For those who describe themselves as anarchists, I thought a discussion might be of interest surrounding belief systems, variations of Anarchist sentiments, and the apparent divergence when it comes to aims and tactics, the 101s as it were, according to the respective adherents.
Issues Pages:
As a study guide, I'll post this link that I posted in another, now closed, thead.
http://crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/toronto2.php
It is a supposed anarchist site with some possible details on how anarchists organized (is that an oxymoron?) themselves for the Toronto G20 summit.
There are also links there to what are suppose to be other anarchist (and regular activists) web sites ... this could just be a front for cops trying to justify their handy work, but either way it is an interesting read, and maybe something that other activists needs to investigate to determine if these are legitimate groups, and figure out ways to use their own organization methods to keep out of their way.
This thread might have the hallmark of an oxymoron, were it not for the apparent denunciations of late from self described anarchists regarding activist tactics re: the G20 and RBC. Apparently there's a little ambiguity that might be worth exploring.
I keep this link in my profile so people can read the words of one of my favourite political writers.
http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/kropotkin/index.html
As I pointed out in another thread the newest book on Emma goldman has a great historical anaylsis of the varying strains of anarchy in the early twentieth centurty.
http://blackrosebooks.com/products/view/EMMA+GOLDMAN,+Still+Dangerous/32437
A history of anarchists - and their enemies
via rabble.ca editor Cathryn Atkinson
Mutual aid and social justice are the twin towers of anarchy in my opinion. I found this an interesting article on his theory of mutual aid.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/dward/classes/Anarchy/finalprojects/brooksfin...
im the type of anarchist who thinks the surest way to contradict your principles and ideals is to make the mistake of having them in the first place...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Without_Principle
Ok, that sounds like fun. Lets continue this discussion on the basis of the principle of not referring to principles. You start...
-_-
Sadly, Monty is no longer with us.
Meh. Why you do that? I thought he was going to challenge some comfort zones, or is he a repeat offender or something? I was personally interested in where he was going with all this.
Yeah, the principle of having no principles. How do you do that?
Nope. Anarchy is order.
Yeah, Cueball, it had nothing to do with this thread--I only let you know here because I know you hoped for a response. Check out some of (i.e. any) of the other threads he particpated in for the reasons why.
Suffice it to say you would have been disappointed in any event.
I did read the other threads, which is what left me confused as to where he was going with all this. I thought it would be cool to see where it all ended up, after he had had some time to express more of his core thesis.
Oh well.... what's done is done...
I clicked on his profile and was denied access.
Yup. Cool to come to the feminism forum, go to a thread about rape that has been specifically framed requesting comment from feminist women, and post that, as a male, you are a pussy. Cool. Interesting. Really challenging those comfort zones.
Because, you know, we're hearing way too much from women on this board. It's time for guys to speak up!
I dig Emma Goldman?
Sorry, al-Qa'bong, that was in response to Cueball. I hope you dig Emma Goldman.
Ahh well, I was asked not to post in the F forum by a couple of established Babblers some time back, so I don't visit there either, really. So, perhaps he should have been banned apropos to those comments, as opposed to these.
Right. But I read everything he wrote other than what appeared in the FF, so you can understand why I didn't understand what was going on. CF's reference to other statements was vague and didn't indicate the FF. I didn't even know that he had posted in that forum because it did not appear in the TAT, since others posted after he did, so you can understand why I could not find the offending comments.
Are we having an argument for the sake of it?
At this point a good anarchist would encourage some mutual aid.
Uh, to that end, howzabout we walk away from this, since nobody here encourages or supports what writer pointed out in the FF, and get back to discussing what we think about anarchism?
Agreed!
How big a tent is Anarchism? Does being in the tent mean you must believe in the removal of the state?
Does the Mondragon movement fit?
Do co-ops and credit unions fit?
If those things don't fit what do we call the philosophies underlying them?
Anarchism is right up my alley, in terms of ending the corporate-capitalist rule we are presently trapped in.
One solution to the corporate-capitalist power grab is community power, which anarchists appreciate. Within a community, anyone who aquires too much wealth or material goods should be ostrasized. Embarrass your piggy neighbor into giving up their ill-gotten gains.
Community energy production, Community produced food, Community funding of schools and hospitals and social safety nets...
The power structure is upside down, as it exists today. Communities should have the most power, then the Provinces, and finally the Federal government [should not be able to dictate to communities].
I might become an anarchist yet, as my understanding of it increases. Thanks for starting this thread [I was just thinking about anarchy today, that they cant possibly believe that "no government" is a good idea... but perhaps I am wrong].
