Its basic structure would begin from the principle that coordination should arise from below, from people where they actually live and work, rather than being imposed from a distant centre. Local assemblies, workplace councils, tenant unions, cooperatives, care networks, and voluntary associations would form the living substance of society. These would not be symbolic forums with no real power, they would be the places where decisions are made, resources are allocated, disputes are addressed, and priorities are debated.

Wider levels of coordination, regional, interregional, even international, would still exist, but they would exist as federations of these bodies, built through delegation rather than rule. Delegates would carry specific mandates, remain recallable, and function as messengers and coordinators rather than a political class.

Technically, such a society would depend on a much more advanced and explicit infrastructure of democratic coordination than anything most twentieth century anarchist movements had access to. That is one of the central facts many people still fail to grasp. Modern communications systems, distributed databases, cryptographic verification, open accounting tools, and transparent public ledgers make it far more plausible to coordinate complex societies without a state bureaucracy standing above everyone.

An anarchist federation would not mean every person voting on every trivial matter every day, that would be absurd. It would mean clear layers of decision making, with most matters handled locally, and only genuinely large scale questions routed upward through federated structures. Energy use, transport, supply chains, ecological planning, healthcare capacity, production targets, and emergency coordination could all be made publicly legible through shared systems. Power, or the exercise of power would be made more visible, not less. The point is not to abolish organisation, it is to abolish unaccountable organisation.

Socially, daily life would likely feel more participatory, more reciprocal, and probably more demanding in some ways than people raised under passive liberal citizenship are used to. People would be expected to take some meaningful part in communal life, not as unpaid martyrdom, but because society would no longer be arranged around spectatorship and delegation upward. Much of what is now handled through market coercion or bureaucratic compulsion would instead be handled through norms of mutual obligation, negotiated responsibility, and communal expectation. Care work would be recognised as socially central rather than treated as invisible background labour. Education would be less about producing obedient labour for employers, and more about cultivating technically capable, socially conscious, self governing human beings. The average person would need a higher level of civic literacy, because freedom at scale requires competence, not just sentiment.

Economically, an anarchist federation society would most likely be plural in form but unified by certain boundaries. Natural resources, infrastructure, and the basic conditions of collective life would need to be held in common or under strong communal stewardship, because allowing these to become private power centres would simply recreate class rule in another costume. Beyond that, production could be organised through cooperatives, municipal associations, trade federations, and distributed manufacturing networks. The decisive question would be whether productive activity remains socially accountable. In practical terms that means workplaces governed by workers and communities, transparent procurement, open standards, interoperable systems, and planning tools that allow coordination without requiring a central state ministry dictating everything from above. In a technologically advanced society this could become far more dynamic than old arguments between market and plan usually allow. The real issue is whether coordination serves collective need, or whether it serves accumulation and domination.

Culturally, an anarchist federation would have to produce a different type of person from the one capitalism and the state currently produce. Today people are trained into competitive isolation, political cynicism, and learned dependence on systems they do not control. A free federation would need a culture of confidence, seriousness, and mutual respect. That does not mean moral perfection, human beings would still be flawed, contradictory, ambitious, and difficult. What changes is the surrounding structure that shapes those traits. Prestige would ideally shift away from wealth, command, and spectacle, and toward contribution, skill, reliability, imagination, and public trust. Art, science, engineering, and philosophy would likely take on a more common and public role, because they would no longer be so tightly subordinated to state strategy or private profit. A society like this would need culture to do real work, it would need stories, rituals, education, and symbols that teach people how to live as free equals in a complex world.

The reason this vision matters is because too much of the left still speaks as though the horizon of politics is either reforming the administrative state or capturing it. That leaves the imagination trapped inside the architecture of domination. An anarchist federation offers a more direct answer, it says society can be highly organised without becoming authoritarian, technically sophisticated without becoming centralised, and socially coherent without requiring a ruling class.

The challenge is not whether such a society can be imagined, it already can. The challenge is building the institutions, habits, and technical systems that make it materially credible. That is where anarchism now has to become more concrete, less purely oppositional, and more capable of presenting itself as a real civilisational design.

___

Written and illustrated by Ash Carr

The post What would look like an Anarchist federation society? appeared first on Void Network.

The economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. It is time to design a new one.

By George Monbiot / theguardian.com

For most of my adult life I’ve railed against “corporate capitalism”, “consumer capitalism” and “crony capitalism”. It took me a long time to see that the problem is not the adjective but the noun.

While some people have rejected capitalism gladly and swiftly, I’ve done so slowly and reluctantly.

Part of the reason was that I could see no clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitalists, I have never been an enthusiast for state communism.

I was also inhibited by its religious status. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century is like saying “God is dead” in the 19th: it is secular blasphemy. It requires a degree of self-confidence I did not possess.

But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to recognise two things. First, that it is the system, rather than any variant of the system, that drives us inexorably towards disaster. Second, that you do not have to produce a definitive alternative to say that capitalism is failing. The statement stands in its own right. But it also demands another, and different, effort to develop a new system.

Capitalism’s failures arise from two of its defining elements. The first is perpetual growth. Economic growth is the aggregate effect of the quest to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity.

Those who defend capitalism argue that, as consumption switches from goods to services, economic growth can be decoupled from the use of material resources. Last week a paper in the journal New Political Economy, by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis, examined this premise. They found that while some relative decoupling took place in the 20th century (material resource consumption grew, but not as quickly as economic growth), in the 21st century there has been a recoupling: rising resource consumption has so far matched or exceeded the rate of economic growth. The absolute decoupling needed to avert environmental catastrophe (a reduction in material resource use) has never been achieved, and appears impossible while economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion.

A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.

This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.

The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the world’s natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other people’s rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.

In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.

To point to such problems is to invite a barrage of accusations, many of which are based on this premise: capitalism has rescued hundreds of millions of people from poverty – now you want to impoverish them again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth it drives, has radically improved the prosperity of vast numbers of people, while simultaneously destroying the prosperity of many others: those whose land, labour and resources were seized to fuel growth elsewhere. Much of the wealth of the rich nations was – and is – built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.

There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism.

Soviet communism had more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit.

Both systems are (or were) obsessed with generating economic growth. Both are willing to inflict astonishing levels of harm in pursuit of this and other ends. Both promised a future in which we would need to work for only a few hours a week, but instead demand endless, brutal labour. Both are dehumanising. Both are absolutist, insisting that theirs and theirs alone is the one true God.

So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging.

Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben.

Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.

I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?

George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

The post Dare to Declare Capitalism Dead – Before It Takes Us All Down With It appeared first on Void Network.

While providing an extensive catalog of scholarly references for the academic reader, this delightful and engaging study is directed at a wide audience and demands no other requirements than a love for pirates, daring theoretical speculation and passionate, yet respectful, inquiry.

Gabriel Kuhn (born in Innsbruck, Austria, 1972) lives as an independent author and translator in Stockholm, Sweden. His publications in German include the award-winning ‘Neuer Anarchismus’ in den USA: Seattle und die Folgen (2008). His publications with PM Press include Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy (2010), Sober Living for the Revolution: Hardcore Punk, Straight Edge, and Radical Politics (2010), Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics (2011), Turning Money into Revolution: The Unlikely Story of Denmark’s Revolutionary Bank Robbers (2014), and Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North (2020). He blogs at lefttwothree.org.

Tasos Sagris, co-founder of Void Network and the Institute for Experimental Arts is a poet, theatre director and cultural activist from Athens. His publications in English include We Are an Image From the Future The Greek Revolt of December 2008 (AK Press, 2010) and From Democracy to Freedom (Crimethinc, 2016).

1.

T.S.: The bourgeoisie created their own universities, academies, honored scientists and publication companies to praise their own establishment as the only possible way of existence, defend private property and the dominant regime, to honor the myths, the history and the superior glory of the upper class, to delegitimize the efforts of the oppressed for social liberation. A characteristic that I love in your books is your uncompromised dedication to consciously write history books for the benefit of the global anarchist movement. What is the role of the anarchist scientists in our struggle against domination?

G.K.: The production of knowledge isnothing neutral. We select material and interpret it based and on how we view the world (our “epistemology,” as people who like those kinds of word would say) as well as on our moral, social, and cultural norms. There is nothing objective about allegedly objective science.

I don’t think this means that there’s a free-for-all type of scholarship, where you simply make up stories and sell them as historical truth. That’s not scholarship, that’s manipulation. Certain things happened in certain ways, and we have a responsibility to acknowledge that. But we also have a responsibility to acknowledge why and how we tell certain stories. We can watch the same football game and, without either of us lying, tell two very different stories about it. The more that the audience knows about us and our interests, the easier it will be for them to interpret our stories and make up their own mind about what happened.

So, this is how I see anarchist scholarship. I am interested in people fighting for freedom and justice. These are the stories I will seek out, and I will look at everything from that angle. There is no point in manipulating the facts. We don’t win by doing that just so that the story fits our interests in the best possible way. People will realize what we’re doing, and we’ll lose credibility. But we can refuse to buy into a way of writing history where the powerful always get their way, where everything supposedly happened in their favor because it was just, deserved, and inevitable. Anarchist scholarship means to say, no, there have always been power struggles, there have always been subversive movements, and these movements haven’t always losteither and they might indeedwin more often in the future if we learn our lessons right.

2.

T.S.: What inspired you to write a book about the pirates?

G.K.: Originally, a fascination with pirate life that I believe a lot of teenagers share. Freedom, courage, adventure! Once I learned that there was more to that than simple imagination, that pirate communities actually were quite progressive and democratic for their time, I added some research to the fascination and wrote a little book about pirates as a student in Austria. It was translated into English, and based on that translation PM Press asked me some years later do to an updated and expanded version of it. That’s how Life Under the Jolly Roger came about.

3.

T.S.: William Burroughs in his wonderful, utopian book Cities of the Red Night, builds a fictional argument that the possible success of the piratic struggles against the established powers of their era could activate revolutionary conditions in the mainland of Europe much earlier and much more progressive than French revolution. What you think about the Burroughs argument and why this didn’t happen? What was the influence of the piratic actions in the other side of the planet to the masses of poor people of Europe in 16th-17th century?

G.K.: As you say, Burrough’saccount is a work of fiction, and he uses the example of a pirate community in Madagascar by the name of Libertaliaas a kind of radical utopia. Libertalia was described in Captain Johnson’s famous History of the Pirates from 1724. Burroughs is not the only one who has incorporated Libertalia in his writing. It probably never existed, butit inspires radical utopias to this day.

Personally, I think that if you read Captain Johnson’s book closely, Libertalia is not that great of a model, it’s more like an outpost of European republicanism in Africa, but that’s a separate discussion. That Captain Johnson would write about it all goes to show that, already in the early eighteenth century, people used pirate communities to project progressive ideas onto them. Burrough’s argument is a little like wishful thinking: “Had the pirates at the time been as radical and powerful as I would have wanted them to be, they could have radicalized mainland Europe.” But there probably was no Libertalia, and the overall power of the pirates was limited.

However, there were clear connections between radical political movements in the seventeenth century and the so-called golden age of piracy, which started in the Caribbean around 1680. The British had exiled many radicals from the English Revolution to the Caribbean colonies, and not few of them ended up in the ranks of the pirates. How inspirational the pirates were on the poor masses of Europe is hard to say, but the fact that pirate plays were staged at popular English theaters already in the late seventeenth century would indicate that they had some impact. So, there was a synergetic effect between radicals on the European mainland and pirate communities.

Had this led to broad social movements able to advance radical political change, Burrough’s fantasy maybe could have become a reality. Pirate communities were certainly more radical than the bourgeois fellows who staged the French Revolution. But they weren’t strong and influential enough. The nation-states were able to crush them. Too bad.

