drugs on the minds of investors,” as one Left Forum panelist noted, unleashing increasingly rapacious and mindless greed. Pushed to its limit, the logic of the system reveals itself in transparent form. The subprime mortgage market offered loans to people with little or nothing in the way of assets or collateral that began at a low rate of interest and then ballooned to massive rates later. These predatory loans were then bundled together and sold as securities, given class “AAA” status by regulatory bodies that had little interest in compelling restraint. These securities based on corrupted loans were meshed with other types of assets and securities and sold up the financial pyramid. As in the classic pyramid scheme, when the debtors at the bottom start to default, the rotten edifice comes tumbling down.<br /><br />At the same time, the crumbling of this scam is revealing deep levels of tulip-style mania in the banks and financial institutions, which had developed highly convoluted mechanisms for extracting profits by lending vast, and nonexistent, sums to each other for short-term periods. While commentators think that the amount of actual wealth that is going to disappear from the world economy is $1.5 – $2 trillion, the amount of imaginary capital traded in rapid fashion to amp up artificial profits was exponentially higher than this number. At a time when credit has evaporated, whoever gets caught holding the i.o.u.’s for these massive amounts faces instant insolvency.<br /><br />It appears that unleashed greed incited by deregulation of the markets has led to a massive implosion of the financial apparatus that may not be fixable within the current system. This crisis may have its roots in the early 1970s, when the US took the dollar off the gold standard, and the untethered US dollar became the global reserve currency, forcing the developing world to adopt it for international transactions and debt repayment. The building of the World Trade Centers could be seen as symbolizing the shift of the focus of the US economy from productive industry to finance capitalism, as the parasitical system of speculation on derivatives and currencies became the central wealth-producing engine within the US. The lack of US productivity coupled with a virtualized currency with no real-world referent has led to the amassing of extraordinary debt, on an individual and societal level.<br /><br />The crisis may actually have far deeper roots, going back to the basis of capitalism itself, an economic system that constantly requires new markets to penetrate and cannot sustain itself without continually extending its reach. In a fully globalized world, where there are no new markets to reach or new resources to exploit, capitalism may have reached its natural limit. It is also imprecise to call the current system “capitalist” in a classical sense, as it is actually one where massive subsidies protect vested interests, from agricultural lobbies to oil companies, and the ideal of a “free market” is a convenient fiction.<br /><br />In a fully globalized world, the Neoliberal model can only perpetuate itself through the types of shock effects described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, where destruction is encouraged and then seized upon as an opportunity to redevelop and recolonize areas already within empire. One of the panelists at the Left Forum described the mortgage meltdown as a “financial Katrina” that will allow wealthy speculators to take over urban neighborhoods where poor people have suffered mass defaults. The disastrous consequences of rampant privatization are increasingly obvious, as services become weaker, corruption increases, and prices rise.<br /><br />End of the current economic paradigm<br /><br />Considering the extent of delusional capital now underlying the financial system, it is possible that the current crisis could be pointing toward the end of the current economic paradigm. This could mean a real trans-valuation of our world. As Marx points out, the function of money was to transform all qualities to quantities that are ultimately equivalent. Money “is the true agent of separation as well as the true binding agent – the [universal] galvano-chemical power of society,” Marx writes in The 1844 Manuscripts. Money-as-mediator and ultimate arbiter seeks to reduce all qualities to quantities, but fails because it reduces everything to sameness, with the Midas touch of nihilism. Love and trust are basic values that elude the mediation of money.<br /><br />In his great book The Gift, Lewis Hyde contrasts our modern market economy with the gift-based economies of tribal and indigenous cultures. He writes, “The desire to consume is a kind of lust. We long to have the world flow through us like air or food. We are thirsty and hungry for something that can only be carried inside bodies. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.” The gift, on the other hand, renews the communal bond, and requires reciprocity as well as trust. Hyde writes:<br /><br />The gift moves toward the empty place. As it turns in its circle it turns toward him who has been empty-handed the longest, and if someone appears elsewhere whose need is greater it leaves its old channel and moves toward him. Our generosity may leave us empty, but our emptiness then pulls gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.”<br /><br />If modern society reduces all value to a universal exchange of quantities, indigenous cultures were conscious of qualities that did not allow for perfect equivalences of exchange. Ultimately, it was the state of mind and heart of the giver that mattered, not the objectified value of an object.<br /><br />The current economic crisis may be resolved – at least temporarily – by an international agreement between oligarchic forces that will lead to some bail outs and a renegotiation, and severe reduction, of American power in the world. Or it may be that the glue that has held together the international monetary order is coming undone, in which case a deeper process of transformation may take place.<br /><br />If this is the case, then the social agreement that is money itself may be up for discussion, and the nature of value may change yet again. In other words, the current economic crisis may represent, not just a reordering of power and finance in the world, but a deeper expression of a crisis of value, and the opportunity to begin the pendulum swing back again, from an economy based on the meaningless exchange of nihilistic quantities to a different model of economy that would require alternative institutions and techniques to support the socially cohesive expression of values-based qualities.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">First published: Fifth Estate, 2008</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="http://www.danielpinchbeck.net/writing/essays/">http://www.danielpinchbeck.net/writing/essays/</a></span></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-60070997667641793782014-12-07T18:45:00.000-08:002014-12-07T18:45:15.491-08:006 December 2014, Solidarity with Nikos Romanos in Turkey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Today, we were on streets for Alexis who was murdered by Greek State and for Nikos Romanos who has been on hunger strike for 26 days against the repression of the same state.<br /><br />Today, we were on streets for our sisters and brothers who have been murdered while resisting in Greece, in Ferguson, in Mexico, in Kobanê.<br /><br />Today, we were on streets for Berkin, Ali İsmail, Ethem, Arin, Kader, Suphi Nejat.<br /><br />As states kill our sisters and brothers all over the world; we, revolutionary anarchists were onthe streets with our anger against states, capitalists, companies and murderers. Despite of the fact that the police held up our way and attacked us with plastic bullets, tear gas bombs and batons; they couldn't achieve to supress our anger. We resisted with our black flags while rising out our slogans.<br /><br />This passion for freedom is getting bigger today; the anger for those who have been murdered by state flare up our riot.<br /><br />Revolutionary Anarchist Action </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">salutes comrade Nikos Romanos' and his resistance.<br />Video of this action:<br /><a href="https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1565161617033056&set=vb.1480916092124276&type=2&theater">https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=1565161617033056&set=vb.1480916092124276&type=2&theater</a><br /><b><br />Statement that read after police attack:</b><br /><br />Today, with all the range against powers that seizes lives, with the conviction to a free world, the black flags are waved all around the world. Against companies that exploit our labour to profit more; against states that murders many of us in the name of the borders they drew; against all powers that fill their pockets with our lives that they destroy, making us poorer and making the rich richer; rebellion is alive in the rage of anachism. The rage against bosses, companies, murderers and states, is propagating in full flood with the black flags. The sorrow of being neglected, dissapeared and murdered, is now turing into anger, and the street are burning with the rage all over.<br /><br />Exactly 6 yers ago, in Exerchia neignourhood of Athens, murdered because he was an anarchist, at the age of 16, was Alexandros Grigoropulos. Murdered by a cop, with the bullet from his gun, because he transformed his anger into rebellion and went on the street, calling to account for the lives being seized, becuase he didn't obey the powers and he was resisting at all costs for freedom. On the day of December 6, 2008, The bullet that ran into Alexis's chest turned in the fire of revolt in the streets. Even though the murderers continued their attacks, the rage against the ones that silenced a heart that was beating for freedom, burned the streets into flames in Athens, in Thessaloniki, in Istanbul and everywhere.<br /><br />Nikos Romanos, who was with Alexis the day he was murdered and who also had the same conviction for a free world, is now captivated because he is an anarchist. Romanos is captivated because he was not silent against injustice, because he didn't give up despite state oppresion, because with the same conviction of his murdered comrade, he kept on the struggle against all powers. The ones who think they can terminate this struggle by murdering Alexis, are now captivating Nikos hoping to stop another heart that is beating with the conviction for anarchism. Just like in 2008, the steets are filled with anger against the state that continue to attack Romanos with all its isolation, oppresion and torture. As Romanos continues his hunger strike since 10th of Novembre, other anarchist comrades in captive also start hunger strikes in solidarity; universities are occupied; and the same voice echoes in burning streets, in cells resisiting captive: "As long as we are alive and we breate, long live anarchy!"<br /><br />The powers that murdered Alexis in 2008 and that captivate Nikos today think that they can silence the rage against injustice that is growing in every part of the world. They continue to captivate, attack and murder under this illusion.<br /><br />In Mexico, 43 students resisting politics of the powers seizing their future, had disappeared by the hand of state; and their bodies are found in mass graves after many days. Just because they are black, the people targeted by fasist repression of the power, become the targets of bullets shot by the police; and the ones who resist being taken to custody are strangling and murdered by the police. Many of our brothers like Berkin, Ethem Ali, Ahmet who resisted for their lives, were murdered by the state police. While the ones resisting in Kobanê to create a new life, like Arin, like Suphi Nejat, like Kader, are murdered by the gangs, military and soldiers of the state; the ones who are on the streets in every corner of the region embracing Kobanê resistance, like Hakan, like Mahsun, are the targeted by the murderer police of the same state...<br /><br />Wherever the ones who call to account for injustice, who resist to win their lives, who struggle with their conviction of freedom are on the streets; there is the adress for oppression, torture and massacre. The oppressors who think that they can discourage the ones who don't obey them by captivating, kidnapping or murdering; a cry of freedom raised in one place is echoed from every direction. From the cells of Athens to Mexico, from the streets of Ferguson to Istanbul, to the free lands of Kobanê, the convision for a new world is propagating in full flood. Now, this passion for freedom is getting bigger; the rage for the murders is flaring up the fire of revolt in hearts.<br /><br />This revolt is against the powers that seize our lives, that intend to destroy our freedom, that murder us. This revolt is against capitalism and the states. This revolt is against all kinds of captivity.<br /><br />With this revolt for freedom in our hearts, anarchism is growing in every part of the world.<br /><br />And our struggle is growing from one corner of the world to another, carried by the waves of the black flags.<br /><br /><br /><br />Long live Revolution, long live anarchy!<br /><br /><br /><br />Revolutionary Anarchist Action (DAF)<br /><br />Lycee Aanrchist Action (LAF)<br /><br />Anarchist Youth (AG)<br /><br />Anarchist Women<br /><br />MAKI<br /><br />TAÇANKA</span></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-77156432969357307452014-11-25T06:19:00.001-08:002014-11-26T07:31:11.710-08:00Black Lives Matters! Ferguson is burning after grand jury decision of no-charges for police officer who killed Michael Brown LIVE REPORT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Ferguson, Missouri, erupts in violence after grand jury verdict not to charge Darren Wilson for shooting dead unarmed black teenager Michael Brown - follow live updates</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: magenta;">VOID NETWORK expresses solidarity for the uncompromised struggle of people all over Amerikkka against the police brutality and the totalitarian "justice" regime that offers to any policeman the right to kill people in the streets with "no-charges" for centuries now! This has to end NOW, the state can not shoot us anymore and no one cares...WE CARE!</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="color: magenta;">DEATH TO THE TYRANNES! FIGHT FOR FREEDOM</span></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">13.30 It's now 7.30am in Ferguson.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">• Darren Wilson, the policeman who was cleared last night of charges relating to the shooting of Michael Brown, has still not been seen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">• Police confirm that 61 people were arrested, 150 gunshots were fired, and a dozen buildings burnt.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">• Following the verdict, at around 8pm in Missouri, protests were staged in New York, Chicago, California and Seattle.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">13.02 An update on the arrests overnight.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">St Louis County Police spokesman Brian Schellman said there were 61 arrests in Ferguson overnight, many for burglary and trespassing.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Francis Slay, the mayor of St Louis, said there were 21 arrests in his city, where some protesters broke business windows. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">(...)</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">11.28 Jon Belmar, St Louis County police chief, has just been speaking about the damage overnight.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">He said that at least a dozen buildings were torched and that he counted about 150 gunshots during a night of looting, vandalism, arson and clashes between demonstrators and police that resulted in at least 29 arrests.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Flights over the area were restricted and police struggled to contain protesters who took to the streets of Ferguson, a suburb of St Louis, smashing shop windows and torching cars and businesses despite President Barack Obama's calls for restraint.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Although no serious injuries were reported, Mr Belmar said the rioting on Monday night and early Tuesday morning was "much worse" than disturbances which erupted in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on Aug 9. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">REPORT by <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/raf-sanchez/" rel="author" title="Raf Sanchez">
Raf Sanchez</a>, Ferguson for Telegraph.uk</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> For a few brief moments, the crowd outside the Ferguson police headquarters fell silent.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The cries of “hands up, don’t shoot” were hushed as hundreds of demonstrators - many concealing their faces behind balaclavas and Guy Fawkes masks - strained to hear the news coming over the car radio.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">They listened as the St Louis County prosecutor announced what to many was a foregone conclusion: the white police officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, would not face criminal charges.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And then the crowd was silent no more.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The streets of Ferguson erupted in fury once again after a grand jury<b><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/11251920/Ferguson-erupts-in-violence-after-police-officer-escapes-prosecution-for-fatal-shooting.html"> decided
not to charge Officer Darren Wilson with any crime for the August shooting. </a></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b> </b>Demonstrators vented months of pent-up anger on the streets outside the police department where Mr Wilson once worked, looting and burning shops, setting fire to police cars and hurling bricks at the lines of riot police who challenged them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In a grim replay of the violence that wracked this Missouri city over the summer, heavily-armed police responded to the sound of gunshots with tear gas and rolled through the streets in armoured vehicles.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Police reported hearing “heavy automatic gunfire” in Ferguson while fires broke out in neighbouring Dellwood and looting was reported in St Louis. A police officer in University City, a few miles south, was shot but it was unclear if the incident was related to the protests in Ferguson.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The clashes began shortly after 8pm, when Robert McCulloch, the St Louis County prosecuting attorney, announced that the 12 jurors - nine white and three black - had decided not to bring charges.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">"They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson," he said.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Mr Brown’s parents immediately released a statement saying they were “profoundly disappointed that the killer of our child will not face the consequences of his actions”.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But Michael Brown Senior and Lesley McSpadden, who have taken their campaign for justice for their son as far as the United Nations in Geneva, also appealed for calm, asking the protesters to “channel your frustration in ways that will make a positive change”.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Their plea was echoed by President Barack Obama, who made a late-night appearance at the White House to remind demonstrators that the US was “a nation built on the rule of law”.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But by the time Mr Obama appeared, the television networks were already splitting their screens between the White House briefing room and the violence on South Florissant Road in Ferguson.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11251994/Watch-live-Violence-flares-in-Ferguson-after-Michael-Brown-shooting-grand-jury-decision.html">Rioters
began by smashing the windows of sandwich shops</a></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">directly next door
to the police headquarters, ignoring the festive letters spelling out
“Seasons Greetings” between two telephone poles.
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But they moved quickly from breaking windows to setting fire to unprotected
police cars. One young black man, who would not give his name, looked on
approvingly as a squad car burned, the ammunition stored inside it crackling
in the heat.
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">“These cops can go around and kill our people and absolutely nothing happens
to them,” the young man said. “We can’t get justice in the courts so we need
to take it for ourselves.”
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Police had initially maintained a light presence, with only a handful of
officers visible and none in riot gear.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">But as the crowd’s anger mounted, a phalanx of police surged into view, carrying shields and batons and forming a line beneath the American flag outside their headquarters. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Soon a column of armoured vehicles began to roll north from the direction of the motorway. An oddly-nasal voice rang out over vehicle speakers and into the freezing night: “You must stop throwing projectiles at police. You are unlawfully assembled. You must disperse.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When words proved insufficient the teargas followed. Canisters rattled at the feet of the demonstrators and painful smoke billowed out, filling throats and leaving eyes watering in pain.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The violence came in fits and starts and at times the demonstrators were happy to stand before the row of police shields and hurl abuse at the officers behind them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The largely-black crowd saved their angriest taunts for the African-American police officers. “Traitors!” shouted one man as a black officer watch impassively from behind a visor. “If that was your son, you wouldn’t be standing there.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Many of the young African-American men were equally disdainful of Mr Obama and
his appeals for calm from hundreds of miles away.
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<script height="258px" src="http://player.ooyala.com/iframe.js#ec=p2Mzl3cTos4G1pZyPZkoao02EBiS8jJu&pbid=7dfd98005dba40baacc82277f292e522" width="460px"></script><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
“The President is not even one of us, I would say that to his face,” said a
man who identified himself as “Faze”. He pointed to the fact Mr Obama’s
father was a Kenyan immigrant, rather than the descendant of slaves. “He
doesn't get it, he doesn’t know what’s happening here.”
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Darren Wilson, the police officer whose bullets ripped through the facade of
what some call “post-racial” America, has been in hiding since August and
did not appear after being cleared by the grand jury.
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">His lawyers released a statement saying that “law enforcement personnel must
frequently make split-second and difficult decisions. Officer Wilson
followed his training and followed the law.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> Five hours after the grand jury announcement, a dozen buildings were reported to have been consumed by flame, along with a number of cars that were set alight.<br /><br />But not all the demonstrators who appeared to protest the jury’s decision turned to violence. One large group remained outside the police station, banging drums and chanting: “This is what community looks like.”<br /><br />At the corner of South Florissant Road and Suburban Avenue, Shala Jones stood holding her three year-old daughter, Lonnie.<br /><br />“I’m here tonight because this is her future,” said Ms Jones, as she tucked a blanket closer around her child. “Young black children need to know they can be safe in America.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">SOURCE: The Telegraph.uk <span style="color: black;"></span></span></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-70399423528827584162014-11-02T07:10:00.000-08:002014-11-02T07:13:42.604-08:00African Anarchism, an introduction <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Welcome to African Anarchism! Void Network introduces a site that is intended to be a resource for anarchists and other anti-authoritarian revolutionary socialists in Africa, and for all those interested in the liberation of this most exploited continent. </div>
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the site is:</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.struggle.ws/africa/">http://www.struggle.ws/africa/</a></span></div>
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Africa has endured centuries of suffering and deprivation in a world of plenty. Capitalism has indisputably failed to provide even a minimum standard of living to Africans. The authoritarian capitalists who called themselves "state socialists" have also proved to offer no answers to the problems of the continent.</div>
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In this context anarchism is not merely one solution, it is the only possible solution that can allow the African masses to fulfill their longings for a life free from misery and exploitation. In the last few years anarchist groups and individuals have started to emerge across the continent, although these are still small shoots, they are a beginning and once they spread anarchism should prove to be a very powerful force in Africa. The African masses have little to lose, once they throw off their mental chains, global capitalism will shudder under their mighty revolutionary force.</div>
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Unfortunately, it is very difficult for African workers to communicate to the outside world, since access to technology in Africa is extremely limited, so very often, the information contained in these pages provides more questions than answers. We are always looking for more information about anarchism in Africa, so if you can add anything to what we have here; news about movements, libertarian analysis or other interesting matter, please <a href="http://www.struggle.ws/africa/mail.html">contact </a>the site: <a href="http://www.struggle.ws/africa/">http://www.struggle.ws/africa/</a></div>
Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-29896719139426255352014-10-28T12:00:00.000-07:002014-10-28T12:00:32.214-07:00Touching the heart: about the blackmail concerning 'the immigrants'<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">During the last 10 years, a lot of comrades in different countries have participated in the struggle around the question of migration, whether it be about the struggle of paperless people to get regularized, the struggle around housing in poor neighbourhoods, the struggle against raids on the street and on the public transport or the struggle against the detention centres. Often these have led to a repetition of certain impasses or to powerlessness regarding possible interventions.<br /><br />A recipe does not exist, but we do consider it necessary to break with some militant mechanisms which have too often made us struggle on an activist base lacking perspectives or agitate under the directions of authoritarian groups, with or without papers. These thoughts simply want to draw up the balance of struggle experiences and to work out some possible tracks for the development of a subversive projectuality around migration and its management, a projectuality which we can call ours.<br /><br /><span style="color: magenta;"><b>Beyond the illusion of the ‘immigrant’</b></span><br /><br />Having a closer look on the protagonists of a social conflict and subordinate them to more or less militant sociological analyses is a classical approach towards an attempt to understand the context of a social conflict and to intervene in it. Not only does this approach focus upon finding the answer to the mysterious question “who are they?” instead of examining ourselves about what we want, it is as well based upon some doctrines which disturb our critical reflection. Next to the usual leftist racketeers who are desperately looking for no matter what political subject which can bring them to the head of a resistance, a lot of sincere others are to be found alongside the paperless people. But since they consider the specific situation of the paperless as something exterior, they are mostly rather driven by an outrage instead of by a desire to struggle together with those who share a common (although not exactly the same) condition: exploitation, police control on the streets or on the public transport, housing in the outskirts or in the neighbourhoods which are being upgraded, illegal activities which are part of the survival techniques. Both of them often reproduce all of the divisions which are useful to the domination. Creating a new general image of the immigrant-victim-in-struggle equals the introduction of a sociological mystification which does not only hinder every common struggle but as well strengthens the states grip on all of us.<br /><br />Libertarian or radical activists (who nonetheless have a certain intuition about what could be a possible common track) are fairly often not the last ones swallowing this pill in their need of collectivity or in the name of the autonomousness of the struggle, as if the struggle is put up by some sort of homogeneous block instead of by individuals, potential accomplices at least against a certain oppression. In relation to the paperless people all of the sudden the methods of struggle (self organisation, refusal of institutional mediation, direct action) became way more relative. The good Samaritan will always appear to explain, using some classical arguments out of the militant tirade, that breaking the windows of an air company which deports during a manifestation will bring the paperless ‘into danger’ (them who nonetheless face up to the police day by day); that the struggle against fascists (e.g. the members of the Turkish Grey Wolves), nationalists (e.g. certain refugees who came here after the disintegration of former Yugoslavia) or priests (e.g. the priest who ‘refuges’ the paperless in ‘his’ church to afterwards kick them out, the Christian associations which take up the vile task of the state like Cimade, Caritas International or the Red Cross) ends at the doorstep of the paperless collectives; that you can spit into the face of a French or Belgian ambassador but not into the face of a Malian one which comes mediating a struggle that threatens to radicalise (idem the leftist politicians who are generally considered unacceptable but being tolerated in the name of a false unity which is demanded by some chief of a paperless collective).<br /><br />It is known to everybody that a struggle always departs from the existent and that the initial differences often differ a lot (e.g. the relation towards the trade unions in the major part of the struggles concerned with exploitation), but according to us it’s all about going beyond those in a subversive dynamic. We will certainly not succeed in this by accepting the variety of authoritarian straitjackets – the goal is already in the means you acquire. Moreover because this relativism doesn’t lead towards a confrontation in the struggle but to some sort of reverse colonialism which makes the immigrants once more into an object with a supposedly different-being (“they” would be like that). In that case the misery is not intended to scare off but to excuse all renouncement.<br /><br />The “innocent immigrant”, the passive eternal victim which is being exploited, arrested, locked up and deported is one of the most prominent characters of this ideological narrowing down. As a reaction to the daily racist propaganda which aims at giving the immigrant the role of the social enemy who is the source of all evil (from unemployment to unsafety and terrorism), a lot of people de facto deny the immigrant all criminal capacity. They aim at presenting the immigrants as being servile, begging for their integration with hopes on a less detestable place in the society of the capital. In this way thousands of refugees are being transformed into sympathetic and therefore integratable victims: victims of war, of ‘natural’ catastrophes and misery, of human traffickers and rack-renters. But what is forgotten are the changes these tracks make to individuals: they create solidarity, resistance and struggle which allow some of them to break the passivity which was attributed to them.<br /><br />Surprise and embarrassed silence rule the leftist camp and her democratic antiracism when these ‘innocents’ defend themselves by all means against the faith imposed on them (e.g. revolts in detention centres, confrontations during raids, wild strikes…). The revolts expressed in a collective way might still be understood by some as “those deeds of desperation”, but a prisoner putting his cell on fire all alone is called a “maniac” whose deed most certainly does not constitute as part of the “struggle”. Hunger strikers in a church are wanted, not the arsonists or escaped prisoners from the detention centres; the people who have been thrown out of the window of a police station or drowned are being understood, but not those who resist against the police during a raid; parents of children attending school get helped with pleasure, in contrast to the bachelor thieves. The revolt and the individuals who revolt do not fit into the sociological framework of the immigrant-victim that has been made up by the good conscience of the militant with the aid of the academic parasites of the state.<br /><br />This mystification hinders a more precise understanding of migration and the migration streams. Clearly, migrations in the first place are a consequence of the daily economical terror of the capital and the political terror of local regimes and their bourgeoisie, all of which give profit to the rich countries. Nevertheless it would be incorrect to state that only the poor proletarians migrate to the rich countries as is sworn to by the thirdworldists in their construction of the immigrant-victim subject. The migrants who succeed in entering the gates of Europe clandestinely are not necessarily the poorest (since those are forced to internal migrations to the cities or to neighbouring countries according to the fluctuations of the market and her disasters) – be it even only because of the cost (financial and human) of such a travel or the social and cultural selection inside of the family of those who can afford taking such a step.