Does anarchy work? / Anarchy, not Anarchism!
You may already be an Anarchist..
It’s true. If your idea of healthy human relations is a dinner with friends, where everyone enjoys everyoen else’s company, responsibilities are divided up voluntarily and informally, and no one gives orders or sells anything, then you are an anarchist, plain and simple. The only question that remains is how you can arrange for more of your interactions to resemble this model.
Whenever you act without waiting for instruction or official permission, you are ananarchist. Any time you bypass a ridiculous regulation when no one’s looking you are an anarchist. If you don’t trust the government, the school system, Hollywood, or the management to know better than you when it comes to things that affect your life, that’s anarchism, too. And you are especially an anarchist when you come up with your own ideas and initiatives and solutions.
As you can see, it’s anarchism that keeps things working and life interesting. If we waited for authorities and specialists and technicians to take care of everything, we would not only be in a world of trouble, but dreadfully bored-and boring-to boot. Today we live in that world of trouble precisely to the extent that we abdicate responsibility and control.
Anarchism is naturally present in every healthy human being. It isn’t necessarily about throwing bombs or wearing black masks, though you may have seen that on television (Do you believe everything you see on television?That’s not anarchist!). The root of anarchism is the simple impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this.
Does anarchy work?
People with very little actual historical background often say of anarchy that it would never work-without realizing that not only has it worked for much of the history of the human race, but it is in fact working right now. For the time being, let’s set aside the Paris Commune, Republican Spain, Woodstock, open-source programming and all the other farmed instances of successful revolutionary anarchism. Anarchy is simply cooperative self-determination-it is a part of everyday life, not something that will only happen “after revolution”. Anarchy works today for circles of friends everywhere- so how we can make more of our economic relations anarchist? Anarchy is in action when people cooperate on a camping trip or to arrange free meals for hungry people-so how can we apply those lessons to our interactions at school, at work, in our neighborhoods?
To consult chaos theory: anarchy is chaos and chaos is order. Any naturally ordered system-a rainforest, a friendly neighborhood-is a harmony in which balance perpetuates itself through chaos and chance. Systematic disorder, on the other hand-the discipline of the high school classroom, the sterile rows of genetically modified corn defended from weeds and insects-can only be maintained by ever-escalating exertions of force. Some,thinking disorder is simply the absence of any system, confuse it with anarchy.
But disorder is the most ruthless system of all:disorder and conflict, unresolved, quickly systematize themselves, stacking up hierarchies according to their own pitiless demands- selfishness, heartlessness, lust for domination. Disorder in its most developed form is capitalism: the war of each against all, rule or be ruled, sell or be sold, from the soil to the sky.
We live in a particularly violent and hierarchical time. The maniacs who think they benefit from this hierarchy tell us that the violence would be worse without it, not comprehending that hierarchy itself, whether it be inequalities in economic status or political power, is the consequence and expression of violence. Not to say that forcibly removing the authorities would immediately end the waves of violence created by the greater violence their existence implies; but until we are all free to learn how to get along with each other for our own sake, rather than under the guns directed by the ones who benefit from our strife, there can be no peace between us.
This state of affairs is maintained by more than guns, more than the vertigo of hierarchy, of kill-or-be-killed reasoning: it is also maintained by the myth of success. Official history presents our past at the history of Great men, and all other lives as mere effects of their causes; there are only a few subjects of history, they would make us believe-the rest of us are its objects. The implication of any hierarchy is that there is only one “free man” in all society:the king (or president, executive, movie star, etc). Since this is the way it has always been and always will be, the account goes, we should all fight to become him, or at least accept our station beneath him gracefully, grateful for others beneath us to trample when we need reassurance of our own worth.
But even the president isn’t free to go for a walk in the neighborhood of his choosing. Why settle for a fragment of the world, or less? In the absence of force-in the egalitarian beds of true lovers, in the democracy of devoted friendships, in the topless federations of playmates enjoying good parties and neighbors chatting at sewing circles-we are all queens and kings. Whether or not anarchy can “work” outside such sanctuaries, it is becoming clearer that hierarchy doesn’t. Visit the model cities of the new world “order”-sit in a traffic jam of privately owned vehicles, among motorists sweating and swearing in isolated unison, an ocean filling with pollution to your right and a ghetto on your left where uniformed and ununiformed gangs clash-and behold the apex of human progress. If this is order, why not try chaos!
Anarchy, not Anarchism!
To that say anarchists subscribe to anarchism is like saying pianists subscribe to pianism. There is no Anarchism —but there is anarchy, or rather, there are anarchies.
For as long as power has existed, the spirit of anarchy has been with us too, named or nameless, uniting millions or steeling the resolve of a single one. The slaves and savages who fought the Romans for their freedom and lived in armed liberty, equality, and fraternity, the mothers who raised their daughters to love their bodies in defiance of the diet advertisements leering from all sides, the renegades who painted their faces and threw tea into Boston Harbor, and all the others who took matters into their own hands: they were anarchists, whether they called themselves Ranters, Taborites, Communards, Abolitionists, Yuppies, Syndicalists, Quakers, Mothers of the Disappeared, Food Not Bombs, Libertarians, or even Republicans —just as we are all anarchists, to the extent that we do the same. There are as many anarchists today as there are students cutting class, parents cheating on their taxes, women teaching themselves bicycle repair, lovers desiring outside the lines. They don ’t need to vote for an anarchist party or party line —that would disqualify them, at least for that moment —to be anarchists: anarchy is a mode of being, a manner of responding to conditions and relating to others, a class of human behavior ….and not the “working ” class!
Forget about the history of anarchism as an idea —forget the bearded guys. It ’s one thing to develop a language for describing a thing —it ’s another thing entirely to live it. This is not about theories or formulas, heroes or biographies —it ’s about your life. Anarchy is what matters, everywhere it appears, not armchair anarchism, the specialists ’ study of freedom! There are self-proclaimed anarchists who never experienced a day of anarchy in their lives —we should know how much to trust them on the subject!
So how will the anarchist utopia work? That ’s a question we ’ll never again be duped into disputing over, a red herring if there ever was one! This isn’t a utopian vision, or a program or ideal to serve; it ’s simply a way of proceeding, of approaching relationships, of dealing with problems now —for surely we ’ll never be entirely through dealing with problems! Being an anarchist doesn’t ’t mean believing anarchy, let alone anarchism, can fix everything —it just means acknowledging it ’s up to us to work things out, that no one and nothing else can do this for us: admitting that, like it or not, our lives are in our hands —and in each others ’.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/27157667/Fighting-for-Our-Lives-An-Anarchist-Primer
Working “Within the System” If you beat them at their own game, you’ve lost.
So . . . you’re in a band, with a really important message, and you want to get it out to as many people as possible—so you’re trying to get really popular and sell lots and lots of records. Or perhaps you’re a political activist and you think that it’s necessary to use the mainstream media to educate people about certain issues. It seems to make sense that you should use these methods to reach people, because otherwise, who will notice you? Yes, you realize that you’re making compromises with the very system you’re trying to fight, but it’ll be worth it in the end… and we all have to make compromises, don’t we? It’s worth considering whether we really do after all, just as it’s worth questioning whether getting ahead in their system of cutthroat competition and mass-marketing can ever really help us change the world. What would happen if we stopped compromising, stopped playing their game altogether and concentrated all our efforts on creating channels of our own for spreading ideas in new ways?
The Revolution Cannot Be Televised
Of course they want you on their television show, radio program, rock festival, major label. They don’t care whether they’re selling mouthwash or anarchist revolution as long as they can keep people watching and buying. They know that sooner or later people are bound to get bored and fed up with the mindless, passionless drivel that they normally have to offer, and they count on you to keep new ideas and styles coming for them to exploit; without that, they’d have nothing new to sell people. They know if they can find ways to sell your own expressions of outrage back to you, to cash in on the very frustration that their system creates, they’ve got you beat. They know that no message you could spread through their channels could be more powerful than the message that your use of their medium itself sends: stay tuned. No awareness you could possibly raise through television or CDs sold in shopping malls is more important than the awareness of the power of individuals to act for themselves. Television watching and supermarket shopping keep people passive, watching things that they can never take part in and people they can never meet, buying what is marketed to them by corporations rather than making their own music, their own ideas, their own lives. To motivate people to act for themselves, you have to contact them more directly.
