just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

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eumaas
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just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by eumaas »

as I'll ever get:

Grace wrote:
CPHigh wrote:Please read "The Limits of Power" by Andrew Bacevich.

This should be required reading before any election, specially this coming one.

The lesser or two evils!! This is the reason why we are voting this year?

We should really start a revolution by not voting!!!!
Lots of other great points have been made but just wanted to address this - it would NOT be revolutionary to not vote! What's revolutionary about that? What's truly revolutionary is to identify the characteristics that YOU think are key in a President and work towards getting someone like THAT in the White House. That's revolutionary. Or working to expand beyond a 2 party system.

But not voting doesn't accomplish anything - it just gives the power to those who do show up to vote and those who are brave/stupid enough to run for office and win.
I disagree. You're assuming statism. There is a long and honorable history of principled abstentionism in the anarchist movement. The electoral process is often mistaken in this country for being the essence of democracy. It serves to legitimate the state. If you view the state as a fundamentally unjustifiable institution, voting (as an act of legitimation) becomes a moral issue.(1)

I myself have been a principled abstentionist for most of my life, as was my father. I'll be voting this time because McCain/Palin is just so godawful, but it's a negative vote, not a positive one. Obama does have many admirable qualities as a politician, however his and my views do not overlap. He is essentially offering the same solutions familiar in the last thirty years of the two party racket. His pick of Biden only reinforces my perceptions.

From an anarchist viewpoint, the state itself creates the problems for which it offers solutions. It's treating sores with a medicine that not only fails to address the underlying disease, but also aggravates those very sores. Some anarchists do believe in the possibility of making a difference through electoral politics, but they pointedly restrict it to the local level as part of a strategy called libertarian municipalism.(2)

However, there is no way to end the state through using the state. This is where every anarchist parts from Marx. Using statist means reinforces the state and weakens anarchy. It's simple behavioral patterning. The state's legitimacy rests first on violence and secondly on the psychological legitimation of that violence by the people. Reformism and trying to work within electoral politics reinforces the psychology of statism.

Anarchists have tried to cooperate or participate in the state (on a national level) before, in the Russian Revolution and in the Spanish Revolution. In both cases we were betrayed and slaughtered by the well-meaning statist socialists--and not just Bolshevists, but social-democrats looked on approvingly as well. The statists broke the back of both revolutions and concentrated power in the state. This is a sure and steady process that occurs as the result of the internal logic of the state.

States cannot tolerate free and voluntary association, which to me is a foundational principle of liberty. This for me is the crux of the problem--I am not allowed the choice to opt out of the state. The idea of someone living freely outside of the state is anathema to reactionaries and paternalistic socialists alike. To the former it's an affront to patriotism, to law and order. To the latter it's a rejection of the nanny state which is here to protect us all from the big bad corporations.(3) After all, an individual or a small cooperative/collective/commune in a state of liberty, producing only for subsistence and simple exchange belies the whole foundation of the state. Gotta bust them up, boys! Marxist legitimize such actions because a bourgeois economy is more "progressive" than a petty-bourgeois. And still more progressive is state capitalism, something they call socialism, only proving Bakunin right that the "red bureaucracy" would produce "the most vile and terrible lie" and "the worst of all despotic governments." Anyone who lived under Hoxha could tell you that.

Breaking the back of the two party racket could be revolutionary. Just getting someone in the White House is not revolutionary. Burning down the White House or turning it into a museum might be. None of these things are revolutionary enough to save us.