<br /><br />If we try to understand everything that forms and traverses every individual rather than setting down the difference and otherness in order to justify an exterior position of ‘support’, we can view a whole complexity including the class differences. At that point we can determine that the collectives of paperless do as well exist out of over certified graduates, failed politicians, local exploiters who managed their travelling money on the expense of others… who migrate to this side of the world because they want to take their enjoyable place inside of the capitalist democracy. Thus many groups of paperless are being dominated by those who were already powerful (be it on a social, political or symbolical level) or were striving for it. These class differences are seldomly taken into account by comrades engaged in a struggle together with paperless people, a struggle in which language becomes an unavoidable and invisible barrier assigning the immigrants coming from the richer classes of their country automatically to the role of spokesman and translator. Sharpening these class differences as we do everywhere is not simply a contribution which can be made by comrades but a necessary condition for real solidarity.<br /><br />In order to understand these struggle dynamics, throwing some comfortable illusions into the garbage bin is necessary as well. Only a stubborn determinism can claim that a certain social condition necessarily implicates the revolt against it. This kind of reasoning used to offer the guarantee of a revolution, a guarantee that many have cherished for a long time while simultaneously degrading the perspective of the individual rebellion which generalizes into insurrection to the level of an adventure. The criticism made on a determinism that has shown its failure in the old workers movement is suitable as well for the proletarians which migrate to this side of the world. Many amongst them look at the West as some kind of oasis where you can live nicely as long as you’re prepared to make big efforts. Undergoing conditions of exploitation that resemble what they’ve been running away from, with bosses who as well play on the paternalistic snare of belonging to a so called common community; being chased; not having any or only a few perspectives on climbing higher on the social ladder and a daily racism which tries to canalize the dissatisfaction of the other exploited, all of this makes up a rude reality to confront. Contrasting the resignation which can sprout from this painful confrontation or the reflex of locking oneself up into the authoritarian communities which are based on for example religion or nationalism, we put forward the perspective not to link up with all paperless in a ‘categorical’ way but with those who refuse their role as exploited and by this way open as well the identification of the enemy. We don’t want the blaming between the capitalist universality and the particularities but a social war in which we can recognize each other beyond the question of papers and different degrees of exploitation, in a permanent struggle for a society free of masters and slaves. As in any struggle in fact, would it not be that the struggle around migration mostly ends by the weight of the affective feeling of guilt, the urgency to prevent a deportation and its possible consequences, and all of this mostly via a relation based on exteriority instead of on a shared revolt.<br /><br /><span style="color: magenta;"><b>The impasse of the struggle for regularisation</b></span><br /><br />In several European countries, a lot of ‘massive’ regularisations took place at the last turn of the century. Although the State follows her own logic, the struggling paperless were able to influence the criteria and rhythm of the regularisations. A comparison can be made to all “big social reforms”, some of which have been achieved through bloodshed while others were buy-outs to maintain the social peace or simply granted in function of capitals need to keep the working class grouped and to increase interior consumption. In those days debates about demands that suit the capitals movement in contrast to insurrectional try-outs were going on in the working class as well. A lot of revolutionaries only accepted these demands as a possibility towards permanent agitation while at the same time it was clearly put that the social question could not be solved inside of a capitalist framework.<br /><br />In the time preceding to these regularisation waves the States were divided between two adversary logics: the growing stream of clandestine migration did on the one hand fit the economic need for flexible workers (as in the construction, catering industry, cleaning sector, agriculture) of countries with an ageing population, on the other hand did this partly denied (as in countries knowing a more recent migration as Spain and Italy) but especially in nature less controllable population disturb the drastic will to manage the public order. While this issue was quickly resolved – more specifically by a closer cooperation between the different authorities (through the exchange of services between the imams and police offices as well as through the distribution of tasks amongst the different foreign and autochthonous mobs, despite some previous bloody games which had to do with unavoidable concurrence) -, the issue of the need for workers was resolved by a tighter interdependence between migration streams and the labour market. It seems to be one of the ruling tendencies on a European level to aim at a more worked out migration management which is tuned up in real time to the needs of the exploitation. Next to the classic labour form of the migrants (work in black) stands the migration which links the permit to stay to a working contract which will become the rule overtime, fitting the reorganisation of the labour delicacy which extends to everybody.<br /><br />The state has almost put an end to the political asylum, has tightened up the family reunion and the obtainment of citizenship by marriage, has abolished the permit to stay for a longer period (like the one of 10 years in France), while she’s on the other hand rejecting regularisation demands using an iron fist. The state directs itself towards what was called “chosen migration” by a certain president. We’re returning to the era in which the sergeant recruiters went to the villages and loaded trucks with the amount of migrants needed by their bosses. The modern formula simply asks a rationalisation of this recruitment on the borders, co managed by the state and the employers (2). The workers are absolutely not supposed to stay and settle down. At the same time different camps at the external borders of Europe are under construction by the state, camps for those who have not been chosen by the grace of the slave tradesmen.<br /><br />Because all the others are there. All those standing in front of a closed gate and all those continuing to arrive. That’s what’s at stake for the change in the degree of the police rationalisation of the deportation system which continues multiplying its camps and organizes more and more massive deportations, national quotes and European charter flights for those who managed their way through the locks of the waiting zones and the racketeering of the human traffickers and other mobs. However nobody cherishes any real illusions: the number of migrants without papers will increase as long as the economic causes continue to exist no matter what deployment (as can be seen at the border between Mexico and the States where a wall of 1200 kilometres is under construction), which will have no consequences apart from the increase of the passage costs and the amount of dead. Only the multiplication of her deportations would enable the state to apply her laws concerning forced expulsion from the territory. But that is not the question, because these deployments do not primarily aim at deporting all paperless, but serve to terrorize the whole of the immigrated workers (the regularized as well as those chosen to have a permit to stay) so that their condition of exploitation which resembles the one they escaped can remain unaltered (internal delocalisation in a certain way) while pressure is put down on the whole of the exploitation conditions. The racist excuse moreover serves to deploy the arsenal of social control which touches everybody.<br /><br />But let us neither forget about the changing character of migration itself. Industrial capitalism used workers as pawns on a game board following an easy logic: here we have too many workers and there we need them. And whenever the need was rather small, other aspects of this population politics were put into action. However, this specific form of migration control has changed as a result of the restructuring of the economic aspect and because of the consequences of industrial growth. You can notice that speaking of a point of departure as well as a point of arrival becomes more difficult. The points of department have been devastated by hunger, war and disasters while the destinations are changing all the time. In this way migration becomes an endless track consisting of different stages; it’s no longer a movement from point A to B. These new forms of migration are not only being defined by the needs of a constantly flexible and adjustable capital. Millions of people, uprooted by the devastation of the places where they were been born are swarming all over this world – ready to be put at work. And the deployments of this control are very visible: the humanitarian refugee camps, the camps at the borders, the slums and the favelas. The struggles for regularisation seem to pose rather few questions concerning this new fact. The situation in Belgium is a good example of the current impasses of the struggle for regularisation. The state acted simultaneously as a lion and a fox when the tension around the closed centres began to rise in 1998. As a lion she repressed the most rebellious parts of the movement (murder of Semira Adamu (3) who was resisting stiffly in the centres; house searches and arrest of comrades who were active in this struggle). As a fox she started negotiating about regularisations with the other part of the movement. Clearly, the demand for regularisation (besides the fact that it equals the demand for integration) does require certain credibility, a recognized mediator. The movement got hit in this way. Regularisation, which once used to be the answer of the state to the tension and agitation which challenged the whole of the migration politics (using slogans against all camps or for a free circulation), became the goal for most of the paperless groups. Instead of forcing the state to give a bonus by struggling, the collectives started a dialogue which was followed by negotiations which attracted a whole army of professional negotiators and juridical charlatans who would solve all problems. The dynamics were on the one hand broken by repression and on the other hand by the start of a bureaucratic dialogue. Neither the successive self-mutilations (as the hunger strikes outside of the camps), nor the most servile self-abasements were enough to win what in a certain way used to be an answer of the state on agitation. The first answer of the state was combined with a rationalisation of the closed centres and a stricter adjustment of the permits to stay in connection to the needs of the economy (the state herself gave different colours to the cards).<br /><br />During the last years the current situation with its cycle of occupations/hunger strikes/deportations suffocated us during the last years in a struggle experience which offered only a few possibilities to go beyond and share a perspective: experiences of self organisation which do not accept neither politician nor religious or trade union leaders; direct actions which permit the development of a real power balance and the identification of the class enemy in all of her aspects. These observations lead us to feel the need and desire for developing a subversive projectuality departing from our bases, instead of running behind an enlargement (which seems to be more and more further away) based on the demand for regularisation. This projectuality could find her first anchors in the revolt which is factually shared amongst those who struggle for the destruction of the centres and those who (e.g. the rebels of Vincennes or Steenokkerzeel) put the critic of detention into deeds by putting their prison on fire.<br /><br /><span style="color: magenta;"><b>Against the deportation machine</b></span><br /><br />While facing these difficulties a debate that is still going on nowadays rises: the debate about solidarity. A lot of comrades continue defending the necessity –at whatever cost- of our presence inside of the paperless groups, until they retreat from any similar struggle, disgusted after so many blows. The justifications are diverse and most of the time a reflection of an activism or of comfortable recipes lacking imagination, lacking any real desire for subversion. And here as well: although the collective character of an action is no criterion for us, we do understand the need “to break the isolation” felt by some comrades. Nevertheless do we doubt if we can manage this by participating in endless meetings, being locked up with 30 people in a squat or an apartment block of paperless and leftists. We tend more towards the development of our own project and so to start from our own bases. As long as solidarity is understood as support to certain social categories, it will continue being an illusion. Even if it would entail some more radical methods, it will continuously be dragged along in a conflict with bases, methods and perspectives which are not ours at all. The only justification left is claiming that by taking part in these conflicts we can ‘radicalize’ the people because their social condition would necessarily lead them towards sharing our ideas. As long as this concept of ‘radicalisation’ is understood as a task of missionaries wanting others to swallow their ideas it will continue to be stuck in the impasse which we notice growing everywhere around. This ‘radicalisation’ however can as well be understood as openness of our dynamic towards others, enabling us to guarantee the autonomy of our own projectuality. In this way, ‘being together’ in a struggle and going forward on the level of perspectives as well as methods demands an existing basic affinity, a first rupture, a first desire that goes beyond the usual demands. In this way our demand for mutuality can become meaningful. There are a lot more tracks to explore than the continuation of the connection which only reason for existing is the maintenance of the fiction of the political subject that in the name of its statute as being the main victim, monopolizes the reason for the struggle and by this way the struggle itself. To put things clear we could say that solidarity is in need of a mutual recognition in deeds as well as in words. It is difficult to be solidary with a paperless “in struggle” who demands his regularisation and the one of his family without any interest whatsoever in the perspective of the destruction of the closed centres. Maybe we would still meet somewhere but this will be on a purely practical base: we don’t need to analyse the reasons nor perspectives which bring somebody to revolt in order to recognize ourselves, at least partly, in these deeds of attack which automatically turn against the responsibles of this misery. As counts for most of the intermediary struggles: there is only a very limited sense in participating to a factory conflict which departs from demands for wage and does not overcome the trade unionist framework, nor develops any sign of direct action. It is limited because there simply is no common base. New perspectives open up at the moment when these workers start sabotaging (even if they regard it as a means to pressure the bosses) or kick out their deputes (even if only because they feel betrayed).<br /><br />So, instead of holding on to more and more slogans such as “solidarity with the immigrants / in struggle” (but which struggle?), we could develop a projectuality against the closed centres using methods and ideas which are ours and subversive in the sense that they question the foundations of this world (the exploitation and domination). This projectuality would be autonomous and strengthened by deeds of revolt contrasting the overall resignation, and strengthening these deeds in return. Again, recipes do not exist but today it is important to go beyond the impasses of a more or less humanist activism which hinders any radical autonomy in favour of an agitation which conceives the cadence of power or follows the logic of the only as legitimate conceived actors of the struggle, while it is actually the freedom of all which is at stake as for example in the case of the raids. As it is important to put forward perspectives which, beyond the partial goals developed in these intermediary struggles, are able to widen up the matter to a horizon which finally questions the whole of this world and its horror; meaning perspectives which are able to always put forward the matters of domination and exploitation. The diffuse attacks could make up the heart of this projectuality. Not only do they offer the advantage of exceeding the powerlessness felt while standing in front of the wall or barbed wire of a camp or while being confronted to a raid with a police deployment that can adjust itself and count on the passivity and fear of the passer-bys, but as well and especially do they offer us on the one hand the possibility to develop our own temporality and on the other hand to show everyone that the structures of the deportation machine which can be found on every corner of the street are vulnerable and at last they offer real action possibilities to everyone, regardless of the number they are.<br /><b><span style="color: magenta;"><br />/Some enthusiastic Internationalists</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://acorpsperdu.wikidot.com/touching-the-heart" target="_blank"><b><span style="color: magenta;">http://acorpsperdu.wikidot.com/touching-the-heart </span></b></a></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-57753795533138813352014-10-01T09:06:00.000-07:002014-10-01T09:12:02.939-07:00"To a Friend / Essay on Blanqui" by The Imaginary Party<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The ingenuity of the Imaginary Party's essay on Blanqui is that it
goes way beyond merely contextualizing Blanqui; it even goes beyond
trying to defend the
indefensible Blanqui, <i>the revolutionary who is unacceptable to everyone, especially self-proclaimed revolutionaries.</i> "To a friend" (as the preface is also known) aims to <i>be</i>
a modern Blanquist statement: an advancement of Blanqui's own ideas and
actions by people unafraid to be called "Blanquists." Who will stop
these "agents" of the Imaginary Party from seizing these positions? No
one. This terrain is completely empty of other combatants; and no one
will want to re-take it once it has been seized. A very neat trick:
affirm Blanqui by negating his absence. And, more importantly, a very
meaningful gesture: there are other once-revolutionary terrains can be
re-taken by agents of the Imaginary Party <i>without firing a single shot.</i><br />
<b>Part of the introduction from translator's collective </b><br />
<b><a href="http://www.notbored.org/blanqui-preface.html" target="_blank">NOT BORED!</a><br />
3 June 2009</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">"To a friend"</span><br />
<br />
"To judge from the current disposition of people's minds, communism
isn't exactly knocking on the door. But nothing is as deceptive as the
situation, because nothing is so changeable." (Blanqui)<br />
We are still afflicted by many superstitions. We have our collective
hallucinations that are only doubted by the crazy, and our images of
ourselves that are only distinguishable from those of yesteryear by
being more secular. We meet our equals and we sincerely believe we see
persons and people. We love someone, and we speak of "the Other." A
century separates us from a certain life and we postulate it as being
faraway. Dissimilar customs or a few variations in vocabulary are
sufficient to convince us of an uncrossable distance. But what we
understand can only be a part of ourselves; what we understand cannot go
much further [than that]. Enlighten yourself: Blanqui[1] is not a
historical person. He does not return to us as a phantom from the 19th
century, though a century can traverse the ages. Blanqui is from
yesterday, tomorrow, today. Blanqui did indeed exist, the facts attest
to it, but the facts also attest to the fact he existed, above all, as a
conceptual persona, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Bataille's Gilles de
Rai or Artaud's Heliogabale.[2] From whence comes Blanqui's proper
eternity. Gustave Lefrancais notes in his Souvenirs: "For the 400,000
voters of la Seine, 'Blanqui' is a revolutionary expression."[3] The
name 'Blanqui' relates, not to a person, but to an existential
possibility, to a manner of being-there, to a power of affirmation. If
Blanqui was named "the Imprisoned One," this was in part due to his
three decades in jail, but also due to the stubbornness with which this
power remained in the historical figure of Blanqui. Prison, glory and
calumny are the means that opportunely command the necessity of
isolating [human] existences that are too ardent.<br />
*<br />
The universal desire to be someone, to be recognized, founds the
comic atrocity of our era and gives it an aspect of free improvisation
in the midst of crazy people, an open-air theatre of narcissistic
pathologies of all kinds. We divert our glance from this bad show. We
imagine a being who could not close his or her eyes to the horror of the
present (this canvas of boredom, injustice, stupidity, separation and
cynicism, the disastrous coherence of which is guaranteed by the
police); a being who a kind of infirmity, certainly, but also perhaps
some spirit of defiance had rendered unable to remain at peace with such
a state of things; a being who had also found, while still young and in
the midst of rioting, fires and conspiracy, the exact contraries of
what he saw around him: intelligence, courage, adventure, friendship and
truth. Such a being -- and there is no doubt that there were a number
of people who, at that very moment, lived and sought each other out --
would be Blanqui, as much as Blanqui was Blanqui. Each moment of his
life, each beat of his heart, would be propelled by these unique
questions: How to do it? How to constitute a revolutionary force? How to
win? Historical figures are there to provide screens for the powers
that carry them. Nothing is simpler, clearer, more communal than
Blanqui. And this is precisely why it will be necessary to cloud this
menacing clarity with so many calumnies, rumors and dirty water. There
is no "Mystery of Blanqui," despite all of his nocturnal intrigues,
secret enterprises and [other] confabs. There is only bottomless
evidence of a revolutionary existence. But what devil drove him? How
could he still attempt, how could he still want to apply himself, always
and forever, to theorizing [penser] the situation after so many
betrayals, losses and disappointments? And what does it all mean? Don't
worry, spectators: he will cave in one day and you will be able to
whisper about him. Or he will triumph, and you will succumb. By waiting
[for Blanqui], he will be your obsession; it will be your possibility
that you will exhaust by incessantly conjuring him up.<br />
*<br />
"The me has always left me cold."[4] This is what Blanqui opposed to
the malevolent hysteria, to the concert of jealousy that his very nature
sufficed to unleash. And this redoubled the din. He who does not deign
to respond to his accusers, who have in their turn circulated rumors, he
must expect to see them become exaggerated, then dry up into thin
streams of bile. Warning to the activist milieus:<br />
"If you encounter these personal hatreds, jealousies and rivalries of
ambition, I will join with you to weaken them; they are one of the
scourges of our cause; but remark that they are not a special plague of
our party; all of our adversaries suffer from them as we do. They only
explode with greater noise in our ranks because of the more expansive
character and more open morals of the democratic world. Furthermore,
individual struggles focus on human infirmity; it is necessary to resign
oneself to such weaknesses and take men as they are. To lose one's
temper about a fault of nature is puerile, if not stupid. Firm spirits
know how to navigate through the obstacles that can't be removed but
which can be avoided or overcome by anyone. Thus, we know to yield to
the necessity and, deploring the evil, never slow down our march. To
repeat: the truly political man doesn't keep obstacles in mind and
instead goes straight ahead, without otherwise worrying about the
pebbles on the road ahead."<br />
This is in the letter to Maillard.[5] Read it.<br />
*<br />
Dionys Mascolo[6] said something about Saint-Just that is also worthy
of Blanqui: "Saint-Just's 'inhumanity' lay in the fact that he didn't
have several distinct lives, like other men, but a single one." The
custom among human beings is to let life go by. The hand on the shoulder
that says, "Go, have no cares, it will pass," is the best-known carrier
of this grippe. Thus, 'inhuman' is the one who devotes herself to the
highest intensity she has encountered like a truth. The one who does not
oppose herself to the shock, to the motion of experience, the
hesitations of bad faith, skepticism and comfort. She becomes a force in
her turn. A little discipline, and this force -- the force that
attaches her to this intensity -- will successfully organize the
maelstrom of attractions that compose all of us and imprint upon them a
unique direction. What spectators stupidly call "will" is instead an
unreserved abandon. For Blanqui, the intensity was insurrection. It was
insurrection that, from the first days of July [1830], polarized his
existence. "Liberty, equality, fraternity" is a decoration in bad taste
for the porticoes of schools; for some it is also the most succinct
expression of the experience of being in a riot. "Liberty, equality,
fraternity" in street combat, facing death. It is still too soon to say
how many Blanquis were born to the world in Genoa [Italy] on 20-21 July
2001. So many have already died from being unable to find, in the desert
of the real, the road that leads there. "Weapons and organization --
these are the decisive elements of progress, the serious means by which
to have done with poverty! He who has iron, has bread. We grovel before
the bayonets; we sweep away the unarmed crowds. France bristles with
workers in arms: it is the advent of socialism."<br />
*<br />
We lead ourselves astray by reviving the specter of "the
superman."[7] Blanqui's enemies amply take up this question. "Somber
temperament, haughty, unsociable, hypochondriac, sarcastic, great
ambition, cold, inexorable, pitilessly breaking men to pave his road.
Heart of marble, head of iron." "The head and heart of the proletarian
party in France" (a journalist). "The most cynical of the demoniacs
conjured up by the fear of modern society" (a reactionary). These are
maneuvers suited to assure the isolation of a being outside the prisons.
The superman is a toy, as man is a chimera. It is sufficient to
distinguish between the mediocre existence that floats and navigates by
what is possible, and the settled existence that is attached to a truth
and works and makes headway from it. It isn't curious that the word
"destiny" [destin] is derived from the [Latin] verb destinare, which
means "to attach."[8] He who becomes devoted [s'attache] must become
less and less a "person" and more and more a presence. Less and less
"human," but more and more communal, simpler. With good cause, the
subject of such an attachment is treated as "irreducible," because it is
no longer reducible to itself. For our part, we are please to name the
reducible the crowd of those who, taking themselves for people, betray
themselves at every moment.<br />
*<br />
On the eve of the proclamation of the [Paris] Commune, [Adolphe]
Thiers took Blanqui away. He kept Blanqui in secret and refused to
exchange him for sixty-four hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris.
Flotte[9] recounts this remark by Thiers: "To bring Blanqui to the
insurrection is to send him a force equal to an armed corps." Blanqui is
feared, and even in his own party, not as a leader, but as power. He
knows how to show his abilities in [both] action and thought, and to
practice [tenir] them together. One need search no further for the
origin of the implacable hatred and the unfailing loyalty that Blanqui
inspired. "The tribunes compare [s'addresser] the heroic and barbaric
beastliness of the multitudes to a wild bearing, the lion's face,
Taurus' neck. As for Blanqui, the cold mathematician of revolt and
reprisals, he seems to hold between his thin fingers the tally [le
devis] of the sorrows and rights of the people" (Valles, L'Insurge).[10]
Blanqui addressed himself to justice and determination; he addressed
himself to his equals. Unlike a leader, he neither flattered nor snubbed
anyone, and he preferred to keep people at a distance than to take the
risk of [mutual] seduction. By his very existence, he contradicted all
the bourgeoisie's propaganda, which -- before turning insurgent Parisian
proletarians into piles of cadavers as tall as barricades -- began by
painting them as a shapeless mass, as a brainless Plebian class of
thieves, drunks, prison-escapees, headless devils, creatures that were
unintelligible, monstrous and foreign to all humanity. And so: there is a
logic of revolt. There is a science of insurrection. There is an
intelligence in the riot, an idea of upheaval. It is necessary to have
all the class-hatred of de Tocqueville to fail to recognize it.<br />
"There then appeared in front of the tribunal a man who I only saw
that one day, but whose memory has always filled me with disgust and
horror. He had haggard and sunken cheeks, white lips, a sickly, wicked
and unclean air, a dirty pallor, the bearing of a moldy body, apparently
no underclothes, an old black frock coat gathered about thin and
emaciated limbs. He seems to have lived in a cesspool and crawled out;
one told me that this was Blanqui." (Souvenirs).<br />
*<br />
"Sink the Romantics!" These were Blanqui's first words, while he was
still sweating, covered with gunpowder, at the end of the three days in
July 1830. There is indeed a romantic feeling for life that extends down
to us and even more profoundly infests our era than the previous
century. Musset[11] codified it once and for all in 1836, in the first
few pages of La Confession:<br />
"A feeling of inexpressible malaise thus begins to ferment in all the
young hearts. Condemned to rest by the sovereign of the world,
delivered up to the pedants of all species, to idleness and boredom, the
young people see recede from them the foaming waves against which they
had prepared their arms (. . .) At the same time that the life of the
beyond was so pale and petty, the inner life of society took on a somber
and silent aspect; the most severe hypocrisy reigned in morals (. . .)
This was like a denial of all things in heaven and on earth, which one
could disenchantedly name despair, as if lethargic humanity had been
thought dead by those who felt its pulse. In the same way that the
soldier of yesteryear -- whom one had asked, "What do you believe in?"
-- answered "In me," the youth of France would today say "In nothing.""<br />
All that has been valuable in the last two centuries -- in all
domains -- has been made against the romantic feeling for life, that is
to say, by keeping it in mind. Lautreamont's Poesies, Chklovski's
Lettres de non-amour, Deleuze and Parnel's Dialogues, and Gang Of Four's
album Entertainment[12] mark out a front that includes Durruti's cold
passion, Lenin's best intuitions, Italian feminism, Huey P. Newton's
speeches, the urban guerrilla and the wind that blows through la villa
Savoye.[13] All this reveals what we would, in opposition, call the
Blanquist feeling for life. [His texts] L'Eternite par les astres and
Instructions pour une prise d'armes[14] are the purest expression of it
in this volume. Starting with what is here, and not with what is
missing, with what (as they say) will default on the real. Never wait;
operate with those who are there. Learn oneself, learn [other] beings
and situations, not as entities, but as intersections [parcourus] of
lines and planes, traversed by misfortunes [fatalites]. No afterlife,
reveries, recriminations or explications. "One only consoles oneself too
much." To renounce the idea of chaos, the simple mental transcription
of renunciation -- "The shadow of chaos never existed, it will never
exist, anywhere." Once what is there is accounted for, get organized. Do
not recoil from any logical consequence. Those who speak of revolution
without concerning themselves with the questions of arms and supplies
already have cadavers in their hands.[13] Leave the questions of origin
and finality to the metaphysicians; the here-and-now is our only
starting point, and what we can do practically is our only serious goal.
If the state of things is untenable, it is not because of this or that,
but because I am powerless within it. Never oppose the necessities of
thought and action. Remain firm in moments of ebb, when one must start
again, alone, from the beginning: one is never alone with the truth.
Such a way of being can find no excuse in the eyes of those for whom
life is only a scholarly collection of justifications. Faced with this
Blanquist way of being, resentment hurls invectives; it denounces "the
taking of power" and "megalomania"; it erects its security corridors of
bad faith, stupidity and contentment; it announces the banning of the
monster that seems to be in the process of extricating itself from the
human herd.<br />
But when a sincere man, leaving aside the fantastic mirage of the
programs and the mists of the Kingdom of Utopia, leaves the [romantic]
novel to enter reality; when he speaks seriously and practically --
"Disarm the bourgeoisie, arm the people: these are the first
necessities, the only signs of the health of the revolution" -- oh! then
indifference vanishes and a long howl of fury resounds from one end of
France to the other. Sacrilege! Patricide! Hydrophobia! There is
rioting; the furies are unleashed upon that man; he is condemned to the
infernal gods for having modestly spelled out the first words of common
sense.<br />
*<br />
The partisans of waiting have always used the adjective "Blanquist"
as an unanswerable insult. The purists among the anarchists use it as a
synonym for "Jacobin," while the Stalinists used it as the equivalent of
"anarchist." The cultivated imbeciles of the Encyclopedia of
Nuisances,[16] who for twenty years have had the lucid courage to
relentlessly bet on counter-revolution, have [also] spoken of the
Unabomber's "imaginary Blanquism" so as to better dissociate it from his
gestures, and thereby introduce their grossly falsified translation of
his Manifesto.[17] Among Marxists, "Blanquist" is a synonym for
"putschist" that denounces an avant-garde adventurism and a haste to get
organized without due care for theory, while the masses are not always
ready for it. All this surface confusion is of no interest. "Let's go!