4.

T.S.: Your book offers us amazing parts of criticism to the pirates. As you mention most of them was Dutch, French and English racists, slave hunters and looters of poor villages. How could this stop the first wave of capital accumulation?  Were pirates revolutionaries and what exactly was revolutionary among their practices?

G.K.: There might have been elements of conscious revolutionary activities among the pirates – as I said, people with political experience were in their ranks – but I believe it was minor. I don’t think there was much of an explicit critique of early capitalism. Yet, while pirates understood that in a capitalist society you needed material wealth to lead a good life, they weren’t willing to subject themselves to the life that capitalism had foreseen for them: toiling away for a few crumbs of the cake, under the whip of both bosses, politicians, and security forces. By raiding merchant ships and coastal towns, they disrupted early capitalist trade to the point of threatening capital’s global expansion. Perhaps that turned them into some kind of proxy revolutionaries who didn’t care much about thelabel themselves. But they became the nation-states’ enemy number one during those years. There have always been plenty of criminals, but not all of them threatened the economic and political order by taking from it whilerejecting its foundations.

5.

T.S.: In your book you offer us a historical analysis of the Pirate’s legacy from a revolutionary perspective. There are a lot of horrible choices, mistakes and a lot of failures in the piratic history – but, there is an emancipatory and revolutionary element to the life and struggle of the Piratic communities.

A.

T.S.: Can we learn something useful for our social struggles from the pirates of the past?

G.K.: Considering that the pirates haven’t left us with any records or writings, it’s perhaps hard to “learn” much in any more classical sense, but, like few others in European history, the pirates indicate the starting point of any radical transformation: to reject the status quo, to refuse to play by the rules, and to try to live a different life at the risk of being killed for it. This is where revolutionary change begins, and the pirates tick those boxes. And I believe that’s where their main role lies even for radical movements today. They are inspirators.

B.

T.S.: Probably one of the finest characteristics of your book is that you offer us detailed informations about the failures and mistakes of the pirates. What you think the pirates did and we have to avoid in our plans for social liberation?

G.K: I think the biggest problem was that pirate society wasn’t sustainable. To begin with, there were, essentially, no women, so the society couldn’t reproduce itself. To maintain its numbers, it constantly needed new people to join. There was a high turnover, and not everyone coming in necessarily espoused the same ideals or interpreted the pirate way in the same manner. During the final years of the golden age, when the pirates fought for their survival, they would force people to join their ships just to keep up the numbers. Obviously, this can’t work in the long run.

There were also no binding social structures that could have facilitated the survival of pirate society. I don’t think institutions were needed, not even necessarily organizations. But some common features beyond the pirate flag that held everything together. Look at hardcore punk: it’s been around for almost half a century, lacks institutions and organizations, but it has a number of common features: the music, an anti-establishment attitude, DIY values, venues where people regularly gather, zines (or today perhaps blogs) that serve as common reference points. Any community, any movement needs some kind of social glue. I think that glue was missing among the pirates.

Other than that, I believe there wasn’t much that the pirates “did wrong.” There were internal contradictions, but any society has internal contradictions. These contradictions can be worked out: sometimes, they’re even healthy. At the end of the day, the pirates suffered a simple fate: they were militarily crushed by their enemy. Many radical movements suffered the same fate.

C

T.S.: Do you believe that the anarchist movements of today have some kind of connection with these crazy motherfuckers, 300 years after their defeat from the kings, and queens and proto-capitalists? Is there something that connects anarchists with the pirates and into what they can benefit the future revolutions? What you think the pirates can offer as reference points to the revolutionaries of our generation? Are these images of a vision for the future? 

G.K.: Yes, I think there’s a connection through the rebellious spirit that the radicals of today and tomorrow share with the pirates. That spirit can benefit any revolutionary movement. The pirates provide a vision for the future insofar as they tried to create their own communities apart from the state. That’s animportant aspect of the pirates and their power of inspiration: their communities were set apart from the system in very tangible ways; they were out there on their ships, somewhere on an ocean much harder to scale and monitor than today, able to hide on faraway islands, in lagoons and mazelike river deltas. How can this not be inspirational?

6.

T.S.: A very unique and interesting process in your book is that you put the Piratic communities under very detailed investigation based on the strategic thought of different revolutionary thinkers. Among them we found chapters based on revolutionary strategies of MaoTse Tung, Carlos Marighella, the social bandits theory of Eric Hobsbawm, war machine and nomadism of Deleuze andGuattari, ecstatic life of Nietzsche. What lead you to apply this method and what was the result of this experiment?

This really came out of the studies I did at the time I started writing about pirates. I was a philosophy student and I liked theory and the history of ideas. I have close to zero interest in academic philosophy today and no longer read much of the kind of literature I read back then. I pretty much stick to history and concrete political debate. With that said, ideas are nice. In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari write that philosophy is about creating concepts. I like that. Theory can easily turn into nonsensical blah blah, especially when academic bubbles detached from everyday life need a justification to reproduce privileged social spaces, but without theory, without developing concepts based on everyday experience that can be used to alter that experience, there is no social progress. The intention with the pirate book was to do something in that vein: to use theory, but to use it in a very practical manner, to flesh out concepts that, in turn, can inspire action. How well that worked is up to the readers to decide. I will say, though, that one of the nicest compliments I got for the book was an accomplished fiction writer saying that it was the first time Deleuze and Guattari made any sense to them.

7.

The disrespect to private property, the break of social constraints and the need for communal solving of the social and private problems caused by inequality and exploitation seem that brings the pirates close to any one of lower class people. Why you think 500 years after the death of the pirates we are still fighting the upper class without obvious success of overthrowing them?

Thanks for an easy question!

Seriously, I don’t know. But let’s try to look at it from an angle where the pirates might be able to help. German anarchist Gustav Landauer was fascinated by a small, sixteenth-century book authored by the French humanist Étienne de la Boétie. It is known in English as the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Why, de la Boétie asked, do people so often choose to support social structures that obviously aren’t beneficial to their well-being? The theme has reappeared in radical writing throughout the centuries, not least after the horrific experience of twentieth-century fascism. If anyone had found an answer to the problem yet, we would probably live in a very different world, but: the pirates, clearly, weren’t voluntary servants. They broke with a pattern that is essential for oppressive power structures to work. It’s a key lesson to learn from them.

8.

T.S.: The only images I have before your book about the pirates comes from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, the Pirate Utopias by Hakim Bey and the amazing TV series Black Sails. In all of them it seems that the pirates join forces under specific circumstances, only if they are under serious threat and without any specific prearranged plan or general strategy. Most of the other time they fight each other, they don’t communicate or trust each other and they are not capable to have any general plan. This reminds me a lot the anarchist and leftist groups today all around the world. What was the reason that the pirates (and still ourselves) fail to find organizing methods that will make use of our differences and disagreements as a beneficial weapon against our common enemies and not as a way of self-destruction and disempowerment of our communities.

With respect to our scenes, I would say there are two main aspects. Both might seem trivial, but that doesn’t make them less relevant.

One is egoism. The great revolutionary theorists were right when they demanded a “new human being” as a precondition for revolutionary change. Now, a new human being doesn’t fall from the sky and can’t be created in some school or guerrilla training camp. It can’t precede the revolutionary struggle, it has to develop within it. But its development must be a main feature of the struggle, otherwise in-fighting will be inevitable. Even if we genuinely long for a society of equals, we have been socialized in a highly competitive, bourgeois environment, and this impacts our movements. We – even anarchists, if we are honest – will often want to lead, will want our ideas to be recognized as superior to others, will want to be acknowledged as the most revolutionary of all revolutionaries. Look at the entirely insignificant things that people can get worked up about. There is no explanation other than this being about ego trips that have nothing to do with the good of the people. We need to be wary of that and call it when we see it.

The other aspect was once summed up by the ever observant Ian MacKaye in the following manner: “People’s power is limited to their scope, and it’s like that saying goes: ‘The people who get hit are the people within arm’s reach.’” In short, if you can’t get to the real enemy – the politicians, the CEOs, the cops – you will let loose on the person next to you. You’ll want to get your anger and frustration out and feel like you’re getting somewhere, have a tiny victory, perhapspreventing their article from being published or excluding them from organizing the local anarchist bookfair. Psychologically, that’s understandable, but it’s devastating for our movements.

With respect to the pirates, I think it was even simpler, plain survival instinct. We have enough evidence to conclude that there was a genuine attempt on many pirate ships to create a rather democratic community with a relatively fair share of the wealth. This was stated in the “Codes” of the pirate ships that we have heard about a lot. But, as stated before, there was no strong social glue that guaranteed that you could expect the same on any pirate ship you signed on to, or that everyone signing the Codes really could be trusted.

I was also talking before about being socialized in a competitive society. Imagine the society that the pirates were socialized in. There was no “social peace” brought on by social-democratic class compromise. You had to struggle for your survival every day. Of course, this impacted the pirates. People were suspicious, also of one another. Again, too little social glue.

9.

In the introduction of your book you quote from Outcasts of the Sea: Pirates and Piracy, an Edward Lucie Smith’s book. The paragraph explains the popularity of piratic stories from 17th century until our days and the way the myths still influence our modern lives:

“The story of the pirates is a product of the urban imagination. One of its most important functions is to provide a safety valve against the pressures exerted on the individual by the demands of civic morality. The basic fantasies are those of unbridled freedom and power as compensation for what the average bourgeois is never going to achieve, however successful he may be on a material level.”

Is this a possible strategy for the anarchist movement of our era, producing such extraordinary actions and lifestyles that will appear as a myth in the miserable minds of the people around us? Can you share some ideas about what can be a myth like this today?

Yes, I never thought of it that way, but I suppose anarchism – at least a particular kind of anarchism – could do that. In simple terms, create ways of life that are attractive to people. They would entail a sense of adventure, make life exciting, but not on a purely individual level, there’d have to be an element of social justice. A Robin Hood-type element. “Social bandits” can do that, free-roaming travelers can do that, communes beyond the restrictions of bourgeois life can do that. In and of themselves, none of these projects are sufficient to bring about an anarchist society, but they contain important aspects of them and might make people curious about anarchism. Key, of course, is that these projects are not driven by people trying to demonstrate how much better they are than the masses (who “don’t get it”), essentially preventing any inspirational potential, but by people able to respond positively to curious inquiry, even by people who aren’t well-versed radicals and who don’t talk or look that way.

Anarchist ideas are attractive to people. Pretty much anyone likes freedom, and most people like justice, too. It’s just that few of them have seen examples of anarchist life that appear attractive. Partly, that’s the enemy’s fault who has done a good job to ensure that very few such examples exist. But partly it’s also our own fault because we haven’t been able to establish many, and easily get sidetracked by the problems mentioned above: in-fighting, showing off, etc.

The pirate flag still has power for a reason. It’s up to us to provide the right content.

________

The post Life Under the Jolly Roger- Gabriel Kuhn talks with Tasos Sagris appeared first on Void Network.

Most utopian communities are, like most start-ups, short-lived. What makes the difference between failure and success?

At 16, Martin Winiecki dropped out of school and left his home in the German city of Dresden to live full-time at Tamera, a 300-acre intentional community in the rolling hills of southwestern Portugal. His mother and father – a doctor and a professor of mathematics – were reluctant to let him go. ‘It was quite a shock for them,’ Winiecki remembers. Born in 1990, just a few months after the collapse of the Berlin wall, Winiecki came of age in a society in limbo. The atmosphere of the former GDR still clung to people. ‘It was a culture that was so formal. So obligation-oriented. That had no heart. No love,’ Winiecki explained. At the same time, in Winiecki’s eyes, the capitalist alternative was creating a ‘system of deep economic injustice – of winners and losers’. Neither story encompassed a humanity he wanted part of. Tamera offered an alternative.