What is revolutionary? It's that old Wobbly motto: "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old." Kevin Carson offers a program somewhat compatible with electoral politics. In all cases, we build counterinstitutions in which anarchist social relations can thrive. Even things as simple as lending without interest are an exercise in mutual aid. Work in every aspect of your life to foster free association, cooperation, solidarity, and mutual aid. As I said to a coworker, a society like ours that works in contradiction to the golden rule cannot help but eat itself, so apply the golden rule in your dealings with other people. Good behavior can be infectious. Agorists (a kind of left-libertarian) say we should work on creating a countereconomy by withdrawing from the legitimate economy as much as we can and only participating in grey and black markets. I don't know much about agorism, and that does sound slightly creepy, but I think it means exchanging, lending, gifting, working outside of the cash nexus. Start a community center. Everyone in your neighborhood could put up a list on the board. In one column are jobs they need done--fixing the waterheater, replacing a door--in the other column are jobs they can perform in return such as repairing siding, etc. Reciprocity and generosity are acts of rebellion against the cash nexus and the state. Here's something from "Riding Out the Credit Crisis" by Douglas Rushkoff in Arthur Magazine No. 29/May 2008:
Whatever the case, the best thing you can do to protect yourself and your interests is to make friends. The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn't necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.

If you're sourcing your garlic from your neighbor over the hill instead of the Big Ag conglomerate over the ocean, then shifts in the exchange rate won't matter much. If you're using a local currency to pay your mechanic to adjust your brakes, or your chiropractor to adjust your back, then a global liquidity crisis won't affect your ability to pay for either. If you move to a place because you're looking for smart people instead of a smart real estate investment, you're less likely to be suckered by high costs of a "hot" city or neighborhood, and more likely to find the kinds of people willing to serve as a social network, if for no other reason than they're less busy servicing their mortgages.

The more connected you are to the real world, and the more consciously you reject the lure of the speculative ladder, the less of a willing dupe you'll be in the pyramid scheme that's in the process of collapsing all around us at this moment.

Think small. Buy local. Make friends. Print money. Grow food. Teach children. Learn nutrition. And if you do have money to invest, put it into whatever lets you and your friends do those things.
There was a time when it was possible to have a traditional violent revolution. There was a time when anarchism was a true mass movement. That all died in Barcelona in May of 1937. But it's not the only way to make things better. Let's look to a world where our idea of politics is getting some people together to repair a road, not putting an X by the name of a lesser evil.

Sorry for the long rant, but I thought I should put these ideas out there. I should say here, though, that if you do believe in the state, if you do support a party, I respect that! We are all individuals with individual convictions, and as an anarchist I cannot but respect your free will, heart, and mind. Do what seems the most moral, most efficacious. I think most state socialists are well-meaning people, as are most conservatives and all in between. Even the elites are not always evil--though they all may be short-sighted and selfish, every one of us is born into a struggle against the inevitable darkness of a yawning grave.

It is my conviction, however, that the ideas I've partially discussed here would result in the maximum balance of liberty and well-being for all. It's rational, commonsensical, and allows for our human folly. There is an alternative to our social cannibalism. If you think this is all idealism, look to history and anthropology. Societies like what I've described have existed, if not in toto at least in part. The opportunity we have is to realize an aggregation of all these good aspects, of these good things we have stumbled across in our primitive attempts to survive and persist. At no other time has a better way of living been simultaneously more possible and more impossible. This contradiction is at the heart of civilization right now: whither shall we go?

If anyone disagrees and thinks this all a load of nonsense, that's fine too! We may work at cross-purposes. None become my enemy until they harm my brother, my sister. I'm a firm believer in solidarity: an injury to one is an injury to all. Let's all just dance a while before we die. I doubt I'll live to see another 1936. But I might live to lay down the basis for it. I sure as hell would like to die trying!

All the best and more besides!
- Gene

Footnotes:
1. Paying taxes is also a moral issue, however in the case of taxes, nonadherence is criminal and so many anarchists still pay taxes in order to be left alone by the state. Of course, interference by the state is unavoidable. For a typical abstentionist piece, see the Case Against Voting by British anarchist Colin Ward.

2. Libertarian municipalism, however, concentrates on repurposing those institutions--a sort of democratic hijacking of the local state.