No government does not mean no governance. Anarchy as a theory and philosophy is all about freedom of association and democracy, unlike our FPTP system that was specifically designed to allow the "Lords" to continue to rule behind a democratic facade. When a worker has no democratic control over their livelihood any pseudo democratic rights granted by the ruling elite are mere illusion, just smoke and mirrors with greedy little men behind the curtain.
i agree, to me Anarchism is just the extension of democracy to all forms of control be it public or private. It's not even really "no government", which every one thinks means simply no organization in society. It's just that instead of a "government" like the one we have now, it would be a system of policies and rules that we are free and more importantly ABLE to change according to the needs at the time, and free to participate in regardless of social position or wealth.
i.e The top 100 CEO's would have no more sway over economic decisions than their employees, as it is now their employees have virtually no input and the leaders get private off the record meetings with finance ministers who then sign investors rights agreements like NAFTA and CETA with no public input.
plus no private domination of media would mean actual information not propaganda, rational discussion, and freer debate which would result in a public that actually is informed and can make better decisions and actually be involved.
I don't believe any kind of anarchist society is achievable. In fact, I believe any such conception is of anarchism; particularly modern anarchism is antithetical to the creed. Fundamentally, it is a theoretical analysis used for critiquing the function of governance and the state. Erecting of any kind government (or even a concrete social order) in its name is contrary to its mandate.
However, it does provide a way of looking at the world that provides a litmus test for looking at how things are ordered, and making improvements thereof. Anarchism is fundamentally dynamic and immediate and allows persons and collectives a way of understanding power, and overcoming power as it manifests itself against them.
It is about process. Most ideologies pose themselves as constructing a future order of social relations as an ultimate end goal, however, the achievement of those goals usually entails acquiring the power that is the source of the repression the revolutionists reject, whereas anarchism seeks to disassemble power, itself, theirs and ours.
On a personal level it is about how one positions oneself in resistance to power in society, even when one accepts the manifestation of that power, things like government, social mores, social organization, oppressive forces, such as the police, or annoying neighbors.
Traditional ideologies generally end up in the same cul de sac, because at some point they will assert the justification of any action under the terms of the "ends justifying the means". However, in an anarchist critique, one sees that the means themselves, the process, is the end object: "the end is the means".
At the end of the day, I would probably have to say that I am politically akin to a socialist who makes his analysis of socialism through the lens of an anarchist critique of power.
Excellent post Cue.
I think that workers can join together into syndicates and if nurtured could provide at least a bit of an off setting balance to international capital at the local level. I would love to see a dedicated capital pool for small worker owned businesses. It is all about access to capital in the final analysis. If our social democratic allies would promote a green fund based on those kinds of principles, similar to the BC NDP's proposed fund but more dedicated, it could provide the seed money to grow a new economy from within. This fund of course would be available to all family businesses that met whatever democratic worker control criteria that was in place for the fund.
One of the best writers of the Anarchist tradion, often forgotten about in traditional left wing circles, because his writing benefits none of the mainstream tendencies of left or right wing ideologies: Memoirs of A Revolutionary -- Victor Serge. If one wants to get a birds eye view of an anarchist critique of socialist authoritarianism, from inside the state structure of the emerging Soviet Union, right through the purges, this is it.
He wrote a number of great novels as well.
I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Darryl Rankin, Manitoba CP leader, makes reference to "anarcho-nihilism" as the dominant anarchist trend in Canada today. There is also some history that may be of interest to those reading this thread.
Rankin of the CP: Marxism and Anarchism in Canada Today
I wouldn't worry about missing out on monties chance to take you out of your comfort zone. Monty is a prolific writer who's work can be found in various places online. Don't expect anarchist ideas though, monty cantsin is not an anarchist but rather a well known neoist.
If neoism did anything right it was trying to root itself outside of the intellectual.
"Neoism is very frequently described as a conspiracy of the New for the purpose of replacing old ideas or opinions, with new and better ideas and opinions. Neoism is based on an intuitive response to the ever arising New rather than a reasoned building up of traditional beliefs into an edifice of logical stupidity.
Once awakened the Neoist’s first response to this miss shapened body of incongruities is to make fun of it, though parody and mocking: to then abandon its false order and raise up nonsense in its place but this is only to add braces and prosthetic devices to a disfigured tragedy that is the result of accidental conditions.
This is much of what we have seen in Neoism till now. This line of reasoning is completely wrong. To view Neoism as still being what it was in 1960 is to cling to an obsolete concept; it is to condemn oneself to understand nothing about Neoism.
To cleave to the ever arising New is to create a firm adherence to truth and to negate everything else. If one’s sincerity is sufficiently strong; one´s intuitions sufficiently clear and after some soul searching, the individual is ready for the destruction of the edifice of belief he has falsely groomed to as his self leading to the possibility of being an awakened Neoist - the most dangerous creature alive.
The aim of Neoism is to open the door, leave the cage and learn to fly."
