Power to the people; a Syrian experiment in democracy:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/50102294-77fd-11e5-a95a-27d368e1ddf7.html
Being old and cynical, I find this report a bit too dewey-eyed to be swallowed whole. Does anyone have any other information on this situation?
"Being old and cynical, I find this report a bit too dewey-eyed to be swallowed whole. Does anyone have any other information on this situation?"
A close friend and former leader of the Federal Greens (way back when it had some radical pretensions!!) recently attended some social ecology and ecosocialist gatherings on the American east coast, home of the Murray Bookchin inspired social ecology movement, where this matter was seriously taken up!
And recently I met up with some activists from Barcelona, preparing to do a film on the matter, well aware of this process. In fact there is an international call out by the Syrian Kurdish movement there for activists with training in eco agriculture and eco teck to come to their assistance.
Yes it is a serious international support movement! Sonething we must consider supporting!!
Thanks, NDPP and iyraste1313. I reckon that if these people in Syria use Bookchin as a springboard and not as a sacred text, and if they are not crushed by the rampaging ideological monsters around them, they may get somewhere.
I read Bookchin, and had a glancing personal contact with him at a Green Party of Ontario conference in 1992. I was not favourably impressed. I throught he had *some* good ideas but tried to extend them too far, a common mistake of system builders.
I do think that we need to develop stronger social organizations at the municipal level, and especially something to replace or redevelop the multi-generational extended-family household and regenerate the household economy. I have a soft spot for intentional communities, but I think that they are a bit too tight for most people and that the cohousing model offers more opportunities for development.
iyraste1313, I deduce you are in touch with Chris Lee. Say hello to him from me. We went through a lot together, and I admired his work as an architect of cooperative housing.
"regenerate the household economy"
This is the closest thing I've read in these pages to what amounts to a radical idea...whatever happened to the ideas of building an informal economy outsdide the rule of money, based on reciprocity, caring and sharing, outside the control of corporate bureaucratic fascism?
The building block of a new populist alternative politics! With eventually a political expression!
BTW, I was referring to Kathryn Cholette, leader of the Greens during its ecofeminist, bioregionalist era, eventually squashed by the realists!
...whatever happened to the ideas of building an informal economy outsdide the rule of money, based on reciprocity, caring and sharing, outside the control of corporate bureaucratic fascism?
For good reasons, exchanges and enterprises like that are probably not widely advertised. My sense is that people will avail themselves of local, 'underground' arrangements that necessarily lack a formal structure whenever the opportunity arises. Such encounters are often doubly rewarding, in that, the possibility exists for a loose bond of sorts to form from the exchange, and obviously a tangible, if not material reward is present. Some people, particularly on the left, will look down upon such activities as criminality that siphons off whatever benefit the official economy is supposed to accrue from every transaction, without acknowledging the vast range of fascist criminality that gets undertaken with everyone's tax proceeds. The issue of offshore tax havens alone is an indication that wink and nudge economic informality is rampant in this society.
" people will avail themselves of local, 'underground' arrangements that necessarily lack a formal structure whenever the opportunity arises."
...apologies for my lack of clarity here....building such an underground economy outside corporate and government control must be well organized, systemic and eventually with a governance albeit populist in nature...
I recall my days decades ago on the Pacific Coast when people really were trying to do just that, building relations between the people on the land (back to the land movement, remember?) and the urban neighbourhoods, setting up production and distribution process, taking control of housing etc.
This is what anarchist propositions must be all about!
We can learn from past failures and with far greater knowlege and skills, not to mention ongoing social experiments globally...
but of course recognize that the engine for such process again will come with economic collapse brought on by the casino financial system teetering, at present....
The “Democratise Europe” Project. A European Movement, A Coalition of Citizens. Interview with Yanis VaroufakisBy Yanis VaroufakisGlobal Research, October 27, 2015Open Democracy 25 October 2015Region: EuropeTheme: Global Economy ...
I include this interview here, as the discussion revolves around a fundamental problem for anarchists, popular democratists and decentralists generally.....
The ideal of Anarchism is the integration of political governance within the forms of social organization, instead of ruling over!
Fundamental to the ideal is the concept of popular demcracy within such organization and fundamental to the urgency of populist democracy is the idea of decentralization to human scale, community scale...
What Varoufakis suggests by his refusal to support decentralist withdrawl in Europe is the problem of the globalist system.
Decentralism to human scale means a holistic system where organized society is social, cultural and economic and technic!
So how can this proceed within the nature of globalized technologies? This is the essential point, here.
So the process to decentralized systems must also include the idea of Federation, a fundamental principle of Anarchism, but a populist controlled system of federalism.