The Values of Mass Production
We’re taught to think of our success in terms of numbers, aren’t we? If touching one person’s life is a good thing, then touching one thousand people’s lives must be a great thing. It’s easy to see where we learned to think this way: our whole society revolves around mass production. The more units we can move, the more customers we can serve, the more votes we can get, the more money and stuff we have, the better, right?
But maybe it’s not possible to touch a thousand people as deeply or as powerfully as one person or ten people. And maybe it’s not really so revolutionary after all to have one person or group telling everybody else what’s right. Wouldn’t it be better to try a decentralized approach where everyone works closely with those around them, instead of a few people leading an anonymous mass? Do you, or your band, or your label have to save the world all by yourselves? Why don’t you trust anyone else to do it with you? (And have you noticed how much you have to stomp all over everyone else to get that success you plan to use to spread your message?)
One political band playing a show to nine hundred people can recite revolutionary slogans for everyone present to stand and listen to, but they remain out of arm’s reach of most of the people there, up on a pedestal as “musicians,” “artists,” “heroes.” On the other hand, one band playing an equally impassioned show to forty people, in a more intimate setting, can interact on a personal level with everyone there, and make it clear that everyone is capable of doing what they do. Thus they have the potential to spark four more bands (or similar revolutionary projects), increasing their impact exponentially. The same goes for record labels, for writers, for speakers and artists, and of course for “leaders” of any kind.
Working Within the System
Most of us don’t get much pleasure out of the things we have to do to work inside the system. We’d rather be reading books on our own than writing assigned papers for school, rather be using our skills, energy, and time to work on projects of our own choice than selling ourselves to employers. But we feel like we have to work for them, whether we like it or not. It never occurs to us how much more fun, and perhaps more effective, it could be to take our labor out of their hands and do something else with it. Sure it would be hard at first, but nothing could be harder than to have to put up with this bullshit for the rest of our lives, right? Better we dedicate ourselves to replacing it than just dealing with it.
But, you protest, you’re still going to be fighting the status quo, you’re going to change things from the inside, right? That’s what they tell you, at least. Of course the system has “appropriate procedures” for people with grievances to go through to try to make things better; that’s the safety valve to release pressure when people get too worked up. Do you think the powers that be would really let anyone use their own laws and methods to depose them? If this system provided opportunities for real change, people would have taken advantage of them a long time ago. Countless generations have set out convinced that they would succeed where other had failed—that’s where lawyers and reporters come from, you know. They’re the cynical corpses of idealistic young men and women who thought the system could be reformed.
Besides, can you trust yourself to work “within the system” for the right reasons? We’re all programmed to want “success,” to measure ourselves by wealth and social status, whether we like it or not. Could it be that you want to become a journalist or professor of political science or rock star because you can’t bring yourself to consider any other options seriously, because you’re afraid to try cutting to the safety line that ties you to the security of a mainstream lifestyle? And how can you be sure that it isn’t that dark corner of your heart pushing you to seek success, the part that loves the attention and feelings of greatness your popularity and social standing bring? Sure it feels great to be able to tell your parents what your goals are and have them applaud your decisions… but is that any way to decide how to go about changing the world? Let’s listen to our hearts, trust our instincts, and refuse to participate in anything that bores or outrages us. We need to nourish our idealism and our willingness to take risks, not work out new ways to integrate our frustration and our desperation for change back into the society that engendered them. Remember, every day we spend “using the system” is another day longer we’ll have to wait until new networks and better ways of life replace the old ones.
How do we get out of here?
Yes, it often seems like there’s no alternative to working “within the system” if we want to get things done and not keep our ideas quarantined within the narrow confines of the underground. But why keep the underground quarantined to narrow confines? Surely if we put all our energy into expanding the spaces in which we can interact as free, equal human beings, rather than trying to repair the burning machinery of this doomed society, we could make at least as much of an impact. Imagine what we could achieve if we kept all our potential in our own hands, and refused to waste it ever again working for their system for even a minute. There’s no excuse to let even a fraction of our lives go by doing things we don’t love, or to let any of our talents and efforts serve to prop up a world order we oppose. Instead, let’s fight so hard, and live so hard, that others inside the cages of mainstream life can see us and are inspired to join us in our complete rejection of the old world and all its bullshit. And let’s make our communities something greater than they are; let’s make them more open and more capable of offering life-support, so that others really will be able to join us.
The system we live under offers only losers’ games: economic competition instead of cooperation, popularity contests in place of community, the struggle to measure up to social norms instead of the pursuit individual dreams. The reason we’re working towards something better in the first place is that everyone loses in these games—so why play them? It’s up to us to create new games, more joyful, exciting games to replace the old ones. Let’s not try to beat them at their games, but make them join us in ours!
http://shiftshapers.blogspot.com/2004/12/crimethinc-special-report-working.html
What Could There Possibly Be Beyond Democracy?
Nowadays, “democracy” rules the world. Communism has fallen, elections are happening more and more in those poor underdeveloped third world nations you see on television, and world leaders are meeting to plan the “global community” that we hear so much about. So why isn’t everybody happy, finally? For that matter—why do less than half of the eligible voters in the United States, the world’s flagship democracy, even bother to vote at all?
Could it be that “democracy,” long the catch-word of every revolution and resistance, is simply not democratic enough? What could be more democratic?
Every little child can grow up to be President.
No they can’t. Being president means holding a hierarchical position of power, just like being a billionaire: for every one president, there have to be millions of people with less power. And just as it is for billionaires, it is for presidents: it’s not any coincidence that the two types tend to rub shoulders, since they both come from a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Our economy isn’t democratic, either, you know: resources are distributed in absurdly unequal proportions, and you certainly do have to start with resources to become President, or even to get your hands on more resources.
Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn’t help the millions of us who inevitably don’t, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This is an intrinsic structural difficulty in representative democracy, and it occurs on the local level as much as at the top. For example: the town council, consisting of professional politicians, can meet, discuss municipal affairs, and pass ordinances all day, without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances inconveniences or angers some of the citizens, they have to go to great lengths to use their free time to contest it, and then they’re gone again the next time the town council meets. The citizens can elect a different town council from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the interests and powers of the class of politicians as a whole will still be in conflict with their own—and anyway, party loyalties and similar superstitions usually prevent them from taking even this step.
If there was no President, our “democracy” would still be less than democratic. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, our system purports to operate by majority rule, with the rights of the minorities protected by a system of checks and balances—and this method of government has inherent flaws of its own.
The tyranny of the majority
If you ever happened to end up in a vastly outnumbered minority group, and the majority voted that you must give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe in recognizing the authority of a group simply because they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us—and those it does threaten are already silenced before we can hear their misgivings.
No “average citizen” considers himself threatened by majority rule, because each one thinks of himself as having the power and righteous “moral authority” of the majority: if not in fact (by being so-called “normal” or “moderate”), then in theory, because his ideas are “right” (that is, he believes that everyone would be convinced of the truth of his arguments, if only they would listen sincerely). Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were clear, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action—without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But such is not always the case—even if “the facts” could be made equally clear to everyone, which is obviously impossible, some things simply can’t be agreed upon, for there is more than one truth. We need a democracy that takes these situations into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class. . .
“The Rule of Law”
. . .and the protection afforded by the “checks and balances” of our legal institution isnot sufficient to establish it. The “rule of just and equal law,” as fetishized today by those whose interests it protects (the stockbrokers and landlords, for example), does not protect anyone from chaos or injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which the power of our communities is ceded to the jurisdiction of expensive lawyers and pompous judges. The rights of the minorities are the very last thing to be protected by these checks and balances, since power is already reserved for those with the privilege to seize it, and then for the lumpen majority after them. Under these conditions, a minority group is only able to use the courts to obtain its rights when it is able to bring sufficient force upon them in the form of financial clout, guileful rhetoric, etc.
There is no way to establish justice in a society through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws: such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in that society. Common sense and compassion are always preferable to adherence to a strict and antiquated table of law, anyway, and where the law is the private province of a curator elite, these inevitably end up in conflict; what we really need is a social system which fosters such qualities in its members, and rewards them in practice. To create such a thing, we must leave representative “democracy” for fullyparticipatory democracy.
It’s no coincidence “freedom” is not on the ballot.
