The goal of anarchistnews.org is to provide a non-sectarian source for news about and of concern to anarchists.

The Anarchist Imagination

Sat, 12/29/2012 - 00:07 -- worker

From Combustion Books

Introducing the Anarchist Imagination

Everyone knows the world is a mess. There’s starvation and ecocide, racism and sexism. The rich get richer and the poor get dead, all while species go extinct and carbon warms up the air. It’s not surprising that so much of our fiction is as bleak as our future threatens to be.

But we can imagine other worlds. We can imagine better ways to organize ourselves, better ways to treat one another, better ways to treat the earth. And specifically, we can imagine worlds without the authoritarianism of the state and capitalism.

The question, then, is: what would those worlds look like?

Combustion Books, a worker-run publisher of genre fiction, is looking to publish a new line of books: The Anarchist Imagination. We are looking for novella-length (15,000-40,000 words) anarchist utopias.

Our intention is not, of course, to put down blueprints that must be followed line by line. We offer no prescription for future society. Instead, the utopia is a form we can use to explore our revolutionary desires, to showcase ideas we might put into practice, to give us glimpses of what we fight for.

The utopia is a peculiar form of fiction to write, to be sure, and we’re looking for stories that balance the exposition of society with compelling narrative and character. The stories can be set in our own world–past, present, or future–or in fantasy. The politics can be anything anti-state, the economics anything that isn’t capitalism. As this series goes on, we hope to showcase just how wide this terrain can be.

Submissions can be sent to submissions@combustionbooks.org.
You can also view our regular submission guidelines.

Category: 

Comments

Submitted by emile on

it's not a question of changing 'what is out there', its a question of changing 'what is in here'.

“But we can imagine other worlds. We can imagine better ways to organize ourselves, better ways to treat one another, better ways to treat the earth. And specifically, we can imagine worlds without the authoritarianism of the state and capitalism. ... The question, then, is: what would those worlds look like?

no, the question is, ‘what would those new people, our new selves with more realistic views of self and other and how these relate, look like?’ [i.e. how would we, as non-dualists rather than dualists, ‘look’]. that's where philosophers of modern physics such as mach, poincare, bohm, schroedinger, position the problem.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Ok ok ok, you got my attention. Where should I begin? And don't fuck around. Begin with a brooad overview, not some specific detail, please.

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

I tend toward the non-dualistic view of reality but so do the liberals, they are idealists. They think if they change themselves then the world will change but it doesnt work. I've done a lot of work on myself but the capitalists are still plundering the earth. Maybe that's what I really want is to be a good guy in a world full of badness so I can indulge in self-righteous indignation and self-pity. Maybe if from this moment forward I believe that this is Utopia, Nirvana, Heaven then that's what it will be. Is this a world of my making or am I just a victim of circumstance?

Submitted by emile on

the advaita trap is what one falls into if one tries to comprehend non-duality without stepping beyond the EITHER/OR logic of the excluded third, which is incapable of transcending ‘opposites’ such as ‘creation’ and ‘destruction’ [creation and destruction are transcended by ‘relational transformation’, which requires BOTH/AND logic of the included third].

to most western raised/educated people [prior to their unlearning of what their culture has been teaching them], LOGIC=EITHER/OR LOGIC and any proposition that appears to involve logical inconsistencies [either/or logical inconsistencies] does not ‘make sense’. in EITHER/OR logic, something cannot ‘exist’ and ‘not exist’ at the same time, but this is not only possible in quantum physics but fundamental to it. in the ‘advaita trap video, the woman who is arguing against non-existence of familiar concepts is holding firm, in her argument, to EITHER/OR logic.

in schroedinger’s ‘what is life’ essay, he notes that the Atman [personal self]= Brahman [eternal self]. this is implicit in Mach’s principle; i.e. the ‘inhabitat’ = ‘the habitat’; e.g. the flow or Oneness = the flow-features. in heraclitus, this non-duality is expressed; “The one and only wise does and does not consent to be called by the name of Zeus” where ‘zeus’ is understood as ‘brahman’ or ‘the eternal oneness’ or ‘space-time continuum’.