With patience, always! With resignation, never!" That is the Blanquist
way. The alternative is not between waiting and activism, between
participating in "social movements" and forming an avant-garde army; it
is between being resigned or organized. A force can grow in an
underground [sous-jacente] manner, according to its own rhythm, and can
seize the time at the opportune moment. If the success of the October
coup d'Etat had value for the Bolsheviks [in the form of] the admiration
of a crowd of followers and opportunists of all nationalities, the
unfortunate attempts of Blanqui -- surrounded with an evil aura -- at
least had the merit of distancing him from this race of wood lice. In
its text On the armed struggle in Western Europe, the Red Army Faction
cites a passage from the famous article on partisan warfare written by
Lenin: "In an era of civil war, the ideal of the party is a militarily
engaged party (. . .) In the name of the principles of Marxism, we
categorically demand that one does not dodge the analysis of the
conditions of the civil war via cliches and worn-out phrases about
anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and [we demand] that one does not
come to discuss with us the scarecrow of certain absurd procedures
applied by such and such organization in a war fought by partisans."<br />
*<br />
He who becomes absorbed in a destiny finds himself on equal footing
with those who share it. The experience of friendship is the sweetest
effect of such discipline. "I regard having made alliances and
friendships with several hearts capable of great affection and great
sacrifices like a conquest; it is an ability that everyone has." Just as
love falls under the heading of the romantic cesspool, friendship
belongs to Blanquist joy. It is that rare form of affection in which the
horizon of the world does not disappear. Hannah Arendt says that
"friendship is not intimately personal, but poses political requirements
and remains oriented towards the world." Here beings belong to each
other in a free state, that is to say, each belongs to the others as
much as each always-already belongs to a destiny. If Cicero's Lelius
foresees the dangers of secession that friendship poses to the City, it
is because an unjust world, a detestable society, doesn't get forgotten
in friendship as [it does] in the suffocating ecstasies of love. It
still has the chance to orient itself against such a world, against such
a society. To speak in blunt terms: today, all friendship is in some
way at war with the imperial order or it is only a lie.<br />
*<br />
Lacambre, Tridon, Eudes, Granger, Flotte and the majority of
Blanqui's co-conspirators were at first only friends who did not repress
their latent politics. Conversely, all friendships have a
conspiratorial kernel. In 1833, Vidocq[18] deplored the fact that there
were more than a hundred secret societies in Paris. Any history of the
revolutionary movement in France between 1830 and 1870 carries the trace
of the societies that -- clubs as far as the regime would permit --
changed into hotbeds of clandestine propaganda or conspiracies when
repression came and once again became clubs the moment that the regime
vacillated. In 1848, there were no less than 600 [secret societies] in
Paris, including -- to mention only one -- the club of l'Emeute
revolutionnaire, located at 69 rue Mouffetard and presided over by
Palanchan, an old accomplice of Blanqui. The official history of the
workers movement has it that the conspiratorial tradition -- with its
oaths, admission rituals and secret decorum -- succumbed during the
development of the workers movement, though it had been its crucible.
Did not the members of the League of the Just, ancestor of the League of
the Communists, participate in the aborted insurrection of 1839,
launched by the Society of the Seasons? Wasn't it Buonarroti who
delivered the precious message of Babeuf to the modern world? Certainly
one wasn't admitted to the so-called Revolutionary Communist League as
one was admitted to the Association of Egalitarian Workers in 1839.<br />
"Listen with confidence and without fear: you are with communist
republicans and consequently you now begin to live in the era of
equality. They will be your brothers if you are loyal to your oath, but
you will be forever lost if you betray it. They have all sworn to it
just as you have sworn to it. Always listen with the greatest attention:
the community is the veritable republic: work in common, communal
education, property and pleasure; it is the symbolic sun of equality, it
is the new faith for which we have all sworn to die! We know no
borders, boundaries, or homeland; all communists are our brothers; the
aristocrats [are] our enemies. Today, if you fear prison, torture or
death; if you find your courage to be weak; you should withdraw. To
enter our ranks, one must confront all that: once the oath has been
taken, your life belongs to us; you have risked your neck [19] and that
of the one who will lead you for the rest of your days. Reflect and
respond."<br />
With the end of the era of conspiracies, the workers movement
supposedly passed from its infantile to its adult phase, from night to
light. At least according to Marxist historiography. The public
organizations of Social Democracy took up the slack from shapeless
proletarian politics. From the League of the Communists one proceeds by
degrees to the International Association of Workers and the existence of
Social Democrat Parties in all countries [of Europe], while the
anarchists [supposedly] sank stupidly into terrorism and syndicalism.
The truth is that conspiratorial politics never ended. [Supposedly] all
the traditional links, all the familiarities based on trade and
neighborhood -- the village, in short -- on which proletarian politics
rested until the Commune have been irreversibly destroyed. And that the
organizations that have substituted themselves for a thenceforth missing
"people" have only demoted [repousser] the conspiratorial to "the
informal" and have consequently de-ritualized all that depends upon
friendship. At bottom, the conflict between Marx and Bakunin concerning
the International and its alleged infiltration by an obscure
International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (founded by Bakunin) came
down to this: on the one side, a politics based on programs and, on the
other, a politics founded on friendship. A Prussian, Karl Marx did not
expect the sad end of the League of Communists due to his hatred of the
politics of friends. His 1850 review of Chenu's book Les Conspirateurs
already oozed pure hostility.[20]<br />
"The entire lives of these professional conspirators are marked by
the sign of Bohemia. Recruiting-sergeants for conspiracy, they shuffle
from wine merchant to wine merchant, feeling the pulse of the workers,
choosing their people, attracting them to [the] conspiracy by dint of
cajoling them, and charging to the firm's account or their new friend
the inevitable glasses that they themselves consume. In sum, the wine
merchant may be consider the veritable fathers of their companionship (.
. .) Due to a temperament that is very much shared by all Parisian
proletarians, the conspirator doesn't delay becoming an accomplished
"carouser" in this incessant tavern ambiance. The shady conspirator, who
observes a rigid Spartan virtue in the secret sessions, suddenly
loosens up and becomes someone who -- in the eyes of all the scholarly
barflies -- knows how to appreciate wine and women. This tavern
joviality is even more heightened by the constant dangers to which the
conspirators are exposed: at any minute, he could be called to the
barricades and perish there; at each step, the police lay traps for him
that could lead to prison or even a galley ship. Such dangers precisely
constitute the attraction of the trade: the greater the insecurity, the
more the conspirator hastens to enjoy the pleasures of the moment. At
the same time, the habituation to danger renders him completely
indifferent to both life and liberty. He is as at home in prison as at a
cabaret. Every day he expects to receive the order to go into action.
The desperate rashness that manifests itself in every Parisian
insurrection is precisely the contribution of these old professional
conspirators, the henchmen. They are the ones who erect and command the
first barricades, who organize resistance, lead the pillaging of
armories, seize weapons and munitions, and carry out in full upheaval
those audacious blows that so often throw the party in power into
confusion."<br />
Here one has a faithful description of the type of man that Bakunin
was at the continental level. Bakunin, who could not in the course of
his incessant transcontinental peripatetics encounter a being whom he
liked without unloading upon him the statutes of his most recently
formed secret society, hoping that he would adhere to what the Program
and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organization of the International
Brothers calls a "kind of revolutionary [general] staff composed of
individuals who are devoted, intelligent and sincere friends,
especially; neither ambitious nor vain; of the people; capable of
serving as the intermediary between the revolutionary idea[l] and
working-class instincts. The number of these individuals thus most not
be large. For the international organization in all of Europe, one
hundred strongly and seriously allied revolutionaries would suffice." In
truth, conspiratorial politics hasn't ceased to double all the
organizational realities. In Spain, the FAI doubled the CNT, while its
military office paid no attention to the Social-Democrat Workers Party
in Russia. [in Russia,] Lenin was the only one up on the latest
expropriation of Kamo, in 1912, [which worked] to the advantage of the
Organization. [In Italy,] the "illegal work" commission of Potere
Operaio[21] tasked itself with auto-financing, and [in France, it] was
evoked by the constitution of the "invisible party." The party -- this
is often forgotten -- has never ceased to be legal and illegal, visible
and invisible, public and conspiratorial. It is one of the traits of the
present that, at the moment we need all the resources of conspiratorial
politics, we no longer understand anything about it. It is necessary,
at any cost, to maintain the following epistemological principle: the
history of he revolutionary movement is, first of all, the history of
the links that make up its reality [qui font sa consistance].<br />
*<br />
Resentment's rationalizations have the art of inverting logical
relations. For more than a century, and notably since The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, every event finds its explication among the slaves
in a conspiracy by the powerful. The global petite bourgeoisie dote upon
this literature, because it comforts its ignorance and powerlessness.
The progression of conspiracism [complotisme] has everywhere followed
the progression of this "class." In fact, the revelation that the
powerful conspire against us only serves to mask evidence of the
contrary: the power that is found in friendship and through conspiracy.
In his preface to Histoire des Treize, Balzac[22] expresses as no one
else the ambivalence of this power, which can return as aristocratic
secession just as it can give birth to a revolutionary force.<br />
"It happened that, under the Empire and in Paris, thirteen men
equally struck by the same feeling, all endowed with a very great energy
for being loyal to the same thought; quite honest amongst themselves
due to never betraying each other; quite profoundly political so as to
dissimulate the sacred links that unite them; strong enough to be above
the law; bold enough to undertake anything; very happy for having almost
always succeeded in their designs; having run the greatest dangers, but
keeping quiet about their defeats; insusceptible to fear, and having
never trembled before the prince, the executioner or innocence; having
accepted each other, such as each was, without minding social prejudices
(. . .) This world apart from the world, hostile to the world, accepted
none of the ideas of the world, and recognized no law in it (. . .)
This intimate union of superior people, cold and teasing, smiling and
cursing in the midst of a false and petty society (. . .) Thus there
were in Paris thirteen brothers who were their own masters and yet
under-estimated in the world (. . .) There were no leaders nor
followers; no one could arrogate power to himself; only the most vivid
passion, only the most demanding circumstance, was the best. There were
thirteen unknown kings, but real kings, and, more than kings, they were
judges and executioners who -- organized into flanks that could traverse
the entire country -- deigned to be something else, because they could
be everything."<br />
*<br />
All of Blanqui's texts are circumstantial texts. They are driven by
the conditions in which and against which they were written. It isn't
until l'Eternite par les astres [1872] that the Fort du Taureau is
mentioned. From whence comes the nonexistence of Blanqui's oeuvre, in
the sense of something that includes an entire treasure. From whence
also comes the absence of a Blanquist doctrine as there exists a Marxist
metaphysics. "A little passion; doctrines later!" There is,
nevertheless, a Blanquist style.<br />
"Revolutions desire men who have faith in them. To doubt their
triumphs is to already betray them. It is through logic and audacity
that one launches them and saves them. If you lack these qualities, your
enemies will have it over you; they will only see one thing in your
weaknesses -- the measure of their own forces. And their courage will
grow in direct proportion with your timidity."<br />
Everything's there. Blanqui is the author of the phrase "Neither God,
nor master," the man who wrote "Honest [reguliere] anarchy is the
future of humanity," and the author of an appeal against mutualism and
in favor of integral association entitled "Communism is the future of
society." Go find an orthodoxy there. Of course, constructing a
revolutionary force when overthrowing an administrative monarchy, when
there is only an elite to put down, this can be the work of an elite.
When Bismarck's armies marched on Paris, acting in a revolutionary way
was "making barricades and digging trenches; assigning churches to
national usages; arming the priests and, consequently, suppressing all
cults; mandating enlistment; placing food in common and rationing it;
dismissing and dispersing the former police forces; and denouncing
suspects and Bonapartists" (Dommanget, Blanqui [1972]). in current
society, in which power circulates within the flows of nourishment,
information and medicines; in which citizens take advantage of their
rights to call the cops; it goes without saying that a revolutionary
force must embrace all aspects of existence; it must be constructed as a
force of supply-provisioning and as an armed force, as a power that is
both poetic and medical; and it must seize territories. It must collect
all useful intelligence about the adversary's organization and provoke
desertions in all ranks of society. It must socialize itself to the same
extent that the social becomes military. But no more than yesterday:
things can't wait. Such a force is in the process of being constituted.
If this force closely studies Blanqui, it is only to better understand
the war in progress.<br />
*<br />
Time passes. That is its nature. As long as there is time, there will
be boredom, and time passes. The past does not pass. All that has
really passed carries in itself a spark of eternity; it is inscribed in
some nook of communal experience. One can efface the traces, but not the
event. One can indeed pulverize the memory, [but] each piece of debris
contains the total monad of what one believed to have been destroyed and
will engender it anew, when the opportunity arises. We repeat:
historicism is a brothel in which one takes care that the clients never
believe [the illusion]. The past is not a succession of dates, deeds or
modes of living; it is not a closet full of costumes; it is a reservoir
of forces and gestures, a proliferation of existential possibilities.
Knowledge of it is not necessary; it is simply vital. Vital for the
present. It is from the present that one comprehends the past, not the
reverse. Each era dreams its predecessors. The loss of all historical
meaning -- like the loss of all meaning in general -- in our era is the
logical corollary of the loss of all experience. The systematic
organization of forgetting doesn't at all distinguish itself from the
systematic loss of experience. The most demented form of historical
revisionism, which now manages to apply itself even to contemporary
events, finds it compost in the suspended life of the metropolises,
where one never experiences anything, except for [all] the signs,
signals and codes, and their padded conflicts. Where one has
experiences, private/tame experiences that float, mute, unwrittable and
empty; implosive intensities that cannot be communicated beyond the
walls of an apartment and that any narrative would empty out more than
it shares. It is under the form of its privatization that the
deprivation of experience expresses itself the most communally.<br />
*<br />
December 2006.[23] The ship of state is taking on water everywhere.
Soon it will only be a look-out post. France burns and shipwrecks. This
is good. It revives memories. The schools on fire burn in memory of the
generations of proletarians who therein experienced the bitter taste of
timetables, work and obedience, and incorporated the feeling of complete
inferiority. Those who no longer vote honor the insurgents of June 1848
-- that "revolt by rebellious angels who have not arisen since then"
(Coeurderoy) -- whom one put to the bayonet in the name of universal
suffrage. The leftist intellectuals [of today] wonder on the radio if
the government has the courage to send the army into the banlieus, just
as their ancestors [who in the early 1960s] applauded the generals who,
upon returning from Algeria, massacred Parisian proletarians, though the
generals had gotten into the habit of "civilizing" the indigenous
people [of that country]. Today as yesterday, this species of skunk
calls himself republican and speaks of "the rabble." The imprisoned
members of Action Directe have long ago surpassed their
mandatory-minimum sentences. Regis Schleicher[24] soon will compete with
Blanqui for length of incarceration. More than ever, the army trains
for urban warfare. In France, the historical clock is stuck at May 1871.
The question of communism is invisibly the only question that haunts
all social relations, even porn. The universe fidgets in place. Last
March 31st, a wild demonstration of 4,000 people lasts more than eight
hours: from the intervention of the president of this senile Republic --
he came on TV to announce that the CPE would be maintained -- to four
o'clock in the morning. The demonstration wants to go to the Eylsee,
oblique to la Concorde sur l'Assemblee national, which it fails to
approach [investir] due to lack of materials and weapons -- same thing
for the Senate.<br />
At the edges of the march, determination grows. A martial scansion is
heard at the door: "Paris! Get up, wake up!" It is an order. On the
Boulevard de Sebastopol, then at de Magenta, the windows of the banks
and interim-job agencies begin to fall, one after the other,
methodically. Prostitutes at Pigalle salute from a window. The crowd
mounts le Sacre-Coeur to cries of "Vive la Commune!" The door to the
crypt does not budge; what a shame, one could have burnt it down.
Descending to a small street, a lady in a baby-doll outfit leans on her
third-floor balcony and yells at the top of her voice, "The bad days
will end."[25] The permanently-open office of the vile Pierre
Lellouche[26] will soon be sacked. It is three o'clock in the morning.
The past does not pass. The burning of Paris will be the worthy
completion of Baron Haussmann's destruction.<br />
<br />
(Signed "Some Agents of the Imaginary Party," this text was published
as the preface to Dominiqu Le Nuz's collection of texts by Blanqui
entitled Maintenant, il faut des arms, published by Editions La Fabrique
in 2007. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 26 May 2009.)<br />
<br />
[1] Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was a French <b>insurrectionist</b>.<br />
[2] Unlike Zarathustra and Heliogabale, Gilles de Rais was a real
person. But it is true that, for Georges Bataille, author of The Trial
of Gilles de Rais, (original 1965, translated by Richard Robinson,
1991), de Rais was more (evil) than just a "mere" man.<br />
[3] Gustave Lefrancais (1826-1901) was a French anarchist.<br />
[4] Uncited quotations are phrases from Blanqui.<br />
[5] Letter dated 6 June 1852.<br />
[6] See Dionys Mascolo's preface to collection of Saint-Just's writings published by Gallimard in 1968.<br />
[7] Surhomme in French and uber Mensch in German.<br />
[8] To fasten, make firm, establish.<br />
[9] Benjamin Flotte.<br />
[10 Jules Valles, L'Insurge, published post-humously in 1886.<br />
[11] Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century (1836).<br />
[12] Released in 1979, this album is strongly influenced by the Situationist International.<br />
[13] A "machine for living" (a house) designed by Le Corbusier in Poissy, France, between 1928 and 1931.<br />
[14] The Instructions for an armed uprising was first published in 1866, while Eternity through the stars was published in 1872.<br />
[15] A detournement of a famous phrase by Raoul Vaneigem: "People who
talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly
to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love
and positive in the referral of constraint, have corpses in their
mouths." A great deal could be said about this detournement: 1) it
removes love from the subversive equation; 2) it re-territorializes a
remark from Vaneigem, whom Guy Debord once criticized for his
"Blanquism" (see letter to Mustapha Khayati dated 13 November 1965); and
3) it reminds us of Debord's complete absence from this text on
Blanqui, in particular, the following highly relevant remarks from
Debord's Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.<br />
"The notion of acceptable political crime only became recognized in
Europe once the bourgeoisie had successfully attacked previously
established social structures. The nature of political crime could not
be separated from the diverse intentions of social critique. This was
true for Blanqui, Varlin, Durruti. Nowadays there is a pretense of
wishing to preserve a purely political crime, like some inexpensive
luxury, a crime which doubtless no one will ever have the occasion to
commit, since no one is interested in the subject any more; except for
the professional politicians themselves, whose crimes are rarely
pursued, nor for that matter no longer called political. All crimes and
offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be
seen as worse than the impertinent pretension to still want to change
something in this society, which thinks that it has only been only too
kind and patient, but which no longer wants to be blamed."<br />
[16] The Encyclopedia of Nuisances was founded as a group and a
journal in 1984 by Jaime Semprun, Christian Sebastiani and others, in
response to the murder of Gerard Lebovici, the editor of Editions Champ
Libre. It began a publishing house in 1993.<br />
[17] The EdN published a translation of the Unabomber's allegedly
anarchist manifesto, "Industrial Society and Its Future," in 1999.<br />
[18] Eugene Francois Vidocq (1775-1857) was a French criminal who became a police spy.<br />
[19] The French here is tu es engage sur ta tete (literally, "you are engaged on your head").<br />
[20] This review by Marx is available on-line in an English
translation. Ironically, this website -- "Marxist," though it is -- is
the best on-line resource for Blanqui's writings in translation.<br />
[21] Potere Operaio ("Workers Power") was an Italian group active between 1968 and 1973.<br />
[22] Honore de Balzac, Histoire des Treize: Ferragus, chef des devorants, XIII, 13.<br />
[23] In the midst of spirited protests against the rescinding of the CPE (Contrat Premiere Embauche).<br />
[24] Regis Schleicher, a member of Action Directe, was sentenced to life in prison in 1986.<br />
[25] "The Bad Days Will End" was the title of an essay published in
April 1962 by the Situationist International, and also the title of a
film made by Thomas Lacoste in 2008.<br />
[26] A right-wing French politician, born in 1951 and, one way or another, in power since 1993. <br />
<br />
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<b>source: <a href="http://www.notbored.org/blanqui.html">http://www.notbored.org/blanqui.html</a> </b>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-85909118430124727032014-07-18T05:35:00.001-07:002014-07-18T05:51:40.952-07:00Understand the Israeli – Palestinian Apartheid In 11 Images<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYWOQyPQ8whbE4FQygi8WC8RhvOdOaVBojdCq-WXQlxoCX4ELL_4LLdi17-l1UeWbJM12luLggxQgwVKWLmZTeZX_MpJMgG87_VaK5izOVW6amNuiIOK9n0bqPhwugYNz_dgfNKeaFb_Lt/s1600/israel-gaza-shoes_2402255b1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYWOQyPQ8whbE4FQygi8WC8RhvOdOaVBojdCq-WXQlxoCX4ELL_4LLdi17-l1UeWbJM12luLggxQgwVKWLmZTeZX_MpJMgG87_VaK5izOVW6amNuiIOK9n0bqPhwugYNz_dgfNKeaFb_Lt/s1600/israel-gaza-shoes_2402255b1.jpeg" height="248" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2gzPhWy5sRn5agFIvrDzn2UxXkKgq1heXz9YZnQVMzlSXxEramhmiHK4c9MQ2NjCmotmPgMgRtRjK9CcRXDkUgeg5XbbdmWD3dP6oo1MBHat5WrXDxIb4yA6yDrJR4pIdB_jWHlzIQkTZ/s1600/gaza_digs_out_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2gzPhWy5sRn5agFIvrDzn2UxXkKgq1heXz9YZnQVMzlSXxEramhmiHK4c9MQ2NjCmotmPgMgRtRjK9CcRXDkUgeg5XbbdmWD3dP6oo1MBHat5WrXDxIb4yA6yDrJR4pIdB_jWHlzIQkTZ/s1600/gaza_digs_out_01.jpg" height="263" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyBVCx9RePc_QEGO_h9gCpbEQeFFwNi278QLQXL6dg8kNXn-i2wQLUliLTMZEzizGoQKIIhHUW6f7dX7EKha09w_ahCym7FGUsF21j1c8IPd3p2po2uEML83SGw9EhjHs-fGfnZW7cuTcC/s1600/gaza_digs_out_05.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyBVCx9RePc_QEGO_h9gCpbEQeFFwNi278QLQXL6dg8kNXn-i2wQLUliLTMZEzizGoQKIIhHUW6f7dX7EKha09w_ahCym7FGUsF21j1c8IPd3p2po2uEML83SGw9EhjHs-fGfnZW7cuTcC/s1600/gaza_digs_out_05.jpg" height="263" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdZ4smzJwPeKGR9DzOhf61ovyMq663dsveEds5UBafi4UmuXPMO-phQM3QJUCz-9K-Q0kU6h09l3ABuC6KznyNvMyG__CT2-feL0HTCe0aSvgJZ2MU7R1zW9zko2vjIczMrzlz0pDMEZJb/s1600/gaza_digs_out_04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdZ4smzJwPeKGR9DzOhf61ovyMq663dsveEds5UBafi4UmuXPMO-phQM3QJUCz-9K-Q0kU6h09l3ABuC6KznyNvMyG__CT2-feL0HTCe0aSvgJZ2MU7R1zW9zko2vjIczMrzlz0pDMEZJb/s1600/gaza_digs_out_04.jpg" height="263" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWIrhpWNuiEPlETRAf0xfjQmnot75yHqWkxSm_6kuTY2DKpbmvskAI3pXLLBYSTFscYChK-PWt9Y3Me2ggwrSItBV_Yt6NvX124w4gMKUDYPnAiOPJIUKguqI_wrGEi3JLYf2C_g6IR3rC/s1600/gaza_digs_out_07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWIrhpWNuiEPlETRAf0xfjQmnot75yHqWkxSm_6kuTY2DKpbmvskAI3pXLLBYSTFscYChK-PWt9Y3Me2ggwrSItBV_Yt6NvX124w4gMKUDYPnAiOPJIUKguqI_wrGEi3JLYf2C_g6IR3rC/s1600/gaza_digs_out_07.jpg" height="263" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiElCyWW9yvpcRWZ1a__tUuXgNvaqA9GmHFOSn17tZQZmoHMv1Kc4RZemFamaETiwZ8ByzCMTzUf05LVS0AK2baUppLQhHH_mBki5AgYPPFtpH93RDBNNt-Pm5_lWDLNzMUDBFsju5SB5Q/s1600/gaza-articleLarge-v2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiElCyWW9yvpcRWZ1a__tUuXgNvaqA9GmHFOSn17tZQZmoHMv1Kc4RZemFamaETiwZ8ByzCMTzUf05LVS0AK2baUppLQhHH_mBki5AgYPPFtpH93RDBNNt-Pm5_lWDLNzMUDBFsju5SB5Q/s1600/gaza-articleLarge-v2.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">All the graphics are from the site <a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/">Visualizing Palestine</a>,
a site dedicated to creating informative and impactful graphics about
the occupied region. Check out many more of these images on their site</span></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">1. The Forced Exile of The Palestinian People</span></b><i><b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b></i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrg-9XvFw_s4j3cktX6bjdBF4ruXAgZko1kPBJN51cLDqh4tLpamJi3nLkqNPH4IxKuBTjRKlbIQufdN2WC9hdAC3J4oHBBtoC1wt2QDpnMydU58WC7zB9kE0wkVMxkwgz28HDdTIGA-NP/s1600/vp-an_ongoing_displacement-en-20130514.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrg-9XvFw_s4j3cktX6bjdBF4ruXAgZko1kPBJN51cLDqh4tLpamJi3nLkqNPH4IxKuBTjRKlbIQufdN2WC9hdAC3J4oHBBtoC1wt2QDpnMydU58WC7zB9kE0wkVMxkwgz28HDdTIGA-NP/s1600/vp-an_ongoing_displacement-en-20130514.png" height="640" width="328" /></a></div>
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full screen:<a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/Disappearing-Palestine" target="_blank"> http://visualizingpalestine.org/Disappearing-Palestine</a><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">2. Maintenance of the Occupation</span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ4veswh7DQeyMfSRZMlqNlo9kPxArV12bnOghIUn2PjbMz78uWCAjUxSdAULvMsC9azQ8tZvWKq085S4-8Z2TEbT_-kf-a9RmVSuBgOfwD0OJIVc-QhcDEvw3COpGo_pCm0OswyVJZQiA/s1600/vp-aida-oslo-final-2013-10-11.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ4veswh7DQeyMfSRZMlqNlo9kPxArV12bnOghIUn2PjbMz78uWCAjUxSdAULvMsC9azQ8tZvWKq085S4-8Z2TEbT_-kf-a9RmVSuBgOfwD0OJIVc-QhcDEvw3COpGo_pCm0OswyVJZQiA/s1600/vp-aida-oslo-final-2013-10-11.png" height="640" width="292" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b></span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: small;">full screen: <a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Palestinian-Israeli-Peace-Talks-Settlements-Oslo">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Palestinian-Israeli-Peace-Talks-Settlements-Oslo</a></span></span></span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">3. Continued Displacement and Destruction</span></b></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilvNe8UoM2gcVev-z-intx0Fz-Kch4oWr2lUjnGjdMl6-VcPwG44XLCgTE3QTomoj1IOqhhWyjseXPqQh8DSidK_RA7vO9KAjlUdr-kL21gP6g0Ztz8MB37SsL59jAdN1HiN2ifu4MEIHi/s1600/vp-demolitions-2012-08-31.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilvNe8UoM2gcVev-z-intx0Fz-Kch4oWr2lUjnGjdMl6-VcPwG44XLCgTE3QTomoj1IOqhhWyjseXPqQh8DSidK_RA7vO9KAjlUdr-kL21gP6g0Ztz8MB37SsL59jAdN1HiN2ifu4MEIHi/s1600/vp-demolitions-2012-08-31.png" height="640" width="238" /></a></div>
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full screen: <br />
<a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infograhic/a-policy-of-displacement" target="_blank">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infograhic/a-policy-of-displacement</a><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">4. A Pattern of Violence and Aggression</span></b></span></b></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv4JSKu_9_DFJCwW7X9efwNDpbYbMtBR8yN-vQHhqE-_MAZ6EURV5-FJYsSGx-CQcV8PfefmVa7gpEwAqU_o3ifvnlYc1vX50HsuqSliNvpZ4gw6k2oD5SBxtWmPr3HSXo9_HQ6m0DERo8/s1600/vp-timeline-of-violence-en-rev01-20140716.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjv4JSKu_9_DFJCwW7X9efwNDpbYbMtBR8yN-vQHhqE-_MAZ6EURV5-FJYsSGx-CQcV8PfefmVa7gpEwAqU_o3ifvnlYc1vX50HsuqSliNvpZ4gw6k2oD5SBxtWmPr3HSXo9_HQ6m0DERo8/s1600/vp-timeline-of-violence-en-rev01-20140716.png" height="280" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">full screen: <a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/timeline-of-violence">http://visualizingpalestine.org/timeline-of-violence</a></span></span></span></span></span><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b> </span></b></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">5. Illegal Detention</span></b></span></b></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ-fFzXwy1_G2h2bApecKk1Gof14NbhsRGyM-A7d1Rlz7uoVVaWeCJHn53kgkrVsEl7RsZ68B2XSwCRIjcF3ypC9VEPTeMB3T8xe1L1XWuBKZ_geZdVDw5uUzeL9_7XUq6pOWDa2E8A0u2/s1600/vp-admin-detention-final-2013-10-17.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ-fFzXwy1_G2h2bApecKk1Gof14NbhsRGyM-A7d1Rlz7uoVVaWeCJHn53kgkrVsEl7RsZ68B2XSwCRIjcF3ypC9VEPTeMB3T8xe1L1XWuBKZ_geZdVDw5uUzeL9_7XUq6pOWDa2E8A0u2/s1600/vp-admin-detention-final-2013-10-17.png" height="640" width="332" /></a></div>
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b> </span></b></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">full screen: <a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Admin-Detention" target="_blank">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Admin-Detention</a></span></span></span></span></span><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></span></b></span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">6, 7 & 8. Segregation of Resources</span></b> </span></b></span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIifWsTnGrM12ZO0_fN6wdgTKlIMOxHPkx0tyccxF5OZupRYR4qCWqG7CfXVZWgPS34Zi3jfXaKZU0h9k8iI4MdhXLtz-PrpAnoBHxDRMyTeOJwy7b5EhKO696GG-od3VsGLXpYJ61Fpq1/s1600/gaza_water_rev1_aug28.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIifWsTnGrM12ZO0_fN6wdgTKlIMOxHPkx0tyccxF5OZupRYR4qCWqG7CfXVZWgPS34Zi3jfXaKZU0h9k8iI4MdhXLtz-PrpAnoBHxDRMyTeOJwy7b5EhKO696GG-od3VsGLXpYJ61Fpq1/s1600/gaza_water_rev1_aug28.jpg" height="640" width="424" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjG9oaYFw8T9sj4tNVM6sp3EDUmUOXy7M8W_FUhFEhW-JofxJOwGzkG_hTQv_icbnaNjRu14bQi2TDyzRm2peANjzOTbncb7Nj5t4653a6eIHorDMUXt3rtLIiAC7F5mx4CIhCQA7NegD4/s1600/vp-west-bank-water-2013-03-21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjG9oaYFw8T9sj4tNVM6sp3EDUmUOXy7M8W_FUhFEhW-JofxJOwGzkG_hTQv_icbnaNjRu14bQi2TDyzRm2peANjzOTbncb7Nj5t4653a6eIHorDMUXt3rtLIiAC7F5mx4CIhCQA7NegD4/s1600/vp-west-bank-water-2013-03-21.jpg" height="303" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></b><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwFfjLC42lnxb4u9bwCYjZV5GLqp1C2-mXQ_CG4B5pWCEol5LhdbR1kqdho2qdMy5Xs-OXkTtYalduTLvK_Cg424ozzQqJhrNNIEqSpeomF7ayZsbiXqDCVSC04b7JVWSxiDGSpMFMrNj9/s1600/vp-olive-harvest-final-2013-10-10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwFfjLC42lnxb4u9bwCYjZV5GLqp1C2-mXQ_CG4B5pWCEol5LhdbR1kqdho2qdMy5Xs-OXkTtYalduTLvK_Cg424ozzQqJhrNNIEqSpeomF7ayZsbiXqDCVSC04b7JVWSxiDGSpMFMrNj9/s1600/vp-olive-harvest-final-2013-10-10.jpg" height="640" width="452" /></a></div>