He is suggesting this be done within the Federation of the EU.
I would suggest differently, the idea of building alliance in an alternative format, regional autonomous zones, partnerships where appropriate!
Good post!
The ideal of Anarchism is the integration of political governance within the forms of social organization, instead of ruling over!
There used to be city states. Governance is now global in scope and is based on obscene, over-bloated economic factors that favour a few in the here and now, but ultimately no one. For example, many US financial laws apply everywhere so long as transactions are circuited through a US banking institution. There's plenty of Anarchist theory dedicated to breaking up rule by monstrosities like that in order to reduce exercises in decision making down to where people live.
So how can this proceed within the nature of globalized technologies? This is the essential point, here.
Yes it is. To put it plainly, for many the system will either have to be brought down in a massive conflagration, or subverted from within by a wholelsale refusal of the masses to participate in the functioning of the machine we're all tied to. Either option seems unlikely on any effective scale we could presently imagine, considering that everything we're about is tethered to the production of desire as D&G put it, or that there is no outside of this thing, or outside of the context in which we live from Derrida's infamous phrase, not to mention the will of the world as Schopenhauer saw things. Ultimately we should begin to realize that there is no one in charge to set things right, no single power that we could appeal to. We are in fact our own monsters, and the clowns and charlatans we put in charge by voting are fully representative of either our sick desires or fiendish nightmares, depending on which of the two wins out in these twisted, electoral parlour games for the rich. And if we elect someone or some entity to contend with this system on our behalf, it should be understood that they will not last long, considering that entire countries are literally destroyed at a whim.
So the process to decentralized systems must also include the idea of Federation, a fundamental principle of Anarchism, but a populist controlled system of federalism.
There is Chomsky's notion of 'anarcho-syndicalism' around a loose, federated state.
I would suggest differently, the idea of building alliance in an alternative format, regional autonomous zones, partnerships where appropriate!
Upthread somewhere, an anarchist friend, Anarchist without Content, discussed Hakim Bey's idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones, or T.A.Z. Fortuitiously, this was found via a quick visit to the AWC site:
Laughing at the Futility of it All
The beautiful idea: Anarchism means many things to many people..........Is there something that persists beyond a shared name? To be direct: what is anarchism?The answer I now give to this question is that anarchism is the start to a conversation. As someone who loves that particular conversation, I use the word freely, contradictorily, and in public places.
Manitoba jails bursting at the seams
Manitoba jails are bursting at the seams, with the occupancy rate currently at 127 per cent.
Overflow in the jails and prisons seems to be a common theme across North America, as the bête noire of the so called proletariat, the petit-bourgeois and the bourgeois alike are being jailed away as part of a program to conceal the contradictions of this society, which also overflows. It seems as if the people who decide, and the people who turn decisions into action, are quite miffed at certain elements of society for mucking things up. Apparently some people insist on giving the capitalist system so many have invested their lives in a bad name by refusing to live in a certain way, even as they're never afforded the means. As well, in the current rush to punish as many people as possible for not living up to certain impossible standards that they have no way of accessing anyway, there will never be enough money for extra judges, lawyers, police, court time, etc. In the meantime, the system and it's players are just as content to hide people behind lock and key from the more polite, still functioning elements of this society - people who shuffle off to work for instance, who pay their bills, pay interest to the banks, who say nothing about anything except if the wolf comes after them for more tax procedes to pay for all of the nonsense.
I would suggest that these propositions now consider the election and the potential to challenge the legitimacy of this last charade....the control of money and media over everything...the examples of Party elites cancelling the right of elected riding candidates...the lopsided delegate count considering the vote proportions...in other words lay a challenge to the system!
First by petition to gain support, then by legal challenge under Federal Law in federal Court ($50!) and a challenge before International Democratic Rights Tribunals....as an aside, here in Guatemala, well over 3 million didn´t bother to vote, over 100,000 left their ballots blank and near 100,000 marked an X through their ballot...and the winner who ran on an end to the thievery and corruption of government won only 2 and a half million votes in the run off election!
So He has minimal legitimacy! And here in a Democratic system with a fairly objective press...what legitimacy can anyone make for the Liberal party win?
Preface to Anti-Oedipus - M. Foucault
This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:• Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchiza-tion.
• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
• Do not become enamored of power.
I would suggest that these propositions now consider the election and the potential to challenge the legitimacy of this last charade....the control of money and media over everything...the examples of Party elites cancelling the right of elected riding candidates...the lopsided delegate count considering the vote proportions...in other words lay a challenge to the system!
These days a trip to the polling station resembles a visit to the museum of industry, where they have various contraptions on display, some of which still have functioning parts. The contraptions are in a museum in order to remind us of what once was, but the mechanisms are no longer suitable in today's reality.