schroedinger pointed out that the findings of modern physic support the understanding that what we call ‘things’ or ‘material bodies’ are ‘variations in the wave-structure of space’ [the plurality of inhabitants = the one-ness of the relational spatial-plenum].

one of the easiest ways of seeing how this non-dualist understanding impacts social relations is in how one sees justice. the non-dualist view of justice [restorative justice] is ‘beyond good and evil’ [as in nietzsche’s philosophical work on beyond-good-and-evil]. the offender and victim opposites ‘do and do not exist’ as separate entities. they ‘do exist’ in the sense that we can see them as distinct forms that are mutually opposed to one another. but ‘they do not exist’ if we understand them as conjugate aspects of a ‘greater dynamic’; i.e. the ‘flow’ in which they break apart in the manner of high and low pressure zones in the atmosphere, which correspond to ‘source’ and ‘sink’ in the convection cell. the tornado is the airflow it is included in. it is a resonance feature in the flow constituted by the conjugating of ‘sink’ (low pressure that ‘sucks’ flow into it) and ‘source’ (high pressure that ‘fountains’ flow out of it); i.e. there is one dynamic, a relational spatial cycling [resonance flow-feature] with ‘opposite poles’.

the implication in social justice terms is that a multiplicity of visibly distinct forms are all part of the same continuously transforming ‘one-ness’ of space; aka ‘the spatial plenum’, the ‘spacetime continuum’. everything is enfolded within this ‘spatial plenum’; i.e. it is continually being stirred by the gathering and regathering of resonance features. western culture uses language to ‘concretize’ and ‘discretize’ the visible forms in the flow which are, at the same time, the oneness of the flowing-spatial-plenum. once language notionally breaks out, concretizes and discretizes the visible, tactile resonance forms, it follows by re-rendering ‘dynamics’ in the notional terms of notional independent ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these notional things-in-themselves do. this is where ‘moral law’ comes in because once we understand these visible forms as ‘independent things-in-themselves, notionally with their own locally originating internal process driven and directed behaviour, then since their behaviour is not seen as being interdependent with the dynamics of the relational space they share inclusion in [that is at the same time being conditioned by the other flow-features included in the flow], it ‘makes sense’ to judge a person’s or flow-feature’s behaviour as if it is purely and solely their own behaviour, hence ‘moral law’ based on the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ behaviour of the individual. in restorative justice, the person as a locally existing thing-in-itself BOTH ‘does’ AND ‘does not’ exist. here one can recall ‘quantum behaviour’ as in the classic experiment of electrons passing through two closely space slits. if we look for individual forms we see them, and if we don’t look, they are not there. that’s the way it goes in a fluid-dynamical world of continually transforming relational space. the resonance features are the means of transformation of the dynamic one-ness. that is the physical reality according to modern physics.

do those islands over there ‘exist’? what if the tide goes out and they are no longer discrete ‘things-in-themselves’ but all part of the mainland? what if the water levels rise and they are bumps on the bottom of the ocean. what about the names we gave them to affirm their separate existence? do continents exist? flow-is relational-spatial and does not depend on ‘things’ and ‘what they do’. ‘things’ in the flow are ‘patterns’ that persist relative to the conscious attention of the observer. the observer uses language to name and define them. but what about those storm-cells that no observer has viewed? do they ‘exist’? nature has no need to define and name them; i.e. to split them out of the flow [the dynamic one-ness]. it is convenient for us to ‘name and define’ forms of interest to us. as john stuart mill observes; “every definition implies an axiom, that in which we affirm the existence of the object defined’, ... be it an island, a continent, a human ‘being’, or ‘tea’. a word has no meaning unless there are at least two people to associate the word with the same sensing experience. multiple people using a word in the same way strengthens the sense of realness of a word-concept. if king ralph stakes out his kingdom and ralph is the only one saying that ‘this is the entrance into the kingdom of ralph’, he may be considered a 'crazy' and ignored. but if he has a bunch of tough gorillas for friends that commit to ‘making believers’ out of anyone who ignores ralph, then soon people will be saying; ... ‘careful, you are about to enter the kingdom of ralph’.

