Opinion

Many have wondered if there is a fundamental contradiction between day to day work demanding services like public housing and heath care, and the anarchist goal of overthrowing government and/or capitalism.

I will posit that no such contradiction exists, as "government" can be bifurcated into the law enforcement/military/corporate support primary component, and the social service components the capitalists have allowed to exist since the last Depression in an effort to buy peace from the lower and working classes. I will posit later in this essay that in supporting these programs we are demanding restitution for capitalism's crimes, so there is no contradiction in supporting any and all social services.

Years ago, GOP scumbags of the Ronald Reagan era proposed to "starve the beast" in an effort to destroy social programs. the plan was to use combined increases in military spending with huge tax cuts to make social spending unaffordable. The plan fell apart at the end of the Cold War-and because at the Federal level the government can literally create money out of thin air with changes in banking "reserve ratios," by borrowing, or just plain printing more.

Yesterday an unusual story arose out of the usual static emanating from the news media. A middle-aged man stormed the Discovery Channel headquarters in Maryland, USA and took hostages. A standoff ensued between the man and police, ending when the police killed the man, Jason J. Lee. Not long after the situation was brought to a head, Lee's manifesto came out. Evidently Lee held some very singular views regarding civilization, and demanded the Discovery Channel air programming elaborating his views.

Lee has already been stuck with the dismissive label of insanity by those who wield unseemly degrees of control over common discourse—the very capitalist media he targeted. Doubtless Lee was possessed of an unstable psychology. In the coming days the capitalist news media will thoroughly flesh out his psychological profile, and use this as an excuse to avoid examining his odd philosophy. Soon the news cycle will move on to some other events and Lee will leave the common consciousness as quickly as he appeared.

Before that happens, I have decided to seize the moment and compare the theory and actions of James Lee to those of Green Anarchism. Though clearly the work of a troubled, desperate and erratic mind, Lee's manifesto raises many important points too often excluded in common discourse. His manifesto bears many similarities to Green Anarchist thought, yet is obviously uninformed by the rich theoretical tradition that has developed within the Green Anarchist milieu in the past few decades. In this essay I will attempt to demonstrate that, though Lee's personal views do not appear to have been coherently processed in his own mind, that they are but one manifestation of a trend which is quickly growing in ranks. I call this trend the anti-civilization movement.

by scott crow

Note: On the fifth anniversary of Katrina I want to share this narrative, an excerpt of stories about anarchist organizing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. This excerpted piece is made of stories about the early violence we came across in dealing with the white vigilantes and police in Algiers. It takes place upon my return to the area after a failed mission to find my friend Robert King of the Angola 3 (see 'It takes a spark' from INFOSHOP archives) right after the levees failed. It also contains characters who had done something good only to reveal themselves as less than honorable, and somewhat harmful later. These stories take place just prior to organizing the Common Ground Collective. This is a rough draft excerpt from my forthcoming book: "Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy and the Common Ground Collective"

Five years later we have only scratched the surface of the atrocities of the vigilantes and the police. Many of us are still healing from those encounters. This story is just one of them

"...within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not - I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior." --Audre Lorde

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Individual freedom is a concept that is foreign to nature. The only individual that is free is God and if he is free, he is either nature itself which is not influenced by anything outside of itself, or more popularly in the West, a supra-natural [situated in the heaven that transcends nature] being; i.e. The person that is free is not a brother who has to share inclusion in a common habitat whose dynamic is conditioned by the dynamics of all the brothers who share inclusion in it at the same time as their behaviours are being conditioned by it.

How many times do we have to hear a Maturana or a Neyrat sharing that "the organism IS the environment", or "organisms and their milieu are not two different things. if a mouse were abandoned in absolute emptiness, it would no longer be a mouse."?

This is not freedom in its popular connotation wherein one is free to choose one’s own actions according to one’s own individual purpose.

As we are increasingly often reminding ourselves, by breathing in, drinking and injesting the pollution that we generate by our careless production and discharging of unfriendly effluents, our outside-of-self-spacenourishes ourinside-of-self. Protecting the health of this outside-of-selfthat we depend upon for nurturance then becomes a qualifying condition without which we cannot As we do our thing, then (exercise our freedom) to favoritize the growth of our individual powers of being.

From NEFAC

The recent U.S. Social Forum in Detroit brought together some 10-15 thousand people, a lot of them young, to have conversations and participate in workshops and assemblies devoted to changing the existing rotten capitalist system. The USSF generated much enthusiasm, for the Forum was a huge opportunity for folks for the first time to meet others who were doing similar work in other places. These projects included issues like fighting foreclosures and evictions, school and hospital closings, police brutality and prisons, fetus fanatics, immigration xenophobia, and union givebacks; and building alternative institutions, environmental justice, transformative justice, participatory cultures, radical bicycling, &c. (Altogether there were well over 1000 workshops and assemblies over four days).

However, despite the excitement, the Forum fell far short of what’s necessary to address the current economic and political crisis of capitalism.