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full screen: <a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/gaza-water-confined">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/gaza-water-confined</a><br />
<a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/wb-water" target="_blank">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/wb-water </a><br />
<a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Olive-Harvest">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Olive-Harvest</a><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">9 & 10. Segregation of Travel </span></b><br />
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full screen:<br />
<a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/segregated-roads-west-bank">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/segregated-roads-west-bank</a><br />
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<a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Bus-Segregation">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/Bus-Segregation</a><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">11. The Wall</span></b><br />
full screen: <a href="http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/ICJ-Separation-Wall-Legality">http://visualizingpalestine.org/infographic/ICJ-Separation-Wall-Legality</a><br />
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Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-62047990941420589312014-07-07T17:56:00.001-07:002014-07-07T17:57:57.179-07:00Intervention (to Greek Anarchist movement) by The Barbarians<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: #f4cccc;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Of course, to begin with, everything needs to be broached with caution. We need to remember to make distinctions<br />in our thought. To speak with tact is not always the same as silence even if in some situations the only real choice is a tactful silence. Yet this is not the case in a general manner. Thus in speaking in a general way, we can avoid this first, no doubt common objection, of preferring silence to dialogue. Similarly, there will be the plea to avoid mixing in these affairs, because, as we ourselves have quite openly admitted, we are neither Greeks nor have we spent our whole lives in Greek Anarchy. If this is admitted, there is no real shame in that. On the contrary, our position as outsiders might be considered as a benefit, both in being more free from insular dynamics and also to aid us in having some space to view things. Besides, as we are outsiders, we have little to lose, and if we have a small influence, then here again this helps us, since we do not have the illusion that with one text we can resolve a practical issue. But to begin a practical process of change and advance, a small text from marginal figures might indeed be suited to its purpose.<br /><br />To aid us along this path, we should inquire what kind of change or development could one desire from Greek anarchy, apart from a general desire for victory? Anarchy has to deal with its own attempt at victory, and most difficult of all, also to prepare for its gradual fading away. The first dilemma would be to show that the change one demands is not abstract but rather rooted in the real situation of the time. So first we must show the situation and later we can elaborate further concerning practical affairs. Thus there would not be random ideas, but rather an exigency of the situation itself. Changes are already underway and our point is merely to act as a midwife, to aid the process of birth. Then our role obviously reorients itself from proclaiming an abstract demand to actually pointing out what is underway, with references to the concrete situation. <br />To commence with a brief overview of the political situation: the Greek State was shaken by December 2008, and this began the general process of decomposition we see unfolding before us, which has both positive and negative aspects. The state, from its own incompetence, corruption, lack of control and so forth, is on the brink of becoming a failed state—this is a sober analysis one can read from various establishment sources, not an illusory radical optimism. In this climate Anarchy itself is changing from a movement of aspiration and hope to a movement of reality. This necessitates a change in forms and ideas of the antagonist movement that have been shaped over time. But again, this is not something made up or imposed onto reality. December, and later Syntagma, February 12, and other developments, have opened up entire new avenues and possibilities for action, most of which, it should be noted, are basically offensive, since the old terrain has shifted. The neighborhood assemblies, new parks and squats, occupations, motorcycle demos, and yes, armed struggle, are all polymorphous changes that no abstract analysis created but rather an integral part of the changing reality itself. This does not need so much philosophizing, but only a quick reflection: Anarchy by definition changes as it gets closer to its goal since it becomes less a small group of believers than a general situation. The only difficulty with accepting this, again, is with lack of distinctions in Thought: often we say one day or one discrete point in time, “the big day” (le grand soir) will change everything; instead of reflecting that change always takes place in time with its delays and irregular progressions, so that the change from normality to Anarchy is a process of quite some time and certainly is in no way inevitable. A real analysis would point out the potential available for anarchy and situations where the state has been shaken. But this is obvious to everyone in the crumbling away of beliefs and buildings, the police on every corner, the splitting of political parties, the polarization of society, continued resistance by anarchists, etc.<br /><br />Everything is getting more anarchic, or potentially more so, in a country that just a short time ago was the middle class success story of Europe. And to deny this, on the basis that we are not yet at Anarchy, is denying the evident reality of the process for the sake of an end that becomes unrealisable and separated from the world. No: the butterfly is leaving its hard, defensive chrysalis; the drab colors and immobility are being changed for something radically new. Or, to recall the old example of Themistokles, the traditional Anarchist way of inhabiting Athens—the classical movement and so forth—is passing as the city falls to the universal despotism of our times. But there is the chance for an audacious victory in a new element, to strike out on the great and stormy sea of revolution.<br /><br />Just as a thing changes in time and so always is and is not, or is always coming-to-be and passing-away, so too Greek Anarchy is changing, just as the larger society and the world are changing. Anarchy itself is getting more anarchic.<br /><br />* * * <br />What can help to bring out the best in this change, and what can be discarded? This basically is one major trend in this issue. In a general way, what is important to promote in order to conserve collective strength in the coming times? For us, as we are trying to show with our example (and thus, our theory is trying to be immediately practical), there can certainly be more openness and discussion in a public form with all the proprieties that should be observed there. To clarify: what exists now is much discussion, but generally in an informal and personalized manner or in a deeply bureaucratic manner (the assembly, to which we will return later). Neither way is the best medium for discussions and they bleed into one another in a deeply tragic fashion. Greek Anarchy is half a dysfunctional and small social milieu, another half a radically utopian political movement, but these should try not to intermingle with one another. And one foresees that in the future, they will continue to diverge. The personal is not the political, as in the misguided 60’s slogan. For us today the slogan must speak to the failure and feebleness of the New Left itself since, of course, the personal makes up a part of the political, as self-evidently persons take part in politics, but this hasty thought has confused the issue. This is the same error as in saying that the marble is the statue, or the paint is the painting. The personal is certainly related and a part of the political, but on the other hand this is so basic a claim and yet so obviously not everything that is in politics (just as the paint does not fully describe the painting). The movement is built upon friends, but politics cannot work only in this fashion, as is obvious, since a general political situation is always larger than the amount of friends, even friendly acquaintances, that one could have. These forms should separate themselves into their proper spheres, as friends are certainly the material for the political, but not the political in and of itself.<br /><br />Historically, this slogan only emerged from the extreme self-denial and negation of the individual undertaken by Stalinism, so the pendulum swung in the opposite direction. Perhaps we can endeavour to find a golden mean, which would both acknowledge the individual, and yet also encourage us to set aside personal differences, or more realistically, to strenuously work to manage them, when issues of over-arching importance come into play. If no existential respect is conceded to others, then not only are we deprived of a certain type of nourishment, but worse, then only force necessarily remains to demand a certain respect. This is in fact the very opposite of the correct relation of mutual respect, which should be in one sense unconditional in a small way, and in a large way, can only be freely granted. For more on this large theme, we have elaborated about negativity in this issue. But in brief what model or ideals can help us? Certainly, not the levelling down of critique, but rather a building up, the noble spirit of ἀγών, as Nietzsche saw, emulation and uplift. As Goethe said, “Divide and conquer, a good maxim. Unite and lead, a better one.”<br /><br />As well, in terms of sustainability, the current model of activism or even the idea as such needs to be questioned. Most people do not have the requisite abnegation to reach the level of sacrifice demanded. And thus, predictably, this model has only worked in small groups for a small period of time, whence comes the famous burn-out or sell-out which inevitably seems to follow. Evidently the model demands too much, this being related to the vaguely Christian roots of the workers’ movement. Similarly we should re- think the idea of the common and reflect on how much is common already and on preserving that as an idea. For example, the welfare- state is doomed, but the idea that a community should care for its ailing, aged, unfortunate or infirm members is a most reasonable idea. But this can equally come about without the state and then it preserves its true character, which is spiritual. Furthermore, this thinking about the common would also apply to our effort since the activist method demands everything and leaves no space for varied <br />or partial commitment. But that is what most people can give. One resource we often do not think of because of an unfortunate tendency to materialism is motivation, which is perhaps the prime thing that keeps the movement going, even though (or seen more clearly, precisely because) it is spiritual. This collective motivation is often squandered in a thoughtless manner that makes things all the more difficult. Whereas if a small effort was made to conserve the collective motivation, one would not demand more or be satisfied with less but recognize varying levels of commitment without a hostile critique.<br /><br />For a brief digression we should also inquire, what exactly is this Greek Anarchy that one speaks about? Not the varied experiences or the actual thing “in itself”, which no one trying to retain their sanity could attempt to define. We here are still persistently looking around Athens for ‘the anarchists’, and also for ‘Greece’, and ‘anarchy’, and as of yet have never really found them. Greece today is nothing more than an empty record of the ruined West, so we should just try for a brief genealogy. But it deserves noting for historical consciousness that this “Greek moment”, with its general strikes and riots and most especially its section of Greek Anarchy, is basically the last recognizable and influential remnant of the classical workers’ movement, which faded out in Western Europe and was discarded as unfashionable by French intellectuals a few decades ago. The only other exception (as we noted last issue) is in Spain, for reasons specific to its history. Greece, besides still having a residue of leftist revolutionism, is also an anarchic country. Anarchy can become a more real expression of something that has always existed in this Greece that could never unite its regions. Revolutions happen and change the lives of peoples, as they make an effort to cast off all their bonds, but on the basis of their prior life. France and Russia had both been the lands of reaction, aristocratic pomp, of authority- and yet that culture, too, was changed in revolution. So that 1789 was seen as the revenge of the Huguenots, the victory of the philosophes, as 1917 was that great revolt predicted by Bakunin, the millennial peasant rising in continuation with the legacy of the social-revolutionaries. But now we come to a new era of revolt: as Surrealism announced almost a century ago now, Marxism never developed the means to attack modernized parliamentary democracy. So it is in fact of the utmost import that Greece is probably the most middle- class country one could ever hope to find. Revolution here would signify leaving behind this middle-class world, the completed welfare-state, and going somewhere completely new, not simply universalizing the bourgeois revolution in peripheral countries as happened for example in Marxism.<br /><br />At any rate, in critique it is very important to avoid the purely negative inf luence that would lead Greece into a similar sad state of apathy and vain intellectualizing that has made most of Europe such a frozen place. On the other hand it is important to note that Greece is, because of this, in a special way behind of Europe, in its form, and yet ahead in its content. This is also related to its backwards historical development, with fascism ending here the prior generation, which in Europe was the position of the New Left. Greece has not yet suffered the defeats other countries have suffered, and the form of its modernity is in this sense undeveloped. So the world has not yet really finished with the issues posed by the workers’ movement, because the real issue of the workers’ movement was always-already Anarchy (Marxism’s heaven is Anarchy so this theory too is oriented around an Anarchy it can never reach). In face of the global oligarchy (allied to Protestant nothingness) arrogantly imposing itself, the issues have clearly not gone away, yet only Anarchy retains some of the old force. But this is actually a hopeful situation since Europe is only more advanced into decadence than Greece. Anarchy is only a retrogression compared to the disillusion following Marxism in the sense of not having advanced so far into intellectual sophistries and poorly-founded hopes. And to close with a brief note, this workers’ movement both was dedicated to leaving behind Christianity yet also had some Christian or militant components.<br /><br />In this vein, there exists both moralizing critique and a moralistic critique of morality in Anarchy, but elaborating a reasonable relation to ethics is surely on the agenda. Should we not rather leave others in the movement to be as mistaken or correct as they wish to be, since the true exists on its own, even in a world of falsity? Moreover, if we had more distinction in Thought we would find not absolute evil everywhere else except for the small circle of true believers (from whom we are always focused on excluding the impure). Rather people are not as supportive as we would have liked; or not at the level of their past behavior; or not at our own way of thinking, which is not the same as absolute evil. This idea or popular morality was itself suited to a time when a small movement confronted a gigantic world opposing it and so could pose an abstract negation to the world, since the relation really was such. Now that the chance to determinately negate a society actually poses itself (by which is meant destruction of the State without the reconstruction of a new State) we will find the need for much more distinction to bring about this goal successfully. To lump everyone together under one label is not fit for the moment, just as Anarchy as a movement already makes a tactical distinction between the Nazified police and Golden Dawn, on the one hand, and on the other hand, Syriza and many other groups. This is quite correct as these social forces are really quite different and the point is to see in what ways they are different and how the movement has to relate to this. Revolutions have always differentiated between officers and soldiers, volunteers and conscripts. Great tacticians have always known to give the enemy a “golden bridge”, as Kutuzov famously gave to Napoleon, as the Ancient Greeks gave to the Persians, to facilitate the disbandment. In a world where there are no more kings to kill, no real power but institutions and networks, it would certainly be a grave mistake not to allow things <br />to disintegrate as much as they will. To oppose to everyone the abstract levelling of death, which is itself already the principle of this dying world, would be a serious error. After all, the world of today is literally dying because it really is total deprivation and incapacity for any good—there is no good left in the official world and this is inherently related to its debility.<br /><br />Similarly, Anarchy can make distinctions amongst itself without needing to impose a “one Anarchy” type of model. Or, put in another way, the “one Anarchy” would be all the different anarchies allowed and then something more, as the sum greater than its parts.<br /><br />Anarchy would then realize it has a richness in itself that is basically a microcosm of the richness of the actual world outside of it in all its changing shapes and individuals. So that the society knows Anarchy<br />as the secret of its own dissolution, but Anarchy knows itself as<br />dissolution embodied.<br />The old esoteric view of German Idealism, of developments in speculative Thought and events in the French Revolution corresponding (so Kant was simply the beginning in 1789, Fichte was its revolutionary phase, and Hegel the phase of victorious Bonapartism) also continued along in Lukács, where the development of the theory of revolution is linked to the reality of revolution itself. This is a quite enlightening way of viewing things and then we would see that the Thoughts in Anarchy express the world, not simply of phenomenal reality, but the world of Thought.<br /><br />However this is correlated to the acts of Anarchy that also express the actual reality of the world today. This strange feeling anyone gets in a riot as the riot police are repelled by a deluge of Molotovs and this strange, curious, black feeling, the possession of a shocking new form of Liberty, as the riot police are forced to retreat, when the crowd still has possession of the street—all this can only happen because the spiritual state of the official world already is in a morbid sickness. Nothing can be destroyed that has much life in it; a healthy body recovers from a common cold. And the unconscious “anarchy” of white collar crime, intellectual confusion, the mass of suicides, imperialist wars, the surveillance state etc. is only expressing that the real truth of the moment is the conscious Anarchy for revolution. The real “truth” of the shopping glass window lies in its shattering or shuttering.<br /><br />As Hegel tells us, History is the history of the advance of Liberty: to resurrect this idealist schema, we simply need add one more new form, that of penultimate liberty, of Anarchy.<br /><br />Talking about the assemblies might be unwanted, but it should be stated. The assembly is most certainly a valuable tool for political organization. No one has ever denied that. However, the real question is: can a political movement always relate amongst itself in a directly democratic manner, and is this always profitable? Let us take the Villa Amalias eviction as an example, since this was when The Barbarian was founded and was quite a big event. To set the scene, afterwards everyone went for a cacophonous assembly at the polytechnic, with shouting and gesticulation for hours until finally people trickled off. The end result was much the same as what everyone was thinking at the beginning: there was the decision for a big collective march. Finally the firebombings that also took place afterwards, which most people probably supported or tolerated, could not have been collectively discussed in that manner. Thus the assembly does not solve everything, nor can everything be put to an assembly. Moreover did the assembly introduce anything new or rather was there already a basically collective sentiment in favor of a march? This is simply to reduce the assembly to its important but by no means all-embracing role, as the democratic assembly is not a panacea but a means of managing political differences. This would also be related to the classical observation that no political form is perfect and the most ideal form of politics is a mixture of the elements. More than anything the aim is a feeling of unity in a community. However, a political movement within itself has little political differences, almost self-evidently. It already has that unity. Thus the debate that takes place is either a caricature of a real debate that would take place in an open forum in any random neighborhood assembly, or a tactical debate that in many cases cannot be conducted openly, for clear reasons.<br /><br />This curious or redundant character of some assemblies stems from the basic fact that the political unity is already there. Thus the question is immediately not “what to do” but “how to do it”, whereas real political debate demands a question of “what”, and then of “how”. Assemblies should most certainly be exported outside of specifically anarchist spaces (the polytechnic) to take part in a real collective life—and this is already happening. On the other hand though, this means the assembly is revealing its true function as a mass participative form of political education, not as something suitable for every occasion for a minority of militants. Just because armed struggle and other actions cannot be conducted or proposed in an assembly do not render them bad, simply it connects the moment of war with a monarchical or aristocratic type of decision, with which historically it was always associated, even in democracies.<br /><br />Finally, what exists in the assemblies is in no way a pure direct democracy but because of the small and self-referential nature of the Anarchist community, it is always-already touched by the social scene and with other political forms like aristocracy. But this in no way is to say a thing is bad (unless we have the one-sided equation that only democracy = good), however it is to say honestly what a thing is.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />Something to note, since it is unavoidable: Nihilist currents of anarchy are not the orphans abandoned on the doorstep of an unsuspecting Greek Anarchy, as was noted quite some time ago (by London Occupied in their work Revolt and Crisis in Greece). On the positive side, we again have to agree with Hegel that a split often confirms the vitality of a principle itself: since both sides find that what they thought was the outside world was in fact inside their movement, forcing them to realize that they never really left the outside world. And that this outside world, while touching the anarchist space, also is becoming touched by it in quite real ways. Then perhaps some potential would exist as the self-clarification is forced upon the two sides. This could become not the mirrored replication of a negative definition but the stimulus for elaboration of positive projects. As always, every difficult situation presents us with the truth of the great proverb that crisis is both a danger and an opportunity.<br /><br />But assuredly more fruitful than discussing the well- worn polemic of non-social and social anarchy would no doubt be armed struggle and who does and does not support the tactic. Immediately we would find the need to make more gradations in Thought, between those who support unconditionally, some support more cautiously, some do not think it is the right time, a few are unconditionally against, etc.&c. This would help clarify things more and would show where Anarchy has a chance to go as the crisis situation deepens and where chances for some practical unity, even from different angles, might lie. From our own Northern history, the Calvinists and Lutherans of different countries all did work together to protect themselves against Catholic reaction in the 30 Years’ War. There were problems, but this did take place. From our anarchist history, Spain had many different stripes of Anarchists, and yes, even left Marxists working together in a fashion. The point is not to have perfect examples since everyone can point out the problems in these situations, but to establish the idea that in the heat of struggle, groups of different goals and forms can work together for tactical objectives, especially if they are committed to everyone making a tiny sacrifice on their own to achieve a collective objective.<br /><br />As an aside, there was a positive debate in the anarchist space concerning anonymity and identity, to which we point our readers and which is available at Contrainfo in English (A Debate on Anonymity). The issue concerned being anonymous or proclaiming a group name for radical actions undertaken. At any rate, philosophy always is concerned with finding unity in division. Here, we can find that both sides are anarchists, they agree on violent tactics (itself already an advance over typical Protestant debates) and where they disagree are on particular tactical matters concerning the presentation of acts of sabotage. But for us, the particular and contingent character of various acts already implies an impossibility of assigning any position normatively, since the real question at hand is the singular <br />meaning of each action and the liberty of the actors to decide the question: would a formal organization, or an anonymous, or a pseudonymous, or no claim of responsibility at all, give more meaning to the acts performed? And also what are the actors themselves trying to communicate and how does this function?<br /><br />So perhaps in this way, at a philosophical level we may say that we have found ourselves again at Hegel’s dictum of the “identity of identity and non-identity”. What should be underlined is the positive fact that the debate was conducted in texts at a reasonably high level (varying interpretations of Homer, something always to be commended) and clearly laid out the contending positions in basically de-personalized texts. Thus the final result of the debate was not winning for either side, as it so rarely is, but a positive gain for Anarchy as a whole, and offers a model of how to raise and manage differences in a type of theoretical forum.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br /><br />If Anarchy is not able to resolve these problems, then it is clear one runs the danger of the unhappy prior experiences of either the French, Russian or Spanish variety of revolution. It might degenerate into factional violence and from there degrade into the unrewarding victories of betrayed revolution in France or Russia. Or on the other hand, it may be too spiritually weak and not have enough faith in itself to push its goals to completion as in Spain. Without a way for managing differences and resolving conflicts in a fashion other than that of the Greek village— constant informal discussions and explosions of emotion, threats of physical violence and appeals to the elders to act as arbitrators—Anarchy does run serious dangers as its importance becomes ever more serious. Especially if we have taken Anarchy to mean not a revolutionary self-discipline but no discipline at all, which anyone could imagine might develop poorly in stateless scenarios. But to point out a danger, in no way implies it is certain to happen. To take a part, however small, in a constructive process is the best way of ensuring that an unhappy outcome will not take place. Happily, the problems are small right now. Yet that is not a reason to ignore them or brush them under the rug, just to avoid a momentary discomfort. If these little issues are ignored, like a small wound or a minor illness, they can fester and get much more serious. While if they are treated with the healthful tonic of frank but respectful proliferation of discussion and resolve at an individual level to carry out the ideas, then they will no doubt help the organism grow stronger—even if this in itself is not the ultimate solution to every problem. Finally, this will also help the lands with less developed movements to expand and grow. So the issues are, as the Greek developments themselves, both specific and universal, just as we are dealing here not with any one incident but general trends.<br /><br />Thus, that is the reason for this intervention and for most of the articles in this issue. Basically these are ideas that are fairly common and have come up repeatedly in our discussions with others. So there is not anything new being presented nor is there the tacit assumption of a lack of thought in Greek Anarchy; rather, what is at stake here is a bringing-out into the best form and a reasonable manner of presentation, attempted in a respectful way. These last are also not new to Greek Anarchy, but in our view these are some things that could most certainly and profitably be multiplied in the movement.<br /><br />* * *</span></span></b></span><br />
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<span style="color: #f4cccc;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="http://thebarbarianreview.wordpress.com/">http://thebarbarianreview.wordpress.com/</a></span></span></b></span></div>
Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-13130645323377003992014-06-30T17:01:00.000-07:002014-06-30T17:01:44.855-07:00"Neoliberalism as Social Necrophilia: The Case of Greece" By Panayota Gounari <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>"You can use the 600 Euros that you will find on me to pay our
health insurance. I paid the rent yesterday. I am sorry, my daughter, I
could not take more suffering just to put a warm plate on the table - a
bloody plate. Make sure that our daughter goes to college and never
</i></span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><i>leave her alone. She should get the house that we have in the village."</i></span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">This is the suicide note of a 50-year-old woman to her husband. She
jumped off a high wall in Crete, Greece, last week and is hospitalized
in critical condition. She is one more victim of the deepening </span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">financial
crisis that is trying the limits of Greek people since 2008. According
to the Greek Census Bureau, there has been a 43 percent increase in
suicides in austerity-chained Greece since the beginning of the crisis.
Unofficial accounts bring the number to 4,000 deaths so far.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Greece is the most recent and historically </span></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"></span></b></span></span></div>
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">unprecedented neoliberal
experiment on a global scale. The neoliberal offensive is moving head on
in the country and, if Chile "was the laboratory for the early phases,
Greece has become the laboratory for an even more fierce
implementation."(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#I">1</a>) What we have in place right now in Greece can be best described as the "downsizing of a country"(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#II">2</a>)
that brings profound changes in its social and economic fabric.