Our particular monty seems to have been trying to e-body the tenants of neoism even if it might not have quite had its intuition totally aligned to the new(like that time i brought my dad to see 010100: The Great Robotic Machinery Rebellion at buddies in bad times theater). While I don't know if I totally agree with its speedy removal I do think their is something worthwhile that has been said about the benefits of emotional solidarity over intellectual soliderity.
"When I looked at that abandoned file cabinet at the freight elevator I became almost ecstatic."
The Crisis as Pacification
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2010072515&msg=27
Thx for the link it was a great read with some clear insight.
I found it useful as well, for completely different reasons.
How is it to be done?
Excerpts from Tiqqun: How is it to be done?
A revival of the critique is pretending to challenge Empire with the slogans and tricks of the sixties. Except that this time it is faked. The whole range of old social-democratic affects are put back into circulation.
And again, here come the demonstrations. The desire-killing demonstrations where nothing happens and which no longer demonstrate anything but a collective absence.
For those who feel the nostalgic about Woodstock, pot, 68 and militancy, there are the counter-summits. The setting has been set again, minus the possible.
Here is today's command of the 'what to do.? To travel to the other side of the world in order to contest the global commodity, and then come back after a big bath of unanimity and mediatised seperation to submit yourself to the local commodity. From counter-summit to counter-summit, they will eventually understand. Or not.
One doesn't contest Empire over its management. One doesn't critique Empire. You oppose its forces from where you are. There is no global alternative project to the global project of Empire, because there is no global project of Empire. There is an imperial management. Those who demand another society should better start to realize that there is none left. And maybe they would then stop being wannabe-managers.
The global order cannot be taken as an enemy directly. Its perfection is not to be global, but to be global locally. The global order can only be opposed locally through the extension of opaque zones over the Empire's maps. Through their growing contiguity. Underground. Whoever regards Empire as an opponent to confront will meet preventative annihilation. To be perceived means to be defeated.
Critique has become vain because it amounts to an absence. Everyone knows where the ruling order stands. We no longer need critical theory, we no longer need teachers. Critique is allied to domination. It propels us elsewhere, it consumes us, and stays cautiously sheltered when it sends us to the slaughter. Hence the brief romances between proletarians and 'engaged' intellectuals. Those rational marriages in which neither has the same idea of pleasure or freedom. Rather than new critiques, it is new cartographics that we need. Not cartographics of Empire, but of the lines that flee out of it.
In the present war, where the emergency reformism of Capital has to dress up as a revolutionary to be heard, a role is prepared for us. The role of the martyrs of the demokratic order. I should start singing the victim's rhetoric. As is well known, everyone is a victim, even the oppressors. I should savour the discreet circulation of masochism which re-enchants the situation.
Today human strike means refusing to play the role of the victim. Making the paralyzed citizens understand the war that they refuse to join, but are part of anyway. That when we are told it is either this or dying, it is always in reality this and dying.
On Gandhi, Pacifism and Black Bloc Recruitment Poster, by Jaggi Singh
http://mostlywater.org/gandhi_pacifism_and_black_bloc_recruitment_poster
"When I talk about 'De-mystifying Gandhi,' I mean taking apart the way his myth is used by middle-class pacifist liberals in the west.."
Call
The Left is periodically routed. This amuses us but it is not enough. We want its rout to be final. With no remedy. May the spectre of a reconcilable opposition never again come to haunt the minds of those who know they won't fit into the capitalist process.
The Left - everybody admits this today, but will we still remember the day after tomorrow? - is an integral part of the neutralisation mechanisms peculiar to liberal society. The more the social implosion proves real, the more the Left invokes "civil society." The more the police exercises its arbitrary will with impunity, the more they claim to be pacifist. The more the state throws off the last judicial formalities, the more they become "citizens". The greater the urgency to appropriate the means of our existence, the more the Left exhorts us to appropriate the conditions of our submission, to wait and demand the mediation, if not the protection, of our masters.
It is the Left which enjoins us today, faced with governments which stand openly on the terrain of social war, to make ourselves heard by them, to write up our grievances, to form demands, to study economics. From Léon Blum to Lula, the Left has been nothing but that: the party of the man, the citizen and civilisation. Today this program coincides with the complete counter-revolutionary program which consists in maintaining all the illusions that paralyse us. The calling of the Left is therefore to expound the dream of what only empire can afford. It represents the idealistic side of imperial modernisation, the necessary steam-valve to the unbearable pace of capitalism.