it is convenient to break things apart on the basis of recognizable local, visible patterns and pretend they ‘exist’ but it is not ‘physical reality’, it is ‘intellectual reality’ and western civilization’s ‘problem’ is that we are psychologically conditioned from birth, in our culture, to confuse intellectual idealization for reality. this ‘intellectual reality’ is NOT ‘physical reality’ since it is commonly based on ‘local things-in-themselves’ and ‘what these things do’ [pure idealization] based on ‘schaumkommen’ [appearances]. physical reality is the continually transforming relational spatial-plenum, or ‘one-ness’, according to philosophers of science such as Mach, Poincaré, Bohm, Schroedinger.

if one ‘goes with’ physical reality, it follows that one will opt for ‘restorative justice’ and the understanding that ‘man belongs to the earth’, ‘the earth does not belong to man’ [the human inhabitant and the habitat are not mutually excluding as ‘dualism’ would have it].

it is this dualist view of self and other that is causing all kinds of problems, and therefore, the question is NOT about imagining how things will work in a new and improved world, ... the question is whether we are going to be able to collectively escape from the curse of being mired down in dualism. ‘dualism’ is very useful, the problems come when we start and stop with dualism, and confuse its idealism for physical reality.

in justice, dualism presents us with the concept of ‘offender’ and ‘victim’. in western justice, this conceptualizing is confused for reality. the implication is that both of these are ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviours; i.e. dualism [absolute separation of self and other] holds that ‘events’ can be understood as the full and sole ‘results’ of independent ‘causal agents’ as in the case of the ‘offender’. note that ‘space’ is a non-participant in the logic of western justice. if the ‘victim’ is a monopoly landowner and the ‘offender’ is a starving peasant that steals an apple from the landowner’s multi-acre orchard, the physically real mediating spatial medium effect [mach’s principle] does not come into it, and the ‘existences’ of the ‘offender’ and the ‘victim’ are solidly affirmed. in restorative justice, the continually transforming relational space is understood as a common mediating spatial medium [habitat] through which the dynamics of the various inhabitants influence the dynamics of the various inhabitants [mach’s principle]. therefore, the simple idealization of ‘offender’ – ‘victim’ is a convenient [common inclusion in a relational space-denying] idealization that must not be confused for physical reality.

the ‘offender’ does not really ‘exist’ and neither does the ‘victim’ exist; i.e. THEY DO NOT EXIST AS THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES. by the same token, hurricane KATRINA as the ‘cause’ of destruction in new orleans does not exist [NOT AS A THING-IN-ITSELF].

events do not deconstruct into ‘doer’ and ‘deed’. we impose such deconstruction, it is not physically real.

“[Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ reflects] our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate” … “That which gives the extraordinary firmness to our belief in causality is not the great habit of seeing one occurrence following another but our inability to interpret events otherwise than as events caused by intentions. It is belief in the living and thinking as the only effective force–in will, in intention–it is belief that every event is a deed, that every deed presupposes a doer, it is belief in the “subject.” Is this belief in the concept of subject and attribute not a great stupidity?” – Nietzsche, ‘Will to Power’ 484

the two women arguing about whether ‘tea’ exists or does not exist is an empty example. let’s take an example in which two women argue whether the ‘offender’ exists and the ‘victim’ exists in a child-soldier rape and murder case. the non-dualist will accept that it is convenient to idealize the continual transformation of relational space in terms ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what things do’, as if they were endowed with locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviours, but she will not hold the offender 100% responsible and the victim and the community-at-large 100% innocent, since the web of relations that constitutes community is the source of the inhabitant behaviours that arise within it [mach’s principle]. the non-dualist view of justice, ‘restorative justice’, is operationalized in northern aboriginal communities;

“Circle sentencing [restorative justice] fundamentally shifts the focus in searching for solutions from symptoms to causes. The discussion in circles, unlike courts, does not isolate the criminal act from the social, economic and family environment fostering crime. Further, unlike courts, the circle focus extends beyond the offender to include the interests and concerns and circumstances of offenders, their families, the victim and the community. --- Honorable Justice Barry Stuart of the Yukon Territorial Court