Greece's economy has shrunk by nearly one-third since 2007, and the debt
has become unmanageable. Through cut-throat austerity measures, massive
privatizations and cuts in the most sensitive sectors of public
education and public health, the constant process of
de-industrialization and the loss of sovereignty, it looks like "Greece
will emerge as a poorer country, with a diminished productive base, with
reduced sovereignty, [and] with a political class accustomed to almost
neo-colonial forms of supervision."(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#III">3</a>)</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">I glance through snapshots in the news: grim faces, desperate eyes,
angry gazes, frustration, and, most of all, fear. The city of Athens is
slowly turning into a cemetery for the living. The transformation of the
city, both as a physical and as a symbolic space, is shocking to the
eye; as a public space and a habitat for its people, it now gets
fragmented into deserted stores "for rent," broken façades and
abandonment apartment windows and balcony doors tightly locked behind
iron bars for "extra safety," carton beds and, along them, homeless
people's possessions: an old dirty blanket, oversized worn out sneakers,
plastic flowers, empty water bottles, stale bread. Different parts of
the city palpably illustrate a degenerating social fabric, as more
Greeks are now joining the ranks of what Zygmunt Bauman has called
"human waste"(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#IV">4</a>):
unemployed, working poor, immigrants, all the outcasts, victims of
"economic progress," preys of rampant neoliberal policies, "casualties,"
real victims to what the Greek prime minister has recently called a
"success story" on the road to privatization and the wholesale of
Greece's national assets and sovereignty.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Greece is radically and violently transformed into the land field of
"wasted lives" in the giant trashcan of global capitalism. Witnessing as
I do this novel form of social necrophilia that eats alive every inch
of human life, workspace and public space, I cringe at the sound of the
words "sacrifice," "rescue" and making Greece, according to the claims
of Greek PM Antonis Samaras, a "success story." Whose sacrifice and
whose rescue? Who succeeds and who loses? Numbers are telling.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Unemployment rates are currently climbing to 30 percent, the same
percentage Greece had in 1961. As a point of comparison, unemployment in
the United States in 1929 was 25 percent, and in Argentina in 2001, it
was 30 percent. More than 70 percent of the unemployed have been out of
work for more than a year, leaving most to rely on charity after losing
monthly benefit payments and health insurance. This percentage does not
include young people seeking a job for the first time, employees without
insurance and part-timers. Unemployment is up 41 percent from 2011, and
for those 15-24, it has reached 51.1 percent, doubling in only three
years (<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#V">5</a>) and setting a negative record for a Eurozone country.(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#VI">6</a>)</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">The IMF/European Central Bank recipe is generating wealth in the
global financial casino, while 31 percent of Greeks live at risk of
poverty, according to Eurostat (2012). These statistics put Greece in
seventh place in poverty percentages among the 27 EU countries. More
specifically, in Greece: 28.7 percent of children up to 17 years old;
27.7 percent of the population between ages 27-64; and 26.7 percent of
Greeks older than 65 live in the poverty threshold.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span>
<br />
<div style="float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 10px; width: 300px;">
<h3>
<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">By social necrophilia, I mean . . . economic policies and austerity
measures that result in the physical, material, social and financial
destruction of human beings . . .</span></span></span></h3>
</div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">There is an 11.8 percent increase in child poverty, raising the number of poor children to 465,000 in 2011.(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#VII">7</a>)
The Greek social and welfare state has been collapsing through
draconian cuts in wages and pensions, massive layoffs and the violation
of vested rights, of labor laws and of collective bargaining rights. All
collective bargaining expired on May 14, 2013, and it has been replaced
by individual contracts where workers become hostages of their
employers. Base salary went tumbling down to 500 Euros monthly (400 for
young people) - not to mention a retroactive salary cut of 22 percent
(32 percent for youth) in February 2012.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">In March 2013, the government announced additional pension cuts of up
to 20 percent. According to the Labor Institute of the National
Confederation of Greek Workers (2012), new measures dictated by the
Troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the
International Monetary Fund) will lead to at least a 35 percent
deterioration of salaried employees' and pensioners' lives. As an
example, since the beginning of 2011, 113,268 people have disconnected
their telephone landlines to decrease expenses. With a 19 percent
increase in the cost of electricity, 350,000 people now live without
electricity in Athens. Additional taxes on property have ravaged the
middle class that is now "paying rent" in their own houses through new
taxes and fines imposed. Quality of life is radically deteriorating for
Greek people.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">This neoliberal experiment, as currently implemented in Greece,
breeds destructiveness and death and resonates with forms of "social
necrophilia." By social necrophilia, I mean the blunt organized effort
on the part of the domestic political system and foreign neoliberal
centers to implement economic policies and austerity measures that
result in the physical, material, social and financial destruction of
human beings: policies that promote death, whether physical or symbolic.
The goal of the ongoing capitalist offensive in the form of a
neoliberal doctrine is to destroy symbolically and physically the most
vulnerable strata of the population, to put the entire society in a
moribund state to impose the most unprecedented austerity measures that
generate profit for the most privileged classes internationally.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Erich Fromm, Frankfurt School philosopher, social psychologist and
psychoanalyst, provides both a metaphor from the realm of psychiatry, as
well as the tools to make the case for a reified market society that is
being forced to start loving death: its own. In his seminal work on the
<i>Anatomy of Human Destructiveness </i>(1973), Fromm defines
necrophilia as "the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed,
putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into
something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive
interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear
apart living structures."(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#VIII">8</a>)</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">In the case of the Greek neoliberal experiment, however, beyond
destroying for the sake of destruction, there are real economic
interests at stake. There are bets and speculations in casino
capitalism, and the game is on in Greece for banks and other large
financial organizations. Social necrophilia here can be understood as
the state of decay, the material and social degeneration of society, and
the destruction of social fabric, where illness and death loom for the
poor as a result of an economy dying through specific political choices
while profit goes to big banks and multinational corporations. Love of
death or the <i>politics of social necrophilia</i> can be illustrated
in Greece in a) the rise of fascism and b) the shocking increase in
illness, suicide, addiction and spread of infectious diseases since the
beginning of the crisis.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Fascism</b></span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">In the <i>Anatomy of Human Destructiveness</i> (<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#IX">9</a>)
Fromm makes the case that necrophilia is a product of fascist thought,
as he discusses the example of Spanish Falangists who used to shout,
"long live death." Fascism finds expression both in government
discourses and policies as well as in the rise of neo-Nazi Party Golden
Dawn. Love of death is currently manifested in Greece in that rise of
Golden Dawn.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span>
<br />
<div style="float: right; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 10px; width: 300px;">
<h3>
<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In a necrophilous state of affairs, the system in charge operates
with the conviction that the only way to solve a problem or a conflict
is by force and violence, both symbolic and material, usually failing to
see other options.</span></span></span></h3>
</div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">In the context of the Greek crisis, a new form of political
domination has emerged, a renewed model of fascism, or another example
of "proto-fascism.(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#X">10</a>)
The elected Greek coalition government has been systematically
violating the Greek Constitution and shaking the foundations of
parliamentary democracy by establishing a "side system" of legislation.
Using "urgent legislative decrees" indiscriminately and regularly, the
coalition government is bypassing Greek legislation to facilitate
privatizations and sellouts. In addition, there is an institutionalized
instability: Laws keep changing, and many laws are voted in and
implemented with retroactive effect.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Beyond the constant constitutional violations, the disappearing
public space is a central feature of Greek proto-fascism. The landscape
taking shape since 2009 is not too far from the kind of totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt wrote about: a "totalitarian government does not just
curtail liberties or abolish essential freedoms; . . . It destroys the
one essential prerequisite of all freedom, which is simply the capacity
of motion which cannot exist without space."(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#XI">11</a>)</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Motion is not only inhibited and/or prohibited, as for example, in
the case of prohibiting demonstrations in the center of Athens when
Troika officials visit, a practice reminiscent of the curfews during the
German occupation of the '40s. Furthermore, what motion there is, is
watched, with heightened surveillance and cameras installed throughout
Athens. In a necrophilous state of affairs, the system in charge
operates with the conviction that the only way to solve a problem or a
conflict is by force and violence, both symbolic and material, usually
failing to see other options. This also explains the increased
exponential violence employed by the state the last five years as
manifested in shutting down protests, criminalizing dissent and activism
and torturing arrested protesters as well as pre-emptive arrests in
every mobilization.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Alongside symbolic violence manifested in economic, political and
discursive form, there is an intensified move toward militarization and
authoritarianism. To this end, and while massive layoffs are taking
place in the public sector, the Greek state spends more money on hiring
and training law enforcement officers. More interestingly, there are
close ties between the police and the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn, whose
members are nostalgic of Hitler and the 1967 Colonels' Junta. Golden
Dawn - now pronounced a criminal organization - is involved in running
"paramilitary operations that systematically attacked migrants, leftists
and gay people."(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#XII">12</a>)
Eighteen of its MPs are already incarcerated, and a number of its
members have been involved in violent attacks, gun possession and even
murder as in the fatal brutal beating of Pakistani immigrant Shehzad
Luqman and the cold-blooded murder of Pavlos Fyssas, a young leftist
anti-fascist activist and rapper.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">The "public" is being abolished in favor of the private, through a
process of devaluation, vilification and degradation. A case in point is
the ongoing demonization of public functionaries, public school
teachers and university professors, and doctors working in the public
system of health as lazy, incompetent, in need of constant evaluation
and with the Damocles sword of investigation should they dare to
disagree. Everything "public" is left to decay, by cutting off funding,
staff and support and creating a fertile space for corruption and
violent competition.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span>
<br />
<div style="float: left; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-right: 10px; width: 300px;">
<h3>
<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Malaria, a disease officially eliminated 40 years ago, also made a comeback in 2012.</span></span></span></h3>
</div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Public schools lack books and other materials, and in many areas in
the north of Greece, children stay at home on very cold days because
schools cannot afford to heat the classrooms. Teachers are suffering
terrible cuts in their salaries, and universities barely meet their
minimum functional needs with cuts in laboratory and support staff that
hinder the appropriate working of the departments.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><b>The Decaying Body</b></span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">"It's simple. You get hungry, you get dizzy and you sleep it off,"
said the mother of an 11-year old boy who has been suffering hunger
pains at school.(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#XIII">13</a>)</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Necrophilia is further manifested in physical terms in the ways the
human body is degenerating, ravaged by illness, malnutrition, drug
abuse, HIV and suicide. People looking for food in the trash. There are
homeless people in every corner; mini slum communities all over downtown
Athens. Walking south, toward the center, thousands of people wait in
line to be served food by soup kitchens that provide over 30,000 free
meals a day. Plenty of people queue up for possibly the only meal of
their day. Welcome to the "human waste" line.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">The Greek governments that assumed the role of the executioners of
IMF/EU directives since the beginning of the crisis in 2008 have
demonstrated a particularly necrophilous character, and they have done
so unapologetically. Αn increasing number of children have been passing
out in schools because of malnutrition; there are embarrassing shortages
in public hospitals, where patients often have to buy their own gauze
and medication from an outside pharmacy while admitted. People without
health insurance with severe illnesses do not have access to treatment.
Malaria, a disease officially eliminated 40 years ago, also made a
comeback in 2012, with cases being noted in eastern Attica and the
Peloponnese.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">There are increasing numbers of suicides (close to a 43 percent hike)
that rank Greece number one worldwide in suicides the past five years.
There are alarming new cases of depression and mental illnesses. A
recent study conducted by the University of Ioannina found that one in
five people facing financial problems presents psychopathological
symptoms. There is also a 200 percent increase in HIV cases.(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#XIV">14</a>)
At the same time, significant funding is cut from psychiatric
hospitals, public drug rehabilitation centers and other social and
welfare provisions while the system tries to "abort" vulnerable social
groups such as HIV-positive women, drug users and people with mental
illness.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">With the 40 percent surcharge the government has slapped on heating
oil, thousands of households have remained cold during the winter while
people are returning to wood stoves, the out-of-control use of which has
generated poisonous toxic smog over the city of Athens. Bodily decay
goes hand in hand with environmental destruction: Greek soil is ravaged
as mineral resources are overexploited in the name of profit. Large
forest areas, such as the Skouries forest in Halkidiki, are turning into
vast mining sites, where private companies exploit the natural wealth
of the country, while poisoning the soil, the air and the water.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span>
<br />
<div style="float: right; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 10px; width: 300px;">
<h3>
<span style="color: magenta;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The more human qualities are attributed to the markets, the more real people are robbed of their own human substance.</span></span></span></h3>
</div>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">It is a challenging and complicated task to try to explain Greek
people's lack of massive organized resistance the last five years given
the radical deterioration of their living conditions. There is almost a
reconciliation with death looming everywhere; people are slowly getting
used to terror. The initial manifestations - gatherings in squares,
protests and other acts of disobedience - did not acquire a more
organized and consistent character, despite small local victories and
the existence of a movement that daily struggles on many levels and
sites. The power elites used the initial shock and paralysis to spread
fear through what Naomi Klein has termed the "shock doctrine." It is
common practice for business interests and power elites to exploit
shocks in the form of natural disasters, economic problems, or political
turmoil, as an opportunity to aggressively restructure vulnerable
countries' economies. In this vein, popular resistance and dissent are
squashed through symbolic and material fear and violence ranging from
"catastrophic" discourses in the media to very real torture and
repression.(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#XV">15</a>)</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Shock helps the system implement antisocial and harmful policies that
citizens would normally object to. Being in a state of shock as a
country, says Klein, means losing your narrative, being unable to
understand where you are in space and time. The state of shock is easy
to exploit because people become vulnerable and confused. They are
robbed of their vital tools for understanding themselves and their
position in the sociopolitical context. People become unalive things and
the market becomes alive. While people are slowly losing their
humanity, with the government abandoning its social and welfare
functions, "markets" become the new referent people should care and
worry about, as if they were something alive.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Although lifeless things, markets acquire a soul and a character in
the neoliberal discourse. One can observe an interesting phenomenon in
the official government discourse, loyally reproduced by mainstream
media: a continuous attempt to ascribe human properties to markets. The
"market" as a noun, subject or object, is projected as the overarching
authority, above and beyond everybody, the entity that should be kept
happy and satisfied - another manifestation of necrophilia as people
have to die to keep the market alive. The anthropomorphism of the market
is illustrated when "markets" are used in the mainstream media in
sentences such as "the markets showed satisfaction today" or "the market
is struggling," and "we need to convince the markets," "we should
appease the markets," or "let's wait and see how the markets respond."
The invisible market's "reactions" give legitimacy to the "human
sacrifices," as all "market feelings" depend on increasing antisocial
austerity measures that relegate a large part of Greek productive
population to the unemployment trashcan. The more human qualities are
attributed to the markets, the more real people are robbed of their own
human substance. It seems as if the system needs to dehumanize people to
"humanize" the market and then, possibly re-humanize them in the new
market society, as a new kind of people robbed of any sense of agency.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">In the Greek people's quest to find their lost narrative, to "renarrativise" themselves in a collective way (<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#XVI">16</a>),
the ability to consciously disobey and to fill the concept of hope with
a real, feasible political project are two very important imperatives.
To paraphrase Fromm, at this point in Greek history "the capacity to
doubt, to criticize and to disobey"(<a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece#XVII">17</a>)
may be all that stands between the future for this country and its end.
In articulating a political project and a narrative against capitalist
necrophilia, there is a need to put at the core critical and radical
thought that, when blended with the love of life, may take the struggle
to the next level. Instead of getting confined to reforming or amending
the current situation, people need to strive to imagine that which is
not, desire it and work hard to make it happen.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span>
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">* This article draws on my forthcoming book chapter "Neoliberalism as
Social Necrophilia: Erich Fromm and The Politics of Hopelessness in
Greece" to appear in Miri, S., Lake, R. & Kress, T. <i>Reclaiming the Sane Society: Essays on Erich Fromm's Thought</i>. Boston: Sense Publishers.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span>
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="I">1.</a> Hall, S., Massey, D. & Rustin, M. (2013). <i>After Neoliberalism: Analyzing the Present</i>. In Hall, S., Massey, D. & Rustin, M. (Eds.) <i>After Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto;</i> London, UK: Soundings, p. 12.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="II">2.</a> Sotiris, P. (2012). <a href="http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/greece-the-downsizing-of-a-country/" target="_blank"><i>The Downsizing of a Country</i></a>. </span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="III">3.</a> Ibid.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="IV">4.</a> Bauman Z. (2004). <i>Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts</i>. Cambridge, UK: Polity, p. 4.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="V">5.</a><i>INE GSEE/ADEDY</i>. (2012). Greek economy and employment: Yearly Report 2012. Athens, Greece.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="VI">6.</a> Eurozone Unemployment Reaches New High (2013, January 8). <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-20943292" target="_blank">BBC</a> </span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="VII">7.</a> Greek National Committee of UNICEF. (2003). State of Children in Greece 2013. Athens: Greece.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="VIII">8.</a> Fromm, E. (1973). <i>The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.</i> New York: Henry Holt, p. 369.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="IX">9.</a> Ibid</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="X">10.</a> Giroux, 2008, p. 21-22). Giroux, H. (2008). <i>Against the Terror of Neoliberalism Politics Beyond the Age of Greed</i>. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="XI">11.</a> Hannah Arendt <i>The Origins of Totalitarianism (</i>1973, p. 466)</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="XII">12. </a><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/02/greece-golden-dawn-new-party-banned-polls" target="_blank">The Guardian</a><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/02/greece-golden-dawn-new-party-banned-polls"><br /></a></span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="XIII">13.</a> Alderman, L. (2013, April 17). More Children in Greece are going Hungry. The New York Times.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="XIV">14.</a> Henley, J. (2013, May 15). <a href="http://truth-out.org/%20http:/www.theguardian.com/society/2013/may/15/recessions-hurt-but-austerity-kills" target="_blank">Recessions</a> can hurt but Austerity kills. </span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="XV">15.</a> Klein: Klein, N. (2008). <i>The Shock Doctrine</i>. New York: Henry Holt.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="XVI"> </a>16. Edmonds, L. (2013, April 26) "Is Greece in Shock?" Naomi Klein tells Enet how her bestseller <i>The Shock Doctrine</i> relates to Greece. <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=el&u=http://www.enet.gr/&prev=/search%3Fq%3DEleytherotypia%26espv%3D2%26es_sm%3D91%26biw%3D1042%26bih%3D723" target="_blank">Eleytherotypia Online</a>.</span></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></b></span></span><span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">17. Fromm, 1981</span></b></span></span><br />
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<h2>
<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/46223">Panayota Gounari</a></span></span></span></h2>
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Panayota Gounari is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics
at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on the
politics of language in the construction of neoliberal discourses in
education and society, as well as on reinventing a theory for critical
pedagogy. She is a co-editor of Critical Pedagogy: A Reader (Gutenberg
2010, with George Grollios) and and a co-author of the Hegemony of
English (Paradigm 2003). She has authored numerous articles and book
chapters that have been translated in many languages.</span></b></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: white;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece" target="_blank">http://truth-out.org/news/item/22584-neoliberalism-as-social-necrophilia-the-case-of-greece </a></span></b></span></span></div>
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Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-46372346556623721922014-06-17T03:38:00.001-07:002014-06-17T03:47:06.628-07:00"Gated Communities for Rich and Poor" by Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #ffe599;"><i><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Sociologist Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores discusses how the concentration of class and racial privilege in gated communities takes place alongside the spatial concentration and confinement of the poor. She argues that gates help sort and segregate people, physically and symbolically distinguish communities, and cement inequality.</span></span></b></i></span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></b>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“You drive to the gate. The community is in the shape of a U. You come in one gate and leave through the other. When you get to the gate, you will have a dial pad. You have to dial my number. Here is the number. Wait for me to answer. I will ask you who you are. You will tell me. Once you talk to me I will push the button to open the gate and let you in. The gate will open. You will be allowed in. You will drive to my house. I will be outside waiting for you.”</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></b></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Following Ramiro’s careful directions, I entered Extensión Alhambra a
subdivision of colorful, concrete, one and two-story single-family homes
located in Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second largest city, in the southern
part of the island. Extensión Alhambra which looks like a mid-century
American suburb, was intended to be an exclusive community for middle-
and upper-middle-income families, its name evoking Spain’s famous
Moorish castle, the Alhambra. When it was built in the early 1970s,
Extensión Alhambra was open to all. But in 1993 residents took advantage
of a 1987 law (<i>Ley de Cierre</i>, or “closing law”) that permitted
communities to build gates for protection. With that law, many
previously open and private middle-class housing subdivisions were
gated—part of the vast array of communities worldwide that form
neighborhood associations, erecting fences and fortresses, and taking
protection into their own hands.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Less than half a mile from Extensión Alhambra is a very different kind
of gated community. Here, in a development called Dr. Manuel de la Pila,
twenty low-rise multiple-dwelling buildings, totaling 906 units,
comprise the largest public housing community in the city of Ponce. Dr.
Manuel de la Pila is one of 337 public housing projects built in Puerto
Rico as part of the massive post-war U.S. federal public housing push
that by the second half of the twentieth century had furnished Puerto
Rico with more public housing units than any U.S. city—after New York.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Like Extensión Alhambra, when it was first built Dr. Pila was an open
community. But early one November morning in 1994, two years after a
private firm had taken over its management, three helicopters carrying
national guards and police descended upon the project, officially
occupying it. Operation Centurion, popularly known as <i>Mano Dura Contra el Crimen</i>
(Strong Arm Against Crime), had dictated that the largest, presumably
most dangerous public housing projects should be gated in order to
reduce crime. Over the course of four years, nearly a quarter of</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Puerto Rico’s 337 public housing developments were “rescued” or
“occupied,” leading to arrests of residents, the establishment of police
outposts, and the erection of fences to control movement. Dr. Pila
became a gated public housing development.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Gates and guards have typically been ways for privileged communities to
“defend” themselves, creating secure residential environments. In their
quest for security, gates symbolize “withdrawal [from the city]” and
they also produce fear, according to</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Teresa P. R. Caldeira, professor of city and regional planning at the
University of California. Promising to protect residents from crime, as
well as from fears of declining property values and loss of prestige
and exclusivity, gated communities enable affluent residents to imagine
that they can leave the unruly, dangerous spaces of cities behind.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The concentration of class and racial privilege in suburbs,
fortressed enclaves, securitized buildings, and private islands takes
place alongside the spatial concentration of poverty in ghettos, <i>favelas</i>, and <i>barrios</i>. Residential gates for the rich have also led to the rise of gates for the poor—in <i>favelas</i>
in Brazil, South African townships, peripheral urban migrant
settlements in China, and even in some public housing developments in
the United States. The built environment sorts and segregates people,
physically and symbolically distinguishing communities from one another.
Whether one is locked inside or kept outside is determined by one’s
race, class, and gender. In both kinds of gated communities, controlled
access points restrict movement in and out. However, living in gated
communities of the rich and poor are vastly different <a href="http://www.surfcanyon.com/search?q=experiences&f=slc&p=wtiffrwo" style="border-bottom: medium dotted; text-decoration: none;" target="scSearchLink">experiences</a>.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The privileged gates of Extensión Alhambra offer a retreat into a
secure, idyllic community; newly privatized street and sidewalks are
restricted to sanctioned, paying community members, who can decide who
is allowed inside. In the impoverished community of Dr. Pila, in
contrast, government and private overseers control the movement of
residents. So while the gates of Extensión Alhambra permit their
affluent residents to exert greater political and social influence over
their home turf, in Dr. Pila they have the opposite effect, diminishing
residents’ power. In privileged communities, gates lock undesirables
out; in poor communities, they lock them in. In both cases, gates are
erected to serve the interest of the upper classes, who are primarily
white. In other words, gates reproduce inequality, and cement or—to use
Michel DeCerteau’s term—“politically freeze” social distinctions of race
and class.</span></span></b></span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In And/Or Out</span></span></span></span></h3>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Ramiro greeted me warmly. To enter the well-appointed homes and
interior gardens of Extensión Alhambra, where he lived, I had to find
people who would vouch for me and arrange for me to gain entrance. Once
inside the gate, I had to justify myself and answer their interrogations
about who I knew, what I was doing, and why. I came to understand that
the residents of Extensión Alhambra were suspicious or confused about me
because of my brown skin, which contrasted with the light-skinned
people depicted in the photographs sitting on Ramiro’s living room
coffee table. According to the 2000 Census, most residents of these
privileged communities racially identified as “Caucásico” (Caucasian) or
“Blanco” (white)— “race symbols,” in the words of economist Glen Loury,
which are enlisted to help navigate these newly privatized community
spaces. Negotiations of membership and belonging occur; outsiders and
insiders are sorted and profiled.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The residents of Dr. Pila know that they are the ones affluent
Alhambra residents wish to keep out. “The controlled access in Extensión
Alhambra allows people from that area to enter,” one woman explained.
“They think people from public housing want to go there to rob them. For
them, we are society’s scum.” Another Dr. Pila resident agreed: “When
they put up that gate in Extensión Alhambra, it was so that the people
from public housing would not go there, so that the vermin would not
enter.” Residents of both private and public communities told me that a
race credential was required for someone to enter community spaces. A
resident of a nearby private upper-middle class community that had been
unsuccessful in putting up gates said that her whiteness prevented her
from entering Dr. Pila: “I would be in a panic,” she said, “because I
feel different even physically [as a] a blonde woman!”</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Gates separate adjacent neighborhoods, freezing race, class
distinctions, and demarcating social distances; they segment identities
and mark the “unmarked.” Gates position and remind specific bodies of
their rightful place, delineating identities and neighborhood limits,
and discouraging movement. They also remind people that public housing
is dangerous. Together with media representations of crime, they
reinforce the idea that dark young males, in particular, are
unemployable, dangerous, and criminal.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Rafa, a dark-skinned, bored young man who lived in Dr. Pila,
explained, “You go and ask if they have [any work] and they say they
don’t. And then they give the job to the favorites.” Residents of public
housing projects often spoke about being turned down for jobs, which
they saw as related to their place of residence. Don Ramon, an employer
at a job fair organized by the social workers in Dr. Pila, said he was
there to offer job opportunities that were typically denied to residents
of public housing. Dinora, a resident, described a job interview. When
she got there, the supervisor asked her where she was from. “When I told
him I was from Dr. Pila,” she said, “his attitude changed to ‘I’ll call
you if anything comes up.’ He went from an attitude that the job was
for-sure to an attitude, once I said where I lived, of ‘I’ll call you
later.’”</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The physical and symbolic meaning of the gates were obvious to public
housing residents. As one woman told me: “By putting up our gate,”
they’re not interested in “protect[ing] our community, or its
residents.” What they are doing, she said, is “isolat[ing] public
housing from wealthy people. They have no reason to think they’re better
than us. We’re all people.” The gates cement physical separation.
Public housing residents resent not being able to take their children to
trick-or-treat during Halloween in the more privileged areas.