Founded by the psychoanalyst and sociologist Dieter Duhm in Germany in 1978 and re-founded in Portugal in 1995, Tamera aspired to dissolve the trauma of human relationships. Duhm, heavily influenced by Marxism and psychoanalysis, came to see material emancipation and interpersonal transformation as part of the same project. Duhm had been deeply disillusioned by communes where he’d spent time in the 1960s and ’70s, and which seemed to reproduce many of the same tyrannies that people were trying to escape: egoism, power struggles, envy, mistrust and fear, while practices of sexual freedom often engendered jealousy and pain. In Duhm’s eyes, communes had failed to create a viable model for a new society. In Tamera, he hoped to begin a social experiment that allowed for deep interpersonal healing.

Communitarian experiments such as Tamera are nothing new, although its longevity – almost 40 years – is unusual. Generally, intentional communities fail at a rate slightly higher than that of most start-ups. Only a handful of communities founded in the US during the 19th century’s ‘golden age of communities’ lasted beyond a century; most folded in a matter of months. This golden age birthed more than 100 experimental communities, with more than 100,000 members in total who, according to the historian Mark Holloway in Heavens on Earth (1951), sought to differentiate themselves from society by creating ‘ideal commonwealths’. The largest surge in communitarian ‘start-ups’ occurred during the 1840s and 1890s, coinciding with periods of economic depression. But it would be a mistake to see intentional communities merely as a knee-jerk response to hard times.

In historic terms, a broader discontent with industrial society has led to people flocking to communes, utopias and spiritual settlements, from eco-villages and ‘back to the land’ style settlements designed to create sustainable lifestyles and a stronger relationship to nature, to communities founded with spiritual or idealist visions for transforming human character and creating new blueprints of society. Of course, the ‘cult’ label is never far behind. Many intentional communities have had to fight their own public-relations battles in the wake of negative or sensational publicity.

But regardless of our suspicions, our appetite for communitarian living might even be evolutionarily hard-wired. Some sociologists have gone as far as to suggest that we are mal-adapted in modern society, and that ‘tribal’ forms of life are more viable. Theories of neo-tribalism suggest that instead of mass society, human nature is best suited to small, caring groups. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford claims that humans can comfortably maintain no more than 150 stable relationships, which suggests that communitarian living might not be so much of an ‘outlier’ or ‘experiment’. From an evolutionary perspective, modern society itself might be the anomaly. As the cultural critic Daniel Quinn writes in The Story of B (1996), for 3 million years the tribal life worked for us: ‘It worked for people the way nests worked for birds, the way webs work for spiders, the way burrows work for moles … That doesn’t make it lovable, it makes it viable.’

Why then do utopian communities so often fail? Interestingly, attrition rates for intentional communities are not all that different from many other types of human endeavour. The failure rate for start-ups is around 90 per cent, and the longevity of most companies is dismal: of the Fortune 500 companies listed in 1955, more than 88 per cent are gone; meanwhile, S&P companies have an average lifespan of just 15 years. Can we really expect more longevity from experimental communities? And if not, what can we learn from an audit of these experiments? What have been the key factors undermining communitarian living?

Perhaps the irony is that many of the administrative and managerial forces that individuals are running away from within mainstream society are exactly the organisational tools that would make intentional communities more resilient: that regardless of how much intentional communities with utopian aims seek to step to one side of worldly affairs, they succeed or fail for the very same pragmatic reasons that other human enterprises – notably businesses and start-ups – succeed or fail.

Malarial infested swamps, false prophecy, sexual politics, tyrannical founders, charismatic con-men, lack of access to safe drinking water, poor soil quality, unskilled labour, restless dreamer syndrome, land not suitable for farming: all sensationalise the rocky history of intentional communities. But the more relevant drivers that cause many communities to unravel sound more like the challenges afflicting any organisation today: capital constraints, burn-out, conflict over private property and resource management, poor systems of conflict mediation, factionalism, founder problems, reputation management, skills shortage, and failure to attract new talent or entice subsequent generations.

When the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen established New Harmony in 1825, on 20,000 acres in Indiana, he attracted an enthusiastic following, gaining more than 800 members in just a little over six weeks. The hope of New Harmony was to create a new kind of civilisation engendering copy-cat communities around the world. Owen’s vision of a ‘new moral world’ or ‘universal permanent happiness’ was committed to improving individual character through environment, education and the abolition of private property, but New Harmony lacked the hard skills to sustain itself. Of its population of 800, only 140 were adept at working in local industry, and just 36 were skilled farmers. The community was far too open and indiscriminate in its invitation, allowing anyone to join, and attracting a lot of free-riders without the necessary skills or appetite for hard work. The absence of its founder did not help; Owen lived in New Harmony only for a few months out of its short, two-year existence. Though gifted as a visionary peddler of utopia, he failed as an executor skilled at building practical operational support to realise his dreams.

Many communities encounter this problem. Dreamers, drifters and seekers in need of belonging, the needy and wounded, and the egomaniacal and power-thirsty are a dangerous constellation of actors for sustaining a community. But often they are the most responsive to an invitation. Additionally, for many dreamers the practicalities of farming and self-sufficiency clash with their utopian hopes for radically new ways of living, as people become pulled into the myopia of just getting by. As Catherine Blinder wrote in 2004, reflecting on her 14 years on a Vermont commune:

By going ‘back to the land’ we would not be bound by the strictures of society. We existed largely beyond the edges, beyond the rules … We were creating an alternative life, and many of us genuinely believed we could make a difference, that we could stop the war and work for social justice while practising guerrilla farming and modelling a collective existence.

Blinder’s days, however, were anything but experimental. ‘Nobody works that hard as an experiment,’ she writes about her time cutting and baling hay, making butter, driving a tractor, cutting firewood, baking bread, and taking care of children, animals and the wellbeing of her peers.

Macaco Tamerice, who left Japan as a famous jazz singer to live and work in Damanhur, a spiritual and artistic eco-community near Turin in Italy, told me that the key to Damanhur’s success has been its very emphasis on practical devotion and work (‘we’re not just a place for spiritual dreamers’). While the community aspires to keep alive what she calls the ‘divine spark in each of us’, the structure of Damanhur has also benefited from pragmatic organisational strategy.

Damanhur is a federation of communities made up of more than 600 full-time citizens, primarily organised into small ‘nucleos’, or makeshift families. The nucleos started as groups of 12 people; now they number 15-20. ‘Scale is critical,’ Tamerice cautions. ‘If you have too few people, you implode because you don’t have enough inputs. But if you have more than 25 people, then it is hard to create intimacy and keep connections close.’ The entire community is governed by a constitution that enables a so-called ‘college of justice’, which upholds the values of that constitution. Other elected roles include king/queen guides who help to coordinate Damanhur projects while seeking to maintain the spiritual ideals of the community. Before becoming a full citizen of Damanhur, aspiring citizens go through a trial period to see if they truly feel aligned with the culture and intentions of the community.

But even with the best organisational acumen, intentional communities are often heavily criticised for the backward progress they tend to symbolise. Bronson Alcott (the father of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women) was characterised by the essayist Thomas Carlyle as a ‘man bent on saving the world by a return to acorns’. In 1843, Alcott founded Fruitlands, an experimental community in Harvard, Massachusetts. An agrarian commune influenced by transcendentalist thought, and built on renouncing the ‘civilised’ world, Fruitlands abolished private property and cherished, yet struggled, with self-sufficiency, refusing to hire external labour or depend on external trade. Attracting a little over a dozen people, Fruitlands failed after seven months. Acorns, it seems, couldn’t cut it.

The ‘acorn problem’ persists today. Jimmy Stice, a young entrepreneur from Atlanta, is working to build a sustainable town from scratch in a river valley in Panama. When he showed his father, a traditional real-estate investor, a mock-up of the town’s infrastructure, his father remarked: ‘Congratulations on going back in time.’ Stice had managed to re-create civilisation as it was more than 500 years ago.

Nara Pais, a Brazilian IT consultant turned eco-villager, lived for a time at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, one of the more successful intentional communities, which has been running since 1972 and is now a model of ecological building, with solar and wind energy. Pais explained that it took Findhorn more than two decades to overcome basic infrastructural challenges. In recent years, its income totalled £2,393,542 (though expenditure was £2,350,411) with more than 60 per cent of the revenue coming from workshops and conferences. That said, many people in Findhorn’s ecovillage still rely on the government for their living, and margins are tight: everyone has food and housing, but, says Pais: ‘There is no money for extras.’

The bottom line is that many intentional communities exist because of wealthy patrons and benefactors, and courting philanthropy and start-up capital is part of the job of charismatic founders. Nazaré Uniluz, an intentional community in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, initially survived on external funding. It had a charismatic founder who attracted donations from wealthy Brazilian elites sold on his vision of deep self-reflection, incorporating elements of monastic living. But when the community started to evolve beyond the control and vision of its founder, he left. Today, Uniluz survives by inviting people in and charging them for weekend workshops or week-long immersions. The permanent residents often find it hard to go deeper into communal living and introspection amid this constant flux of people coming in for short-term healing or to try their hand at hippie life, even while acknowledging that spiritual tourism is a significant revenue for communities such as Uniluz.

Freetown Christiania in Denmark was created in the 1970s as people took over abandoned military barracks in Copenhagen as a birthplace for a ‘new society’. It’s become a thriving site for an underground economy – including a profitable trade in cannabis. The community also created its own currency which doubles as a kitsch souvenir sold to tourists for money. Christiania is the fourth largest tourist attraction in Denmark’s capital city, and receives more than half a million visitors a year.

Piracanga, another spiritual community in Brazil, has also stayed financially healthy by catering to a market for spiritual voyeurs and wealthy elites who flock there to learn aura readings, breathing and meditation, conscious eating, dream interpretation, yoga, even clowning.

All in all, the top revenue streams for intentional communities tend to be tourism, education (workshops and trainings), crafts and artisanal goods, and agriculture. As the historian Yaacov Oved observed in Two Hundred Years of American Communes (1987): ‘[In New Harmony] the only prosperous venture was the local hotel, where the many tourists and the curious who came to see with their own eyes Robert Owen’s famous social experiment were put up.’ In fact, Owen covered New Harmony’s overall losses with a private fund. When he did make the balance sheet publicly available, community members were shocked at their illusion of self-sufficiency.

The Shakers, one of the more successful communities in US history, numbered more than 6,000 at their mid-19th-century height. Their success owed to a religious philosophy of hard work, honesty and frugality, which made them good farmers and artisans – that famous furniture! But ultimately, even with their artisanal viability, their practice of celibacy – procreation was forbidden to members of the community – undermined their sustainability. Without human reproduction, the Shakers relied on active recruitment, and celibacy wasn’t an attractive proposition to many. Today, the last Shaker village in Maine has a population of two. In contrast, the Amish – whose families produce, on average, five children – number more than 300,000.

Unusually, the Amish practice of ‘shunning’ has proved quite effective for retaining the young in the Amish lifestyle. Shunning excludes those who have transgressed community rules from commercial dealings and common social interactions (eating meals, exchanging gifts) with Amish members. It’s a way of creating a tight boundary around the community that maintains the culture, while threatening social suicide to members tempted to default from the Church.