[this aboriginal traditional view, which is essentially ‘machean’ or ‘quantum physics compliant’ as contrasted with ‘newtonian’, is also the basis of anarcha-indigenism]

the ‘dualist’ woman in the arguing pair, if she is a hardline dualist, will stick to her guns in insisting that the ‘offender’ is not simply a convenient idealization, and that he is 100% responsible for his own behaviour, the rape and murder that he has inflicted on a 100% innocent female victim. meanwhile, in africa, restorative justice where the community takes responsibility for its engendering of inhabitant dynamics, is used to bring such offenders back into full acceptance in the community.

compare this to ‘the war on terrorism’, guantanamo bay [omar khadr etc.], grand juries, big brother government surveillance and other continuing zero tolerance initiatives in our ‘institutionalized vengeance’ brand of western justice.

the question is not whether we can imagine things being done in a new and improved way, the question is whether we can escape our confusing of the dualist worldview for physical reality.

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

The third party is a jazzed up scientific god to take some of the responsibility for what goes on this world which is ok with me but it's nothing new. You're creating a duality between restorative justice and institutionalised vengeance which is false since western justice at times includes mercy for offenders and responsibility for people not to be victims and god takes some blame too (third party). Maybe we can do better though with the new paradigm. If all is one then ultimately there is no offender or victim or spatial plenum or web of communal relations just the revealing of one. You still consider some things as good (like justice and restoration) and some things as bad (child soldiers and rape) which I do too but only subjectively. Objectively we don't know what THIS is or what it means. I tend toward solipsism that the only thing that exists is what I see and if I stop looking at the bad stuff it doesn't exist and if it comes back on me karma brought it back (my sick desire for sick things). So by me following the bad news and becoming interested in social justice and activist stuff I brought it into being and I can turn it off anytime I want (it's just a bad habit of mine). You might say well don't watch the news for a while or think about bad things but when some atrocity does happen I'll send you a newspaper clipping that details the events so you know that it's real and that when a tree falls in the forest it really does make a sound but since we made this agreement before hand I brought it into being because of my sick need to live in a world where bad things happen sometimes. It's an interesting experiment, try avoiding all negativity for a while and the world you experience will change. Don't watch the news (or any tv) don't read any bad news reports (or pessimistic philosophy) and the world becomes a better place. This is a good prescription for people suffering bad mental health, turn everything off and your brain will calm down, these machines make people sick. Sunshine, fresh air and exercise do wonders for the human spirit. Anyway emile I enjoy your writing and you can count me as a fan I know you put a good effort into your posts.

Submitted by emile on

ok, the limitations of language make communications on dualism and non-dualism difficult, but only in the sense we can’t capture what is actually going on ‘directly’. we can still use inference. you say,

“You're creating a duality between restorative justice and institutionalised vengeance which is false since western justice at times includes mercy for offenders and responsibility for people not to be victims and god takes some blame too (third party).”

as i said, if one wants to restrict one’s interpretation of propositions to either/or logic, then all difference is duality. but if you care to use both/and logic, you can see the community BOTH as a relational web wherein every individual’s action is interdependent with everyone else’s and with the community dynamic AND as a collection of notional ‘local independent’ participants.

i don’t accept that being ‘merciful’ as in ‘liberal’ worldview is ‘non-dualist’. the liberal believes that the offender is the one responsible for the ‘offence’ but wants to be merciful because of ‘mitigating circumstances’. this is still ‘dualism’ which sees the offender and ‘those he has offended’ [victim] as ‘mutually exclusive’; i.e. the liberal view does not accept that one can be ‘guilty’ and ‘innocent’ at the same time; it merely wants to treat the offender ‘mercifully’ because of the mitigating circumstances; e.g. the hard life or difficult hand he has been dealt by God or by ‘random chance’

indigenous/restorative justice or non-dualist justice does not make absolute splits so there is no ‘guilty/innocent’ offender/victim split in the non-dualist view. in the relational web that is community, dissonance has arisen that has manifested in murders and rapes etc. the non-dualist view is that the community is screwed up but there is no way of tracking this back along a causal chain to find it dead-end in an ‘offender’; i.e. to impute the jumpstarting of a causal chain in an individual. the causal sourcing keeps going back into the relational space of the community where the original sourcing is circularly laundered out by way of mach’s principle; “the dynamics of the habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the inhabitants at the same time as the dynamics of the inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the habitat.”