Opportunities for engaged contact are practically nonexistent.</span></span></b></span><br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Getting Inside The Gates</span></span></span></h3>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b>
<br />
<div class="wp-caption alignright" id="attachment_4137" style="width: 270px;">
<div class="wp-caption-text">
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
</div>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Getting
inside Extensión Alhambra takes careful planning. Ramiro’s screening
interrogation gave him decisive control over my entry and presence in
the public streets and sidewalks of the community, much like the power
he and his neighbors wield to make decisions about who enters their
private home spaces. With the Closing Law that allowed private
communities to gate themselves in the interest of safety, security
technology came to facilitate the control rich people exercise over
private spaces. Private guards follow orders through telecoms or
telephones; electronically-powered gates allow owners to exert control
through remote beepers, security spikes and electric currents,
administering entry and exit as they see fit. In private communities,
residents and visitors are welcomed into safe havens protected from
outside perils. Whether one is welcome depends on who is seeking entry,
and who is doing the credentialing. This credentialing is done by
residents; in public housing, in contrast, the government makes such
decisions, seizing control from residents.
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The gate in Extensión Alhambra “is private,” a resident of Dr. Pila
told me: “here it is controlled.” When a temporary fence was first
built, residents of Dr. Pila thought their own gate would function
similarly to that of Extensión Alhambra, with residents controlling
entry either through remote access or granting approval to the guard.
But in time, their ability to control entry diminished. Rather than work
in the service of residents, a police sentry with a one-way mirror came
to control residents, federally inspired zero-tolerance regulations
demanded that residents be screened, and the government appointed social
workers to organize community activities. Residents, not visitors, came
under scrutiny. As one woman explained: “I have been stopped, and asked
what building I am going to, what am I going to do. They see the face
of a crook in me.”</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">To enter the gated caserío (public housing) was, as one resident
said, to lose the capacity to “move freely,” and instead to be
controlled, isolated, and actively barred from freedom of contact both
inside and outside. Just as residents’ movements were restricted, so
were mine. Upon entering Dr. Pila, visitors and residents are signaled
to stay out or wait by a sign in front of the guardhouse that reads:
“Residential zone with controlled access. Any resident or visitor
without identification must identify himself at the entry. Visiting cars
are subject to search. Housing Administration.” The sign is a reminder
that entering public housing makes one suspect.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
As they block access to outsiders and turn public spaces—the street,
the sidewalks—into private community property, these gates expand the
power of privileged insiders over urban space and development. The gates
that lock some in and others out hand control over the city to the
privileged, giving the poor little recourse, little control, and less and less power.</span></span></b></span><br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Cemented Distinctions</span></span></span></h3>
<br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Puerto Rico illustrates the ways social inequalities are physically and
symbolically articulated in residential urban built environments
throughout the world, underscoring differences in power and agency.
Throughout the world, security policies have become a popular way to
address feelings of insecurity in urban areas. Gates in residential areas and public spaces, security guards, security <a href="http://www.surfcanyon.com/search?q=cameras&f=slc&p=wtiffrwo" style="border-bottom: medium dotted; text-decoration: none;" target="scSearchLink">cameras</a>,
and metal detectors sort and divide city residents. In China, for
example, new urban migrants are being locked in enclaves in the city’s
periphery. There, as in Latin America and the rest of the developing
world, as well as in the United States, grave social inequalities are
spatialized in residential neighborhoods, new technologies delimit
insiders and outsiders, and the rich exert power over the poor.</span></span></b></span>
<br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Community gates signal and reconstitute deep social inequalities,
both imagined and real. For the rich, the public is increasingly
privatized; for the poor, the private sphere is increasingly subject to
public surveillance. For both, social activities are limited to the
family unit and to intimate and exclusive spaces. Those who can afford
to do so “bowl alone” and live alone. Those of lesser means are
subjected to monitoring, control, and surveillance in their places of
residence. This bunker mentality diminishes the spontaneity of public
life.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Although the gates of Puerto Rico’s public housing are not in
operation today, the fences are still there. The police no longer patrol
the grounds, and only a boarded-up guardhouse remains. Entry and exit
is no longer formally monitored, but the remains of the public gates
continue to interfere with everyday routines, segregating and
re-inscribing social inequality. Meanwhile, the gates around the private
enclaves continue to be fortified by technology. The gates of the poor
and the rich face each other, turning residents away from the city and
its salutary social promises.</span></span></b></span><br />
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b>
<br />
<h3>
<span style="color: yellow;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Recommended Resources</span></span></span></h3>
<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Atkinson, Rowland and Sarah Blandy. <i>Gated Communities: International Perspectives</i> (Routledge, 2006). Provides a wide array of gated community case studies.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Blakely, Edward J. and Mary Gayle Snyder. <i>Fortress America: Gated Communities in the United States</i>
(Brookings Institution Press, 1999). The first book-length work on
gated communities, it provides an account of how gated communities
emerged in the United States.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Caldeira, Theresa P. R. <i>City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo</i>
(University of California Press, 2000). Examines gated communities and
their relationship to crime and class segregation in Brazil.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Costa Vargas, João. “When a Favela Dared to Become a Gated
Condominium: The Politics of Race and Urban Space in Rio de Janeiro,” <i>Latin American Perspectives</i>
(2006), 33(4): 49–81. One of the few examinations of gates in poor
communities, it explores the relationship of gates to urban poverty and
race in Brazil.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Low, Setha. <i>Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America</i>
(Routledge, 2003). Provides a historical background of gated
communities and uses ethnography to see how privilege is contained
behind gates.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Safa, Helen I. <i>The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality</i> (Rinehart and Winston, 1974). The first and only book-length study examining life in Puerto Rico’s public housing.</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">>>></span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores is in the sociology and Latino & Hispanic Caribbean studies departments at Rutgers University. She
is the author of <i>Locked In, Locked Out: Gated Communities in a Puerto Rican City</i>, from which this article was adapted.
</span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></b></span>
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">source: American Sociological Association </span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://contexts.org/articles/fall-2013/gated-communities-for-the-rich-and-the-poor/">http://contexts.org/articles/fall-2013/gated-communities-for-the-rich-and-the-poor/</a></span></span></b></span><br />
<span style="color: white;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span></b></span><br />
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Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-47406954062170220802014-06-08T07:06:00.000-07:002014-06-08T07:06:35.790-07:00Deep Anger! We need to rediscover something we lost along the way. -- by Darren Fleet with Stefanie Krasnow (Adbusters mag.)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: yellow;">In a better world, there’d be no reason to write this. In that world, plastic bags would be outlawed, rednecks would voluntarily stop driving those obnoxious Ford F-350s and the yogis in yuppie neighborhoods would stop believing that a hybrid SUV could save the planet. But that’s not the world we live in.<br /><br />In this world, when push comes to shove, most of us are too comfortable to care, too polite to speak out. With so much at stake we need to rediscover something we lost along the way: our anger.<br /><br />I’ve been around a while now and all I can say is that everything has gotten worse. Deforestation. Species extinction. Overfishing. Melting glaciers. CO2 through the roof. We won a few symbolic victories here and there, but the big picture is total loss. And that’s why this isn’t your standard a-better-world-is-possible-peace-and-love-we’re-all-in-this-together-be-the-change-you-want-to-see circle jerk that has become the cachet of an entire generation of professional activists.<br /><br />I’m a child of the “awareness generation,” the one who grew up learning to reduce, reuse and recycle. I remember first learning about global warming and climate change in high school in the 90s. Back then it was called the Greenhouse Gas Effect. Most of my early environmental knowledge came from classroom videos about acid rain, slash-and-burn logging in the Amazon and the hole in the ozone layer. There was also the slogan “think globally, act locally” plastered across my Social Studies 11 class wall. Those of us who cared two cents about anything believed in that mantra religiously, even though by that point almost everything around us—the school supplies, the clothes on our backs, even the food in our stomachs—came from across an ocean.<br /><br />At the same time that we were learning to be more conscientious about our market choices, the global bazaar was pried open by the WTO, NAFTA and GATT trade regimes, effectively eliminating any possibility we had to make truly environmental choices. Before we were even old enough to know about our carbon footprint, it was already ten times that of a kid in the developing world. Meanwhile, our history books were full of inspirational Gandhi, MLK and Mandela quotes, all driving home the point that change, even revolution, was sentimental, nice, easy, positive. The first time the cops threatened to arrest us at an environmental protest, we shit our pants. Turns out positivity has its limits. And that’s exactly how we got into this mess.<br /><br />There’s nothing worse than interorganizational bitching, especially among environmental campaigners and NGOs. We’re like a bunch of abused children taking out our frustrations on each other when we should be unified and directing our focus elsewhere. But since we don’t have the collective gumption to stand up to the man, we squabble among ourselves; it’s the only way to release the impotent rage we all feel. Even so, I have this to say: every time I see one of my environmental heroes jump on the corporate bandwagon to say some stupid-ass shit about how there are no sides in the climate struggle—how pessimism is an affront to the imagination—my heart breaks.<br /><br />Recently, best-selling environmental author, TED talker, anthropologist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence Wade Davis went down that road. In an interview with a Vancouver newspaper he reflected proudly on his days as an energy company consultant, saying, “In all these resource conflicts, there are no enemies, only solutions.” This kind of well mannered sweetness, in the face of such a violent problem, is our greatest problem.<br /><br />So if we’re going to get serious about disrupting an increasingly apocalyptic horizon, we’ve got to challenge the feel-good Hallmark sentiments that inundated my generation. We have to say fuck the TED talks, with their sincere but vacuous optimism. Fuck the positivity gurus claiming the world is not dying, it’s only changing. And fuck environmentalists willing to play nice with Big Oil and Big Energy, saying things like: “you’re not going to stop the tar sands. It’s naive to think you can,” as Davis recently proclaimed. This type of thinking sounds a lot like those fearful souls who thought apartheid was too entrenched to defeat, that Big Tobacco was too rich to take on, that austerity was too fixed to shake—that there’s nothing you, or I, or we can do in the face of a multi-trillion dollar industry. Truth is, nothing on this Earth is inevitable.<br /><br />Last year, I watched in amazement as a group of radical First Nations scholars brought down the house in Vancouver at an academic conference called Global Power Shifts. Rather than reply with academia’s standard response when confronted with a social issue—“that’s problematic”—they had the guts to take a stand. One in particular, Dr. Glen Coulthard of the Yellowknife Dene, delivered a paper saying that folks on the front-lines of land, climate and environmental battles in Canada are tired of being told not be angry; that given the ongoing process of colonization, theft and exploitation, anger is not only the natural response, but the only moral response.<br /><br />What he hinted at was a resurgent anger. Deep Anger. The type of anger that overturns tables, defends the weak from the strong, would rather die than live on its knees. Most mainstream environmentalists don’t like this kind of language. It means you have to do more than sign a petition. It means you can’t count miniscule corporate concessions as victories. It means you have to let yourself unravel a bit.<br /><br />In our culture, anger is seen as impolite, brutish, violent and indulgent. It’s politically incorrect. It makes people squeamish. We’re afraid of anger like we’re afraid of obsessive passion and overt eroticism. Anger is dark and dirty, but Deep Anger is a form of empathy, care, even love.<br /><br />Psychologists explain that anger is a natural and appropriate response to violating behavior, to situations where our boundaries have been crossed. Not having a say in whether or not ecocide is going to happen—and being asked to participate in a calm and nice debate about whether or not the tar sands should expand or not—is a violation of our boundaries. Yet somehow, we’re expected to smile and keep our imaginations open as if positivity were the goal of the movement.<br /><br />The great irony is that, despite our civilization’s claim to reason, there is a deep irrationality, a fatal blind spot blocking out emotion and sanity. We’re so deeply in denial about what is happening to our planet that we’re risking our own extinction.<br /><br />Unless humanity breaks through the denial, unless we start to get angry—fuckin’ angry—then we won’t ever be able to accept the challenge at hand. We won’t ever be able to rise up and face our planetary reality … we won’t ever be able to fight … and we won’t be able to win.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/113/deep-anger.html">https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/113/deep-anger.html</a></span></span></span></b>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-66652836404005690802014-05-30T01:49:00.000-07:002014-05-30T01:55:59.843-07:00WHY RIOT? — by Phil A. Neel / Ultra magazine<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Two years ago in Seattle, on May 1st, 2012, roughly four to five hundred people engaged in the largest riot the city had seen in more than a decade. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of property were destroyed[i], a minor state of emergency was declared, and the next day’s headlines were filled with horror stories of crazy, “out-of-town” anarchists run amok.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This event, occurring on the tail end of the Occupy movement, also quickly became the post-facto excuse for extensive federal, state and municipal investigation, surveillance and ongoing <a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/green-scare/" target="_blank">repression</a> of political dissent. Several anarchists in the Pacific Northwest were <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/political-convictions/Content?oid=14397498" target="_blank">put in prison without charge</a> in the fall of that year, only to be<a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/28/nation/la-na-seattle-anarchists-20130301" target="_blank"> released </a>months later, still with no charges filed. Houses were <a href="http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/fbi-raid-anarchist-literature-portland-seattle/6267/" target="_blank">raided</a> in search of anarchist literature and black hoodies. Up to a year later, people were still being followed.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I was one of the five people originally charged for crimes on May Day 2012[ii]. I’ve since pled guilty to slightly lesser charges, in order to avoid going to trial on two felonies[iii]. I pled in the fall of 2013 and completed the bulk of the sentence in the winter, spending three months in King County’s Work-Education Release (WER) Unit. Technically an “alternative to confinement,” living in WER effectively means that you are imprisoned at all times that you are not allowed out for work, school or treatment (for mental health or drug offenses).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This puts me in a unique position. Since I am one of the few people who has pled guilty to certain crimes from May 1st, 2012, including Riot, I do not necessarily face the same risks in talking about—and defending—the riot as a tactic or the impulses behind it. This by no means makes what I say below an exhaustive or fully representative account of why others may have engaged in that same riot. They mostly got away—a good thing in and of itself, though federal charges may still be pending for one window that was smashed in an empty courthouse. But this also means that they cannot speak of or defend their participation without risking repression.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">To be clear: I’m not speaking on behalf of any groups who wound up engaged in the riot that occurred on May Day 2012. To my knowledge, the riot was by no means planned ahead of time, and the anti-capitalist march that the riot grew out of, technically an Occupy Seattle event, was itself planned in public meetings. I’m not even speaking on behalf of this specific riot, but instead on behalf of rioting as such, in the abstract. The question “Why Riot” is not simply: why did you engage in this riot, but, instead, why riot at all? And the perspective given here is that of a rioter.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So I’m writing here for simple reasons: to defend the riot as a general tactic and to explain why one might engage in a riot. By this I mean to defend and explain not just the window breaking, not just “non-injurious violence,” and certainly not just the media spectacle it generates, but the riot itself—that dangerous, ugly word that sounds so basically criminal and which often takes (as in London in 2011) a form so fundamentally unpalatable for civil society that it can only be understood as purely irrational, without any logic, and without possible defense.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I aim, nonetheless, to defend and explain the riot, because we live in a new era of riots. Riots have been increasing in absolute number globally for the past thirty years. They are our immediate future, and this future will spare Seattle no less than Athens or London, Guangzhou or Cairo.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Who am I?</span></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I am a member of the poorest generation since those who came of age during the Great Depression. Born to the “end of history,” we watched the ecstatic growth of the Clinton years morph seamlessly into the New Normal of Bush and Obama.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.lifehealthpro.com/2014/01/22/millennials-see-american-dream-fading" target="_blank">We have no hope </a>of doing better than our parents did, by almost any measure. We have inherited an <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0c6e9302-c3e2-11e3-a8e0-00144feabdc0.html" target="_blank">economy in secular stagnation</a>, a ruined environment <a href="http://www.sesync.org/sites/default/files/resources/motesharrei-rivas-kalnay.pdf" target="_blank">on the verge of collapse,</a> a political system <a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf" target="_blank">created by and for the wealthy, skyrocketing inequality</a>, and an emotionally devastating, hyper-atomized culture of pyrrhic consumption.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The most recent economic <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/are-millennials-screwed-generation-65523" target="_blank">collapse has hit us the hardest</a>. According to <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/07/the-rising-age-gap-in-economic-well-being/" target="_blank">a study by the Pew Research Center</a>, the median net worth of people under 35 fell 55 percent between 2005 and 2009, while those over 65 lost only a fraction as much, around 6 percent[iv]. The result is that if you calculate debt alongside income, wealth inequality is today increasingly generational. Those over 65 hold a median net worth of $170,494, an increase from 1984 of 42 percent. Meanwhile, the median net worth of those under 35 has fallen 68 percent over the same period, leaving young people today with a median worth of only $3,662[v].</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Despite cultural narratives of laziness and entitlement, this differential is not due to lack of effort or education (my generation is the most educated, as well, and works some of the longest hours for the least pay). The same Pew Study notes that older white Americans have simply been the beneficiaries of good timing. They were raised in an era of cheap housing and education, massive state welfare and unprecedented economic ascent following the creative destruction of two world wars and a depression—wars and crises that they themselves didn’t have to live through.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And the jobs that older Americans hold are not being passed down to us, though <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/are-millennials-screwed-generation-65523" target="_blank">their debt is</a>. When they retire, the few remaining secure, living wage and often unionized positions will be eliminated, their components dispersed into three or four different unskilled functions performed by part-time service workers. The <a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/4/jobs-unemploymentobama.html" target="_blank">entirety of the job growth </a>that has come since the “recovery” began has been in low-wage, temporary or highly precarious jobs, which exist alongside a permanently heightened unemployment rate.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the long term, this means that, after having been roundly robbed
in almost every respect by our parents’ generation, our own future holds
nothing more than the hope that we might be employed in two or three
separate part-time, no-promotion positions in the few growth sectors,
such as healthcare, where we can have the privilege of being paid
minimum wage to wipe the asses of the generation that robbed us.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is no coincidence, then, that every time we hear a fucking baby
boomer explain how we’re so entitled, and how they worked summers to pay
for college, we contemplate whether or not disemboweling them and
selling their organs on the booming black market might be the only way
to pay back our student loans.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Where did I come from?</b></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Meanwhile, this economic overhaul has led not only to a global
reordering of where things are made, and by whom, but also to a spatial
concentration of economic activity in the US.[vi] Those metropolitan
regions that were capable of becoming network hubs for global logistics
systems fared best, with their amalgamation of hi-tech industries and
producer services. These became the <b>urban palaces</b>, with concentrations of “cultural capital” and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Securing-Spectacular-City-Revitalization-Homelessness/dp/0739105698">redesigned</a> downtown cores (lightly <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Banished-Social-Control-America-Studies/dp/0199830002">cleansed</a> of “undesirable” populations) built to appeal to tourists and foreign dignitaries.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Beyond this, large swaths of the country were simply abandoned as <b>wastelands</b>,
where resource extraction was either hyper-mechanized or too expensive,
agricultural goods were produced under heavy government subsidy, and
small urban centers were forced to compete for the most undesirable jobs
in industrial farming, food processing, waste management, warehousing
or the growing private prison industry. In many areas, <a href="http://www.ilo.int/public/english/support/lib/resource/subject/informal.htm">the informal economy</a> expanded enormously—consistent with <a href="http://www.ilo.org/global/publications/ilo-bookstore/order-online/books/WCMS_222979/lang--en/index.htm">global trends</a>, most visible in the <a href="http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=34119&">worldwide growth of slums</a>.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I am from one of these wastelands where the majority of work is
informal, the majority of formal industries are dirty or miserable, and
where rates of poverty, unemployment, chronic disease, illiteracy, and
mental illness are often two to three times the national average. Raised
in a trailer several miles off a reservation in one of the poorest
counties on the west coast, all of the structural shifts mentioned above
were for me not academic abstractions, but living reality. I come from
that part of America—the <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/10/66-americas-growing-underclass/3618/">majority</a>
of it—where weed is the biggest cash crop, where kids eat Special K
like it’s cereal, and where the only “revitalization” we’ve ever seen is
when the abandoned factory down the street was converted into a meth
lab.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And I was, due mostly to dumb luck, one of the few who was able to
earn enough to pay the exit fee. Upon arrival in Seattle, despite having
a degree I was fed into the lowest tiers of the labor market. Rather
than being some “out-of-town” suburban youth using Seattle as a
“playground,” as commentators would claim of the rioters, I was, in
fact, one of the multitude of invisible workers that the city depended
on—whether hauling goods to and from the port, working in the south
county warehouses, cleaning downtown’s sprawling office towers, or, as
in my case, working behind the kitchen door.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">At the time of the riot, I was working for ten cents more than
minimum wage in a wholesale kitchen in South Seattle, where we produced
tens of thousands of pre-packaged sandwiches and salads for consumption
in upscale city cafés and office buildings. It is not an exaggeration to
say that my full-time work schedule (for the duration of Occupy
Seattle, which I attended every day after morning shifts at work)
amounted to me feeding hundreds of thousands of Seattleites over the
several months that Occupy was a present force in the city. It’s likely,
then, that those hysteric KIRO-TV commentators claiming that I was part
of some “outsider” gang come from the heart of chaos (or Portland,
maybe?) to fuck up Seattle have themselves regularly eaten the food that
I was paid poverty wages to make.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Despite the language of post-industrial, guilt-free success common to
many wealthy Seattleites’ image of themselves, the fact is that
Seattle, like any other global city, relies on what is called a <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/dual-labor-markets">dual labor market</a>[vii].
Higher tiers of skilled labor, cultural production, finance and
producer services exist atop a secondary tier of less skilled, minimally
compensated work in high-turnover jobs with little chance of promotion.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This creates a fundamental spatial problem within capitalism: despite
the outsourcing of the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs in manufacturing
and resource extraction, the rich <i>can never entirely get away from the poor</i>. The <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files">extension of surveillance</a>, <a href="http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie.html">incarceration and deportation</a>, the <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-americas-police-have-become-too-militarised-cops-or-soldiers">militarization of the police</a>, and the <a href="http://escalatingidentity.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/who-is-oakland-anti-oppression-politics-decolonization-and-the-state/">softer counter-insurgency</a>
of philanthropy foundations[viii], social justice NGOs, conservative
unions and various other poverty pimps are all methods to manage
different dimensions of this problem. The riot is what happens when all
these mediations fail. And in an era of crisis and austerity, such
mediation becomes more and more difficult to maintain.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">So in all the media’s talk of “outsiders,” “anarchists” and other terms meant to make the rioting subject <i>opaque </i>to
those not immediately engaged in the riot, the one fact that was
consistently distorted was the simplest: the thieves in the palace were,
in fact, <i>the servants</i>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I, the terrifying, irrational rioter, am you.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Why don’t I engage in more productive forms of protest?</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The other common theme was, of course, the morality play between the
“good protestor” and the “bad protestor.” The rioters somehow
“infiltrated” the march. They distracted from the “real” issues. They
turned “normal” people away from the day’s events, ultimately hurting
attempts at reform that were already underway.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There is in this an implicit assumption that there exist “better” forms of protest, and that we rioters <i>do not also do these things</i>. This produces a few small ironies, as when the local alt-weekly, <i>The Stranger</i>, <a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/08/02/eight-arrested-outside-downtown-seattle-mcdonalds-as-fast-food-strike-gains-momentum">contrasted</a>
the negotiated arrest of fast food protestors, who showed their courage
by standing their ground and “demanding arrest,” with the May Day
rioters, who did nothing but “hide behind bandanas while hurling rocks.”
The irony here was that I was myself one of those rioters <i>and </i>one
of those fast food workers—having been involved in the fast food
campaign from its inauguration, leading a walkout at my workplace in the
first strike, planning segments of the intermediate actions (including
the wage theft protest, though my pending riot case prevented me from
being arrested there), and then briefly taking a paid position with
Working Washington for two weeks leading up to the second strike.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Beyond the irony, though, there is the troublesome presumption that
this highly negotiated, thoroughly controlled and largely
non-threatening activism is somehow more productive in the long term.
When I did engage in the fast food strikes, I did so initially <i>as a fast food worker</i>,
and the short-term goal there was to build power among food workers in
the city. Despite this, no amount of organizing for (often much-needed)
reforms can get over the basic problems of reform itself, which is today
equivalent to <b>trying to take a step uphill during an avalanche</b>—you may well complete that step, but the ground itself is moving the opposite direction.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What would have been easily achievable, relatively minor reforms in
the boom era of fifty or sixty years ago, such as raising the minimum
wage to match inflation, enforcing laws against wage theft, and coming
up with an equitable tax system, today require herculean effort and mass
mobilization, even when ninety percent of the original demand is
usually sacrificed simply to show “good faith” at the negotiating table.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>Why don’t I like capitalism?</b></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There is plenty more to talk about here—which you <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/13/occupy-right-capitalism-failed-world-french-economist-thomas-piketty">can</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X">explore</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445684">if</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445692/ref=pd_sim_b_1/183-4526949-6160836?ie=UTF8&refRID=0EXM6WNFHGX4VP9RNQSM">you</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Critique-Political-Economy-Classics/dp/0140445706/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=12M8FZ1PGBFS3C3S7T2Z">please</a>. But the basic problem, cut to the size of a tweet, is that <b>the economy is the name for a hostage situation</b> in which the vast majority of the population is made dependent on a small minority through implicit threat of violence.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">If we challenge the system’s capacity to infinitely accumulate more
at a compounding rate, it goes into crisis—this is basic definition of
crisis: when profitable growth slows, stops, or, god forbid, reverses.
Whenever this accumulation is challenged, whether by contingent factors
such as poor location, or intentional ones, such as a resistant
populace, those who hold the power (the wealthy) will start killing
hostages.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is precisely what has been happening over the last fifty years
of economic restructuring. Any regions that show significant resistance
to the lowering of wages, the dismantling of social services, the export
or mechanization of jobs, or the privatization of public property can
easily be sacrificed. The American landscape, circa 2014, is littered
with just such <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Days-Destruction-Revolt-Chris-Hedges/dp/1568586434">dead hostages</a>: Detroit and Flint, MI, Camden, NJ, Athens, OH, Jackson, MS, the mining towns of West Virginia or northern Nevada.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The handful of cities (such as New York and Seattle) that were able to escape this fate today pride themselves on being <i>such good hostages</i>.