Freedom is not a condition—it is something closer to a sensation. It’s not a concept to pledge allegiance to, a cause to serve, or a standard to march under; it is an experience you must live every day, or else it will escape you. It is not freedom in action when the flags are flying and the bombs are dropping to “make the world safe for democracy,” no matter what color the flags are (even black!); freedom cannot be caught and held in any state system or philosophical doctrine, and it certainly cannot be enforced or “given” to others—the most you can hope is to free others from forces preventing them from finding it themselves. It appears in fragile moments: in the make-believe of young children, the cooperation of friends on a camping trip, the workers who refuse to follow the union’s orders and instead organize their own strike without leaders. If we are to be real freedom fighters, we must begin by pledging ourselves to chase and cherish these moments and seek to expand them, rather than getting caught up in serving some party or ideology.
Real freedom cannot be held on a voting ballot. Freedom doesn’t mean simply being able to choose between options—it means actively participating in shaping the options in the first place, creating and re-creating the environments in which options exist. Without this, we have nothing, for given the same options in the same situations over and over, we’ll always make the same pre-determined decisions. If the context is out of our hands, so is the choice itself. And when it comes to taking power over the circumstances of our lives, no one can “represent” us—it’s something we have to do ourselves.
“Look, a ballot box—democracy!!”
If the freedom so many generations have fought and died for is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth, who checks a box on the ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was an hour before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the true liberty they lusted after.
For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they actively create the sonic and emotional environment in which they exist, participating thus in the transformation of the world which in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other, and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system: a harmony in human relationships and activity, a real democracy. To get there, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.
Representative democracy is a contradiction in terms.
No one can represent your power and interests for you—you can only have power by acting, and you can only know what your interests are by being involved. Politicians have made careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy. Now, inevitably, they have become a priest caste that answers only to itself—as politician classes have always been, and will always be.
Voting is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we leave technology to scientists, health to doctors, living environments to city planners and private real estate developers; we end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.
The fact is we don’t have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, competing activist organizations, television shows, news magazines, political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and action coalitions and magazines and entertainment, we can create our own individual approaches to life that leave our unique perspectives intact. Here’s how.
What are the democratic alternatives to democracy?
Consensus
Radically participatory democracy, also known as consensus democracy, is already well-known and practiced across the globe, from indigenous communities in Latin America to postmodern political action cells (“affinity groups”) in the United States and organic farming cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy, consensus democracy is direct democracy: the participants get to share in the decision-making process on a daily basis, and through decentralization of knowledge and authority they are able to exercise real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy, consensus democracy values the needs and concerns of each individual equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, then it is everyone’s responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to all. Consensus democracy does not demand that any person accept the power of others over her life, though it does require that everybody be willing to consider the needs of everyone else; thus what it loses in efficiency, it gains tenfold in both freedom and goodwill. Consensus democracy does not ask that people follow a leader or standardize themselves under some common cause; rather, its aim is to integrate all into a working whole while allowing each to retain her own goals and ways of doing things.
Autonomy
In order for direct democracy to be meaningful, people must have control over their immediate surroundings and the basic matters of their lives. Autonomy is simply the idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live, that no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential—or for that matter how the environment you live in is constructed. It is not to be confused with so-called “independence”— in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other (“Western man fills his closet with groceries, and call himself self-sufficient”)—that’s just an individualist myth that keeps us collectively at odds. The glamorization of “self-sufficiency” in the present cutthroat-competitive society really constitutes an attack on those who will not exploit others to “take care of themselves,” and thus functions as an obstacle to community building[1]. In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy is a free interdependence between those with whom you share a consensus, with whom you act freely (i.e. without waiting for permission or instructions from anyone else) in order to cooperatively establish self-management of the whole of life.
Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. For autonomy to be possible, every aspect of the community from technology to history must be organized in such a way that it is accessible to everyone; and for it to work, everyone must make use of this access.
Autonomous groups can be formed without necessarily establishing a clear agenda, so long as they offer the members ways to benefit from each others’ participation: the CrimethInc. Collective, the Dada movement, and knitting circles of the past and present all offer evidence of this. Such groups can even contain contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still serve their purpose. The days of marching under a single flag are over.
Autonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the encroachments of others who do not believe in the rights of individuals to govern themselves, and expanding the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to both destroy the structures of coercive societies (including those of representative “democracy”) and replace them with more radically democratic structures. For example, it’s not enough just to block or destroy highways that are creating noise and air pollution; you also have to provide free transportation by means such as communal bicycles and community repair centers, if you want to help others replace the competitive/authoritarian relations of car dependency with cooperative/autonomous means of transportation.
Direct Action
Autonomy means direct action, not waiting for requests to pass through the “established channels” only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations. Establish your own channels. If you want hungry people to eat, don’t just give money to some high-handed charity bureaucracy; find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and feed them. If you want affordable housing, don’t try to get the town council to pass a bill—that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings and share them, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don’t petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters; find ways to work with others to simply take the power from them: don’t buy their products, don’t work for them, sabotage their billboards and buildings, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you; it only looks valid because they bought the laws and social customs, too.
Don’t wait for permission or organization from some outside authority, don’t beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Act.
Topless Federations
Independent autonomous groups can work together in federations without any particular group holding authority. Such a social structure sounds utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient. International mail and railroad travel both currently work on this system, to name two examples: while the individual postal and transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another, without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree on enough issues to be able to work together within one collective should still be able to see the importance of being able to coexist with other groups. For such a thing to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations—but that is exactly what we are proposing.
How to solve disagreements without calling “the authorities”
In a social arrangement which is truly in the best interest of each participating individual, exclusion from the community should be threat enough to discourage violent or destructive behavior. It is certainly a more humanitarian approach than authoritarian means such as prisons and executions, which corrupt the judges as much as they embitter the criminals. Those who refuse to integrate themselves into any community and reject the assistance and generosity of others may find themselves banished from human interaction; but that is still better than exile in the mental ward, or on death row, two of the options which await such men today. Violence should only be used by communities in defense, not with the smug entitlement of post-divine judgment with which it is applied by our present injustice system. This applies as well to the interactions of autonomous/consensus groups with the “outside world” which does not yet abide by cooperative or tolerant values.
Serious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by reorganizing or dividing the groups. Often individuals who can’t get along in one social configuration will have much more success cooperating in another setting, or as members of parallel communities. If consensus cannot be met within a group, that group should split into smaller groups who can achieve it internally—such a thing may be inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power and ruthlessness at their disposal. All the independent communities will still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must somehow negotiate ways to achieve this. . .
Living without permission
. . .that’s the most difficult part, of course. But we’re not talking about just another social system here, we’re talking about a total revolution of human relations—for that is what it will take to solve the problems our species faces today. Let’s not kid ourselves—until we can achieve this, the violence and strife inherent in non-consensus relations will continue, and no law or system will be able to protect us. The best reason to transcend representative democracy is simply that in consensus democracy there are no fake solutions, no easy ways of suppressing conflict without resolving it, and thus those who participate in it must learn to coexist without coercion and submission and all those other nasty habits we are so tired of in our present society.
The first precious grains of this new world can be found in your friendships and love affairs, when they are free from power relations and cooperation occurs naturally. Take this model, and expand it to the whole of society— that is the world “beyond democracy” for which the heart cries out today.
It seems a challenging prospect to get there from here. . . but the wonderful thing about consensus/autonomy is that you don’t have to wait for the government to vote for them to apply these concepts—you can practice them right now with the people around you, and benefit immediately. Once put into practice, the virtues of this way of living will be clear to others; they need no pointing out once one is experiencing them firsthand. Form your own autonomous group, answering to no power but your own, and create an environment in which you chase down freedom and fulfillment for yourselves, if your representatives will not do it for you—since they cannot do it “for” you. From such seeds, the real democracy of the future will grow.
Next time we state our demands and grievances and they refuse to acknowledge them, saying “just be thankful you live in a democracy,” we’ll be ready to respond:That’s not enough! . . .and know clearly what we want instead, from our own experience.
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/harbinger/beyonddemocracy.php
The Climate is Changing / A Field Guide to False Solutions
If we really believed what scientists are telling us about global warming, the fire engines of every fire department would sound their sirens and race to the nearest factory to extinguish its furnaces. Every high school student would run to the thermostat of every classroom, turn it off, and tear it out of the wall, then hit the parking lot to slash tires. Every responsible suburban parent would don safety gloves and walk around the block pulling the electrical meters out of the utility boxes behind houses and condominiums. Every gas station attendant would press the emergency button to shut off the pumps, cut the hoses, and glue the locks on the doors; every coal and petroleum corporation would immediately set about burying their unused product where it came from—using only the muscles of their own arms, of course.