Notes on the State of Exception - Claire Fontaine
Interview with Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill
The Cybernetic Hypothesis
Wow, that one reminded me of Ted Kaczynski's manifesto. What about the wicked technological advancement known as fire? Just observing how many people have died by fire and its effects since the stone age, I'm not sure fire was a good idea, either. We'd surely have been better off freezing in the dark and being carried off in the night in the mouths of saber tooth cats the size of large cows. And eating from the tree of life? OMG! Don't get us started on that one. Apples and fruit in general have had a bad rap ever since. It's no wonder anarchists are cranky.
Well, I thought it made for some good holiday reading. Kaczynski was a murderer and a reactionary, whose personal vendettas betrayed a complete disregard for human life. On the other hand, these particular authors include throughout their writings such caveats as:
"Those who would respond to the urgency of the situation with the urgency of their reaction only add to the general asphyxiation. Their manner of intervention implies the rest of their politics, of their agitation."
From what I've gathered, it seems they lump black block groups, lone vigilantes, peaceful protestors, and leftist parliamentarians into similarly 'misguided' categories...which is to say that none of these things work anymore if it ever did, whether acting in isolation or coordinated together, despite the fact that people remain foolishly enthralled by the various forms of expression we've seen displayed all too often. The outcomes to which technology had historically been and remains dedicated toward is certainly a theme, but it would be a stretch of the imagination to say that Luddism is being advanced as an alternative. It suggests you either haven't understood or haven't read the material, or worse again and by the sound of it, perhaps you've managed both?
Well okay, I apologize for the Kaczynski reference. Looking back, it was uncalled for. I admit that technology in the wrong hands would be a dangerous thing indeed. And I think there will be new and genuine dangers with advances in nanotech, genetics and robotics in general. We will have new and efficient ways to destroy ourselves. The risks are real for sure. But with great risks come great rewards at the same time. The next 100 years of tech advancement will be the most crucial period in human history according to some scientists. It will either make or break us as a species. As Izzy Mandelbaum once said in a Seinfeld episode, though, it's go time!
I've always admired Ray Kurzweil's optimism for the future of tech. Kurzweil thinks we are evolving towards becoming 'spritial machines' and the like, and that we should embrace technology. Very clever person is Kurzweil. But at the same time I tend to shy away from Kurzweil's belief that human intelligence can be reproduced in silicon. I think it may require quantum computing power sometime in the future if it's even possible. I don't know, but I think materialist scientists like Kurzweil assume perhaps too much about human spirituality and consciousness. I think we are more than the sum total of our physical parts, and I am in good company with my skepticism apparently.
Bill Joy, co-founder of the former Sun Micro shares the anarchist view of technology.
Why the future doesn't need us. Bill Joy
Joy takes a left turn apparently. There is an interesting reference to the unabomber's manifesto, which Joy thinks can not be dismissed as easily as his actions. Again, no offense intended.
Collectively we can be more, but the problem individually and thus collectively is that our capacity for reason, or more accurately the place where our capacity resides to absorb the various forms of reasoning, just happens to be part and parcel of the physical whole. And it is in this place specifically where it is possible for programming to occur, and alternately de-programming to the point of partially writing over at least the existing information. From the beginning of individual awareness and throughout, these 'applications' arrive at our processing center through largely external influences after all. Sometimes we are able to come up with new opinions on our own, which are mostly elaborations of previously imbedded knowledge, but which are not always very helpful on their own either.
Right now though, the technology is not intended to assist us with any clarifications. We have to 'take from it what we can, for our own purposes,' seems to be a common proposition running througout the material posted above; which I suppose were it applied to another conversation could otherwise be repeated as a point favouring your brand of politics. Give that a try why not? I have a response. :)
I think you are either absolutely right or absolutely wrong about this, one or the other. We have no proof either way. I think it will be possible to mimick and even surpass human physical brain capabilities in certain ways. But the exact location of consciousness in the brain is still a mystery today. They've seen glimpses of shadows of it in brain imaging, but it's as if they've discovered traces of a thief by feeling their way in a darkened room. The thief is a master of evasion apparently.
I think the first AI's to approach human intelligence will be infantile, and then child-like followed by adolescent stage machines. And the problem with teenagers, they say, is that many of them are borderline sociopaths. I think the danger of AI machines will be real, and the teenagers will have to be contained much like robots are mostly enclosed behind steel cages and locked clean rooms in automated factories today. It will have to be a good day when people and machines can interact safely. There will have to be safety "kill switches" for some time until machines pass the test. Who will create the test, and what will the protocol look like? Good question if I do say so.
I haven't made any radical conclusions thus far. I have no idea what the actual future holds only guesstimates. I am, afterall, only human. But I think that in the future we will have ways of telling one another apart from the most intelligent and even the most spiritual of machines.
Corny sci-fi flick adapted from a book entitled: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but it made me wonder even way back then. Life is more precious than we admit throughout most of our lives. It's typically near the end that we take notice. Sad.
This Is Not A Program
This is Not the Black Bloc
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