Why? First, in my view the crisis is much more than an increased level of attacks on working class and oppressed people. (Capitalism attacks them every minute of every day anyway—that’s the nature of the system). Rather, it’s a crisis of the system itself, graphically illustrated less than two years ago by the collapse of such corporate giants as Bear Stearns, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Chrysler, Washington Mutual and others. The capitalists exposed themselves as being incapable of managing their own system. (And we don’t want to manage it, either).

From Rocktown Rebel

"Violent attacks on the high seas without lawful authority have always been piracy under the law of nations" -Benjamin Hatch, lead prosecutor in the Norfolk, VA piracy trial (quoted in the WSJ, August 14th, emp. added)

"I think the military and the government have some things that should be kept secret. [...] There is no 'right to know' secret information." -Jim Hanson, a right-wing blogger, counter-protesting a "Free Bradley Manning" demonstration in Quantico, VA (quoted in CNN.com, August 9th, emp. added)

From Counterpunch - by Peter LineBaugh

"All For One and One For All!"

Human solidarity as expressed in the slogan “all for one and one for all” is the foundation of commoning.  In capitalist society this principle is permitted in childhood games or in military combat. Otherwise, when it is not honored in hypocrisy, it appears in the struggle contra capitalism or, as Rebecca Solnit shows, in the disasters of fire, flood, or earthquake.

The activity of commoning is conducted through labor with other resources; it does not make a division between “labor” and “natural resources.”  On the contrary, it is labor which creates something as a resource, and it is by resources that the collectivity of labor comes to pass.  As an action it is thus best understood as a verb rather than as a “common pool resource.”  Both Lovelock’s ‘Gaia Hypothesis’ and the environmentalism of Rachel Carson were attempts to restore this perspective.

Commoning is primary to human life.  Scholars used to write of ‘primitive communism’.  ‘The primary commons’ renders the experience more clearly.  Scarcely a society has existed on the face of the earth which has not had at its heart the commons; the commodity with its individualism and privatization was strictly confined to the margins of the community where severe regulations punished violators.  

Commoning begins in the family. The kitchen where production and reproduction meet, and the energies of the day between genders and between generations are negotiated.  The momentous decisions in the sharing of tasks, in the distribution of product, in the creation of desire, and in sustaining health are first made here.

From C4SS - by David D'Amato

Given what are widespread and prevailing misconceptions, one could perhaps be forgiven for identifying anarchy with unmitigated chaos and libertarianism with today’s corporate avarice. At the same time, Statists — whose systems have rendered nothing but destitution for those they purport to aid — enjoy an opposite but related misbelief, namely, that theirs is the philosophy concerned with economic or social justice. Not only, then, do the state and its influential manipulators use brutality to exploit productive individuals and despoil society of its wealth, they have also inveigled almost everyone into believing that their tools of plunder proceed from a genuine concern for those among us with the least. The coercive apparatuses of the state, however, have never been commanded by the poor and powerless, instead falling under the sway of elites all grasping at the levers of power in attempts to accomplish their ends through force as against voluntary, peaceful means. As characterized by political economist Frederic Bastiat, “When … the legal code imposes mutual sacrifices on the citizens, human nature is not thereby abrogated. Everyone will then direct his efforts toward contributing little to, and taking much from, the common fund of sacrifices. Now, is it the most unfortunate who gain in this struggle? Certainly not, but rather the most influential and calculating.” So in the mainstream, general discourse a view contending merely that no one ought to be able to initiate force against another is misconstrued as merciless and inhuman while the ethics of violence and theft are raised to the level of genuine charity.

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Authoritarian-control-freakism finds its forte in popular beliefs such as ‘the climate is misbehaving’ and ‘we can', and, 'we need to' correct its errant behaviour. (which we claim, we caused in the first place).

That is, there is a popular belief amongst the currently extant crop of humans, who are parented by, and receive life-sustaining nurturance from the natural milieu they are included in, that they can manipulate the outside habitat that parents and nurtures them, by way of their inside transient inhabitant dynamic, ... a kind of ‘mobius strip’ operation. This is made difficult by the notion that ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ (Heaven and Earth) are mutually exclusives ‘spaces’.

A lot of old arguments concerning the relation between outside and inside or ‘heaven’ and ‘earth’ that were squelched a long time ago seem to be ‘coming home to roost’ in our modern era.

From Anarchist Writers - by Anarcho

A few years back, I published a few articles in Freedom on raising the demand for co-operatives in response to the economic crisis. These were ‘Bailouts or co-operatives?’ and ‘Co-operatives and conflicts!’ (although they appeared in Freedom slightly edited). The last was in reply to another article on this subject, which was replied to on-line. Somewhat belatedly, I now respond to the response.

The author, Joseph Kay, stresses “the importance of a comprehensive discussion of a libertarian communist response to the crisis is reaffirmed” and his reply had “the hope of clarifying some of his misunderstandings or misrepresentations of my position and contributing constructively to this necessary debate.”

First, he proclaims that his arguments are not contradictory, as I suggested. He argues that there “is no contradiction here, for two important reasons.” First, he “made clear in my article my objection to a strategy of co-operatives is twofold” as “anarchist demands for co-operatives are impotent, since we’re in no position at present to force them.” However, my point was that his position was contradictory because he argued that anarchists were in “no position to demand” anything yet that did not stop him raising “Communist demands” in the very same article.