But we’re too out of touch to grasp what’s happening, let alone put a stop to it.
Those who learn about the destruction of the environment from books or the internet can’t hope to rescue anything. The decimation of the natural world has been going on around us for centuries now; it takes a particularly bourgeois brand of blindness to drive by felled trees, spewing smokestacks, and acres of asphalt every day without noticing that anything is happening until it shows up in the newspaper. People for whom reality is composed of news articles, rather than the world they see and hear and smell, are bound to destroy everything they touch. That alienation is the root of the problem; the devastation of the environment simply follows from it.
When profit margins are more real than living things, when weather patterns are more real than refugees fleeing hurricanes, when emissions cap agreements are more real than new developments in our own neighborhoods, the world has already been signed over for destruction. The climate crisis isn’t an event that might happen, looming into view ahead; it is the familiar setting of our daily lives. Deforestation isn’t just taking place in national forests or foreign jungles; it is as real at every strip mall in Ohio as it is in the heart of the Amazon. The buffalo used to roam right here. Our disconnection from the land is catastrophic whether or not the sea level is rising, whether or not the desertification and famine sweeping other continents have reached us yet.
As usual, the people who brought this crisis upon us are eager to explain that they are the best qualified to remedy it. But there’s no reason to believe that their motives or methods have changed. The results are in that smoking causes cancer, but they’re still trying to sell us low-tar cigarettes.
Forget about nuclear power, solar power, clean coal, and wind turbines. Forget about carbon trading, biofuels, recycling programs, organic superfoods. Forget about new legislation, along with every other inefficient, insufficient response involving ballots, petitions, or some other proxy. Our only hope is to fight with our own hands, to take a stand on the ground beneath our feet—rediscovering in the process what it means to be a part of the world, not separate from it. Every tree they try to cut down, we can stop them. Every poison they try to release into the atmosphere, we can block them. Every new “sustainable” technology they introduce, we can unmask them.
They aren’t going to stop destroying the planet until we make it too costly for them to continue. The sooner we do, the better.
Appendix: A Field Guide to False Solutions
from the makers of global warming—“sustainable” energy!
The Corporate Solution
Where others see hardship and tragedy, entrepreneurs see an opportunity for financial gain. Putting the “green” in greenhouse gases and the “eco” in economy, they greet the apocalypse with outstretched wallets. Are natural disasters wrecking communities? That’s great—sell the survivors disaster relief and put up luxury condominiums where they used to live. Are food supplies contaminated with toxins? Slap “organic” on some of them and jack up the price—presto, what was once taken for granted in every vegetable is suddenly a selling point! Is consumer culture devouring the planet? Time for a line of environmentally friendly products, cashing in on guilt and good intentions to move more units.
So long as being “sustainable” is a privilege reserved for the rich, the crisis can only intensify. All the better for those banking on it.
The Conservative Solution
Many conservatives deny that our society is causing global warming; of course, some still don’t believe in evolution, either. But what they themselves believe is immaterial; they’re more concerned with the question of what it is profitable for others to believe. For example, when the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its 2007 report, an ExxonMobil-funded think tank linked to the Bush administration offered $10,000+ to any scientist who would dispute its findings.
That is to say—some people consider it a better investment to bribe experts to deny that anything is happening than to take any steps to avert catastrophe. Better that the apocalypse snatches us unawares so long as they can maintain their profits one more year. Sooner the end of life on earth than the possibility of life beyond capitalism!
The Liberal Solution
Certain do-gooders would like to claim credit for bringing global warming to the attention of the public, even though radicals have been clamoring about it for decades. But politicians like Al Gore are not trying to save the environment so much as to rescue the causes of its destruction. They are pressing for government and corporate recognition of the crisis because ecological collapse could destabilize capitalism if it catches them off guard. Small wonder corporate initiatives and incentives figure so prominently in the solutions they propose.
Like their conservative colleagues, liberals would sooner risk extinction than consider abandoning industrial capitalism. They’re simply too invested in it to do otherwise—witness the Gore family’s long-running relationship with Occidental Petroleum. In this light, their bid to seize the reins of the environmentalist movement looks suspiciously like a calculated effort to prevent a more realistic response to the crisis.
The Malthusian Solution
Some people attribute the crisis to overpopulation—but how many shantytown dwellers and subsistence farmers do you have to add up to equal the ecological impact of a single high-powered executive?
The Socialist Solution
For centuries, socialists have promised to grant everyone access to middle class standards of living. Now it turns out that the biosphere can’t support even a small minority pursuing that lifestyle; one might expect socialists to adjust their notion of utopia accordingly. Instead they’ve simply updated it to match the latest in bourgeois fashions: today every worker deserves to eat organic produce and live in a “green” condominium. But these products only came to be as a marketing ploy to differentiate high-end merchandise from proletarian standard fare. If you’re going to think big enough to imagine a society without class differences, you might as well aim for a future in which we share the wealth of a vibrant natural world rather than chopping it up into inert commodities.
The Communist Solution
In practice, Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism served as a convenient means to swiftly jerk “underdeveloped” nations into the industrial age, utilizing state intervention to “modernize” peoples who still retained a connection to the land before eventually dropping them unceremoniously at the margin of the free market. Today, party communists have gotten no further than blithe assurances that new management would take care of everything. Sing along to the tune of “Solidarity Forever”:
If the workers owned the factories, climate change would not exist
All the smoke from all the smokestacks would be changed to harmless mist . . .
The Individual Solution
An individual or community can live a completely “sustainable” lifestyle without doing anything to hinder the corporations and governments responsible for the vast majority of environmental devastation. Keeping one’s hands clean—“setting an example” that no statesman or tycoon will emulate—is meaningless while others lay the planet to waste. To set a better example, stop them.
The Radical Solution
Too many radicals respond to the crisis with despair or even a kind of wrongheaded anticipation. There’s no reason to believe the exhaustion of the planets petroleum supply will put an end to patriarchy or white supremacy. Likewise, it’s all too likely that hierarchy can make it through ecological collapse intact, so long as there are people left to dominate and obey.
We’ll get out of the apocalypse what we put into it: we can’t expect it to produce a more liberated society unless we put the foundations in place now. Forget about individualistic survival schemes that cast you as the Last Person on Earth—Hurricane Katrina showed that when the storm hits, the most important thing is to be part of a community that can defend itself. The coming upheavals may indeed offer a chance for fundamental social change, but we have to come up with a compelling vision and the guts to implement it.
Destroy Borders! Destroy Slavery! No Borders, No Nations; Stop Deportations!
![[unwanted.gif]](https://ecotopianetwork.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/unwanted.gif?w=172)
DESTROY BORDERS, DESTROY SLAVERY!
This is the text of a leaflet distributed in February 2004 at Waterloo station (London), where border guards meticulously control the documents of passengers arriving from and directed to France, as they have to guarantee that no ‘illegal immigrant’ is among the respectable passengers, the commuters and the rich tourists.
Our abhorrence of borders extends to this whole society of slaves where each has a role to play in maintaining a system of globalized plunder. In its ruthless selection of the cheapest of everything, the latter knows no borders at all.
The best-loved slaves are cheerful and compliant, content to surrender their lives in exchange for status, a monthly salary, lavish expense accounts. To them we leave their illusions, determined to do our best to make them short-lived. Millions of others carry out their daily routine, clinging to what they’ve got in an uncertain world where the unions have joined the bosses under banners of ‘work mobility’ ‘flexibility’ ‘participation’. But there is a level of exploitation beyond which they will not go, a level indispensable to the smooth running of the production machinery. The supermarkets, the services industry, electronics assemblage, etc therefore all rely on a huge mass of underpaid, uprooted slaves who have nothing left but chains of debt, exclusion and fear. Housed in prison-like conditions which they pay for at extortionate rates, they work around the clock, until they drop.
They are the undesirables, ‘barbarians’ from far off lands ripped apart by war or famine, (natural disasters of capitalism drawn up in buildings just a stone’s throw from here), stripped of everything that qualifies them as ‘citizens’, ‘people’ or even ‘human beings’. Without them the whole death machinery of capital would collapse.