History shows that a lot of fundamentally religious 18th- and 19th-century social experiments in the US were built on practices of self-denial, repression and perfectionism that became exhausting for people to sustain, no matter the zeal of community members. William Penn’s success with Philadelphia – the province, and future commonwealth – notably came once the city grew beyond the ‘sober’ utopia of its founder’s imagination.

The question confounding nearly all those seeking alternatives to mass society, says the dystopian novelist Margaret Atwood, is: ‘What sort of happiness is on offer, and what is the price we might pay to achieve it?’ The puritan impulse towards the suppression of passion, like Penn’s insistence on sobriety, was a high price to pay for belonging. But the loose sexual practices of secular communes in the 1960s and ’70s created immense jealousies and conflicts that just as readily caused many communities to implode. Most people, of course, flock to intentional communities to fulfil emotional needs, but the capacity of a community’s relational skills are quickly tested by the personalities of its members: as Winiecki explained to me about Tamera: ‘If you go deep in a group, you can find all the light and shadows of humanity.’

Speaking about her time at Findhorn, the social entrepreneur Kate Sutherland told me: ‘It’s not utopia. It’s microcosm. Everything that’s in the outer world is there – marginalisation, addiction, poverty, sexual issues, power. Communities are just fractals of society.’ The difference for Sutherland was that in Findhorn there was good will and a clear commitment to waking up: ‘People are willing to look at their stuff.’

Meanwhile, at Damanhur, conflicts are cleverly allowed to escalate into a playful battle that serves to exorcise community tensions and animosities. ‘The battle lets people have a defined space to bring out the natural competitive energy in each one of us in a way that is playful and constructive, and ultimately leads to a sense of unity,’ says Quaglia Cocco, who has been part of the Damanhur community for eight years. A battle at Damanhur isn’t too dissimilar from childhood play-fighting. Teams equip themselves with white shirts and squirt guns filled with paint, and judges are used to determine whether a person is still in the game or has been defeated. Battles allow members to vent their warrior natures and access more of their shadow personalities, too often repressed by the soft statues of civility to which we default.

Damanhur’s mock battles prevent the kind of burn-out you find when the most empathetic people in a community get tasked with dealing with the emotional needs of others, putting a lot a strain on the shoulders of a few. In New Zealand, one freelancer collective in Wellington has found another way of distributing the emotional load: a system of emotional stewardship. Every member of Enspiral has a steward – another person who checks in with them regularly, listens to their emotional grievances, and holds them to their commitments. As Rich Bartlett, a senior member of Enspiral, explained: ‘One of the main jobs of stewards of the culture is to be continuously weeding this beautiful garden. In practical terms, that means being really proactive about hosting conversations, calling out harmful behaviour, treating each other with compassion, prioritising relationships and feelings over process and rightness.’

Good communication, in turn, builds flexibility. As Tamerice, from Damanhur, puts it: ‘You should change things when they work – not when they don’t work. Then you have fuel. Otherwise, things get so broken down that you don’t have the energy.’ Compared with communities of the 18th and 19th centuries, this ability to pivot and change direction, to not get locked in to one path or way of doing things, creates greater resilience over time. It’s another lesson more communities might learn from start-up culture. When I asked a Hummingbird elder about the key to the success of their community in New Mexico, he said: ‘It’s about not getting undermined by one meme.’ Communities, like start-ups, need oxygen (not dictatorship). They need to trial innovations and re-invent themselves organically, responding to the changing needs of members.

The real challenge for successful communities comes, as it does inside companies, when core values must pass to the next generation. The ‘superficial things – the specific rituals and practices’, in the words of Tamerice – are less critical. And yet, generational conflicts seem to be par for the course, especially when an inspired leader or a generation of elders is unwilling to relinquish control. Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement, was militant about quality control: as the late psychologist Eugene Taylor pointed out in Shadow Culture (1999), instead of a loose-knit confederation of churches over which she could exert little control, Eddy’s ministry was constituted around an overweening mother church. Individual sermons were forbidden, and no free interpretation was permitted. This inability to cede control is a common founder problem within intentional communities, leading to factionalism and splinter groups.

Within the entrepreneurial sector, start-up founders tend to be replaced once the characteristic passion that was an asset in catalysing a venture is no longer seen as the best attribute to sustain and grow an organisation. This is reflected in statistics. More than 50 per cent of founders are replaced as CEOs by the time a start-up raises its third round of financing: after first-round financing, 25 per cent of founders have already been replaced.

However, having a visionary founder as a figurehead is almost always an essential ingredient of success – someone who carves out a coherent vision, empowers organisational ability among others, and acts as a publicist and propagandist of a company (or community) to the outside world. Over time, a founder’s role can be disassembled and distributed, but in the beginning it’s critical, keeping a community focused on what’s important, while overcoming a lot of the pettiness that can creep into everyday life. At Damanhur, community members are dealing with the fallout of losing their leader, Falco Tarassaco, who died in 2013. As Tamerice tells me: ‘It’s a great loss. But it can also become an opportunity. Now everyone needs to become a visionary – its exciting, demanding and challenging.’

We can learn as much from failed communities as from their successful counterparts. Not least because, while many communities ‘fail’, their lineage lives on: temporal and short-lived experiments in community have acted as powerful provocations for mainstream society. For example, the ideas of universal and compulsory education, and town meetings, were pioneered by the Puritans. City planning and architecture, likewise, owes much to utopian dreamers. Early utopian communities also sought to incubate certain virtues that would later become part of a mainstream ethos. Concerns with inequality, for example, or the abolition of slavery, religious freedom, and a focus on universal education were all notions pioneered in failed utopias.

In this way, intentional communities and utopias can serve as short-lived petri dishes for emergent culture. The Findhorn Foundation has been home to several hundred people, but the number of those touched by the community runs to millions. Similarly Enspiral, despite being remotely nestled in Wellington, is now influencing communities around the world by exporting best practices and software tools such as Loomio, for decentralised decision-making, and Cobudget for managing finances within communities and groups.

Today’s experiments in intentional communities benefit from the ease with which best practice and know-how can travel digitally. Experience, wisdom and insight can be shared with a click. Moreover, advances in the science of management have come a long way since the early days of utopian communes, making it easier to collaborate, manage projects and make collective decisions.

But the art of culture-building remains a thornier challenge – one that our ancestral utopias knew all too well. One aspect of that struggle is that business models for many intentional communities remain elusive, or unformed. Self-sufficiency, for example, often means not taking advantage of economies of scale that can support growing populations. At the same time, many communities are chagrined to find themselves servicing voyeurs and tourists for needed cash, which brings ‘mission drift’ to their organisations and a departure from their founding vision. That said, contemporary communities can benefit from the rise of freelancers and digital working, which reduces the agrarian burden and the pressure of self-sufficiency, allowing for more diverse revenue as communities contract with the outside world. Amish e-retailers are one sign of this growing trend.

If today’s communities offer escape from the cult of individualism only to end up being ‘walled gardens’ for a privileged class of bohemians, entrepreneurs or spiritual seekers, then perhaps, for all their material success, they might yet be said to have failed. Whether today’s collaborative experiments will create tentacles into more diverse populations or tackle agendas of social justice and economic inequality remains to be seen. Perhaps a more useful construct than intentional community is the idea of ‘shadow culture’, defined by Taylor as a ‘vast unorganised array of discrete individuals who live and think different from the mainstream, but who participate in its daily activities’. Shadow cultures have the potential to hold distinct values, but also utilise the infrastructure and opportunities of mass society. In many ways, then, utopias are only ever tightly glued pockets of shadow culture that mistakenly parade themselves as isolated entities.

____

written by

Alexa Clay a writer and researcher in pursuit of misfit subcultures. She is the co-author of The Misfit Economy (2015). Her writing has appeared in Wired, The Guardian and Vice, among others. 

Source:

https://aeon.co/essays/like-start-ups-most-intentional-communities-fail-why

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IN 1909, A poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow travelers, sending his car into a ditch and completely destroying the vehicle. Here’s how Marinetti described the encounter:

The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming toward me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way—Damn! Ouch! … I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air …

You can already tell from this account that Marinetti was a bit of an eccentric. He was a poet, after all. And while he positions the cyclists as the issue, it’s likely that Marinetti wasn’t the safest driver. The lines that lead up to this retelling of the crash recount just how fast they were going in their car, “hurling watchdogs against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars under a flatiron.” (In case you’re wondering, yes, there was drinking that night.)

But this account of a poet’s chaotic, life-threatening drive isn’t just some strange remnant from his personal files. The crash—to him a symbol of how the old ways (bicycles) must give way to the new ones (his car)—is what propelled Marinetti to put into writing a theory of progress that he’d been ruminating on for years. The words above are actually the beginning of The Futurist Manifesto, a document that Marinetti published in 1909 with the help of a small handful of fellow Italian artists who had dubbed themselves Futurists. What follows the car crash story is a list of 11 declarations—the tenets of Futurism.

Today, when we talk about futurism, we’re not usually talking about sculpture, painting, or poetry. Futurists today are scenario builders, people with advanced degrees in strategic foresight, science fiction writers, consultants to businesses. Futurists focus largely on technology, and the field today is inextricably linked to technologists working on everything from artificial intelligence to Crispr. And today’s Futurists almost never link their work to the existence of Marinetti, and the Italian movement that came before them. This is in part because Marinetti was an artist, and the Italian Futurists worked in paint and bronze and clay, rather than future forecasts. And there is no direct link between Marinetti’s group and the strategic foresight consultants working today. But the link is also one that today’s futurists would prefer to avoid in part because of another element of the artists behind the Futurist Manifesto of 1909: Marinetti and his cohort embraced and championed fascism. There are lessons to be learned for today’s technologists and futurists in Marinetti’s manifesto, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

Let’s first take a look at the words often used to describe the Italian Futurist movement: invention, modernity, speed, industry, disruption, brash, energetic, combative. Italian Futurists were obsessed with cars and airplanes; they emphasized youth over experience; they believed that the only way to live was by pushing forward and never looking back. The first tenet in the manifesto reads, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.”

Does any of this sound familiar? Disruption? Moving fast (and perhaps breaking things)? The rejection of history? Today’s most vocal voices in tech might not communicate their values with the same aplomb as the Italian poets, but they’re often saying the same kinds of things. Here’s a quote from Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of Waymo, about the value of history: “The only thing that matters is the future. I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow.” Here’s a quote from the 1909 manifesto: “Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?” Where Marinetti declares “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!” today’s technology moguls say “the future is now.” Where the Italian Futurists were hypnotized by cars and planes, today’s technologists are drooling over rocket ships and space travel. Where Marinetti believed that women were too effeminate to bring about the kind of speedy progress he desired, former Google employee James Damore writes about how the gender gap in tech exists because men and women “biologically differ”.

Not only was Marinetti instrumental in the Futurist movement, he was also one of the artists who pushed the idea of artists as a brand. “Marinetti’s public braggadocio—and his manipulation of and engagement with the mass media—changed the way artists conceived of their relationship to the art world and popular culture,” writes Jon Mann at Artsy. Marinetti believed in the power of the manifesto, and in the idea that artists should be personas, and that they should push their narrative into the world. If Marinetti could have lived to see Elon Musk launch a red Tesla to space, he would likely have been beside himself with joy.

But Musk and his colleagues should heed the warning that the Italian Futurist movement provides. This love of disruption and progress at all costs led Marinetti and his fellow artists to construct what some call a “a church of speed and violence.” They embraced fascism, pushed aside the idea of morality, and argued that innovation must never, for any reason, be hindered. Marinetti and his movement cheered, for example, when Italy invaded Northern Africa. “Italian bombardment of Tripoli from biplanes and dirigibles was the first air bombardment in the history of the world, and thus a major technological innovation,” writes Eugene Ostashevsky. Today, some technologists praise drone warfare with similar language. “Though they painted themselves as scions of a new age, the Fascists and Futurists were really ultraconservatives ideologically,” writes Gabriel T. Rubin. Again, sound familiar? In their never-ending quest for progress at any cost, today’s companies are flirting with fascism themselves.