3. Yet these very corporations have pushed for such regulation and such policies. Every large corporation profits from the state. If we had free markets, it'd cease to be capitalism, and Walmart would no longer exist. See Chapter Six of Studies in Mutalist Political Economy by Kevin Carson for a historical survey and analysis of this, and see Chapter Five for why laissez-faire never existed, and finally Chapter Four for why capitalism has always been statist and exploitative.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by JulieJazz »

I "BIG HEART" Eumaas! :kiss:

eumaas
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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

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JulieJazz wrote:I "BIG HEART" Eumaas! :kiss:
I Superzied Heart JulieJazz! ;)
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by Wolter »

eumaas wrote:
JulieJazz wrote:I "BIG HEART" Eumaas! :kiss:
I Superzied Heart JulieJazz! ;)
I ultra-Spade my dog.
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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by eumaas »

Wolter wrote:
eumaas wrote:
JulieJazz wrote:I "BIG HEART" Eumaas! :kiss:
I Superzied Heart JulieJazz! ;)
I ultra-Spade my dog.
You never did the Kenosha Kid.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by Wolter »

eumaas wrote:
Wolter wrote:
eumaas wrote:
JulieJazz wrote:I "BIG HEART" Eumaas! :kiss:
I Superzied Heart JulieJazz! ;)
I ultra-Spade my dog.
You never did the Kenosha Kid.
Schwarzkommando!
”INDER LOCK THE THE KISS THREAD IVE REALISED IM A PRZE IDOOT” - Thomas Jefferson

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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by dpwolf »

That makes a lot of sense. I wonder about the separation of church and state, and whether that is a help or hindrance to the sort of revolution or evolution you describe. If only we could agree upon some basic religious concepts that transcend the various churches, gods and goddesses - such as the golden rule - and set those as basis for social contract (without the taboo of crossing the separation line) rather than allowing political theory to create and support a government structure without any injection of morality, because such a government inherently ends up serving itself rather than (and to the detriment of) the people who formed it. In other words, a Frankenstein creation always needs morality lessons, some of which do not stem logically from logic but rather through wisdom and experience, and teaching charismatically and learning by accepting rather than arguing, proving logically and then testing to make sure a student has been sufficiently brainwashed and conditioned. I often similarly wonder about Socrates and the Sophists, as in Socrates being a personification of the dangers which become invoked when logic and science replace learned wisdom and experience to become the only method through which knowledge and truth can be obtained. I'm having a hard time explaining my thoughts but what you're suggesting seems more moral, individual and faith oriented than it does political and logical (which is fine by me). For example, from within the state, which says it is impossible to work outside the state, and thinking logically, which also says you cannot escape the state, what your suggesting to begin the necessary change seems nonsensical and impossible, a ridiculous waste of effort, but it isn't. It would work. Sorry for rambling.
then don't go killing all the bees

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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

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dpwolf wrote:That makes a lot of sense. I wonder about the separation of church and state, and whether that is a help or hindrance to the sort of revolution or evolution you describe. If only we could agree upon some basic religious concepts that transcend the various churches, gods and goddesses - such as the golden rule - and set those as basis for social contract (without the taboo of crossing the separation line) rather than allowing political theory to create and support a government structure without any injection of morality, because such a government inherently ends up serving itself rather than (and to the detriment of) the people who formed it. In other words, a Frankenstein creation always needs morality lessons, some of which do not stem logically from logic but rather through wisdom and experience, and teaching charismatically and learning by accepting rather than arguing, proving logically and then testing to make sure a student has been sufficiently brainwashed and conditioned. I often similarly wonder about Socrates and the Sophists, as in Socrates being a personification of the dangers which become invoked when logic and science replace learned wisdom and experience to become the only method through which knowledge and truth can be obtained. I'm having a hard time explaining my thoughts but what you're suggesting seems more moral, individual and faith oriented than it does political and logical (which is fine by me). For example, from within the state, which says it is impossible to work outside the state, and thinking logically, which also says you cannot escape the state, what your suggesting to begin the necessary change seems nonsensical and impossible, a ridiculous waste of effort, but it isn't. It would work. Sorry for rambling.
No, no. Thanks for the response. I appreciate what you've said. I'm not sure where to take it yet but if I have an idea I'll respond in detail.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

eumaas
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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by eumaas »

