What follows is the epilogue to “The Disastrous Ordeal of 1987”, which is a historical ethnography about a village called Betafo in central Madagascar, by me, David Graeber.
By the way: the definitions of political action which I allude to but don’t quote is: ‘political action consists of actions intended to influence people who are not present when the action is being taken’ (i.e., by being represented to others later; though this does not mean it cannot be intended to influence people who are there, too) and ‘political power is the ability to stop others from acting that way.’
If anyone gets around to reading it, I’d love to know what people think.
It might be useful ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
When evaluations of reality become seen entirely in terms of their utility as rhetorical weapons it ruins a group’s capacity to get an accurate lay of the land and efficiently strategize. Everything becomes about winning debates, not about ultimately winning ground.
One of the main things the social media age has done is collapse divides between private and public conversations. This leaves everyone constantly on edge for how they posture and maneuver rhetorically contra the outgroup — to the point of overwhelming honest internal discussions. Most productive conversations require a limited or specific audience. This is necessary to discuss any specialized topic or claim that not everyone on the planet agrees with or has c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Adapted from George Orwell’s Homage to Catatonia.
Does your father drift from one hobby to another, fruitlessly seeking a meaningful way to spend the little “leisure time” he gets off from work? Does your mother endlessly redecorate the house, going from one room to the next until she can start over at the beginning again? Do you agonize constantly over your future, as if there was some kind of track laid out ahead you—and the world would end if you turned off of it? If the answer to these questions is yes, it sounds like you’re in the clutches of the bourgeoisie, the last barbarians on earth.
The Martial Law of Public Opinion
Public opinion is an absolute value to the bourgeois man and woman because they kn... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Robert B. Carson, in an article published in the April 1970 issue of Monthly Review, writes that the "major thrust" of 'Listen, Marxist!' is to "destroy a class-based analysis of society and revolutionary activity." This criticism has been made by many Marxists who read the article.[1]
Carson's accusation is quite absurd. I seriously doubt if he did more than skim the article. Carson goes on to say that my approach is "ahistorical" and that I try to promote a "crude kind of individualistic anarchism"—this despite the fact that a large portion of the article attempts to draw important historical lessons from earlier revolutions and despite the fact that the article is unequivocally committed to anarcho-communism.
The most... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The following is a transaction of a text from the June ’91 edition of the Spanish magazine Etcetera based loosely around the Spanish truck drivers’ strike of October 1990. It could equally apply to the French truckers’ strike of July ’92. The occasion doesn’t matter too much as basically the text deals with the re-organizing of production in the 80s. How a highly efficient managerial offensive is equally highly vulnerable to a sectorally limited action which due to the new totalitarian invasion of capital cannot have much visionary edge but could prove to be one of the decisively destructive components of the new upsurge from below we are beginning to see all around the world. (not from translators:BM Blob).
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
To wrap up our series on the day of action on January 20, 2017 and the protracted legal struggle that followed it, we present this outside submission from a group including J20 defendants. In May 2018, at the opening of the second J20 trial, a call to action appeared entitled “Freedom for J20 Defendants,” encouraging people to take a more confrontational approach in the solidarity campaign. The following text begins where that one left off, functioning as a reflection, critique, and addendum. While this is not the way that we would put things, we consider it important that various dissenting viewpoints enter the historical record to inform future organizing.
All charges have been dismissed for the J20 defendants. Congratulatio... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The dissonance lies in the content of these arguments. But by remaining in the content, crystallizing itself in the place for saying (and even doing), they could also become elements of recuperation, food for future conservative thought, new uniforms (of a different color), new ‘idols’ (in a more agreeable format). There are no definitive recipes not even dissonances, capable of breaking the rhythm that constantly envelops us.
Yet dissonance has something else to offer.
Something meaningful appears in the crossroads of rhythms between re-evoked facts, the time of writing and the time of fruition, that is, in the task freely taken on by the reader one perceives a content which is something other than the single argu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Anarchists tend to pose our core differences with marxists in terms of degrees of radicalism or rootedness. One of the classic ways this gets stated is that marxism deals with the political whereas we deal with the ethical.
These terms to the disagreement, once posed, are almost always immediately acknowledged and indeed embraced by both marxists and anarchists.
The marxists tend to be delighted by the framing because it smoothly follows their narrative of being the pragmatists. And additionally by and large most marxists are explicit moral nihilists — they don’t believe there’s a point to the investigations of ethical philosophy. They’re not interested in interrogating what values or desires they shoul... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Over a century ago, a famous writer quipped that the industrial worker was “a mere appendage of flesh on a machine of iron.” Today, that description can be applied across the board: each of us is no more than an appendage of flesh on the vast machine that is our society, for our lives and communities are atomized into isolated sectors. If we want to change the whole of life, we must first become whole again.
Separation: the Disintegration of the Self
Modern man’s activity is compartmentalized: it is divided and subdivided into separate components which can only interfere with each other. He experiences life as an ongoing conflict between achievement, romance, social responsibility, fitness, relaxation, adventure, and so ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the front lines of the globalization debate, Naomi Klein, Flamingo, ISBN 0 007150474
Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century, Howard Zinn, Dana Frank and Robin D. G. Kelly, Beacon Press, Boston, ISBN 0-08070-5013-X
The current wave of “anti-capitalist” demonstrations and protests are, of course, just the most recent expression of a conflict that has marked capitalism from the start: the class struggle. For as long as wage slavery has existed, workers have been fighting against it. As long as the state has existed, its subjects have resisted it. The intensity and forms of social struggle have changed, depending on the cir... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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