For a couple of hours some from all of these categories sat side by side in the Eurotrain, superb transporter of human merchandise, assisted by smiling hostesses. Now, having reached their final destination, the moment of truth is about to dawn. Because, precisely here, behind this great hall festooned with enticements of weekends in Paris for romantic lovers, lurks a place where Gestapo-style operations are constantly in act. The undesirables are identified, held, criminalised and dispatched to concentration camps surrounded by barbed wire, left to languish for months before being dispatched to their country of origin. Some of the ‘lucky’ ones are presented with papers and allowed to join the super-exploited which the bosses in this country need so much.
We are here because we feel a common bond with the wanderers. We too are aliens, undesirables in a world of which we want no part. We have not come to appeal to dialogue or the democratic integration of ‘papers for all’. Zenophobia, hierarchy and racism cannot be fought with such means. Nor can they be fought with fratricidal wars sworn on bibles or patriotic flags.
In breaking the silence and indifference of the civilized we want to widen the space for revolt, increase the possibilities for direct attack on the pillars of this world. The objectives can be seen everywhere: the concentration camps, the airline companies that deport aliens, the ‘waiting zones’, the slave traders, the lines of communication, etc etc.
Only through direct solidarity shall we be able to refuel the social tempest of class war, sabotage and relentless attack where the division into nationals and foreigners, legal immigrants and aliens dissolves in joyous collusion against the enemy that oppresses us all.
DESTROY ALL BORDERS AND PRISONS!
On Saturday April 8 a No Borders demonstration was held at Heathrow, which saw the presence of various groups and individuals. Pushed by their desperate situation and encouraged by the manifestation of solidarity, 120 people presently being held in Harmondsworth De tention centre began a hunger strike to draw attention to the outrage that exists within those walls.
Here is the text of one leaflet distributed the following days:
The good people of Oswiecim, better known as Auschwitz, knew little about the production of the death factory on its periphery except that sometimes ‘there was a very bad smell’ emanating from its chimneys. That shocks. Yet how many of the good people of London are aware of the ‘clean’ concentration camps that exist today and are essential in the production of segregation and slavery that are at the basis of the smooth running of capital.
Times have changed, the old camps have become museums and the humiliation and suffering of the millions of slaves on whose backs the present civilization was built has been dismissed in a few words of apology by statesmen and clergy. The persecuted have become persecutors, and the great wars of reciprocal carnage have given way to the massacre of peoples by the policemen of the planet using cutting edge weaponry.
Meanwhile, there is an undeclared civil war in act that does not heed national borders or democratic euphemism. This war is raging and taking its toll on millions of excluded all over the world in the form of ‘ecological emergencies’ resulting from intensive monocultures, nuclear testing, the plundering of the earth’s resources, climate change, post colonial political meddling, extortion rackets by the world bank, etc., etc.
This has led to a total mobilization of millions of exploited people coerced into moving in their search for better living conditions or simply for survival from the catastrophes imposed by economy and States. We are not talking of a passive, amorphous mass, but of millions of individuals, many of whom have struggled in their homelands against the global enemy in its local manifestation.
Many have been imprisoned, tortured, have escaped from massacres of epic proportions. They are the undesirables of the planetary system of profit and plunder, the ones who are no longer useful to the great migration industry which has found new raw material more suited to the needs of a flexible economy that has moved into the tertiary sector. The heavy industrial sector that was developed on the sweat of past migrants (starting from Ireland and Scotland and extending to the other colonies) can now be worked out of sight in far off lands at rock bottom costs thanks to information technology and local taskmasters free from the restrictions of the politically correct.
Fortress Europe is putting up its defences, walls are being erected, the barbed wire is extending. One such structure is that at Heathrow airport, known as Harmondsworth Detention Centre, which is to all extents and purposes a concentration camp. People are held within its walls for weeks, months, even years, and have no rights at all, not even the minimal ones of the worst prison in the land. As in all similar structures, the suffering of the interned is aggravated by lack of medical care, disgusting food, lack of exercise, abuse and punishment, and constant threat of repatriation.
Not everyone is indifferent to the sort of those whose misery mirrors our own, that of the open prison of the world of the privileged. Demonstrations and actions have taken place against concentration camps and those responsible for them in Italy, Belgium, France and Australia as well as this country. Solidarity with the immigrants exists in many forms. In Lecce, southern Italy, the camp Regina Pacis was shut down as a direct result of the constant denunciation of local anarchists. Some of them are now in prison themselves as a result, and they and others of the group are presently on trial, accused of subversive association, that all encompassing law for locking people up without the need for any concrete evidence. Similar to becoming a ‘criminal’ because you don’t have a stay permit.
On Saturday April 8th, a no borders demonstration was held at Heathrow which saw the presence of various groups and individuals. Pushed by their desperate situation and encouraged by the manifestation of solidarity, 120 people presently being held in Harmondsworth Detention Centre spontaneously began a hunger strike to draw attention to the outrage that exists within these walls.
There are thousands of ways that anyone, group or individual can show their solidarity and subvert this world of controllers and controlled. The first is deciding on which side we stand. That of the barbed wire and the negation of life in the fear of the different – or the rejection of every division that the masters of the world want to impose on us, the refusal of an existence of passivity and apprehension.
Forward, for the destruction of the lie and of the phantoms! Forward, for the complete conquest of individuality and of life!
SOLIDARITY WITH THE HARMONDSWORTH HUNGERSTRIKERS
SOLIDARITY WITH THE LECCE ANARCHISTS
FREEDOM FOR ALL!
DESTROY ALL BORDERS AND PRISONS!
random anarchists
BELGIUM: SOLIDARITY AGAINST ALL BORDERS
On January 19th, 2006, the trial began of anarchists arrested this past May in Lecce, Italy. In Belgium, solidarity leaflets and posters were distributed and put up in Kortrijk (Courtrai), Ghent, Geel, Saint-Nicolas, Antwerp, Louvain-la-Neuve, Leuven (Louvain), Bruges, and Hasselt. In Antwerp, one person was detained for 10 hours for distributing the leaflets. In Lecce, the trial will resume March 2nd, 2006.
Text of the leaflet distributed in Belgium:
On the 12th of May 2005, five anarchists were arrested in Italy during ‘Operation Nottetempo’. Today, the 19th of January 2006, their trial starts. They fought un-interrupted against the asylum camp of Lecce, against the deportations of people without papers, against raids… They chose to attack those responsible for the asylum camps and the deportations directly – their property, the banks who arranged the financial aspect of the camp, collaborators… They didn’t hesitate to support the immigrants, locked-up up in the asylum camp of Lecce, in their rebellions…
[Politicians are the terrorists]
Two comrades are still held in prison, the other three are under house arrest. Of course our comrades were labeled as ‘terrorists’, but we all know that those who lock up, beat up and deport others are the ones who sow the terror. This pamphlet wants foremost to explain the struggle they fought and will fight against the asylum policy in Europe. They didn’t let their struggle be blinded by empty words like ‘human rights’ and ‘charity’… used by politicians and official refugee organizations, but they held everybody who is involved in the asylum policy responsible for the incarceration, ill-treatment and deportation of people without papers. They didn’t hesitate to unmask and denounce the involvement of the Red Cross, NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations), politicians, charity organizations… in the management of asylum camps.
Every day people are drowning, choking, freezing of disappearing during their attempts to reach or survive within Fortress Europe. Every day people are deported to defend the ‘advanced’ States…. But everywhere the struggle against the asylum policies is igniting. In numerous asylum camps all over Europe, hunger strikes, insurrections and revolts are followed one after another. Deportations are facing more and more militant, determined and efficient resistance. The masks of collaborators are falling to the ground. We are not alone! Everywhere there are brothers and sisters struggling against the borders and barbed wire of Fortress Europe. Here also: the occupation of the St-Boniface church in Brussels by people without papers, the actions against deportations and razzias (raids) in Brussel and Antwerp, the growing self-organisation of people without papers (e.g. UDEP – Union for the Defence of People without Papers)…
Our solidarity with the arrested comrades in Italy consists of understanding their struggle, and continuing and spreading it locally, here and wherever it is possible.