Amazon has been providing facial recognition software to police in the US. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, and Motorola Solutions all have contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE and are profiting off the current wave of deportations and internment camps. American scientists and technology companies are helping China track minority groups. China is also hoping Google will help it suppress any kind of information about their treatment of those minority groups. Brian Merchant at Gizmodo recently wrote about all the ways big tech companies are contributing to the current climate crisis. This is before we get into the ways that YouTube is contributing to the spread of conspiracy theories, white nationalism, and fascism.

Today’s technologists love to eschew history for the same reason the Italian Futurists did, but if they ignore the lessons contained in that movement, they’re bound to repeat it. And I’ll leave it to you to guess who said this, Marinetti or Musk: “Standing on the world’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the Stars!”

________

written by Rose Eveleth, an Ideas contributor at WIRED, creator and host of Flash Forward, a podcast about possible (and not so possible) futures.

source: WIRED

The post When Futurism Led to Fascism—and Why It Could Happen Again appeared first on Void Network.

To be clear, this program does not represent our collective as a whole, nor the international anarchist movement. There should be as many such programs as there are anarchists. As you read this, reflect on what resonates and what does not; think about what changes you want to make in the world and what means of change are consistent with your values and desires.

How to Use this Program

What follows is the opposite of an ordinary political program. It is not written in stone; it does not pretend to represent a general will, the public, the people, or any such abstraction.

Anarchists understand freedom as arising from an ongoing process; it is something we create individually and communally every day of our lives. In our view, it cannot be defined via a piece of paper or granted to us by a powerful institution; each of these practices actually destroys freedom. We also believe that defining and obtaining freedom for ourselves is the best way to guarantee our well-being.

Anarchist analyses of capitalism, the state, patriarchy, and colonialism have proven useful in countless social struggles over the past several decades, as have our critiques of reformism, authoritarian revolution, and the institutional left—and perhaps most importantly, our practices of mutual aid and self-organization. Anarchist forms of struggle have also proven compatible with a number of other struggles that have left their mark on the world, as well as influencing and informing anarchism as a living concept.

We do not present a program on the premise that we could lay claim to an absolute truth, nor that this program could speak to all the visions of liberation that we act in solidarity with. Short of presenting a complete vision, we still find the need to express some vision, no matter how partial. Recent experience has shown that we cannot win a revolution that we are not even able to imagine.

That is the primary purpose of this document: to aid in imagining what sort of changes we would begin working towards right now if we were able to abolish the government or create an autonomous zone. None of these are absolute truths we would want to impose, forcing everyone to support a single vision of freedom and revolution. Rather, this offers a way of envisioning principles and goals that many of us would fight for, which will inevitably shift and grow along the way as we enter into conflict and dialogue with other people and other visions. The point is not to convince everyone that our vision of freedom is the correct one. We will be most free when each of us can imagine our own best possible world in every given moment.

Not even the people writing and publishing it think this document is a valid program or a complete proposal. Our hope is that it will serve as a point of departure for discussion and debate, helping people to articulate similar visions, conflicting visions, or visions that are simply different. The more people who imagine the world of their dreams and reflect on how countless such worlds can fit into a single world, breaking with the homogenizing Western project, the greater our collective intelligence will be.

This program deals with some painful topics that no single collective has the right to decide. We concluded that it would be less harmful to address those topics imperfectly than to avoid them and pretend they do not exist. We hope that our inadequate attempts will inspire others to do better. The incompleteness of this program expresses a fundamental anarchist principle: no one can ever express everyone’s needs. Whatever you find missing, it’s up to you to fill it in, and up to all of us to support each other through the process of accomplishing this together.

At the end, there is a short glossary that explains what we mean by certain terms.

An Anarchist Program

0. The Ends Are the Means

Those who support an anarchist program live and organize in a way that makes the program imminently possible, not in some distant future after a dictatorial party has acquired power. This represents a completely different way of creating power starting right now.

Nothing in this program, not even the abolition of the state, can justify means of struggle that would not be at home in the world we wish to inhabit, nor the postponing of questions of freedom and well-being until after some state of exception that we dress up as a revolution.

1. Mutual Survival

Under capitalism, no one has a right to survival. We are all forced to pay for the means of survival—and some of us can’t. Millions of people die every year from easily preventable causes; billions live in misery because they are denied the means for a healthy, dignified life. That ends now.

A. Every person and every community has a right to their means of survival.

B. It follows that persons and communities that choose to constitute themselves in a way that destroys others’ means of survival, or that withhold those means in exchange for some service (exploitation), are destroying the possibility for mutual survival. Therefore, their “way of life” does not constitute survival—it endangers survival.

C. Persons and communities are right to defend themselves against exploitation or threats to their means of survival, preferably by convincing those who threaten or exploit them to change their way of life to a more harmonious, mutually feasible pattern—but also, if necessary, by force.

D. Conflict and death have always been a part of life, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. With current technologies, attempts to stave off death are predicated on multiplying deaths among those who lack access to such technologies. It follows that survival is not the absence of death, but the possibility for a healthy and fulfilling life, as well as the possibility to pass something of that life on to future generations.

E. In this sense, the opposite of life is not death, but extermination, the total annihilation of a group, including even the destruction of the memory of that group. Extermination belongs to the state. It precludes the possibility of mutual survival.

2. Decolonization

Colonization is crucial to the global spread of capitalism and the devastation it has entailed. This devastation has ongoing repercussions at every level. Colonization is the basis of the United States; it has also been foundational to the major European states that functioned as the architects of the current global system of statism and capitalism. The partial revolutions of the 20th century did not alter the basic colonial frameworks they inherited. All of this must change.

A. Colonized peoples have a right to reconstitute their communities, their languages and knowledge systems, their territories, and their organizational systems. All of these are fluid realities that members of such communities adapt to their present needs.

B. Settler societies must be destroyed. Because they are so historically ingrained, their abolition will not be a single moment of compensation (as though a price tag could be attached to all the suffering that has been caused), but a complex and evolving process. Indigenous communities should be able to define what decolonization looks like from a position of strength and healing, such as the abolition of the United States (and Canada and other nations) will allow. This is also necessary to break with the gunboat diplomacy that has characterized much of settler colonialism.

C. By definition, we cannot and will not define the limits of decolonization from the present moment, from within the reality of a settler society. Anarchists, Indigenous and otherwise, favor models of decolonization that break with colonial logics and repudiate nation-states, ethnic essentialism, punitive and genocidal practices, and mere reforms regarding who holds state power.

D. Settler communities that have historically and to the present day played the role of an aggressive and hostile neighbor helping to police and exploit Native communities in the reservation system will be encouraged to disband, and will be treated as paramilitaries if they continue any form of hostility. All “Man Camps” will be disbanded immediately, and resources will be dedicated to helping find missing Indigenous women and two-spirit people.

E. Universities, museums, and other institutions will return all bodies, body parts, art, and artifacts stolen from Indigenous communities.

F. It is right for Indigenous communities to recover all the territory they need for their full cultural, spiritual, and material survival.

G. Priority might be given to recovering land of spiritual importance, land that had belonged to the government, and large commercial holdings—but again, preconceived limitations should not be placed on how decolonization will unfold.

H. Communities in countries that maintained external colonial projects (e.g., the United Kingdom, Spain, France) will facilitate a large-scale transfer of useful resources expropriated from their abolished governments, the wealthy, and institutions that existed to serve the wealthy (e.g., private hospitals). These resources will go to communities in the ex-colonies.

3. Reparations and Ending Anti-Blackness

Anti-Blackness and other forms of racism are fundamental to the current power structure. They grew out of colonialism and capitalism from the very beginning, to such an extent that capitalism is inseparable from racism, though the latter can take many forms. It is impossible to fully abolish these power structures without striking at the historically grounded legacies of racism.

A. Communities of people largely descended from the survivors of slavery are right to take over large landholdings that had previously been plantations, as well as the excess wealth of families and institutions that profited off of slave labor. This redistribution should be carried out on a communal rather than an individual basis, to avoid encouraging identitarian processes that declare individuals legitimate or illegitimate based on abstract criteria. Those who organize a collective or communal expropriation have the right to define their own experiences and how oppression has affected them historically, as well as to choose how to constitute themselves and whom to invite into their community.

B. Historically racialized neighborhoods that have been gentrified may be reclaimed. Because many neighborhoods, before gentrification, are in fact quite diverse and working class people of all races can lose their homes, those who are involved in housing and anti-racist struggles at the time of the revolution may form assemblies to organize the process of inviting people back into reclaimed neighborhoods, for example prioritizing prior residents or their children, and finding ways to strike a balance between revitalizing Black and other cultures of resistance and creating practices of cross-racial solidarity that break down the segregations and separations of racism.

C. People in neighborhoods that are infrastructurally unsound or unsanitary, that suffer from environmental racism or other harmful effects that will continue causing health problems into the foreseeable future, may expropriate and move into wealthy neighborhoods (preferentially targeting the wealthiest). The prior residents of those neighborhoods may move into the vacated, substandard neighborhood with an eye towards improving it through their own effort, or they may move into other unused housing, of which there is plenty, thanks to capitalist real estate markets.

D. Weapons taken from the disbanded police and military will be distributed among Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities, and to volunteer militias that fought unambiguously on the anti-racist side during the entirety of the revolutionary conflict. The communities will decide what is to be done with the weapons—whether to distribute, store, or dismantle them.

E. Resources related to education and healthcare may be taken from wealthy neighborhoods for the benefit of racialized neighborhoods.

F. The onus is on white anti-capitalists, or more correctly, anti-capitalists in the process of definitively breaking with their whiteness, to work with other white people to achieve a process of reparations that is as peaceful as possible, to help them move to other neighborhoods or territories in the case that they are evicted, to soften their landing and help them find the means for dignified survival, without creating entrenched identities or resentment that might encourage intergenerational conflicts or keep whiteness alive.

G. Assemblies of people committed to the relevant causes at the time of the revolution will set up truth and reconciliation committees to deal with whatever racist atrocities are brought to their attention, such as the forced sterilizations carried out in ICE facilities. The processes for uncovering the truth of these atrocities and achieving some kind of reconciliation will not be purely symbolic, and they need not delegitimize personal acts of revenge, but they will strive for some form of collective healing and transformative justice rather than punitive and carceral measures.

All the following points of the program are contingent on points 1-3 being put in motion in a way that is satisfactory to those who have suffered white supremacy, colonization, and racial capitalism. The rights and principles in point 4, for example, about access to land, must not be used to thwart efforts by Indigenous communities to get their Land Back.

4. Land

The way capitalism and Western civilization have taught us to think about the land and the way to treat it has brought us to the brink of disaster. The paradigm of land as property, as a resource to be exploited, is simultaneously a failure and a travesty. The commodification of land has been instrumental to colonialism and exploitation, while the measuring, demarcation, and assertion of dominion over land has been central to the state throughout its history.

A. Land is a living thing. Land cannot be bought and sold.

B. Land belongs to those who belong to it, which is to say, those who take care of it and those whose survival is based on it.

C. Land should be respected. Communities should consider the personhood of the land and all other beings that exist in relation with it. The idea that only humans of a predetermined type have personhood is responsible for a large part of the disaster we face.