The only reason they were able to survive this rigged game of
neoliberal roulette was because of a mixture of sheer geographic luck
(often as port cities or pre-existing financial centers) and their
absolute openness to <i>do whatever the rich wanted</i>. Public goods
were sold off at bargain basement prices, downtown cores were redesigned
according to the whims of a few large interests in retail, finance and
real estate, and tax money, paired with future tax exemptions, was
simply handed out as bribes to big players like Nordstrom and
Boeing.[ix]</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">If we then zoom out to the global scale, it is abundantly obvious
that the currently existing economic system—which we call capitalism—is a
failed one. If it ever had any grudging utility in raising general
livelihoods after its mass sacrifices in war and colonization, that time
has unequivocally passed. Aside from the numerous examples cited above,
there are a few especially appalling illustrations. <a href="http://www.globalslaveryindex.org/">Slavery</a> is <a href="http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/category/the-facts/the-number/">growing</a> worldwide at a rate higher than at any other time in recent history. Mechanization is set to push massive swaths of workers <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-rich-and-their-robots-are-about-to-make-half-the-worlds-jobs-disappear">out of the production process entirely</a>,
even while the gains of this increase in productivity are themselves
concentrated almost exclusively in the hands of the wealthy. The central
role of finance and speculation in the global economy has resulted in
massive <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/jun/02/global-food-cricis-commodities-speculation">spikes in global food prices</a>, causing <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/ethiopia/2083074/Ethiopia-facing-new-famine-with-4.5-million-children-in-danger-of-starvation.html">famines</a> and <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/we-are-now-one-year-and-counting-from-global-riots-complex-systems-theorists-say--2">food riots</a>, as well as a situation in which the majority of grain in the world, to take one example, is <a href="http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/rr-cereal-secrets-grain-traders-agriculture-30082012-en.pdf">controlled</a> by just four companies.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Meanwhile, the bulk of the globe’s basic goods production is
increasingly concentrated—both in the producer services of high-GDP
metropoles like London, New York and Tokyo and in the “world’s factory”
of South and Southeast Asia. The production of these goods is not only
dominated by vast, low-wage retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon, but also
increasingly dictated by massive contract manufacturers like <a href="http://rdln.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/pun-ngai_chan-jenny_on-foxconn.pdf">Foxconn</a> or <a href="http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1483287/yue-yuen-shoe-factory-workers-strike-dongguan-plants-continues">Yue Yuen</a>, which concentrate their production in <a href="http://stefanal.com/factory-towns-of-south-china/">factory cities</a> where the lives of migrant workers are surveilled and managed in a quasi-military fashion.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The concentration of the production process coincides with the
concentration of the wealth generated by that process. Even within the
old “first world,” poverty and unemployment have been <a href="http://npc.umich.edu/publications/u/2013-06-npc-working-paper.pdf">on the rise</a>
since long before the most recent crisis. Greece and Spain are only the
most visible signs of this trend. In the US, especially, the trend
splits along racial lines. <a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/watch-these-us-cities-segregate-even-they-diversify/2346/">Cities</a> and <a href="http://seattletimes.com/html/education/2004450677_reseg01m.html">schools</a> <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/31/the-real-reasons-new-york-has-the-country-s-most-segregated-schools.html">are</a> <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/11/11/students-video-leads-discussion-race-ucla">resegregating</a>, though the <a href="http://www.mixedmetro.us/">patterns of segregation</a> are more complex than the redlining of the Jim Crow era. One dimension of this resegregation has been the <a href="http://newjimcrow.com/">growth</a> of the US prison system into <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/world/americas/23iht-23prison.12253738.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">one of the largest</a> the world has ever seen. Even if calculated as a percentage of population, rather than absolute number, the US today <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all">imprisons</a> roughly the same fraction of its population <a href="http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/22/zakaria-incarceration-nation/">as the USSR</a> did at the <i>height </i>of the gulag system—and our prison population is still on the rise.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://euobserver.com/social/119101">Curable diseases</a> are <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-return-of-the-plague-we-need-to-act-now-to-prevent-tuberculosis-from-wreaking-more-havoc-9197896.html">returning</a> en masse, while new viruses are <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00702.x/abstract">being developed at record rates</a> in the evolutionary pressure-cooker of <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22682088">industrial agriculture</a>.
Each economic crisis is larger than the one preceding it, and these
crises are not just “business cycles.” Or, more accurately: the
so-called business cycle is simply a sine wave oscillating around a
trajectory of <a href="http://endnotes.org.uk/en/endnotes-misery-and-debt">absolute decline</a>.
And this decline, like the last major ones in the global economic
system, will only be reversible through an unimaginably massive bout of
creative destruction.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the face of a collapsing environment, a hyper-volatile economic system and skyrocketing global inequality, it is simply <i>utopian </i>to
believe that the present system can be perpetuated indefinitely without
great violence. Opposition to capitalism has become an eminently
practical endeavor.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><b>But… Why riot?</b></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Despite all of this, the riot itself may still seem an enigma. On the
surface, riots appear to produce little in terms of concrete results
and, when you add up the numbers, often do less actual economic damage
to large business interests than, for example, <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/21/one-year-after-the-west-coast-port-shutdown/">blockading the port</a>. They produce a certain spectacle, but so does <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJt7gNi3Nr4&feature=kp">Jay-Z</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In one sense, there is often a practical side to many riots, which
can be far better at winning demands than negotiated attempts at reform.
Despite the fact that reform itself is designed to treat symptoms
rather than the disease, it’s also evident that riots are a useful tool
even in reform efforts. Riots, accompanying illegal blockades,
occupations and wildcat strikes, have <a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-04/09/content_17415767.htm">proliferated</a> in China’s Pearl River Delta over the past several years, and the result has been that workers there have seen an <a href="http://www.bls.gov/fls/china_method.pdf">unprecedented rise in manufacturing wages</a>, which more than doubled between 2004 and 2009. Some scholars have called the phenomenon “<a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9215104">collective bargaining by riot</a>.”</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Similarly, more and more historical work has been emerging showing that riots and other <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465033105/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465033105&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20">forms of armed organizing</a>
were very much the meat of movements like the civil rights struggle in
the US, despite the common perception that these things were somehow
“non-violent.” It is, in fact, difficult to find <i>any </i>example of
a successful, significant sequence of reforms that did not utilize the
riot at one point or another. As Paul Gilje, the pre-eminent historian
of the US riot, has <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=QqvIvErLiecC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">argued</a>:
“Riots have been important mechanisms for change,” and, in fact, “the
United States of America was born amid a wave of rioting.” The tactic,
then, should by no means be seen as in and of itself exceptional.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And it’s also not a sufficient tactic unto itself. The function of
the riot is less about a religious or petulant obsession with the act of
breaking shit and also not entirely about winning any given demand.
This was apparent in examples like Occupy, which had no coherent,
agreed-upon demands, aside from a general rejection of those in power.
This <i>demandlessness</i> was a feature not only of Occupy, however,
but of nearly every one of the mass movements that began in 2011,
starting with the Arab Spring. In each instance, the only thing that was
agreed upon was that the system was fundamentally fucked, and it was
this aspect alone that transformed the riots from mere attempts at
reform into truly <i>historical </i>procedures.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">My generation was not only born into the ecstatic “end of history” of
the 1990s, but is also the global generation—of slum-dwelling youth and
“<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/graduate-without-future-q-and-a">graduates with no future</a>”—who are inducing the first pangs of <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/history-and-the-sphinx-of-riots-and-uprisings">history’s rebirth</a>.
And this rebirth has taken the figure of the hooded rioter, as has been
evidenced by the increasingly frequent transformation of mass riots
into occupations of public squares, which themselves evolved into new
forms of rioting and, ultimately, the first major insurrection of the 21<sup>st</sup> century—which took place in Egypt and has since been <a href="http://www.versobooks.com/books/1661-soldiers-spies-and-statesmen">largely crushed</a> by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The riot is most important, then, not in its traditional ability to <i>win </i>demands that progressives can only drool over, but instead when it takes on a <i>demandless </i>character. This absence of demands in the riot and occupation implies two things: First, it implies <b>a</b> <b>rejection of existing mediations</b>.
We do not intend to vote for fundamentally corrupt political parties or
play the rigged game of activism. Though it may be important in
particular instances to fight for and win certain demands, such as the
demand for <a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/02/12/new-poll-68-percent-of-seattle-voters-support-15-an-hour-minimum-wage">$15 an hour</a>, these reforms <i>in and of themselves</i>
contribute nothing to the ultimate goal of winning a better world. They
can contribute to this project only in very particular contexts, and
only when <i>superseded</i> by forms adequate to that true project, as
when the growing spate of strikes in Egypt in the years leading up to
2011 was suddenly superseded by a mass insurrection.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Second, it implies <b>the question of power</b>. The riot
affirms our power in a profoundly direct way. By “our” power I mean,
first, the power of those who have been and are continually fucked-over
by the world as it presently is, though these groups by no means all
experience this in the same way and to the same degree—the low-wage
service workers, the prisoners, the migrant laborers, the indebted,
unemployed graduates, the suicidal paper-pushers, the 农民工on the assembly
line, the child slaves of Nestle cocoa plantations, my childhood
friends who never got out of the trailer or off the rez. But I also mean
the power of our generation: the millenials, a label that already
implies the apocalyptic ambiance of our era. Or, more colloquially:
Generation Fucked, because, well, <a href="https://news.vice.com/articles/the-us-is-using-its-youth-as-a-credit-card">obviously</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The question of power, though, isn’t simply a question of the
devolution of power to the majority of people, though this is the
ultimate goal. At the immediate level it is a struggle over power
between shrinking fractions of the population dedicated to maintaining
the complete shit-show that is the status quo, and growing fractions of
the population dedicated to destroying that shit-show as thoroughly as
humanly possible, while in the process collectively constructing a
system in which poverty becomes impossible, no one is illegal, power
itself is not concentrated in the hands of a minority of the population,
our metabolism with the natural world bears less and less resemblance
to the metabolism of a meth-head scouring the medicine cabinet, and the
collective material wealth and accumulated intelligence of the human
species is made freely accessible to all members of that species, rather
than being reserved as party-swag for <a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/Fringes/portrait-of-a-russian-oligarch">half-naked Russian oligarchs</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Pretending that power does not exist directly serves those who
presently hold it. And the riot overturns such pretense by exerting our
own power against theirs. It is a mechanism whereby we both scare the
rich and attract people to a project that goes far beyond the reform of a
collapsing world. In this particular instance, it has worked. Many of
the fast food workers with whom I organized in the year following the
riot understood its portent perfectly well. By <a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/05/22/why-they-break-windows">May Day 2013</a>, the riot had taken on a life of its own.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The riot, then, is not a hindrance to “real” struggle or a
well-intentioned accident where people’s “understandable” anger gets
“out of control.” <b>Getting out of control is the point</b>, which is precisely why the riot is the <i>foundation </i>from which any future worth the name must be built.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And <i>we </i>will be the ones to build it. Our generation: the millenials, generation fucked, or, as we’ve taken to calling it: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/GenerationZeroInternationale">Generation Zero</a>. Zero because we’ve got nothing left except debt—but also nothing to lose. And zero because, like the riot, <b>it all starts here</b>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">In the end, then, you can lose the economics, you can lose the
spectacle and the moralizing and the god-awful appeals to cute and fuzzy
“social/racial/environmental justice.” Throw all of this in the alembic
of the riot, and it boils down to the simplest of propositions:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Our future’s already been looted. <b>It’s time to loot back.</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">—<b>Phil A. Neel</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[i] Note that left-wing political riots primarily target property
and, secondarily, engage in defensive violence against the protectors of
that property, namely police, security officers, or vigilantes. This
has been referred to as “non-injurious” violence, since there is an
implicit agreement that rioters not cause harm to innocent bystanders,
and since persons are not the primary target of the violence. By
contrast, right-wing riots exhibit an opposite aspect, where persons,
and particularly the least powerful in a situation, are generally the
primary target of the violence, with property destruction being the
ancillary. This is a well-documented phenomenon. See, for example:
Gilje, Paul A. <i>Rioting in America</i>, Indiana University Press, 1996.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[ii] Of these five cases, one has been dropped after significant
expense on the part of the city achieved only a hung jury. Out of all
five, there have been only two guilty pleas, mine included.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[iii] It’s worth noting here that striking a police officer in the
United States is a felony—which also means that, if you hit a cop and
are found guilty of the crime, you lose the right to vote (usually for
the duration of your multi-year probation, though in some states, such
as Kentucky, you are disenfranchised for the rest of your life).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[iv] Ages 35-44 lost 49%, 45-54 lost 28% and 55-64 lost 14%.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[v] If you calculate the same data for Generation X and the younger
Baby Boomers, with the same age brackets used in 1984, you see ages
35-44 losing 44% of their median income, though still holding roughly
ten times the wealth ($39,601) as millenials. Ages 45-54 losing 10%,
holding a median of $101,651, and ages 55-64 <i>gaining </i>10%,
growing to $162,065. Similarly, since 1967, poverty among the
35-and-under age group has increased from 12% to 22%, while, for those
65 and older, it has actually dropped from 33% to 11%.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[vi] For a more detailed academic account of this process, see Saskia Sassen, <i>The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. </i>Princeton University Press, 1991.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[vii] See Michael Piore, <i>Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies</i>. Cambridge University Press, 1979</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[viii] The philanthropic endeavors of the wealthy are similar to the
actions of a burglar who, after robbing a neighborhood, returns to that
neighborhood to return half of one percent of the loot as gifts—or, in
the case of much international philanthropy, in the form of gift cards
that you can only use at the burglar’s own department store, as when the
Gates family gives loans earmarked to be used only for the purchase of
pharmaceuticals from companies in which the Gates family owns a
significant share.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">
</span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[ix] For a detailed account of this process in Seattle, see: Timothy A. Gibson, <i>Securing the Spectacular City: The Politics of Revitalization and Homelessness in Downtown Seattle</i>. Lexington Books, 2003.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="http://www.ultra-com.org/project/why-riot/">http://www.ultra-com.org/project/why-riot/</a> </span></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-55932372964995144922014-05-26T02:51:00.000-07:002014-05-26T02:51:40.891-07:00"Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium" by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">QUESTION: When you describe capitalism, you say: "There isn't the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality (not at all a false rationality, but a true rationality of *this* pathology, of *this madness*, for the machine does work, be sure of it). There is no danger of this machine going mad, it has been mad from the beginning and that's where its rationality comes from. Does this mean that after this "abnormal" society, or outside of it, there can be a "normal" society?<br /><br />GILLES DELEUZE: We do not use the terms "normal" or "abnormal". All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational -- not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn't been adequately discussed about Marx's *Capital* is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalists mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a society? It is -- the interests being defined in the framework of this society -- the way people pursue those interests, their realisation. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true story is the history of desire. A capitalist, or today's technocrat, does not desire in the same way as a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and *for themselves*, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the "right" to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A "disinterested" love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all.<br /><br />Q: So what is specific to capitalism in all this?<br /><br />GD: Are delirium and interest, or rather desire and reason, distributed in a completely new, particularly "abnormal" way in capitalism? I believe so. Capital, or money, is at such a level of insanity that psychiatry has but one clinical equivalent: the terminal stage. It is too complicated to describe here, but one detail should be mentioned. In other societies, there is exploitation, there are also scandals and secrets, but that is part of the "code", there are even explicitly secret codes. With capitalism, it is very different: nothing is secret, at least in principle and according to the code (this is why capitalism is "democratic" and can "publicize" itself, even in a juridical sense). And yet nothing is admissible. Legality itself is inadmissible. By contrast to other societies, it is a regime born of the public *and* the admissible. A very special delirium inherent to the regime of money. Take what are called scandals today: newspapers talk a lot about them, some people pretend to defend themselves, others go on the attack, yet it would be hard to find anything illegal in terms of the capitalist regime. The prime minister's tax returns, real estate deals, pressure groups, and more generally the economical and financial mechanisms of capital -- in sum, everything is legal, except for little blunders, what is more, everything is public, yet nothing is admissible. If the left was "reasonable," it would content itself with vulgarizing economic and financial mechanisms. There's no need to publicize what is private, just make sure that what is already public is being admitted publicly. One would find oneself in a state of dementia without equivalent in the hospitals.<br /><br />Instead, one talks of "ideology". But ideology has no importance whatsoever: what matters is not ideology, not even the "economic-ideological" distinction or opposition, but the *organisation of power*. Because organization of power-- that is, the manner in which desire is already in the economic, in which libido invests the economic -- haunts the economic and nourishes political forms of repression.<br /><br />Q: So is ideology a trompe l'oeil?<br /><br />GD: Not at all. To say "ideology is a trompe l'oeil, " that's still the traditional thesis. One puts the infrastructure on one side-- the economic, the serious-- and on the other, the superstructure, of which ideology is a part, thus rejecting the phenomena of desire in ideology. It's a perfect way to ignore how desire works within the infrastructure, how it invests in it, how it takes part in it, how, in this respect, it organizes power and the repressive system. We do not say: ideology is a trompe l'oeil (or a concept that refers to certain illusions) We say: there is no ideology, it is an illusion. That's why it suits orthodox Marxism and the Communist Party so well. Marxism has put so much emphasis on the theme of ideology to better conceal what was happening in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power. There is no ideology, there are only organizations of power once it is admitted that the organization of power is the unity of desire and the economic infrastructure. Take two examples. Education: in May 1968 the leftists lost a lot of time insisting that professors engage in public self-criticism as agents of bourgeois ideology. It's stupid, and simply fuels the masochistic impulses of academics. The struggle against the competitive examination was abandoned for the benefit of the controversy, or the great anti-ideological public confession. In the meantime, the more conservative professors had no difficulty reorganizing their power. The problem of education is not an ideological problem, but a problem of the organization of power: it is the specificity of educational power that makes it appear to be an ideology, but it's pure illusion. Power in the primary schools, that means something, it affects all children. Second example: Christianity. The church is perfectly pleased to be treated as an ideology. This can be argued; it feeds ecumenism. But Christianity has never been an ideology; it's a very specific organization of power that has assumed diverse forms since the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, and which was able to invent the idea of international power. It's far more important than ideology.<br /><br />FELIX GUATTARI: It's the same thing in traditional political structures. One finds the old trick being played everywhere again and again: a big ideological debate in the general assembly and questions of organization reserved for special commissions. These questions appear secondary, determined by political options. While on the contrary, the real problems are those of organization, never specified or rationalized, but projected afterwards in ideological terms. There the real divisions show up: a treatment of desire and power, of investments, of group Oedipus, of group "superegos", of perverse phenomena, etc. And then political oppositions are built up: the individual takes such a position against another one, because in the scheme of organization of power, he has already chosen and hates his adversary.<br /><br />Q: Your analysis is convincing in the case of the Soviet Union and of capitalism. But in the particulars? If all ideological oppositions mask, by definition, the conflicts of desire, how would you analyze, for example, the divergences of three Trotskyite groupuscules? Of what conflict of desire can this be the result? Despite the political quarrels, each group seems to fulfill the same function vis-a-vis its militants: a reassuring hierarchy, the reconstitution of a small social milieu, a final explanation of the world... I don't see the difference.<br /><br />FG: Because any resemblance to existing groups is merely fortuitous, one can well imagine one of these groups defining itself first by its fidelity to hardened positions of the communist left after the creation of the Third International. It's a whole axiomatic, down to the phonological level -- the way of articulating certain words, the gesture that accompanies them -- and then the structures of organization, the conception of what sort of relationships to maintain with the allies, the centrists, the adversaries... This may correspond to a certain figure of Oedipalization, a reassuring, intangible universe like that of the obsessive who loses his sense of security if one shifts the position of a single, familiar object. It's a question of reaching, through this kind of identification with recurrent figures and images, a certain type of efficiency that characterized Stalinism--except for its ideology, precisely. In other respects, one keeps the general framework of the method, but adapts oneself to it very carefully: "The enemy is the same, comrades, but the conditions have changed." Then one has a more open groupuscule. It's a compromise: one has crossed out the first image, whilst maintaining it, and injected other notions. One multiplies meetings and training sessions, but also the external interventions. For the desiring will, there is --- as Zaire says-- a certain way of bugging students and militants, among others.<br /><br />In the final analysis, all these groupuscules say basically the same thing. But they are radically opposed in their *style*: the definition of the leader, of propaganda, a conception of discipline, loyalty, modesty, and the asceticism of the militant. How does one account for these polarities without rummaging in the economy of desire of the social machine? >From anarchists to Maoists the spread is very wide, politically as much as analytically. Without even considering the mass of people, outside the limited range of the groupuscules, who do not quite know how to distinguish between the leftist elan, the appeal of union action, revolt, hesitation of indifference.<br /><br />One must explain the role of these machines. these goupuscules and their work of stacking and sifting--in crashing desire. It's a dilemma: to be broken by the social system of to be integrated in the pre-established structure of these little churches. In a way, May 1968 was an astonishing revelation. The desiring power became so accelerated that it broke up the groupuscules. These later pulled themselves together; they participated in the reordering business with the other repressive forces, the CGT [Communist worker's union], the PC, the CRS [riot police]. I don't say this to be provocative. Of course, the militants courageously fought the police. But if one leaves the sphere of struggle to consider the function of desire, one must recognize that certain groupuscules approached the youth in a spirit of repression: to contain liberated desire in order to re-channel it.<br /><br />Q: What is liberated desire? I certainly see how this can be translated at the level of an individual or small group: an artistic creation, or breaking windows, burning things, or even simply an orgy or letting things go to hell through laziness or vegetating. But then what? What could a collectively liberated desire be at the level of a social group? And what does this signify in relation to t"the totality of society", if you do not reject this term as Michel Foucault does.<br /><br />FG: We have taken desire in one of its most critical, most acute stages: that of the schizophrenic--and the schizo that can produce something within or beyond the scope of the confined schizo, battered down with drugs and social repression. It appears to us that certain schizophrenics directly express a free deciphering of desire. But now does one conceive a collective form of the economy of desire? Certainly not at the local level. I would have a lot of difficulty imagining a small, liberated community maintaining itself against the flows of a repressive society, like the addition of individuals emancipated one by one. If, on the contrary, desire constitutes the very texture of society in its entirety, including in its mechanisms of reproduction, a movement of liberation can "crystallize" in the whole of society. In May 1968, from the first sparks to local clashes, the shake-up was brutally transmitted to the whole of society, in some groups that had nothing remotely to do with the revolutionary movement--doctors, lawyers, grocers. Yet it was vested interests that carried the day, but only after a month of burning. We are moving toward explosions of this type, yet more profound.<br /><br />Q: Might there have already been a vigorous and durable liberation of desire in hostpry, apart from brief periods. a celebration, carnage, war, or revolutionary upheavals? Or do you really believe in an end of history. after millennia of alienation, social evolution will suddenly turn around in a final revolution that will liberate desire forever?<br /><br />FG: Neither the one nor the other. Neither a final end to history, nor provisional excess. All civilizations, all periods have known ends of history--this is not necessarily convincing and not necessarily liberating. As for excess, or moments of celebration, this is no more reassuring. There are militant revolutionaries who feel a sense of responsibility and say: Yes excess "at the first stage of revolution," serious thing s... Or desire is not liberated in simple moments of celebration. See the discussion between Victor and Foucault in the issue of *Les Temps Moderns* on the Maoists. Victor consents to excess, but at the "first stage". As for the rest, as for the real thing, Victor calls for a new apparatus of state, new norms, a popular justice with a tribunal, a legal process external to the masses, a third party capable of resolving contradictions among the masses. One always finds the old schema: the detachment of a pseudo capable of bringing about syntheses, of forming a party as an embryo of state apparatus, of drawing out a well brought up, well educated working class; and the rest is a residue, a lumpen-proletariat one should always mistrust (the same old condemnation of desire). But these distinctions themselves are another way of trapping desire for the advantage of a bureaucratic caste. Foucault reacts by denouncing the third party, saying that if there is popular justice, it does not issue from a tribunal. He shows very well that the distinction "avant-garde-lumpen-proletariat" is first of all a distinction introduced by the bourgeoisie to the masses, and therefore serves to crush the phenomena of desire, to *marginalize* desire. The whole question is that of state apparatus. It would be strange to rely on a party or state apparatus for the liberation of desire. To want better justice is like wanting better judges, better cops, better bosses, a cleaner France, etc. And then we are told: how would you unify isolated struggles without a party? How do you make the machine work without a state apparatus? It is evident that a revolution requires a war machine, out this is not a state apparatus, it is also certain that it requires an instance of analysis, an analysis of the desires of the masses, yet this is not an apparatus external to the synthesis. Liberated desire means that desire escapes the impasse of private fantasy: it is not a question of adapting it, socializing it, disciplining it, but of plugging it in in such a way that its process not be interrupted in the social body, and that its expression be collective. What counts is not the authoritarian unification, but rather a sort of infinite spreading: desire in the schools, the factories, the neighborhoods, the nursery schools, the prisons, etc. It is not a question of directing, of totalising, but of plugging into the same plan of oscillation. As long as one alternates between the impotent spontaneity of anarchy and the bureaucratic and hierarchic coding of a party organization, there is no liberation of desire.