SOLIDARITY WITH THE ARRESTED ANARCHISTS IN ITALY
As anarchists, we see the struggle against the asylum policy, the asylum camps and the deportations starting in the streets. More than ever before it is possible to build solidarity in the streets. In complicity with resistance against police raids; with the struggle against the constant controls which militarize our neighbourhoods; in the restless rejection of every nationalist and racist separation that the rulers of this society try to force upon us (belgians vs foreigners, legal vs illegal immigrants…)
As long as our sisters and brothers are being locked up in asylum camps and murdered like the boat refugees in the seas surrounding Fortress Europe, are being deported because they don’t have legal papers, as long as States and borders exist – just as long we will continue to fight and struggle for a world without barbed wire, without customs, without police and without rulers. We ask you, readers of this pamphlet, for complicity in this struggle for a free world. Long enough have politicians recuperated (like the foolery about the controls on the metro in Antwerp or the boat refugees that arrived in Antwerp) our struggle by on the one side protesting against ‘undemocratic situations’ or ‘humanitarian tragedies’, and on the other side approving in parliament the construction of new asylum camps. Long enough has the charity of those who have everything to lose destroyed our dignity and militancy. Our struggle without compromise for freedom is taking place – not only here, but in the whole of Europe and the whole world.
NO BORDERS, NO NATIONS; STOP DEPORTATIONS
LOVE AND STRENGTH FOR ALL PERSECUTED PEOPLE, FUGITIVES AND REBELS
29/01/2006, Closed Centre Vottem, 14h, Demonstration against asylum camps
25/02/2006, Brussels-North Station, 14h, Demonstration against the asylum policy
‘Let us be clear: asylum detention centres are camps. To call asylum centres where immigrants await their deportations camps is not a rhetorical stressing but a strict definition. The camps of the Nazi’s were concentration camps for people the police considered as a danger for the State. It was ‘preventive incarceration’, without any form of trial. So camps weren’t places where you had to pay for a crime. Camps were places where power imposed its exception; the legal postponement of legality.’
– Extract from the Italian anarchist magazine ‘Tempi Di Guerra’
HANDS OFF THE IMMIGRANTS! SOLIDARITY IS OUR WEAPON!
A brief communique about the situation of immigrants in Greece, the recent torture of Afghan refugees in Ag.Panteleimonas police station in Athens, and one view of the action of anarchists, antiauthoritarian and autonomous comrades who attacked the station.
The end of the Olympics and of the biggest part of the construction works means for the Greek state the beginning of a new period, where immigration policies are being redefined as long as large numbers of immigrants who were used as expendable slaves for the realization of the «grand idea»(1) are now considered useless. At the same time, a wider repressive attack against those who resist is in progress, in accordance with the global «anti»terrorist crusade of domination which includes the fortification of the borders to confront the waves of refugees deserting regions that have been turned into war-zones.
Today, an operation of «law and order» -as it was named by the minister of interior P.Pavlopoulos- is launched in order to reduce the number of immigrants, to register them and put them under control so that the interests of the bosses will be better served within an environment that is more convenient for them. An environment imposing suffocating terms of survival for the immigrants and making more effective the regulation of their movement from one country to another according to the needs of the market.
Practically this operation means that the forces of repression are intensifying the intimidation campaign and escalating the terrorism excercised on immigrants, and the Media are cultivating an atmosphere of defused nationalism-racism, in order to gain consent from parts of society.
This operation has many aspects, moments and tactics: The racist pogrom against Albanian immigrants by cops and fascist thugs of the state after a football match in the beginning of September.(2) Deportations taking place on a daily basis. Hundreds of deaths on the borders, either in minefields or shipwrecks. Numerous incidents where police guns are supposed to have «accidentaly» gone off and shot somebody in police blockades in the streets. Torture and humiliation suffered by immigrants inside police stations every day. Concentration camps. The cover up that all institutions of democracy offer to cops-pimps who rape immigrant women.(3)
One more moment of this campaign was the torture of dozens of Afghan refugees by the cops during the first days of December, first inside a house they live and then in Ag.Panteleimonas police station, where they were taken by force and tortured in order to give information about another Afghan immigrant who had previously escaped from that police station.
For days, people who could not defend themselves were chained and beaten in the cells of Panteleimonas station, suffered the torment of «phalanga» (repeated flogging of the soles of the feet until they bleed and swell), were forced to strip naked, children and juveniles threatened with rape unless they speak. Bruises and wounds on the abused bodies of people harassed and hunted, fear in the eyes of those experiencing State brutality on their skin.
Against the systematic violence of the State and the bosses, militants oppose tactics of social anti-violence strengthening the social-class struggle.
Among others, one important moment of this struggle was the demonstration of 150 enraged anarchists, antiauthoritarians and autonomous comrades on Friday 24/12/2004 from Ag.Paneleimonas square towards the police station, who attacked the station causing property damage to the building and to many police cars parked outside. It was an assault against a police station that had already been targetted in society after torture had been revealed, reminding us of Guantanamo and Abu Graib).
The forces of repression, after experiencing the outburst of social rage, arrested 18 persons. 17 were immediately released without any charges and one comrade, badly beaten by the cops who satisfied their vengeance on him, was finally accused. This comrade, N.M. who participated in the demonstration in solidarity with the immigrants refused all police charges. His arrest created a new wave of solidarity and on Wednesday 29/12 he was released on parole.
The attack against the Ag.Panteleimonas police station was an action of social justice. An action that has spread wider than the specific neighbourhood the message that social and class solidarity among the oppressed finds its significance in the struggle against the domination of the state and capital, in the struggle against the brutality and the daily crimes of authority.
LET’S NOT LEAVE ANY CRIME OF THE STATE AND THE BOSSES UNANSWERED
LET’S OPPOSE SOCIAL ANTI-VIOLENCE TO THE VIOLENCE OF AUTHORITY
December 30, 2004
Open Assembly of anarchists -antiauthoritarians
(1) The olympic games were referred to as the new national «grand idea» by all the political and economic bosses and their lackeys in the Media.
(2) After the albanian national football team’s victory over the greek team in a match that took place in Albania, on September 4 2004, hundreds of Albanian immigrants went out in the streets of many greek cities to celebrate. They faced a pogrom by cops and fascists – nationalists. A 21year-old Albanian worker, Gramos Palusi, was murdered and two of his friends seriously injured in Zakinthos island by a fascist who attacked them with a knife. In Athens at least 70 immigrants were taken to hospital, and in the rest of the country the wounded Albanian immigrants were more than 300.
(3) The latest incident (December 23, 2004) is the acquittal by the court of the cop Nikos Brékolias who had raped in 1998 the 19 year-oldUkranian immigrant woman Olga B. Olga was forced into prostitution after coming in Greece.
To the immigrants – Alfredo M. Bonanno
translated from guerra sociale
We asked for labour power, men came.
Max Frisch
No one emigrates from their country for pleasure – this is a simple truth that many want to hide. If someone leaves their land and loved ones peacefully, we don’t define them as migrants, but simply as travellers or tourists. Migration is a coercive form of moving, a roaming in search of better living conditions.
At the moment there are 150 million ‘foreigners’ around the world due to wars, ecological disasters, famine, or simply the management of industrial production (the destruction of countryside and forests, mass lay-offs, and so on). All these aspects form a mosaic of oppression and misery in which the effects of exploitation become more or less direct causes of suffering and uprooting in a never ending spiral that makes any distinction between “displaced”, “migrants”, asylum seekers, refugees, survivors, hypocritical. Just think how social so called ecological emergencies (lack of water, growing desertification, field sterility) are: the explosion of an oil refinery, together with the destruction of every local autonomy on which it rested, can sometimes change the fate of an entire population.
Contrary to what racist propaganda would have us believe, only 17% of immigration concerns the rich North, it involves all continents (the African and Asian ones in particular); that means that for every poor country there is an even poorer one which immigrants are running away from. The total mobilization imposed by economy and States is a planetary symptom, an undeclared civil war that crosses every national border: millions of exploited people roam through the hell of the commercial heaven, jolted from border to border, forced into refugee camps, surrounded by police and army, handled by so-called charity organisations – partners in tragedies whose causes they don’t denounce for the mere purpose of exploiting the consequences – piled up in “waiting zones” in airports or stadiums (macabre circenses for those who don’t even have bread), locked up in Lagers called “detention centres” and, finally, packaged and expelled in the most total indifference. For many reasons we could say that the face of these unwelcome people is the face of our time – and that’s also why we’re so afraid of them. Immigrants scare us because in their misery we can see the reflection of our own, because in their wanderings we recognise our daily condition: the condition of persons who feel more and more like strangers both to this world and to themselves.
Uprooting is the most widespread condition in our present society – we might call it its centre – not a threat coming from a terrifying and mysterious elsewhere. Only by directing our gaze at our daily lives can we understand what gets all of us into the condition of immigrants. First though we must define a fundamental concept: that of clandestinity.