I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

eumaas
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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by eumaas »

eumaas wrote:Said discussion is continuing on:
http://www.websitetoolbox.com/tool/post ... id=3022611
Some pretty good stuff going on over there and I welcome the opposition and challenges to my views--it helps me to restate and refine my convictions. If you're into this kind of thing, give it a read. It's a nice chat. I'm a little long-winded there, but I feel I have to be just to explain things a bit more.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by Flex »

eumaas wrote:Some pretty good stuff going on over there and I welcome the opposition and challenges to my views--it helps me to restate and refine my convictions. If you're into this kind of thing, give it a read. It's a nice chat. I'm a little long-winded there, but I feel I have to be just to explain things a bit more.
Don't worry about the long-windedness folks, I make up for it with short posts that contain cursing!
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by eumaas »

Flex wrote:
eumaas wrote:Some pretty good stuff going on over there and I welcome the opposition and challenges to my views--it helps me to restate and refine my convictions. If you're into this kind of thing, give it a read. It's a nice chat. I'm a little long-winded there, but I feel I have to be just to explain things a bit more.
Don't worry about the long-windedness folks, I make up for it with short posts that contain cursing!
Ah, so you're not just a jackbooted government thug, you're a foul-mouthed jackbooted government thug.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

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Re: just posted this over at snews--as close to a manifesto

Post by Wolter »

eumaas wrote:
Flex wrote:
eumaas wrote:Some pretty good stuff going on over there and I welcome the opposition and challenges to my views--it helps me to restate and refine my convictions. If you're into this kind of thing, give it a read. It's a nice chat. I'm a little long-winded there, but I feel I have to be just to explain things a bit more.
Don't worry about the long-windedness folks, I make up for it with short posts that contain cursing!
Ah, so you're not just a jackbooted government thug, you're a foul-mouthed jackbooted government thug.
I hate myself for loving both of you.

No, wait. I just hate both of you.

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snews

Post by dpwolf »

Wow, that's quite a read. I've never spent as much time on that site before and didn't realize folks here go there that often. Pretty serious and intelligent discussion going on so I hesitate to comment with my babel but I generally agree that a cooperative, infectious anarchic non-participation in state assumed affairs is an real option, and can be the means to the necessary change which neither Obama nor McCain, nor Nader nor anyone else operating within the system, is going to accomplish. On the other hand, the following quote from one of the posters provides a great reason to vote:

[quote""]There is zero reason to believe that if Gore had gotten in in 2000, we would have either Iraq, this economic insanity, or the level of environmental damage we've had in the last 8 years. Matter of fact it's a damn good bet we'd have none of those. [/quote]
then don't go killing all the bees

eumaas
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Re: snews

Post by eumaas »

dpwolf wrote:Wow, that's quite a read. I've never spent as much time on that site before and didn't realize folks here go there that often. Pretty serious and intelligent discussion going on so I hesitate to comment with my babel but I generally agree that a cooperative, infectious anarchic non-participation in state assumed affairs is an real option, and can be the means to the necessary change which neither Obama nor McCain, nor Nader nor anyone else operating within the system, is going to accomplish. On the other hand, the following quote from one of the posters provides a great reason to vote:
There is zero reason to believe that if Gore had gotten in in 2000, we would have either Iraq, this economic insanity, or the level of environmental damage we've had in the last 8 years. Matter of fact it's a damn good bet we'd have none of those.
Sure. And note that I am voting this year. I don't think it need be exclusionary--let those who think they can work within do so. Us anarchos will keep doing things our way. The overthrow of the state is so far off (I'm thinking generations and generations away) that there's no serious conflict yet.
I feel that there is a fascistic element, for example, in the Rolling Stones . . .
— Morton Feldman

I've studied the phenomenon of neo-provincialism in self-isolating online communities but this place takes the fucking cake.
— Clashy

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