D. Land is the basis for survival, and all land is interconnected.

E. It follows that defense of the land is self-defense, and is therefore right.

F. A community that exists in an intimate, localized relationship with the land, or a community that historically has had such a relationship and proved to be good stewards of the land, will probably know best how to interrelate with a specific territory. Others should defer to them in questions regarding defending and caring for the land.

G. It is the responsibility of all communities to aid and accompany the land as it heals from centuries of capitalism and the state.

5. Water

Water is life.

A. All communities must return the water they use to the river, lake, or aquifer as clean as they found it.

B. All communities have a responsibility to help their watershed heal and purify itself after centuries of capitalist aggression.

C. In view of climate change, desertification, and all the other forms of damage to the planet, all communities have a responsibility to adapt their lifeways in the event of water scarcity, and to help each other to migrate if increasing water scarcity and desertification render a dignified survival impossible.

D. In the event of water scarcity, priority for water use is given to localized forms of sustainable agriculture and to preserving the habitats of other forms of life.

E. Polluting the water or taking so much that others downstream or in the same aquifer do not have enough for a dignified survival is an act of aggression.

F. Communities should respond to assaults on their water with attempts at dialogue and negotiation, but if these attempts are fruitless, they are right to defend themselves.

6. Borders

The global system we are abolishing is based on states asserting sovereignty over clearly demarcated borders, alternately cooperating and competing in capitalist accumulation and warfare. Nation-states have always led to cultural and linguistic homogenization and genocide, and borders have revealed themselves to be increasingly murderous mechanisms. All that, henceforth, is abolished.

A. People and communities, in concert, decide what communities they want to be a part of, and how they wish to be constituted, respectively. This is the principle of voluntary association.

B. All together, as best we can, we will develop principles of Freedom of Movement, balanced with a respect for the communities that are the custodians of the territories others wish to move through. These two principles necessitate the abolition of borders, on the one hand, and the abolition of individualistic, entitled tourism on the other. It is reasonable for communities, which exist in relation to a specific territory, to expect privacy as well as basic respect from visitors; at the same time, it is good for people to be able to move freely in search of a better life or even simply because movement brings them joy and well-being. These two rights, such as they are, may come into conflict. Communities and individuals commit to resolving those conflicts as constructively as possible.

C. Communities commit to offering basic hospitality and safe conduct to migrants. This could include migrants who wish to return home, having been forced to emigrate by the effects of capitalism. It could include the migration of entire communities fleeing the long-term effects of environmental racism.

D. Communities will coordinate across territories as they see fit. This could include federations organized along linguistic lines (for the sake of convenience), coordinating bodies in a shared watershed, and more. Anarchists recommend redundant, overlapping forms of organization, as well as membership in multiple communities, to resist the potentially militaristic reproduction of bordered units or essentialist identities.

7. Housing

Even governments that enshrine the right to housing in their constitutions have failed to guarantee this basic need. As Malatesta pointed out, capitalism is the system in which builders go homeless because there are too many houses.

A. Houses belong to those who live in them.

B. No one has a right to more houses than they need. This should not be reduced to a principle of “one family, one house,” because of the danger in normalizing one model of the family, and because some dynamic families include movement between multiple nodes, and to respect pastoral and other societies organized around seasonal migrations. However, this does mean that the vacation houses of the rich are fair game for expropriation for those who need access to land or decent housing.

C. Housing is not a commodity to be bought and sold.

D. Communities will make sure all their own members have dignified housing, and then they will help neighboring communities find the resources they need to meet their housing needs.

E. Anarchists will encourage the transformation of housing, which capitalist real estate development and urban planning utilized specifically to promote patriarchal nuclear families. People are encouraged to change their vital spaces in a way that enables more communal practices of kinship, child-rearing practices not based in the heterosexual couple, and autonomous spaces for women and gender nonconforming people.

F. Anarchists will make it a priority to provide safe housing for people fleeing abusive relationships and circumstances.

G. Communities will begin immediately, within their means, to modify housing to be ecologically sustainable, and to modify settlement patterns so that housing nuclei correspond to ecological and cultural needs, moving away from the present reality in which existing housing corresponds to the imperatives of capitalism. As this process will take decades, communities should develop plans and share ideas for organizing the transition, taking into account that there will be a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and changes in the availability of different construction materials.

H. Evicting people from their houses is an emotionally traumatizing act that we do not want to form a part of the world we are building. However, many historically oppressed communities find themselves living in situations that directly shorten their lives, whereas the ostentatious housing of rich people represents generations of accumulated plunder; in those cases, it is better for them to take the housing of those who profited off their misery than to continue in misery. Under capitalism, there is no inalienable right to remain in a particular house, and we are not carrying out a revolution in order to give rights to rich people they did not even claim under their own chosen system.

8. Food

A key aspect of capitalist accumulation has been the industrialization and hyper-exploitation of food producers, both human farmers and other forms of life, trying to squeeze out an ever-growing surplus. This has led to the acts of genocide associated with the commodification of the land, the total destruction of peasant societies, deforestation and monocrop deserts, mass starvation, mass extinction, pollution, climate change, dead zones in the ocean, the destruction and commodification of communities of different living beings, the murder of living soil, and the systematized imprisonment and torture of non-human animals. How we feed ourselves is a nexus that brings together how we organize our society and the relationships we create with the broader ecosystem.

A. Everyone has a right to all the food they need for a healthy, dignified life.

B. Making sure that everyone has enough food is a collective responsibility.

C. Arbitrarily placing limits on or destroying the food supply that others depend on is an assault on their survival. They may respond to this with legitimate self-defense.

D. Workers in food production industries at the time of the revolution will socialize the means of production under their control with the aim of ensuring everyone’s access to food.

E. Communities will begin the process of redistributing large tracts of farmland and reclaiming land in urban environments to enable food sovereignty and to share access to the means to feed ourselves.

F. Agriculture will transition away from the current petroleum-dependent, highly industrialized model to a localized, ecocentric model designed to fulfill two purposes: ensuring food security and restoring the health of the planet. The human diet will be resituated in an ecosystemic logic.

G. Particularly damaging technologies like factory trawlers and animal warehouses for industrial-scale meat and dairy production will be dismantled as quickly as possible.

9. Healthcare

Under capitalism and the state, healthcare has been used as a form of extortion to keep poor people in misery and in debt, to surveil, discipline, and control our bodies, and particularly to torture and control women, trans and non-binary people, racialized people, and people with different abilities and mental health difference. It is one of the most damning indictments of the present system that the practices that should focus on healing function as a venue for cruelty and profiteering.

A. Everyone has a right to preventive therapies and living conditions that guarantee them the best possible health.

B. Everyone has a right to define for themselves what constitutes health, in dialogue with their community. People who share a collective experience or identity related to gender, sexuality, physical ability, mental health, ethnicity, or anything else, may develop their own definition or ideal of health; members of those groups are free to subscribe to those definitions or not to subscribe to them.

C. Everyone has a right to alter their body, in line with their gender expression or for whatever reason, as they see fit. People have an unrestricted right to contraceptives and abortion.

D. No healthcare worker can be forced to perform a procedure that they do not agree with, but denying someone access to a medical procedure is an assault on their bodily autonomy. Training in skills related to healthcare will be spread as widely as possible so no one is ever in the position of gatekeeping access to healthcare.

E. Everyone has a right to the full extent of treatment available to them in their community, or to travel in search of better conditions or better treatment options.

F. Healthcare workers at the time of the revolution will socialize the hospitals and other institutions and infrastructures at their disposal, and do their best to ensure continuing access to healthcare, to universalize and improve access and quality of treatment, to equalize treatment for historically marginalized populations, to facilitate reconciliation processes to address the abuse of such populations by the medical profession, and to reorganize their profession to remove all capitalist influences and classist organization, while still weighting internal hierarchies to favor training and experience.

G. Trafficking in healthcare, including the threat to withhold healthcare, is an act of aggression.

H. As part of the process of self-definition of health, anarchists will encourage the formation of assemblies that center people’s own needs and experiences, breaking the tradition that establishes healthcare professionals as the protagonists and people as mere receptacles for illness or treatment. People will share and increase knowledge of their own bodies, availing themselves of the tools they need to be proactive in securing the greatest health and happiness possible.

10. Education

Public education has been used to create patriotic, obedient, and white supremacist civil servants, soldiers, and citizens. For even longer, Catholic education in Europe and in the colonies was used to justify colonialism and state authority. Both public and private education are linked to systematic child abuse. Contrary to classist stereotypes, people with more formal education are often more able to dismiss facts that contradict their prejudices or worldview. Education as it stands is a cornerstone of oppression.

On the contrary, education should be an unending process of growth and self-actualization. Anarchists have always been at the forefront of experimenting with models of liberating education that break with the standard formulas of patriotic, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist education.

A. Knowledge must be free; it belongs to the community.

B. Everyone must be able to access whatever educational opportunities they desire. Anarchists will encourage specific projects that end the oppressions that limit people’s access to education because of their gender, sexuality, race, class, or other divisions. Examples might include intensive trainings in fields like math, sciences, and mechanics for people from groups that have historically been discouraged from entering those fields, or history and literature courses that center the voices and experiences of subjects other than upper-class heterosexual white men. Such projects will also deploy a diversity of learning environments that do not assume a single, normative standard of physical and mental abilities.

C. Anarchists will help ensure that historically marginalized groups can obtain the resources they need to identify and develop the body of knowledge that is important to their specific community and to spread it as they see fit.

D. Children are free to engage in educational settings as they see fit, in dialogue with their communities. Free children who have all their basic needs met are constantly engaged in their own education, independently of whether they do so in a formal setting.

E. Teachers and professors who want to continue working as such may organize basic education, but anarchists will encourage the emergence of new projects based on liberating models of education rather than rote memorization or the completion of preconceived modules, especially collective self-organized self-education projects.

F. Professions that prove to be useful and desirable after the demise of capitalism will organize educational programs to train new members of the profession, expropriating resources from schools and universities or taking over teaching spaces within them, in dialogue with other professions.

G. Scientific organizations may constitute themselves to provide for professional training in universities, and to maintain laboratories and peer-reviewed papers. They will discuss ways to raise the resources necessary to maintain laboratories and needed technologies without capitalizing on the processes of knowledge production. One possible solution is that scientific experimentation will have to respond largely to the needs voiced by communities as a whole.

H. The advanced education needed to become a scientist is a gift from the community to the individual; the knowledge the scientists help produce should be a gift back to the community. Scientists should also honor their responsibility to share tools for education as widely as possible. Scientific knowledge and training should not be concentrated in a few hands. Good science thrives on widespread participation in the process of research and review. For science to live, scientists must cease to treat other human beings as objects in a petri dish and focus on equipping them to participate in that process.

I. Scientists, teachers, and other educators will facilitate reconciliation processes to deal with forms of abuse they may have been complicit in before the revolution, from facilitating police violence against students to working with corporations that caused people harm. Accredited scientists who used their knowledge to aid fossil fuel, armaments, and similar industries should be stripped of their perceived legitimacy in the same way that doctors can be delicensed for malpractice.

J. Associations of scientists will decide if they actually need to use some form of licensing in order to assure the quality of their work. The answer may not be the same for heart surgeons as for botanists. This implies a balance between the needs of scientists to ensure standards of quality, the interests of people to prevent monopolies or gatekeepers that limit access to knowledge and training, as well as people’s need for transparency—ensuring, for example, that those they entrust with their medical care or technological projects that might pollute their environment have not been dangerously negligent in the past. Associations of laypeople will also organize to weigh in on these decisions.