The creation of the clandestine, the creation of the enemy
[…] what are you? […]
You are not of this castle, you are not of this village, you are nothing.
But you are something too, unfortunately, you are a foreigner, someone that is always
inopportune and in the way, one that brings a lot of troubles, […]
whose intentions no one knows.
F. Kafka
An alien is simply someone who doesn’t have regular papers. And this is certainly not due to the pure pleasure of risk or illegality, but rather because in the majority of cases, in order to own such papers he or she would have to give certain guarantees the possession of which wouldn’t have made them aliens in the first place, but simply tourists or foreign students. If the same standards were forced on everybody, millions would have been thrown overboard. Which unemploy-ed Italian, for instance, could give the guarantee of a legal wage? What about all the precarious people here who work for temporary job agencies, whose contracts are not even worth a visa for immigrants? And by the way, are there as many Italians living in a 60 squares metres flat with no more than two other people? If we read all these decrees (from both the left and the right wing) about immigration, it will be clear that clandestinization is a precise project of States. Why?
An illegal immigrant is easier to blackmail, to make accept, under the threat of expulsion, even more hateful conditions of work and existence (precariousness, endless wandering, makeshift accommo-dation, and so on). With the threat of the police, bosses obtain tame wage slaves, or rather real forced labour workers. Even the most reactionary and xenophobic right wing parties are perfectly aware that hermetically closed borders are not only technically impossible, but are not even profitable. According to the United Nations, in order to keep the present “balance between active and inactive population”, from here to 2025, Italy should “take” inside its borders a quantity of immigrants five times the present yearly fixed amount. Confindustria, in fact, continuously suggest doubling the quantity fixed so far.
The granting or rejection of year-long or season-long permits contributes to creating a specific social hierarchy among the poor. The same distinction between immediate forced repatriation and expulsion (or the obligation, for an irregular immigrant, who shows up at the borders to be sent back home) allows them to choose who to make clandestine or to expel right away – a choice based on ethnic principles, economical-political agreement with the governments of the countries the immigrant comes from and the needs of the labour market. In fact, the authorities are perfectly aware that no one will ever spontaneously show up at the border to be expelled; surely not people who have spent all that they owned – sometimes even more – to pay for their trip here. Businessmen define the features of the goods they buy (immigrants are goods, like everything else after all), the State records data, police carry out orders.
The warnings of politicians and mass media, anti-immigration claims build up imaginary enemies to drive the exploited from here to lay on an easy scapegoat the growing social tension and reassure them, letting them admire the show of poor and even more precarious and blackmailed people than themselves, and let them feel part of a ghost called Nation. Making of “irregularity” – that same irregularity that they create – synonymous with crime and danger, States justify police control and the criminalisation of class conflict that is getting more and more seditious. In this context, for instance, should be seen the manipulation of consensus after September 11, summed up in the despicable slogan “clandestine=terrorist” which combines, if read in both senses, racist paranoia with the demand for repression against the enemy within (rebels, subversives).
They shout out, from the right as well as the left, against the Mafia that organises the journeys for clandestine people (described by the media as an invasion, a scourge, the advance of an army), when it’s by their very laws that they are promoted. They shout out against “organised crime” exploiting so many immigrants (which is true but only partially), when it’s they who supply it with desperate and ready-for-everything resources. In their historical symbiosis, State and Mafia stand united by the same liberal principle: business is business.
Racism, a means for economic and political necessity, finds room to spread in a context of generalised standardisation and isolation, when insecurity creates fears that can be opportunely manipulated. A moral or cultural condemnation of racism is of little use, since it is not an opinion or an argument, but psychological misery, an “emotional plague”. It’s in the present social conditions that the reason of its spreading ought to be sought and also, at the same time, the power to fight it.
The welcome of a lager
To call the detention camps for immigrants waiting for expulsion Lagers– centres introduced in Italy in 1998 by the left wing government by mean of the Turco-Napolitano law – is not rhetorical emphasis, as most of those who use this formula think. It is a strict definition. Nazi Lagers were concentration camps where people thought by the police to be dangerous for State security were locked up, even in the absence of criminally indictable behaviour. This precautionary measure – defined as “protective detention” – consisted in taking all civil and political rights away from certain citizens. Whether they were refugees, Jewish, gypsy, homosexuals or subversives, it was up to the police, after months or years, to decide what to do about them. So Lagers were not jails in which to expiate some crime, nor an extension of criminal law. They were camps where the Rule set its exception; in short terms, a legal suspension of legality. Therefore a Lager is not a consequence of the number of internees or of the number of murders (between 1935 and 1937, before the start of Jewish deportations, in Germany internees numbered 7500), but rather of its political and juridical nature.
Immigrants nowadays end up in the Centres regardless of possible crimes, without any criminal trial whatsoever: their internment, ordered by the police superintendents, are a simple police measure. Just as happened in 1940 under the Vichy government, when prefects could lock up all the individuals considered a “danger for national defence and public security” or (mind this) “foreigners in respect to the national economy”. We can refer to administrative detention in French Algeria, to the South Africa of apartheid or to the present ghettos for Palestinians created by the State of Israel.
It is not a coincidence if, with regard to the infamous conditions of the detention centres, the good democrats don’t appeal to the respect of any law at all, but to the respect of human rights – the last mask in front of women and men to whom nothing remains but belonging to the human species. It’s not possible to integrate them as citizens, so they are falsely integrated as Human Beings. The abstract equality of principles hides real inequalities everywhere.
A new eradication
Immigrants that for the
first time landed on Battery Park soon
realized that what they had been
told about the marvelous America
wasn’t true at all:
maybe land belonged to everybody,
but the first come
had largely served themselves already,
and to them there was nothing left
than to crowd together in tens in windowless
hovels
of the Lower East Side and work fifteen hours
a day. Turkeys didn’t fall roasted
straight in the dishes and the streets of New York
weren’t paved in gold.
Yet, most of the times, they weren’t
paved at all. And then they realised that
it was just to get them to pave these streets that they
were allowed to come. And to dig tunnels
and canals, to build up streets, bridges, big
embankments, railroads, to clear forests, to exploit
mines and caves, to make cars and cigars,/
carabines and clothes, shoes, chewing gum,
corned-beef and soap, and to build
skyscrapers higher
than the ones that they discovered when they first arrived.
Georges Perec
If we go a few steps back, it will become clear that eradication is a crucial moment in the expansion of the State and capitalistic domination. At its dawn, industrial production drew the exploited away from country and villages to gather them into the city. The ancient skills of farm workers and artisans were thereby substituted with the forced and repetitive activity of the factory – an activity impossible to control, in its means and its finalities, by the new proletarians. So the first children of industrialization lost both their ancient spaces of life and their ancient knowledge, that which had allowed them to autonomously provide for the most part of their means of subsistence. On the other hand, forcing millions of men and women to similar living conditions (same places, same problems, same knowledge), capitalism unified their struggles, got them to find new brothers and sisters to fight against that same unbearable life. The 20th century marked the apex of this productive and State gathering, whose symbols had been the factory-neighbourhood and the Lager, and at the same time the apex of the more radical social struggles for its destruction. In the last twenty years, due to technological innovation, capital has substituted the old factory with new productive cores ever smaller and more widely distributed throughout the territory, also breaking up the fabric of the society within which those fights had grown, thereby creating a new eradication.
There’s more. Technological reorganisation has made trade faster and easier, opening the whole world to the most ferocious competition, overthrowing the economies and the ways of life of entire Countries. So there is, in Africa, in Asia, in South America, the closure of many factories, mass lay offs. All this, within a social context that has been destroyed by colonisation from the deportation of inhabitants from their villages to the shantytowns, from their fields to the assembly lines, produced a crowd of poor people who became useless to their masters, of unwanted children of capitalism. Add to this the fall of self-styled communist Countries and the debt racket initiated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and we will get quite a faithful cartography of migration, of ethnical and religious wars.
What we now call “flexibility” and “precariousness” is the consequence of all this: a further progress in the submission to the machines, fiercer competition, a worsening of material conditions (deals, health, etcetera). We’ve seen the reason why: capitalism has dismantled the community that it created. Anyway it would be partial to see precariousness in an economic sense alone, as the lack of a steady work place and the old pride for professionalism. It is isolation inside standardisation, or a fanatical conformity with lack of common spaces. In the distressing void of meaning and perspectives, mystified, the unfulfilled need of community returns, giving birth to new nationalistic, ethnical or religious counterpositions, a tragic re-proposition of collective identities just where any real communality among individuals has diminished. And it’s exactly within this void that the fundamentalist argument finds its place, false promise of a redeemed community.