<br /><br />Q: In the beginning, was capitalism able to assume the social desires?<br /><br />GD: Of course, capitalism was and remains a formidable desiring machine. The monary flux, the means of production, of manpower, of new markets, all that is the flow of desire. It's enough to consider the sum of contingencies at the origin of capitalism to see to what degree it has been a crossroads of desires, and that its infrastructure, even its economy, was inseparable from the phenomena of desire. And fascism too--one must say that it has "assumed the social desires", including the desires of repression and death. People got hard-ons for Hitler, for the beautiful fascist machine. But if your question means: was capitalism revolutionary in its beginnings, has the industrial revolution ever coincided with a social revolution? No, I don't thing so. Capitalism has been tied from its birth to a savage repressiveness; it had it's organization of power and its state apparatus from the start. Did capitalism imply a dissolution of the previous social codes and powers? Certainly. But it had already established its wheels of power, including its power of state, in the fissures of previous regimes. It is always like that: things are not so progressive; even before a social formation is established, its instruments of exploitation and repression are already there, still turning in the vacuum, but ready to work at full capacity. The first capitalists are like waiting birds of prey. They wait for their meeting with the worker, the one who drops through the cracks of the preceding system. It is even, in every sense, what one calls primitive accumulation.<br /><br />Q: On the contrary, I think that the rising bourgeoisie imagined and prepared its revolution throughout the Enlightenment. From its point of view, it was a revolutionary class "to the bitter end", since it had shaken up the *ancien regime* and swept into power. Whatever parallel movements took place among the peasantry and in the suburbs, the bourgeois revolution is a revolution made by the bourgeoisie terms are hardly distinguishable--and to judge it in the name of 19th or 20th century socialist utopias introduces, by anachronism, a category that did not exist.<br /><br />GD: Here again, what you say fits a certain Marxist schema. At one point in history, the bourgeoisie was revolutionary, it was even necessary--necessary to pass through a stage of capitalism, through a bourgeois revolutionary stage. It'S a Stalinist point of view, but you can't take that seriously. When a social formation exhausts itself, draining out of every gap, all sorts of things decode themselves, all sorts of uncontrolled flows start pouring out, like the peasant migrations in feudal Europe, the phenomena of "deterritorialisation." The bourgoisie imposes a new code, both economic and political, so that one can believe it was a revolution. Not at all. Daniel Guerin has said some profound things about the revolution of 1789. The bourgoisie never had illusions about who its real enemy was. Its real enemy was not the previous system, but what escaped the previous systems's control, and what the bourgoisie strove to master in its turn. It too owed its power to the ruin of the old system, but this power could only be exerciced insofar as it opposed everything else that was in rebellion against the old system. The bourgoiseie has never been revolutionary. It simply made sure others pulled of the revolution for it. It manipulated, channeled, and repressed an enormous surge of popular desire. The people were finally beaten down at Valmy.<br /><br />Q: They were certainly beaten down at Verdun.<br /><br />FG: Exactly. And that's what interests us. Where do these eruptions, these uprisings, these enthusiasms come from that cannot be explained by a social rationality and that are diverted, captured by the power at the moment they are born? One cannot account for a revolutionary situation by a simple analysis of the interests of the time. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic Party debated the alliances and organization of the proletariat, and the role of the avant-garde. While pretending to prepare for the revolution, it was suddenly shaken up by the events of 1095 and had to jump on board a moving train. There was a crystallization of desire on board a wide social scale created by a yet incomprehensible situation. Same thing in 1917. And there too, the politicians climbed on board a moving train, finally getting control of it. Yet no revolutionary tendency was able or willing to assume the need for a soviet-style organization that could permit the masses to take real charge of their interests and their desire. Instead, one put machines in circulation, so-called political organizations, that functioned on the model elaborated by Dimitrov at the Seventh International Congress--alternating between popular fronts and sectarian retractions--and that always led to the same repressive results. We saw it in 1936, in 1945, in 1968. By their very axiomatic, these mass machines refuse to liberate revolutionary energy. It is, in an underhanded way, a politics comparable to that of the President of the Republic or of the clergy, but with red flag in hand. And we think that this corresponds to a certain position vis-a-vis desire, a profound way of envisioning the ego, the individual, the family. This raises a simple dilemma: either one finds a new type of structure that finally moves toward the fusion of collective desire and revolutionary organization: or one continues on the present path and, going from repression to repression, heads for a new fascism that makes Hitler and Mussolini look like a joke.<br /><br />Q: But then what is the nature of this profound, fundamental desire which one sees as beeing constitutive of man and social man, but which is constantly betrayed? Why does it always invest itself in antinomic machines of the dominant machine, and yet remain so similar to it? Could this mean that desire is condemned to a pure explosion without consequence or to perpetual betrayal? I have to insist: can there ever be, one fine day in history, a collective and during expression of liberated desire, and how?<br /><br />GD: If one knew, one wouldn't talk about it, one would do it. Anyway, Felx just said it: revolutionary organization must be that of the war machine and not of state apparatus, of an analyzer of desire and not an external systhesis. In every social system, there have always been lines of escape, and then also a rigidification to block off escape, or certainly (which is not the same thing) embryonic apparatuses that integrate them, that deflect or arrest them in a new system in preparation. The crusades should be analysed from this point of view. But in every respect, capitalism has a very particular character: its lines of escape are not just difficulties that arise, they are the conditions of its own operation. it is constituted by a generalized decoding of all flux, fluctuations of wealth, fluctuations of language, fluctuations of art, etc. It did not create any code, it has set up a sort of accountability, an axiomatic of decoded fluxes as the basis of its economy. It ligatures the points of escape and leaps itself having to seal new leaks at every limit. It doesn't resolve any of its fundamental problems, it can't even forsee the monetary increase in a country over a single year. It never stops crossing its own limits which keep reapperaing farther away. It puts itself in alarming situations with respect to its won production, its social life, its demographics, its borders with the Third World, its internal regions, etc. Its gaps are everwhere, forever giving rise to the displaced limits of capitalism. And doubtless, the revolutionary way out (the active escape of which Jackson spoke when he said: " I don't stop running, but while running, I look for weapons") is not at all the same thing as other kinds of esacpe, the schizo-escape, the drug-escape. But it is certainly the problem of the marginalized: to plug all these lines of escape into a revolutionary plateau. In capitalism, then, these lines of escape take on a new character, a new type of revolutionary potential. You see, there is hope.<br /><br />Q: You spoke just now of the crusades. For you, this is one of the first manifestations of collective shizohrenia in the West.<br /><br />FG: This was, in fact, an extraordinary schizophrenic movement. Basically, in an already schismatic and troubled world, thousands and thousands of people got fed up with the life they led, makeshift preachers rose up, people deserted entire villages. It's only later that the shocked papacy tried to give direction to the movement by leading it off to the Holy Land. A double advantage: to be rid of errant bands and to reinforce Christian outposts in the Near East thretened by the Turks. This didn't always work: the Venetian Crusade wound up in Constantinople, the Childrens Crusade veered off toward the South of France and very quickly lost all sympathy: there were entire villages taken and burned by these "crosses" children, who the regular armies finally had to round up. They were killed or sold into slavery.<br /><br />Q: Can one find parallels with contemporary movements: communities and by-roads to escape the factory and the office? NAd would there be any pope to co-opt them? A Jesus Revolution?<br /><br />FG: A recuperation by Christianity is not inconceivable. It is, up to a certain point, a reality in the United States, but much less so in Europe or in France. But there is already a latent return to it in the form of a Naturist tendency, the idea that one can retire from production and reconstruct a little society at a remove, as if one were not branded and hemmed in by the capitalist system.<br /><br />Q: What role can still be attributed to the church in a country like ours? The church was at the center of power in Western civilization until the 18th Century, the bond and structure of the social machine until the emergence of the nation-state. Today, deproved by the technocracy of this essential function, it seems to have gone adrift, without a point of anchorage, and to have split up. One can only wonder if the church, pressured by the currents of Catholic progressivism, might not become less confessional than certain political organizations.<br /><br />FG: And ecumenism? In't it a way of falling back on one's feet? THe church has never been stronger. There us bi reasiob ti oppose church and technocracy, there is a technocracy of the church. Historically, Christianity and positivism have always been good partners. The development of positive sciences has a Christian motor. One cannot say that the psychiatrist has replaced the priest. Nor can one say the cop has replaced the priest. There is always a use for everyone in repression. What has aged about Christianity is its ideology, not its organization of power.<br /><br />Q: Let's get to this other aspect of yopur book: the critique of psychiatry. Can one say that France is already covered by the psychiatry of *Sectuer*--and how far does this influence spread?<br /><br />FG: The structure of psychiatric hospitals essentially depends on the state and the psychiatrists are mere functionaries. For a long time the state was content to practice a politics of coercion and didn't do anything for almost a century. One had to wait fot the Liberation for any signs of anxiety to appear: the first psychiatric revolution, the opening of the hospitals, the free services, instituional psychotherapy. All that has led to the great utopian politics of "Sectorization," which consisted in limiting the number of internments and of sending teams of psychiatrists out into the population like missionaries in the bush. Due to lack of credit and will, the reform got bogged down: a few model services for official visits, and here or there a hospital in the most underdeveloped regions. We are now moving toward a major crisis, comparable in size to the university crisis, a disaster at all levels: facilities, training of personnel, therapy, etc.<br /><br />The instituional charting of childhood is, on the contrary, undertaken with better results. In this case, the initiative has escaped the state framework and its financing to return to all sorts of associations--childhood protection or parental associations.... The establishments have proliferated, subsidized by Social Security. The child is immediately taken charge of by a network of psychologists, tagged at the age of three, and followed for life. One can expect to see solutions of this type for adult psychiatry. In the face of the present impasse, the state will try to de-nationalize institutions in favor of other institutions ruled by the law of 1901 and most certainly manipulated by political powers and reactionary family groups. We are moving toward a psychiatric surveillance of France, if the present scrises fail to liberate its revolutionary potentialities. Everywhere, the most conservative ideology is in bloom, a flat transposition of the concepts of Oedipalism. In the childrens's wards, one calls the director "uncle," the nurse, "mother." I have even heard distinctions like the following: group games obey a maternal principle, the workshops, a paternal one. The psychiatry of *Secteur* semms progressive because it opens the hospital. But if this means imposing a grid over the neighborhood, we will soon regret the loss of the closed asylums of yesterday. It's like psychoanalysis, it functions openly, so it is all the worse, much more dangerous as a repressive force.<br /><br />GD: Here's a case. A woman arrives at a consultation. She explains that she takes tranquilizers. She asks for a glass of water. Then she speaks: "You understand I have a certain amount of culture. I have studied, i love to read, and there you have it. Now I spend all my time crying. I can't bear the subway. And the minute I read something, I start to cry. I watch television; I see images of Vietnam: I can't stand it ..." The doctor doesn't say much. The woman continues: "I was in the Resistance... a bit. I was a go-between." The doctor asks her to explain. "Well, yes, don't you understand, doctor? I went to a cafe and I asked, for example, is there something for Rene?" I would be given a letter to pass on." The doctor hears "Rene"; he wakes up: "Why do you say "Rene"? It's the first time he asks a question. Up to that point, she was speaking about the metro, Hiroshima, Vietnam, of the effect all that had on her body, the need to cry about it. But the doctor only asks: "Wait, wait, 'Rene' ... what dies 'Rene' mean to you?" Rene--someone who is reborn [re-n'e]? The Renaissance, this fits into a universal schema, the archetype: "You want to be reborn." The doctor gets his bearings: at last he's on track. And he gets her to talk about her mother and her father.<br /><br />It's an essential aspect of our book, and it's very concrete. The psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have never paid any attentiaon to delirium. It'S enough just to listen to someone who is delirious: it's the Russians that worry him, the Chinese; my mouth is dry; somebody buggered me in the metro; there are germs and spermatozoa swimming everywhere; it's Franco's fault, the Jews, the Maoists: all a delirium of the social field. Why shouldn't this concern the sexuality of the subject--the relations it has with the Chinese, the whites, the blacks? Whith civilization, the crusades, the metro? Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts hear nothing of this, on the defensive as much as they are indefensible. They crush the contents of the unsoncious under prefab statements: "You speak to me of the Chinese, but what about your father? No, he isn't Chinese? THen , do you have a Chinese lover?" It's atz the same level of repressive work as the judge in the Angela Davis case who affirmed: "Her behavior can only be explained by her beeing in love." ANd what if, on the contrary, Angela Davis's libido was a social, revolutionary libido? What if she were in love because she was a revolutionary?<br /><br />That is what we want to say to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts: yopu don't know what delirium is; you haven't understood anything. If our bnook has a meaning, it is that we have reached a stage where many people feel the psychoanalytif machine no longer works, where a whole generation is getting fed up with all-purpose schemas--oedipus and castration, imaginary and symbolic--which systematically efface the social, political, and cultural contents of any psychic disturbance.<br /><br />Q: You associate schizophrenia with capitalism; it is the very foundation of your book. Are there cases of schizophrenia in other societies?<br /><br />FG: Schizophrenia is indissocialble from the capitalist system, itself conceived as primary leakage (fuite): and exclusive malady. In other societies, escape and marginalization take on other aspects. The asocial individual of so-called primitive societies is not locked up. The prison and the asylum are resent notions. One chases him, he is exiled at the edge of the village and dies of it, unless he is integrated to a neighboring village. Besides, each system has its paricular sickness: the hysteric of so-called primitive societies, the manic-depressive paranoiacs of the great empires... The capitalist economy preoceeds by decoding and de-territorialization: it has its exterme cases, i.e., schzophrenics who decode and de-territorialize themselves to the limit; but also it has its extreme consequences--revolutionaries.<br /><br />by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/capitalism-very-special-delirium.html?m=1">http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/capitalism-very-special-delirium.html?m=1</a></span></span>Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7462053410018632954.post-17998639879793900082014-05-05T01:40:00.002-07:002014-05-05T01:58:05.646-07:00 S.O.S Greek coastline is destroyed by private interests and Greek government. The paradigm of the destruction of Spain's coastline / Η Καταστροφή της Ισπανικής ακτογραμμής παράδειγμα για το μέλλον των Ελληνικών ακτών!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As the far-right government in Greece is preparing a new law that allows the destruction of Greek coast-line by private interests and all kinds of capitalist's investments we publish here a serial of photos from Spain where anyone can see clear the destructive effects of capitalistic development in Mediterranean environment. We are asking all people of Europe to fight for the defense of Greek coast-line and the paradesiac Greek beaches from destructive Greek government and private interests.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">To understand what they try to do in Greece you can see the total destruction of coast-line in Spain.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Καθώς η ακροδεξιά κυβέρνηση στην Ελλάδα ετοιμάζει νόμους που θα επιτρέψουν την καταστροφή της Ελληνικής ακτογραμμής από ιδιωτικά συμφέροντα και κάθε λογής καπιταλιστικές επενδύσεις δημοσιέυουμε εδώ μια σειρά από φωτος από την Ισπανία έτσι ώστε να γίνει ξεκάθαρο στον καθένα το απόλυτα καταστροφικό αποτέλεσμα της καπιταλιστικής ανάπτυξης στο περιβάλλον της Μεσογείου. Ζητάμε από τους ανθρώπους όλης της Ευρώπης να υπερασπιστούν τις παραδείσιες Ελληνικές παραλίες από την καταστροφική Ελληνική Κυβέρνηση και τα ιδιωτικά συμφέροντα. </span></span><br />
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The destruction of Spain's coastline / Η Καταστροφή της Ισπανικής ακτογραμμής</span></span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-weight: normal;"><b>In the past two decades the once-beautiful Spanish coastline has been ravaged by the construction of hotels, apartment blocks and second homes. Here are some of the worst examples</b>. </span></b></span></span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Τα τελευταία 20 χρόνια αυτό που κάποτε ήταν οι πανέμορφες Ισπανικές παραλίες και ακτές έχει κακοποιηθεί από την κατασκευή ξενοδοχειακών μονάδων, συγκροτημάτων διαμερισμάτων και εξοχικών. Εδώ μπορείτε να δείτε κάποια χαρακτηριστικά παραδείγματα: </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcWhi0VJ0DSotZof_GMqYw-HtTGxVA-1-Nr9-YHjPpe7m4MEf3MhQZhi76XwVq-i57mMY6XHLdUbnTBlqB3wzAwLjB8E-TWvgT7lPx0PITAG6FuzzqG6o38La33cGXEHHR6Jr9l6I2l4F/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2005-A-007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLcWhi0VJ0DSotZof_GMqYw-HtTGxVA-1-Nr9-YHjPpe7m4MEf3MhQZhi76XwVq-i57mMY6XHLdUbnTBlqB3wzAwLjB8E-TWvgT7lPx0PITAG6FuzzqG6o38La33cGXEHHR6Jr9l6I2l4F/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2005-A-007.jpg" height="267" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2005: The Azata del Sol complex on the Algarrobico beach in the Cabo de Gata park in Almeria, southern Spain</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2005: Το οικοδομικό συγκρότημα Azata Del Sol στην παραλία Algarrobico στην Νότια Ισπανία</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRCoKuThS55nX4N9I8dwswuD2c-l-yw99kidaUt9xVUEIXnsa2p9L8u5Du9T80exDG9RjEGDqjVNe-McDJwUOAYd4PohVCmKJaHB_Tj2_elFKKdhOzgVEip4VLVIamg0V94zK-KJSbNz5X/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-S-006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRCoKuThS55nX4N9I8dwswuD2c-l-yw99kidaUt9xVUEIXnsa2p9L8u5Du9T80exDG9RjEGDqjVNe-McDJwUOAYd4PohVCmKJaHB_Tj2_elFKKdhOzgVEip4VLVIamg0V94zK-KJSbNz5X/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-S-006.jpg" height="266" width="400" /><span class="caption" itemprop="description"> </span></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"> 2007: Scores of Greepeace activists disembark in front of the hotel Azata del Sol, Algarrobico, which has been built on the first coastal line of Carboneras, Almeria. The activists painted 'Illegal Hotel' on the front of the hotel</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2007: Aκτιβιδτές της Greenpeace γράφουν μπροστά από το ξενοδοχείο </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">Azata del Sol που έχει χτιστεί μπροστά στην θάλασσα του Algarrobico "Παράνομο Ξενοδοχείο". </span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4K1Erbe7LElsUtLOhFM40DgHjClGPJqVnd5erVK2QI13mUI43-bjZSfZxlGqcOBvR5w87I8e4vIMwuHFYH1U8Exbhjd6-14hXecadDCR36etYlVbf51v81AOSSo_I0t-VoJ7MZRYzE0HE/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-N-003.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4K1Erbe7LElsUtLOhFM40DgHjClGPJqVnd5erVK2QI13mUI43-bjZSfZxlGqcOBvR5w87I8e4vIMwuHFYH1U8Exbhjd6-14hXecadDCR36etYlVbf51v81AOSSo_I0t-VoJ7MZRYzE0HE/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-N-003.jpg" height="247" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"> 2007: New holiday homes being built in Altea on Spain's Costa Blanca. According to Greenpeace Spain is failing to stop the overbuilding which is destroying its Mediterranean coastline [Caption amended 5 June 2009] </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2007: Nέες κατοικίες διακοπών στην περιοχή </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Altea της Ισπανικής Costa Blanca. Σύμφωνα με την </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Greenpeace η Ισπανική κυβέρνηση αποτυγχάνει να σταματήσει την υπερδόμηση που καταστρέφει την Ισπανική ακτογραμμή.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLETx_tpRNpFGVn2p__R7v3UiDV1N7frTR1nNn_xjzqyFkWxROcnHrBFRYdmWaegPX9tTwM4LOMDW9FbS42-A2E8jmcjeni-mkG3Vp80fzWglAzcpPuio6rwbUhb9v3XCDQlCeSXyN_pXC/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-1960-B-011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLETx_tpRNpFGVn2p__R7v3UiDV1N7frTR1nNn_xjzqyFkWxROcnHrBFRYdmWaegPX9tTwM4LOMDW9FbS42-A2E8jmcjeni-mkG3Vp80fzWglAzcpPuio6rwbUhb9v3XCDQlCeSXyN_pXC/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-1960-B-011.jpg" height="282" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Benidorm as it was in 1960</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Το </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Benidorm όπως ήταν το 1960</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAcBsu3Y-eOl0LU6ILz3_mEml1bTf6fvAPvYYXKTdwpzfmdALfSonp2fcJ1guFG7dTfxvTsQFc3t_HIvC0EE3bT9Int8utSIcIRY9czIfVefTfaEE3cichP-qtEihzp4wEMh8QAugZqRjN/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2008-T-002.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAcBsu3Y-eOl0LU6ILz3_mEml1bTf6fvAPvYYXKTdwpzfmdALfSonp2fcJ1guFG7dTfxvTsQFc3t_HIvC0EE3bT9Int8utSIcIRY9czIfVefTfaEE3cichP-qtEihzp4wEMh8QAugZqRjN/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2008-T-002.jpg" height="248" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"> </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Towers in Benidorm on the Costa del Sol, as it is now</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Ουρανοξύστες στο </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">Benidorm της Costa del Sol όπως είναι σήμερα</span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh1U-NMsLKoK8kEye0UUOLJTwo9XcVNah7h1sehTRLliFK9eiuCdfoPv5YcuAL4ufIBQ86nBUaEIWGmhHl6v8Ip1tPCH9a45gL53v3JhJlWDJOUFDYmQ5Bv0SaJimfvEwuHWZTWyMparvH/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-A-004.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh1U-NMsLKoK8kEye0UUOLJTwo9XcVNah7h1sehTRLliFK9eiuCdfoPv5YcuAL4ufIBQ86nBUaEIWGmhHl6v8Ip1tPCH9a45gL53v3JhJlWDJOUFDYmQ5Bv0SaJimfvEwuHWZTWyMparvH/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-A-004.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2007: A packed beach in Benidorm</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2007: </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">Η παραλία του Benidorm </span></span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwfaX2B9kbJGF-C0N7ff-32I87uDB43mz8-P5IbRXRRKkFEGqU4WnbKP4J42pDsinChRbcVPUP0dRyAeZa90k7gg1i9b5LYx9snxmjuM9Y8DIqKufqhM0mww4CcecWP9hwH5l25gjhBmcH/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-1959-T-010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwfaX2B9kbJGF-C0N7ff-32I87uDB43mz8-P5IbRXRRKkFEGqU4WnbKP4J42pDsinChRbcVPUP0dRyAeZa90k7gg1i9b5LYx9snxmjuM9Y8DIqKufqhM0mww4CcecWP9hwH5l25gjhBmcH/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-1959-T-010.jpg" height="256" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"> Torremolinos, Costa Del Sol, as it was in 1959</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description"> Η παραλία Torremolinos στην Costa Del Sol, όπως ήταν το 1959</span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIRJ_Cm1Qzd-npKaZnfrz8AXYeLODYqcCCN9986eAmgUUbuOv0SvFNqIA6sJ9rMmaaKfpgkIXRMDYT0VdjXGorAtDJzWOZBf7MwdSSamYn5shyphenhyphenlV-M1rEM9iw4rmnBMfNaCTh54BjMu5pN/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-T-012.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIRJ_Cm1Qzd-npKaZnfrz8AXYeLODYqcCCN9986eAmgUUbuOv0SvFNqIA6sJ9rMmaaKfpgkIXRMDYT0VdjXGorAtDJzWOZBf7MwdSSamYn5shyphenhyphenlV-M1rEM9iw4rmnBMfNaCTh54BjMu5pN/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2007-T-012.jpg" height="267" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"> Torremolinos, Malaga, as it is now</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description"> Η παραλία Torremolinos όπως είναι σήμερα</span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBYwKW9BgCVZ7l6D_7eVGl-D39GYn77D073Jn-rOCXLAeudYlbR1UPANHo3mdDwwOM-QJqdPAo3_GqxTh4ioxtyC2Vilyiq1Q2cdkE4lH2LJCi5IaPJ0VcZI58Pg46J-ySDGWckNOLbSl4/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2009-A-008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBYwKW9BgCVZ7l6D_7eVGl-D39GYn77D073Jn-rOCXLAeudYlbR1UPANHo3mdDwwOM-QJqdPAo3_GqxTh4ioxtyC2Vilyiq1Q2cdkE4lH2LJCi5IaPJ0VcZI58Pg46J-ySDGWckNOLbSl4/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2009-A-008.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2009: A view of a building at the beach of Torremolinos, near Malagá</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2009 </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">Θέα από την παραλία Torremolinos</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj52fS_qvomM_EyJUC6ScMKSv0m5jJgjWMpypnKGh4Ri69lqguWTonTOmt5oZTAvrUZdyjVMPQX4gh322-eIvI7OzqseMCrpVDJbODD3hDC-PKsGZ30O8WzgwMSPenJ96miiWZGDAFhY9uU/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2006-C-005.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj52fS_qvomM_EyJUC6ScMKSv0m5jJgjWMpypnKGh4Ri69lqguWTonTOmt5oZTAvrUZdyjVMPQX4gh322-eIvI7OzqseMCrpVDJbODD3hDC-PKsGZ30O8WzgwMSPenJ96miiWZGDAFhY9uU/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2006-C-005.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2006: Construction work close to the Mediteranean sea in Calpe, near Valencia</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2006: Κατασκευαστικές εργασίες στην Μεσόγειο θάλασσα στο </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">Calpe, κοντά στην Valencia</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5hPtXJxkIHzXWZQBsqbijEhxBZRJ0xPFBwtnCwtpLT-c-68AgotXPwnMDR02pO6kQakulEpCOPocPg5fLYAoqI4fE7aJNN_YNxKvCEFKB2jxK6g9P5yUkkSgBpHrHThiApeS-UzEoNi-K/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2009-B-001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5hPtXJxkIHzXWZQBsqbijEhxBZRJ0xPFBwtnCwtpLT-c-68AgotXPwnMDR02pO6kQakulEpCOPocPg5fLYAoqI4fE7aJNN_YNxKvCEFKB2jxK6g9P5yUkkSgBpHrHThiApeS-UzEoNi-K/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2009-B-001.jpg" height="266" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"> 2009: Buildings line up at the beach of Cullera near Valencia. The European Parliament has said that Spain is not doing enough to protect individuals and the environment from abuse by developers, construction firm and local government involved in its property sector</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2009: Οικοδομικά συγκροτήματα στην παραλία </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Cullera κοντα στην Valencia. Το Ευρωπαϊκό Κοινοβούλιο δήλωσε πως η Ισπανική κυβέρνηση δεν κάνει αρκετά ώστε να προστατέψει τους κατοίκους της χώρας και το περιβάλλον από τα καταστροφικά σχέδια των επενδυτών "ανάπτυξης", τις κατασκευαστικές εταιρίες και τις τοπικές αρχές που κερδοσκοπούν σε κάθε ένα από αυτά τα σχέδια</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdtgkYlrTuWC8Bc_AZtimT_TPLcizXweFN68y0bi9WjQ5Wm0_knGWuydiMwT-iMvMmWL5F7KQIGnCnWlRiYGhOvQ33KKM5Z5FFbvYDgPFBkpKA4Hy9P9bX2KIu6gUKmyOtaP2mHpzOlglO/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2008-A-009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdtgkYlrTuWC8Bc_AZtimT_TPLcizXweFN68y0bi9WjQ5Wm0_knGWuydiMwT-iMvMmWL5F7KQIGnCnWlRiYGhOvQ33KKM5Z5FFbvYDgPFBkpKA4Hy9P9bX2KIu6gUKmyOtaP2mHpzOlglO/s1600/Spanish-coastlines-2008-A-009.jpg" height="261" width="400" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span class="caption" itemprop="description">2008: A bulldozer
demolishes a house at Cho Vito village in Tenerife. Civil guard officers
started the planned eviction of 23 families from their houses following
orders to demolish them due to an infringement on the coastal housing
law which prohibits constructions from being closer than 50 metres from
the shoreline. </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">Τhen the doors of development are wide open</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">2008: Μπουλντόζα διαλύει σπίτια στο παραλιακό χωριό </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">Cho Vito village στην Tenerife. Η τοπική αστυνομία ακολουθόντας διαταγές βασισμένες στο νόμο που απαγορεύει κατοικίες 50μ. απόσταση από την ακτή γκρεμίζει τα σπίτια του παραθαλάσσιου χωριού για να ανοίξει τις πόρτες στην "ανάπτυξη".</span> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="color: yellow;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">WHOEVER WANTS TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF GREEK NATURE PREPARED BY THE GREEK GOVERNEMT, E.U. AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM HAS TO UNDERSTAND HOW </span><span class="caption" itemprop="description"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">THE SPANISH COASTLINE</span> HAS BEEN DESTROYED FOR EVER . </span></span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="color: yellow;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">WE HAVE TO ORGANIZE AND RESIST NOW AS TO DO NOT CRY TOMMOROW. </span></span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="color: yellow;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description">OΠΟΙΟΣ ΘΕΛΕΙ ΝΑ ΚΑΤΑΛΑΒΕΙ ΠΟΙΟ ΜΕΛΛΟΝ ΕΤΟΙΜΑΖΟΥΝ ΓΙΑ ΤΙΣ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΕΣ ΑΚΤΕΣ Η ΚΥΒΕΡΝΗΣΗ, Η ΕΥΡΩΠΑΪΚΗ ΕΝΩΣΗ ΚΑΙ Ο ΠΑΓΚΟΣΜΙΟΣ ΚΑΠΙΤΑΛΙΣΜΟΣ ΔΕΝ ΕΧΕΙ ΝΑ ΚΑΝΕΙ ΤΙΠΟΤΑ ΑΛΛΟ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΝΑ ΜΕΛΕΤΗΣΕΙ ΤΗΝ ΚΑΤΑΣΤΡΟΦΗ ΤΗΣ ΙΣΠΑΝΙΚΗΣ ΑΚΤΟΓΡΑΜΜΗΣ. ΝΑ ΟΡΓΑΝΩΘΟΥΜΕ ΚΑΙ ΝΑ ΑΝΤΙΣΤΑΘΟΥΜΕ ΤΩΡΑ ΓΙΑ ΝΑ ΜΗΝ ΔΑΚΡΥΖΟΥΜΕ ΑΥΡΙΟ! </span></span></b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span class="caption" itemprop="description" style="font-size: small;">source: <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2009/jun/01/spain-construction#/?picture=348167373&index=11">http://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2009/jun/01/spain-construction#/?picture=348167373&index=11</a></span></span></div>
Void Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07298435279240363454noreply@blogger.com0