non-dualists are not bleeding heart liberals that want to ‘go easy on the offender’ [they accept the offender-victim model as a useful but highly simplified model]. non-dualists [particularly indigenous aboriginal traditionalists] truly believe the community is responsible and therefore use the circle to have all participate in the restoring of balance and harmony. as ‘fits’ with the notion of community as an interdependent relational web, no-one is uninvolved in the outbreak of dissonance, just as no part of the earth is uninvolved in an earthquake, and no part of the atmosphere is uninvolved in the emergence of the hurricane.

i am not suggesting an ‘either/or’ choice between restorative justice and western-find-the-offenders-among-us-innocents-and-punish-them justice; i am instead claiming that the ‘offender-victim’ model is an ‘intellectually simplified’ view of a physical dynamic that is inherently relational. the simplification [useful and perhaps necessary] derives from imposing absolute space and absolute time reference framing to ‘split out’ the event in question and intellectually reducing it to a doer-deed affair. so we get three choices;

1. conservative dualism: the offender is guilty, the victim and community are innocent, punish the offender.

2. liberal dualism: the offender is guilty, the victim and community are innocent, but the offender has been given a difficult life [an act of God] so that we, the innocent citizens of the community who, thanks to God, have had an easy life, should be merciful.

3. non-dualism: everyone in the relational web of community has a hand in the emergence of dissonance within the community [mach’s principle]. restoring the relational web of community to balance and harmony is called for. this non-dualist approach goes beyond judging behaviours as good as bad since there is no one without responsibility and thus no-one to ‘judge the rest’ [there are no grounds for a judging/commanding hierarchy]

in restorative justice, (3.), there will be an intervention and an ‘offender’ and a ‘victim’ will be identified, but there is no assumption that the dissonant event is fully captured in terms of an offender doing a dirty deed to a victim. the relational web of community is understood to be the source of the emergent dissonance. as with the case of the earthquake which can be superficially seen as two bodies of rock; one active/thrusting and the other passive, while the deeper source is relational-spatial tensions, in which the full space is involved.

if one applies this to the world community of nations, one can see that politicians employ (1.) and no politician could stay in office employing (2.) while (3.) would require everyone [all nations] to go beyond the standard good and evil judging of the actions of other nations, and thus eliminate hierarchy in good-and-evil judging and veto power for those highest in the power hierarchy, the stuff that political hierarchy is made of.

as for shutting out the bad news, it would appear just as important to stop confusing the propositions of language for reality and thus ‘reading the news’ in a different way. a lot of the ‘depression’ in the news comes from watching the persisting failure of our institutions of justice, governance and commerce, a light at the end of the tunnel that the non-dualist can celebrate.

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

The genocide in Rawanda came to mind where a mass hysteria swept the country and caused people to hack each other up with machetes in a wholesale slaughter (causal sourcing). How could you possibly sort that situation out with a western offender/victim model of justice. Obviously there was a dynamic at work that was greater than any of the participants many whom would probably never commit such acts under normal circumstances. Another example that comes to mind is a small blackish community north of here that has an exceptionally high murder rate this year for such a small town area. I can easily see how the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws and economic depravity and isolation have been determining factors in these events and how we as a community are also responsible for what's going on there (relational web). In both of these examples throwing some people in jail isn't going to cure the problem. I interpret this dissonance to be an alarm signal for a sick area of the community that needs some healing. I would have to read some examples of restorative justice before I would know how to apply it to situations like these.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"a mass hysteria swept the country"?? you racist fuck. what a disgusting simplification.