Eğitim; devlet için itaat edenleri, kapitalizm için üreten köleleri var etmek demektir.
Eğitim; devlet için itaat edenleri, kapitalizm için üreten köleleri var etmek demektir.Bu itaat ruhu; toplumda ailede başlar, devletin okullarında 18 yıl zorla hapse mahkum olur, taa ki ihtiyacı olan köleyi elde edene kadar…yavaşça sindirir, yok oluşa hazırlar.
18 lik ruhlar; sistemin bugün ihtiyaç duyduğu itaatkar beyinlerdir.İtaatkar Beyinleri yaratmak için kontrol düzeneği olan okullar yazı ve sözlü sınavlarla sürekli itaati canlı tutmayı sağlar.Sınavlar, üniformalar, disiplin kurulu, veli toplantıları ile bizleri “hazırol” pozisyonunda tutarlar.
İşte bu mahşer gününde; öğretmenlerinin ve ailesinin sözlerini dinliyerek, verilen bilgileri uslu bir şekilde almış olanları tespit etmek için sistemin süper bir fikri var:ÖSS
Haziran sıcağında cehennemde yanmak için hazır mıyız?
Hayatımızın dönüm noktası olarak kurgulanmış bu sınavı kazanmak ya da kazanamamak için hazır mıyız?
Bize dayatılan bu iki şıklı oyunu oynayacak mıyız?
Hayır..Bizler bu sınavın 195 dakikalık bir sınavdan ibaret olmadığını gayet iyi biliyoruz.ÖSS demek, anaokulundan başlayarak lise bitene kadar dayatılan her şeye bolun eğmektir.Bizim için seçilen kıyafetleri gitmek, öğretmenlerin emirlerine uymak, bize verilen “milli” bilinci sorgulamadan kabul etmek demektir.Rakibin olan 1,5 milyon kişinin arasından sıyrılarak şanlı 2 yüz bin kişinin arasına girmek, dershane patronlarına rant sağlamak demektir.
Bizler Eğitilmek istemiyoruz.
Paylaşmanın ve dayanışmanın ruhu, yaşamın bilgisiyle harmanlanmadığından özgürlükten bahsedebiliriz.Bilgiyi tahakküm aracına dönüştürerek var olan bu sistemde bir yok oluşa süüklenmek istemiyoruz.Çocukluğumuz, gençliğimiz, hayatımız bizimdir.Anarşinin isyan çığlığını atın, bu sınavı kaybedin…hayatı kazanın…
Eğitilmek istemiyoruz!
Özgürlüğe tutkusu olan, sistemin bilgisini reddeden ve eğitilmiş olmaktan nefret eden herkesi birlikte hareket etmeye çağırıyoruz.
Eğitilmek Nedir?
“Okullara kapatılmak, sıraya dizilmek, numaralandırılmak, kurallara uydurulmak, hizaya sokulmak; gözetlenmek, yorumlanmak, soruşturulmaktur.
Eğitilmek ne marifeti nede yaratıcılığı olan öğretmenler tarafından sayıma tabi tutulmak, denetlenmek, sınanmak, notlandırılmak, elenmektir.Yaptığın her eylemde mimlenmek, dövülmek, sövülmek, damgalanmak, kaybedilmek anlamına gelir.
Eğitim topluma yararlı bireyler olmamız bahane edilerek çocukluğumuzun, gençliğimizin;beyinlerimizin ve ruhlarımızın sömürülmesi demektir.Bütün bunlar toplumun ve halkın yararı için yapılır.Daha sonra ilk direniş belirtisi ya da şikayet sözcüğünde kişi baskı altına alınır, soruşturulur, yargılanır, cezalandırılır, kınanır, uzaklaştırılır, disipline edilir.
Eğitim bireyin eziyet görmesi, onurunun kırılması, küçük düşürülmesidir…Eğitim işte budur; onun kerameti de, ahlakı da budur!”
Öğretmene Mektup: Bize İtaat Etmeyi Öğreten Siz Değil Misiniz!
Biliyorsunuz; bilmiyorsanız da hissetmişsinizdir.
Bugün Toplu Sözleşme Hakkı olmayan kamu emekçileri grevdeydi.
Onlar “yasal” olan şey onlar açısından “meşru” olmadığı için yasal olmayan bir eylem gerçekleştirdi bugün.
Ne güzel değil mi? Özgürlük için mücadele ediyorlar. İsyan ediyorlar.
Ve toplumun tüm kesimlerini de kendilerine destek olmaya çağırdılar. Bizi, öğrencileri de.
Biz Lise Anarşist Faaliyet olarak; okullarda bizlere itaat etmeyi öğretmeye çalışan; otoritenin meşru olduğuna bizleri alıştırmaya çalışan öğretmenleri bu İTAATSİZ anlarında yakalamışken, LAF’ımızı söyleyelim dedik.
Ve eğitim emekçilerinin bulunduğu kortejlere giderek onlara mektubumuzu ilettik.
İŞTE LAF’IMIZ
Öğretmene Mektup
Bugün grevdesiniz, haksızlıklara karşı hakkınızı arayacaksınız, açlığa, yoksuluğa, krize karşı, özgür ve eşit bir dünya için grevedesiniz. Ülke genelinde bir grev, trenler, otobüsler, vapurlar işlemeyecek, hemşireler ve doktorlar ise sadece acil vakalara bakacaklar, sizlerse eğitim öğretim kurumlarını işletmeyeceksiniz. Ve grevin etkisini genişletmek için, grev kararı alındığınızdan beridir herkese seslendiniz, fabrika işçilerine, taşeron işçilere, annelere, babalara ve hatta bizlere yani öğrencilerinize seslendiniz.
Seslendiniz, aynen hep geç geldiğimizde, saçımız başımız, kılık kıyafetimiz, hayallerimiz düşüncelerimiz uygunsuz olduğunda seslendiğiniz (bağırdınız) gibi. Siz de açlığa yoksulluğa, işsizliğe, eşitsizliğe, adaletsizlğe karşı koyun; eşit ve özgür bir dünya için greve gelin dediniz bize. Ama unuttunuz mu! Okullarda öğrencilerinizi sistemin istediği prototipe dönüştüren sizler değil misiniz? Sistemin istediği gibi bizleri etkisiz tepkisiz itatkaar kölelere dönüştürmüyor musunuz?Bizlerin hayal etmesini – düşünmesini engelleyerek faşizme alışmamıza, kılık kıyafet yönetmeliğiyle – tektipleştirerek militarizmi özümsememize, sürekli gelecek kaygısı – kariyer kaygısıyla kapitalizmi içselleştirmemize katkıda bulunmuyor musunuz… Bu saçma sistemde sizler de bizlerin yaşadığı, tüm sorunları yaşamadınız mı? Şimdi bir şekilde yaşamlarını sürdürmek adına bu işleri yapan sizler bu sistemin sürekliliği sağlamıyor musunuz? Biliyoruz sizin de sıkıntılarınız var. Kira, faturalar, kredi kartları ekstraları… biliyoruz belki siz bile bu saçma sapan sistemde seçilerek (ÖSS) bu meslektesiniz. Siz de efendilerin birer kölesisiniz. Tıpkı bizlerin biçimlendirildiği gibi sizler de biçimlendirildiniz. Sizler de biliyorsunuz ve bu yüzden bu grevdesiniz. Biliyorsunuz, özgür ve eşit bir dünya için mücadele ediyorsunuz.
Şimdi size sesleniyoruz; şimdi şu anda olmadığında asla olmayacak. Bizler yaşamlarımızda özgür ve itaatsiz anlar – alanlar oluşturmadıkça devrim bir ütopyadan öteye geçmez. Sistemin içindesiniz ama onu işletmeyebilirsiniz. Bu gün olduğu gibi hergün okulda sınıfta sokakta sistemin istemediği olabilirsiniz.
Devrim bir gün değil. Devrim her gündür. Devrim yapılmaz devrim yaşanır.
Bu bildiri Lise Anarşist Faaliyetin 25 Kasım 2009 tarihinde dağıttığı bildiridir.
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