11. Production

Under capitalism, production is one of the chief means of accumulating capital for the wealthy—through alienated work, exploitation, and the destruction of the environment. In anarchy, the only question is how to meet socially defined needs, which include everything from collective survival to the need people feel to grow and enjoy life.

A. Ex-workers will seize their workplaces at the earliest convenience, studying whether the workplace (factory, workshop, office, store, restaurant, etc.) can be modified to produce something socially useful in a healthy way. If not, the workplace will be dismantled and its resources shared out among ex-workers, neighboring communities, and useful workplaces.

B. Ex-workers, excluding managers while welcoming unemployed people with pertinent skills who had been denied access to employment under capitalism, will create some form of collective, cooperative, or communal structure to organize their workplaces, federating with other workplaces across their industry in order to oversee the production of socially useful goods.

C. Delegates within these productive federations must be beholden to a specific collective mandate (promoting positions that arise from their base assembly), they must be immediately recallable if they fail that mandate, and they must continue to exercise their craft. Workplace assemblies will decide if delegates must carry out their normal work on a daily basis or if they may be excused for a limited number of months before returning to normal work, as demanded by the conditions of their work and the needs of the federative labor (for example, delegates may have to travel long distances and might not be able to work during certain periods).

D. Those who wish to be professional representatives, doing no other work but that of bureaucrats and politicians, may form their own federations of representatives in which to go about representing themselves and others to the best of their abilities. For this purpose, it is recommended that they paint their faces white, don berets and striped shirts, travel from community to community, and hold their committee meetings open to the public. People don’t need bureaucrats—but we will always need entertainment!

E. No one may be forced to work. Communities and productive federations will do their utmost to operate according to a logic of abundance rather than a logic of scarcity or monopoly. People who wish to carry out productive or creative labors in a more individual setting or manner will be encouraged to do so, and insofar as it is possible, they will be afforded the space and resources they need, though in moments of absolute scarcity, such as the difficult years of the transition, communities may prefer to favor more effective collective workplaces that are immediately responding to a community need.

F. The gendering of different productive activities is abolished. Anarchists encourage their communities to reflect on how different useful, necessary, and beneficial activities are unequally recognized and rewarded with status, and propose initiatives or new traditions by which to eliminate these vestiges of patriarchy.

G. Ex-workers are encouraged to fully transform their workplaces, deconstructing machinery into its component tools if need be in order to work at a safer pace and create an environment that is healthy in terms of noise, air quality, chemicals, and non-repetitive labors.

H. Workplaces will strike a balance between the creative or productive desires of the members, the needs of surrounding communities, and the needs of society as a whole. This means encouraging artisans in their creative development, making sure not to pollute nearby communities with harmful chemicals or excessive noise, and seeking to create things that others in society need, though embracing the logic of abundance means giving this latter directive the broadest possible interpretation except in cases of acute scarcity that threaten a community’s survival.

I. Destructive energy infrastructure will be phased out at the safest pace possible. Experts in the relevant fields will be encouraged to oversee the shutting down of nuclear power plants according to a schedule that leaves the smallest amount of highly radioactive waste and the plugging of oil wells so they do not contaminate ground water.

J. On a less urgent timeline, communities will explore the decommissioning of highly destructive “green energy” projects that endanger river populations, migratory birds, and other living things. This work will depend on the development of localized, ecological energy production and the drastic reduction of overall energy use, a part of which is the redesigning of buildings to allow for passive solar heating and cooling, a demanding endeavor that cannot be accomplished in a single decade.

K. Communities will decide what technologies and what kinds of scientific experimentation and development they will support. However, in all cases, the communities and scientific organizations involved must be able to absorb or remediate all the negative consequences of that technology. There is no justification for mining someone else’s territory or creating toxic substances that future generations will have to deal with.

12. Distribution, Communication, and Transportation

Localizing power in people and communities has an adjunct in organizing the material means of survival on as local a level as possible, for example through principles like food sovereignty. However, the danger of dependence on an exploitative socioeconomic system decreases dramatically when people can meet most of their survival needs through the resources and activity of a small local network of communities. For the remainder of those needs, as well as all the things that make life more enjoyable, it may be necessary to organize distribution across multiple regions of a continent and beyond. Additionally, travel is extremely important in an anarchist society to inculcate a global consciousness, encourage reciprocity and solidarity, prevent the emergence of borders, and collectivize knowledge as much as possible.

A. All state-backed currencies are abolished. All monetary debts are canceled.

B. Exchange of goods between communities shall be done in as equitable a manner as possible. Communities in close contact may prefer a free exchange or gift economy. Communities without the basis of trust that makes a gift economy easier to practice may decide to use quid pro quo trade, but trading up for profit (serial trading to capture a growth of value) or charging interest on the lending of goods can be considered attempts at coercion and exploitation.

C. Communities should pursue food sovereignty, meeting the majority of their survival needs from their local land base, but beyond that, infrastructures should be maintained to encourage exchange and travel.

D. Transport workers, together with affected communities, will collaborate to transform existing transportation infrastructure to be as ecologically sustainable as possible, while other infrastructures (e.g., airports and highways) are to be dismantled.

E. Already extracted fossil fuel reserves and existing infrastructures will be rationed, giving priority to the transition in agricultural production, global reparations of resources, and maintaining connectivity in rural areas with no transportation alternatives.

F. Communities, transportation workers, and those involved in fighting against patriarchal violence at the time of the revolution will work together to make sure that people can travel freely and safely regardless of their gender. Communities that enable or permit violence against women or gender non-conforming people traveling through their territory are considered to be in aggression against the rest of the world.

G. Communities will do their best to maintain existing communications infrastructure so that they can remain in touch to communicate globally and share the experiences of their respective revolutionary processes. In the long term, they will explore ways to maintain those infrastructures they find useful with recycled or non-harmful materials. They will also study whether addictive and depressive behaviors related to social networking technologies are intrinsic to those technologies or a maladaptive response to the alienations of capitalism.

13. Conflict Resolution and Transformative Justice

Prisons and police have existed for far too long, destroying people and communities. There are ways to deal with the inevitable conflicts of social existence that see people as capable of growth, redemption, and healing, and that are organized to meet the needs of the community rather than to protect a system of oppression and inequality. The revolution is a process of destroying state power; it is also a process of the rebirth of real communities. Capitalism forced us to be dependent on its mechanisms for our survival, but once it is abolished, our survival once again becomes something we create collectively.

A. Communities are reconstituted through the assemblies and other spaces through which they organize their territory and the survival of their members. A part of this means being accountable to the community on which our survival depends, and taking part in the healthy resolution of conflicts, the healing of harm, and the restoring of reciprocal relations.

B. Communities will do their best to enable fluid ways of being and relating that break with the closed, patriarchal, and micro-oppressive structures that have been traditional in many places. However, no leeway need be given to the dominant concept of fluidity of late capitalism in which people move through space without ever acknowledging their relations, their impact on others, or the simple fact that their survival is not their personal property.

C. People involved in mediation, conflict resolution, and transformative justice will share resources and encourage communities to deal with conflict and harm in a restorative way that promotes healing and reconciliation. We will also make sure that the burden of this work does not fall disproportionately along gender lines.

D. Communities will define norms and boundaries around harmful behaviors, but anarchists will encourage them to develop practices that center dialogue and processes of healing and reconciliation, rather than the codification of prohibited behaviors and punishment.

E. Communities that already have traditions of mediation and reconciliatory processes are encouraged to share their experience as they see fit.

F. All prisons will be dismantled, with communities taking in ex-prisoners who had been convicted of harming other people and committing to working with them on exploring the circumstances around the harm.

G. Committees of people experienced in transformative justice will work with ex-prisoners who are not taken in and vouched for by any community, together with the communities harmed by them, to try to find a solution.

H. Given that total opposition to prisons is not a widespread position, anarchists will organize debates on other possible responses to the worst scenarios of harm—the small minority of cases in which people repeatedly kill, abuse, or victimize others. One possible proposal is to always favor reconciliation with all resources available, but to never delegitimize autonomous acts of self-defense or revenge, especially in cases in which reconciliation is not a realistic outcome.

I. Special attention will be given to all acts of gender and sexual violence, especially those that had been normalized under the patriarchal, punitive regime that is to be abolished. People active in opposing such violence will suggest appropriate structures and practices for communities to adopt.

14. Safety

The state thrives on the lie that security and freedom constitute a dichotomy, two things that exist in inverse proportion and that we must sacrifice each in equal measure to strike a balance between them. Because security is connected with survival, the state can convince us that we would not be able to enjoy what little freedom we have if we did not prioritize security and accept its protection.

In truth, our survival, our safety, and our freedom all depend on how well we can take care of one another, not how high we build walls around ourselves. As long as states exist, even only as a projection in the minds of the power-hungry, we will need to defend ourselves from those who would subjugate and exploit us; sometimes, we will also need to defend ourselves from those who cause harm by not recognizing others’ boundaries, not empathizing with others, or not realizing the consequences of their own actions. How we organize our defense can be dangerous to our freedom. It is also a challenge to conceive of dangers and conflicts in a way that transforms us and others, rather than fixing our antagonists as permanent enemies we need to destroy.

A. All police forces are abolished, and their members should participate in reconciliation processes to address the harm they have caused. Those who refuse may be viewed as statist paramilitaries.

B. Communities may create some kind of volunteer service to protect against various forms of aggression or interpersonal harm. However, to prevent anything like a police force from emerging, whatever form this service takes, it must focus on de-escalation and reconciliation rather than punishment; it should focus on calling out the rest of the community to deal with the conflict or instance of harm rather than monopolizing the response; and the participants must not have special privileges in terms of the right to use force or access to weapons that the rest of the community does not have.

C. Communities are encouraged to create some kind of protective group, tradition, or structure specifically designed to respond to and deal with gender violence in all its forms. They may wish this force to be composed of people other than cis men.

D. Because the state will not be abolished everywhere at once, and because many communities with hierarchical values may continue to exist and may try to subordinate neighboring communities to their will, there may be a need to create anarchist militias or other fighting units—both to defend a free territory and to engage in revolutionary warfare against a statist, imperialist territory. To deserve the terms “free militia” and “revolutionary warfare,” these must be dedicated to several key principles that distinguish them from statist armies. Simply tacking on a red flag is not enough. The fighters must be volunteers; they must be able to choose their own leaders and leadership structures. There must be no officers with aristocratic privileges. The entirety of the force must decide together on acceptable measures of discipline. Assemblies that transcend the free militias—for example, federations of the communities from which the fighters come—will decide the broad strategic objectives and guidelines for humanitarian conduct. In other words the militias must not be fully autonomous: they exist to defend the needs of broader communities, rather than dominating those communities or promoting their own interests on anything but a tactical level.

E. Free militias will avoid the logic of territorial, aggressive warfare in which the objective is to conquer a space defined as enemy territory. The purpose should either be defensive warfare, defending the communities and dissuading others from attacking, or revolutionary warfare, supporting people in an oppressive society who are fighting for their own freedom. In the latter case, the initiative must come from those oppressed people and must not be organized primarily by the militias of a neighboring territory.

F. Free communities do not try to eliminate or annihilate enemies. They defend their freedom and dignity, and support others who are doing so, and then they try to make friends or at the very least make peace.

G. Safety, in an anarchist framework, is not the protection of the weak by the strong, it is the empowerment and cultivated capacity for self-defense of all, with priority given to those whose gender socialization, racialization, or physical and psychological difference has specifically disempowered them under current oppressive conditions.