Submitted by emile on

the application of restorative justice to re-establish harmony in the community and dispel the tensions of vengeance-seeking involves the participation of ‘offenders’ and ‘victims’ in a ‘circle’ process or web of circle processes. but the mindset of the collective is where this would have to come from. as nietzsche points out, our western habit is to see the source of the violence as jumpstarting from within the offending individual, from his intention. in this ‘newtonian view’ based on seeing humans as ‘beings’ with their own locally originating, internal intention-directed behaviour, there is no notion of ‘circularity’ in the sourcing of behaviour that ‘tracks back’ to the web of relations that constitutes community in the Machean physics view [in a relational space, nothing jumpstarts from ‘local beings’. instead of seeing ‘organisms’ as ‘units of being’, one sees them as resonance features in the dynamic One-ness of relational space. as emerson puts it in ‘The Method of Nature’, the genius of nature not only inhabits the pear-tree but creates it, infusing it with a talent to produce pears, this ‘locally instantiating talent’ owing itself to its being sourced by the ‘genius’ of nature [by the One-ness]. the sourcing of the production of pears in the pear-tree APPEARS to be a behaviour that originates locally, jumpstarting from the internal processes in the pear-tree. in this view, we are ignoring the ‘fullness’ of space in which the pear-tree gathers and is sustained for a while as a resonance feature within a larger relational ecosystem [sun, soil, water, air]. it is language and grammar that are the source of this psychological ‘appearance’ wherein we attribute full responsibility of the production of pears to the pear-tree. this psychological impression derives from our considering the pear-tree as a local, visible, material system-in-itself, which our experience informs us is not the case.

i am elaborating on this, because there is no point in launching into a restorative justice ‘circle’ process if the participants are all assuming that our ‘local, visible, material systems BEING’ is ‘all she wrote’ and that our behaviours must therefore jumpstart fully and solely from our internal processes. this, of course, is the standard view of the biological sciences, which conflicts with the Machean physics view and conflicts with views of philosophers such as Emerson and Nietzsche, who observe the arbitrariness of the dualist breaking out of local, visible, material systems and imputing ‘thing-in-itself’ status to them as language is so adept at.

the Machean model of dynamics sees the individual more as a sailboater whose power and direction derives from the relational dynamic it is situationally included in, while orthodox biological science sees the individual as a powerboater whose power and direction derives from its own internal processes. the latter ‘biological sciences’ view of the ‘organism-as-thing-in-itself-operating-in-absolute-space-and-absolute-time’ is what is institutionalized in western justice, governance and commerce [in rewarding/nurturing and punishing/starving]. ‘i did it my way’ is an expression of the pride that comes into the psychology of ‘superior achievers’, which disregards the physical reality that ‘the opening of relational-spatial possibility’ is conjugate to the assertive action of the individual [the sailboater rather than powerboater view of the individual matches physical reality; i.e. the powerboater view of the individual is a language-based idealization, as in the case of the pear-tree discussed by Emerson].

‘intellection intent’ or ‘destination, goals and objectives driven and directed behaviour’ is something that the sailboater, situationally included in a continually transforming relational spatial Oneness, TAKES ALONG ON THE TRIP; i.e. his intellectually directed intention is secondary. the behaviour of the inhabitant inextricably, situationally included in a continually transforming relational space, is orchestrated firstly by the dynamics of the space he is included in, and comes only secondarily from the inhabitant. furthermore, the actions of the inhabitants are ‘stirring the waters’ that are orchestrating the behaviours of the inhabitants [mach’s principle].

all this elaboration, to make the point that the ‘circle process’ of restorative justice makes no sense if one believes in the dualist model of a human individual [backed up by orthodox/newtonian biological sciences]. the circle process seeks to heal relations that are the very substance of community in the Machean relational space view, but which do not exist in the western culture institutionalized worldview in terms of ‘what people as things-in-themselves do’ [as independent powerboater beings within an absolute space and absolute time operating theatre].

in other words, the intuition of non-dualism must be re-attuned to by the participants in a restorative circle practice in order for it to even ‘happen’ much less ‘work’. the politics of sovereign nation states, and its justice and commerce operations are founded on the powerboater model of the state, the corporation and the human, so the leadership is not going to come from politicians. as clinton decided in denying the ethic of ‘mitakuye oyasin’ [we are all related] and not moving to intervene in the eruption of violence in colonization-factionalized rwanda, the U.S. had no interests, commercial or strategic in rwanda and intervention was therefore, in his view, inappropriate. this is essentially an expression of the view of self/selves as independent [disconnected] ‘powerboaters’, that colonization by western powers has infused generally into the world, and into the hutu and tutsi collectives that accepted [they had no choice] putting themselves all under the control of a sovereign state central authority, and thus exposed in a new and more inextricably penned-in way to this european-invented fault-intolerant governance implementation [one crazy at the top can use all of the resources provided by all of the people against a selected group of people].

insofar as new generations model their sense of self from sovereign state politics and capitalist corporate leadership, the powerboat view of self will continue to dominate, supporting western justice as it is [in denial of mach’s principle describing the interdependent connectedness of physical reality and in embrace of the idealized absolutisms of european language and grammar].

in sum, the hubris of the european language infused powerboater sense of self has to be subsumed by a more physically realistic sailboater [machean] sense of self is the necessary precursor for the circle processes of restorative justice.