Now, the aim of this piece is to target the idea of leadership, individually and within organizations. Who gets to decide who that said leadership is? Do retweets and hashtags count as votes these days? And who really benefits from a black leadership?It’s quite interesting when you think about it, even the simple fact that black people have a leadership but white people don’t? You’ll never hear some news anchor say “well now we’re going to listen to the white leadership give a press conference on why Timmy shot up that school today” or, “lets discuss with the white leadership as to why there is an epidemic of heroin use in their community.” No, racial leadership is something that is reserved for the black community since we’re all homogeneous and think the same, we’re simple folks like that.
For one to be given the title leader it’s important that 1. The person is a cis-male, 2. The person isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty, and by dirty I mean work with politicians, media heads, and the police. On the local level it’s with community leaders you never even knew you had until a riot happens and they speak in front of a press conference telling black youth to calm down and to protest peacefully, or on the national level where they are doing the same thing but on some cable news network.
Postscript on the Societies of Control - Gilles Deleuze
"There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons."
The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment.
the grease to fuel this cycle is in the rewards offered...struck home to me yesterday, visiting some "progressives" at home, switching on their full flat movie screen watching the latest brainwash fantasy cooked up by Hollywood...to excite the masses while offering them guarantees that their authorities will always come to the rescue, even if it means a lot of blood and gore ........
but the ponzi scams are nearing their end...the routs are just beginning...leading inevitably to mass protest, what with governments bankrupt to do anything, the entertainment to death no longer available! The controls will inevitably darken!
François Laruelle - Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy
For Laruelle, philosophy must be "mutated" by its engagement with another discipline, and he has set up, in other texts, the theoretical framework for what that change -- in terms of the division of labor between philosophy and extra-philosophical domains -- would look like. But Badiou has also developed his own plan for how that division of labor should look. In his Being and Event and Manifesto for Philosophy, Badiou develops his theory of the four truth-conditions that philosophy serves. But what Laruelle argues is that, in Badiou's return to a kind of modern (but not contemporary) philosophy, this supposedly humble philosophy is actually a more insidious form of control. Badiou's conditions always have a vanguardist character to them, so there is always some general name followed by its more radical core. The four truth-conditions, or privileged domains, that philosophy must interact with are science (mathematics), politics (communism, namely in its Maoist variant for much of his work), love (which has as its science psychoanalysis), and art (here Badiou has vacillated between poetry and film as the vanguard of the truth in art). Laruelle gently mocks the notion that there are four -- just these four -- truth-conditions, and he points out he is not the first or only one to do so.
By posting this I don´t mean to suggest that the electoral system should be ignored, rather used...but how?
Nor certainly do I suggest that we not organize to change the system, but how...this should be the focus here!
The Sanders/Trump SmokescreenBy Moti Nissani
“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.” ― Mark Twain
“What is the use of voting? We know that the machines of both parties are subsidized by the same persons, and therefore it is useless to turn in either direction.”—Woodrow Wilson
History reinforces the view that nothing can be expected from electoral politics in America (and in most other countries of the world). If change ever comes to our shores, it cannot possibly be brought about by politics as usual.
Many of my acquaintances, and many writers in the alternative media, put their faith in electoral politics. They feel, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that it makes a difference whether a Republican or a Democrat is elected, that it makes sense to sue the government for one or another gross violation of the public interest or common decency. They fail to notice that most of our presidents, governors, and mayors, most of our “elected” representatives at the local, state, and federal levels, most of our judges—are puppets of the men in the shadows (a few international banking families and their lieutenants in huge corporations, governments, armed forces, and intelligence services).
Others acquaintances, a bit more sophisticated but still profoundly misinformed about the nature of American politics, reject the corrupt two-headed party system out of hand, yet put their trust in the electoral process itself and in the ability of friends of the American people (as opposed to the traitors, swindlers, sycophants, and psychopaths who now infest most public offices of this land) to gain political or judicial office and bring about meaningful change. That trust is touching, but it fails to acknowledge incontestable political realities. To campaign for a Ron Paul, or a Bernie Sanders, or a Donald Trump, or a Eugene Debs, or Jesus of Nazareth himself, in this system is counterproductive. A few crystalline raindrops cannot disinfect a cesspool.
The reasons for this futility, the reasons it is misguided in principle and perhaps even immoral to take part in electoral politics are many. For the moment, I can only offer a summary statement and some supporting documentation for the seven interacting factors (there could be more, but at this writing I can only think of seven) that render electoral politics in America a sad joke (for a more detailed review of the first three factors, please consult this).