H. Peace, in an anarchist framework, is not simply the absence of armed conflict, especially when such absence indicates acquiescence to oppression. Peace is an outgrowth of happiness, freedom, and self-actualization, which we hope this program will foster more than capitalism ever has, and a proactive effort. Anarchists will encourage communities to engage and exchange not just with their immediate neighbors, but transcontinentally, sharing and creating cultural bonds, affinities, and friendships on a global scale so as to make the wars of conquest and annihilation that states have been practicing for millennia inconceivable.

15. Community Organization and Coordination

In opposition to involuntary citizenship and dictatorial or representative decision-making that imposes homogenizing laws on all of society, anarchism posits the principles of voluntary association and self-organization, meaning people are free to form themselves into groups of their choosing, to organize those groups as they see fit, and to order their lives on a daily basis, with everyone’s participation.

A. Every community is autonomous and free to organize its own affairs. Every community should develop its own methods and structures of organization and subsistence.

B. Anarchists encourage models that prioritize well-being and prevent the reemergence of statist organization, including the gift economy within communities, and overlapping, redundant forms of organization that prevent the centralization of power, such as combinations of federated territorial assemblies, workplace assemblies, infrastructural organizations, and professional and educational organizations. The goal is to tie people together in a multiplicity of organizational spaces. This way, many different organizational models and cultures can be practiced, since none are neutral or equally accessible to everyone; conflict is mediated by multiplying relationships through numerous organizational and territorial bonds; and the emergence of a political class that is skilled in manipulating assemblies and that thrives in the alienated space of politics is discouraged. If there is no central space where all decisions and authority are legitimated, no matter how participatory that space pretends to be, there can be no political class. This is the difference between democracy and anarchy—not to mention the fact that anarchism has historically opposed slavery, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, and the like, whereas democracy has often relied upon them.

C. In order to prevent the return of authoritarian dynamics in the guise of democracy, anarchists would do well to facilitate community processes exploring how formal and informal mechanisms of decision-making distribute gendered power and how vital informal, non-legitimized spaces are to the organization of daily life—but also identifying which informal spaces enable the centralization of power and studying how different ways of organizing, opening, and diffusing formal spaces can serve to prevent rather than facilitate the centralization of power.

D. As a general rule, the only time it is acceptable to intervene in the affairs of a neighboring community is in matters of self-defense, when they do not respect their neighbors’ need for freedom and a dignified survival.

E. When a community does not respect its members’ need for food, water, shelter, healthcare, and bodily integrity, it is good for neighboring communities to offer those members support and refuge. The neighboring communities may support efforts by oppressed or exploited members of the first community to end their oppression, but liberation must always be the task of those who are most directly affected by oppression. Communities should try to avoid intervening directly or forcefully in the affairs of their neighbors.

F. Communities should strive to accept the inevitable differences they have with their neighbors, aiming to foster relations of dialogue and peace. In the case of communities that do not respect the dignity and survival of others, it may be preferable to seek mediation or cut off connections rather than escalating to physical conflict.

G. Many communities will find the need or the desire to join in larger associations for matters of culture, production, and distribution and in order to share common resources. It is preferable to form free federations or associations that maintain power at the local level, while also creating multiple, cross-cutting organizational ties so that every person in every community is a member of multiple groups—for example, the coordinating body to protect a shared watershed, a cultural-linguistic grouping, a scientific association and university system, a producers’ and consumers’ union for sharing resources, and a territorial confederation. In this way, each community has a richer web of relationships, and in the case of conflicts, disputes do not fracture into two belligerent sides, but everyone is tied together by other relationships so there is an abundance of mediators and a general interest in preserving the peace.

16. The Planet

Capitalism has brought the planet to the brink of collapse. It is not enough to destroy capitalism. We must also uproot the capitalist, Western way of relating with the land in favor of healthy, reciprocal, ecocentric relations, and we must do everything possible to heal the planet and all the living communities that share it.

A. It is our responsibility to help the planet heal and help ensure the survival and continuity of all living communities.

B. Communities will tend to their territories as best they can to remediate the destruction and pollution caused by capitalism, to identify and protect species and ecosystems that are in danger, to promote the rewilding of spaces, and to conceive of themselves as part of the ecosystem.

C. Communities and scientific associations will pool resources and share information in order to track problems of global concern, such as greenhouse gases, vulnerable species, dead zones and plastic pollution in the oceans, radiation, and other forms of long-term pollution. They will set targets and make recommendations to specific communities and territorial confederations with the goal of ameliorating these problems as thoroughly and fairly as possible.

Glossary

___________

Community

A community is a group of people who live together, mutually creating their material and cultural survival. Because communities define and organize themselves, it is difficult to give them a specific definition. In some cases, community refers to the smaller group, between 30-150 people, that coordinates more closely for the organization of daily affairs, taking advantage of the small numbers and close relationships to decide their affairs smoothly and horizontally. In other cases, it can also refer to the supra-community of several, dozens, or even hundreds of communities that share common languages and culture and an identification with a territory, and that coordinate frequently for matters of subsistence, infrastructure, education, and other matters.

In some cases in the text, living communities does not refer exclusively to humans but to all living things that exist in a web of relationships.

Excess Wealth

Communities should decide for themselves what constitutes excess wealth or a wealthy person. However, the intention in this text is not at all to follow in the footsteps of left-wing populism and focus our disapproval on billionaires or even millionaires. On the contrary, we feel the bar should be set much lower. For determining wealthiness, we suggest the guidepost as having three times more wealth than is average in a given geographical region (e.g., those making more than three times the average wage in their country before the abolition of capitalism and nation-states). Excess wealth, after the abolition of money, is everything a wealthy person possesses that is not necessary for their dignified survival, especially what they had used to ostentatiously set themselves apart from the average.

Managers

A manager is someone whose job is to monitor and discipline other workers in order to increase their productivity and facilitate their exploitation. At each workplace, people can decide whether a person did something genuinely useful before the revolution and whether a part or the whole of their job category can be redeemed.

Rights

In this document, we do not use the concept of rights in the Christian or liberal fashion, as a set of properties guaranteed by God or nature, nor in the statist fashion, as a list of opportunities that a state must safeguard for all its citizens. We mean it strictly in an anti-authoritarian ethical sense: things that we consider it right for people to have, to take, or to defend, so much so that we would fight alongside them to help them protect or recover these things if they were threatened.

Territory

We do not understand territory as a dead, two-dimensional space demarcated on a map, with borders and a fixed area. Territory is the earth, it is alive, it is a web of relationships. The only rightful claim people have to a specific territory is if they are a part of that web of relationships and help keep the web vibrant and alive. Because memory is an important part of knowing and respecting a territory, people who had a strong relationship with a territory and were forced off that land still have a relationship with the territory.

Additionally, territory implies movement. This is not a proposal for allotting equal parcels to roughly interchangeable communities. All territory is specific, and the healthiest way to relate with the territory will change from region to region. Nomadic or semi-nomadic lifeways are just as legitimate, just as intimately connected with the territory, as sedentary ones (excluding, of course, those based on private property and exploitation). Following this logic, claims to territory can and do overlap, with different groups carrying out different activities related to subsistence, spirituality, play, and the like at different moments and in different ways.

Transition

The only kind of transition referred to in this document describes the transformation of existing capitalist infrastructure into the kind of infrastructure suited to a free society. This is simply a recognition that it will involve difficulties and a great deal of effort to make universal food, housing, and healthcare a reality by means of infrastructures and productive practices that do not harm the planet. We do not contemplate any kind of transitional state. The state never fades away; it must be destroyed.

Workers

Under capitalism, workers designates an alienated category: we are those who sell our activity in order to buy back a small part of the value we produce. We are the ones who carry out the labor that gives society life; yet it is important to emphasize that we do not seek to identify with our alienation, the quality that makes us workers, but rather to abolish it, especially since under capitalism, work creates so many useless or harmful things and is organized in a way that tends to be terrible for our health. Ex-workers, then, are those who had been forced to be workers under capitalism, but who, with the abolition of capitalism, abolish the category of wage work and other compulsory labors. They may deserve some special legitimacy when it comes to expropriating the resources of their former workplace or industry; like everyone else, they are engaged in the endeavor of transforming human activity in order to create abundance for all and to blur the distinctions between learning, work, and play.

CRIMETHINC

The post Exercise: What Would an Anarchist Program Look Like? – Crimethinc appeared first on Void Network.

3ήμερο Φεστιβάλ ΟΥΤΟΠΙΑ

Θέατρο ΕΜΠΡΟΣ (Ρ.Παλαμήδη 2) , Παρ. 2 έως Κυρ. 4 Φεβρουαρίου 2018

80 Καλλιτέχνες και ο Άλλος Άνθρωπος

ΕΙΣΟΔΟΣ ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΗ

The post Φεστιβάλ Ουτοπία- Παρ.02-Σαββ.03-Κυρ.04/02/2018 ΕΜΠΡΟΣ- Festival Utopia in Athens appeared first on Void Network.

Κύκλος διαλέξεων-παρουσιάσεων

ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ

κύκλος 3ος
Πέμπτη 1 Φεβρουαρίου 2018 8.00μμ

Επανάσταση και Ουτοπία, οι συνδηλώσεις ενός Ρομαντικού Πεπρωμένου.
Ομιλητής:
Στέφανος Ροζάνης (Καθηγητής Φιλοσοφίας, συγγραφέας)

Ελεύθερος Κοινωνικός Χώρος ΝOSOTROS
Θεμιστοκλέους 66 Εξάρχεια

Παρουσίαση-συντονισμός συζήτησης
Γιάννης Ραουζαιος (Κριτικός κινηματογράφου, συγγραφέας, μέλος της συλλογικότητας Κενό Δίκτυο)

διοργάνωση:
ΚΕΝΟ ΔΙΚΤΥΟ https://voidnetwork.gr/
με την υποστήριξη του Ελεύθερου Κοινωνικού Χώρου Nosotros

Οι επόμενοι κύκλοι συζητήσεων σχετικά με την Επανάσταση θα ανακοινωθούν σύντομα
* “Ο Χρόνος” αποτέλεσε το θέμα συζητήσεων της περσινής χρονιάς. Οι φετινές ομιλίες πάνω σε αυτό το θέμα θα ανακοινωθούν επίσης μέσα στις επόμενες εβδομάδες

The post ΕΠΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΗ και Ουτοπία- μέρος 3ον / Στέφανος Ροζάνης- Πεμ.1/2/2018 NOSOTROS- Κενό Δίκτυο appeared first on Void Network.

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.

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.

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.

One big J.G. Ballard/Philip K. Dick shopping mall from now till eternity, basically.

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.

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.

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.

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”?”

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.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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!

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!

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.)

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

“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?

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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…


SOURCE: The Anvil Review http://theanvilreview.org/
for further inquiry follow the comments here: http://anarchistnews.org/content/new-nihilism and here: http://www.anarchistnews.org/content/new-nihilism-forum-topic-comment-section

a comment at the essay by Emile:

THE FOURTH OPTION NOT MENTIONED BY WILSON

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).

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.

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?

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”.

there are quite a few references to nietzsche here, but none to ‘amor fati’, love of fate;

“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’

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”.

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’;

“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

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.

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.

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;

“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.
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… 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.
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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)

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.

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.
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.

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.

nietzsche was on the same wavelength as emerson on this;

“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’

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.

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.

The post “The New Nihilism” by Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey appeared first on Void Network.

Morning Star: 
Surrealism, Marxism, Anarchism, Situation-ism, Utopia. by Michael Lowy

YOU CAN READ AND FREE DOWNLOAD THE BOOK HERE:
http://dlx.b-ok.org/genesis/520000/9d6e4d1f61a0a66ad3d71c4bfd6388d2/_as/[Michael_Lowy]_Morning_Star_surrealism,_marxism,_(b-ok.org).pdf

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