Submitted by Krampus (not verified) on

Peace is to allow that which is not yourself to exist. Therefore, I must leave. Far away do I travel, for the humans are hell bent on causing a singularity, even though it may destroy the whole world. Dualism was just a part of many-ism. which is a part of omni-ism.

conclusion. Anarchist is singular-ism. Libertarianism is singular-ism. All civilized though is singular-ism. Away I go and far do I venture, if only in my own mind.

Bye

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

After reading your explanations and the wiki entry on restorative justice I know much more about it now, thanks. I think the most immediate result of oneness is compassion for the world and our fellow travelers. If more people were exposed to these ideas the world would probably be a better place.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

emile, I have deep admiration for you and a lot of what you write. You are certainly a shining example for the rest of us. May I never bitterly disagree with you as that would be a mighty challenge!

Submitted by emile on

the philosophical stuff i write about has been around for a long time but is habitually overlooked. i can’t take credit for it, but would like to see it ‘revisited’ and re-embraced. it is about ‘seeing the same things in a new way and thus responding to them in a new way’ [e.g. crime]. in essence, this amounts to transforming ourselves rather than holding ourselves invariant and transforming our practices. our practices will be transformed, in the former case, because our sense of self is transformed, and not because our same self has come up with highly imaginary new practices. restorative justice comes from revising our view of self from 'newtonian independent being' to 'machean strand in the relational web-of-eco-community'.

Submitted by longfox (not verified) on

to add to this admiration, i spent a good few hours last night explain restorative justice, beings as things in themselves catergorized by language first (and then by the application of language to 'science') Young-Girl and Bloom to a close friend of mine who's first reading of society is economic - i was amazed at the ease with which he took to it, and then elaborated on keynes(i think it was, i was drinking, sorry) who makes similar statements about economic models in the real world. it is fascinating how far these ideas pervade, and how understated they are, but i have you to thank for pointing me in the right direction. without this becoming a emile-worship, thread hijacking, i offer sincere appreciation for your time and dedication.

Submitted by daedlanth on

I will have to agree with others that say you go to far at times. The deep treatise here seems to begin by displacing violence from with in to some thing with out. There is is deep Gordian Knot of consciousness but we've known that all along. It is time to find something new. The powerboat view of Rwanda is/was super ethnic rape and machete genocide. These motherfuckers NEED the Taliban. Western folks hate getting fucked and killed. I'm deeply soory that I felt the need to be so blunt, but I have been drinking?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

congratulations on writing a whole paragraph, without saying anything of substance.

Submitted by daedlanth-anon (not verified) on

I'm up for this. Any deadlines?

Submitted by Margaret (not verified) on

No deadlines: we intend to be running this series for the foreseeable future.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Do these have to be about utopias? Or can they just be about dystopias with anarchists in them? My steampunk, post-civ idiocy will be far from utopic.

Submitted by Margaret (not verified) on

Well, the series The Anarchist Imagination is specifically utopias. But we're always looking for submissions, certainly including dystopias.

Submitted by Krampus (not verified) on

But, I am an anti-authoritarian, and a dualist. I love dualism. Well, everything seems mostly black and white to me, mostly. Except when it is grey.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"There’s starvation and ecocide, racism and sexism. The rich get richer and the poor get dead, all while species go extinct and carbon warms up the air. "

well hey, we can fix all that with foreign aid, environmental regulations, affirmative action, hate crimes laws, and welfare. good job, liberal.

Submitted by Vaguely Anonymous (not verified) on

What this callout should have said was "there are newspaper boxes that remain on the sidewalk, windows that still have glass."

Add new comment

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
A
r
P
j
W
V
c
Enter the code without spaces.
Subscribe to Comments for "The Anarchist Imagination"