There is a line that divides many people whose struggles I respect. I won’t name this line or define either camp, to avoid entrenching them, and I don’t know of any fair definitions that have been put forward by any of those involved in this antagonism. Most of us are familiar with the strawmen that litter this battlefield, though. Those on one side are guilty of “identity politics,” those on the other are “privileged” or “dogmatic.”
In some cases I think the different practices can complement each other, each having their own shortcomings. But in other cases they are merely different; I know of people on either side who seem to me to have a complete revolutionary practice, with its own... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) So far, the only thing that has mitigated the horrifying opening salvos of Trump’s presidency—of course the first president to follow through on his campaign promises had to be this one—has been the widespread popular resistance against his deportation orders, Muslim bans, pipeline projects, and misinformation campaigns. Resistance in and of itself is a beautiful thing because it shows that people are still alive, they still consider themselves a part of their environment; on the other hand, resistance is by no means a synonym for change. The State has long known how to manage resistance, and how to factor it in as one more cost of its policies. For that reason, rather than being self-congratulatory when we resist, we shou... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In 1823, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote an opinion in Johnson v. M’Intosh regarding the legality of American possession of land stolen from Indians. “However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land and cannot be questioned.” To paraphrase: if a country is based on conquest (in this case the genocide of hundreds of indigenous nations), that conquest cannot be questioned. Marshall himself summed up the sentiment rather aptl... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) While some people were shocked when Obama revealed himself to be an energy policy rightwinger in his State of the Union address, advocating more oil drilling, more nuclear power, and uttering that egregious Bush-era term, “clean coal,” I think the most remarkable aspect of this portion of his speech was that a politician had uttered the plain and obvious truth about the future.
While progressives typically wear the mask of green capitalism and conservatives the mask of the free market, the difference in the results of policies either camp would enact really only comes down to how fast renewable energy production would develop in comparison to conventional energy production. If the conservatives have their way, renewables ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) White vigilantes play a vital paramilitary role in the functioning of any settler state. The violence of such vigilantes was the driving force in the US’s westward expansion, and at the same time the paramilitary culture they developed became central to the official military, as documented by John Grenier and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. The vigilantes of the KKK were the vanguard of the terrorist reaction against Reconstruction, bolstering racial capitalism. Vigilantes like James Earl Ray can assassinate problematic rebels, allowing the official branches of law enforcement to keep their hands ostensibly clean. White vigilantes patrol a border designed to kill, and they have assassinated and injured numerous people participating in the Georg... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Corporate media in Western democracies exist not only to expand their markets and fatten the wallets of their executives and shareholders, but also to maintain social control by managing public perceptions to retain the acquiescence of the governed. The distinguished journals and periodicals of the affluent contain discourse on contending strategies for social control, all well within the mainstream of the ruling culture, but mass media — corporate media for the masses — are remarkable for their absence of analysis and substitutive reliance on almost heavy-handed pulp propaganda, in the sense of information propagating state mythology.
Often the themes are cogent to contemporary control strategies, as in anthrax scare st... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It was my grandfather’s memorial service, and the Dutch Reform pastor took a break from talking about God and Heaven to the members of the congregation, in which I, as a dutiful grandson, was unfortunately included for the moment, in order to address the children in the audience, the grand-kids and great grand-kids of the deceased, nearly all of them baptized into the Dutch Reform church or a like-minded denomination, as the apple does not fall far from the tree.
“Now, you all might be wondering,” began the pastor in a condescending tone, only slightly more exact in diction and enunciation than that with which he had been addressing the adults, “what all this is about. On Friday, when you found out that Grandp... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) So last week we had Peter Gelderloos in the studio; he’s probably best known for his book ‘How Non-Violence Protects the State’. He is currently touring social centers around Europe with his new book published earlier this year, called ‘Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation’. We caught up with him while he was in town.
D.I. #1: So Peter, welcome to the show!
P.G.: Thanks a lot for having me.
D.I. #1: I guess my first question is, why would we learn about state formation? What value does it have to understand the development of states over time?
P.G.: Learning about where states came from, how they emerged, why the evolved and developed actually shows us ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A historic look a waves of reaction to periods of revolt and upheaval and how this relates to our own current situation.
To speak of reaction, I want first to distinguish it from counterinsurgency. Readers who are less interested in a condensed theory of counterinsurgency and want to read about the patterns of reaction leading up to the present moment should skip to the second section.
Counterinsurgency
Counterinsurgency is a constant aspect of life under the State. It refers to the strategies and activities implemented by government and its privileged partners (capitalists without public office) to prevent effective rebellion and maintain control. This can include varying roles for military, police, courts, political part... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Before the Spanish call-out for a global day of action on October 15, a few critical notes and words of encouragement from the Barcelona neighborhood assemblies…
After the courageous revolts of the Arab Spring, the next phenomenon of popular resistance to capture the world media’s attention was the plaza occupation movement that spread across Spain starting on the 15th of May (15M). Subsequently, attention turned back to Greece, and now to the public occupations spreading across the US, inspired by the Wall Street protests.
The function of the media is to explain interruptions in the dominant narrative, not to spread lessons useful to the social struggles that generate those ruptures. As such, it is no surprise th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In charting the origin of social hierarchies and control systems, many radical theorists take a materialist stance, and attribute authoritarian behavior to surpluses resulting from agricultural production and other aspects of the civilization process. The fact that some nonagricultural, hunter-gatherer societies developed hierarchical social structures offers a critical contradiction to the materialist view, and presents the key to understanding the origin of hierarchy. Anarchists, whether we wish to abolish all the cultural artifacts of Western civilization as inherently oppressive or to retain certain aspects of civilization, would do well to learn the partial extent to which civilization and hierarchy are concomitant.
Civilization... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) It is no surprise that current efforts within the US to stop the ongoing war against Iraq have been so ineffective. The antiwar movement has indoctrinated itself with the pacifist delusion that peaceful protest ended the Vietnam war (when it was demonstrably the armed Vietnamese and the high number of mutinous, violently rebellious US troops), and now they are trying to repeat a victory that never happened. The Democratic Party, eager for a passive opposition to lead, has been more than willing to embrace this delusion, which has found fertile ground among self-righteous, missionary-minded peace protesters. The antiwar movement, living out a false history, prevents itself from learning from the past, and even creates false measurements, ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Barcelona.
It started with a protest announced via Twitter, Facebook, and various listserves, scheduled for May 15, a week before the countrywide elections. Democracia Real Ya, “Real Democracy Now,” was the name of the platform and its central demand. The protest took place simultaneously in dozens of cities throughout Spain. In Madrid there was a massive turnout; everywhere else it passed without incident, easily lost amid a series of other protests that have been occurring with increasing frequency in response to the Labor Reform, social cuts, and home repossessions.
But the night of May 15 and the following day, the protests transformed into occupations of central plazas in every city where people had taken to t... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In his February 6 article entitled,“The Cancer of Occupy,”Chris Hedges attempts to analyze the political beliefs and practices of the black bloc, a group he characterizes as the scourge of the Occupy movement. Although Mr. Hedges evidently conducted at least a little to research his article, he does not quote a single proponent or participant of a black bloc, neither within the Occupy movement nor from any of the many other black blocs that have been organized in the United States. Such research would not have been difficult. There are a plethora of anarchist blogs, websites, newspapers, and magazines that discuss Occupy, the black bloc, and even the use of the black bloc within Occupy protests.
Despite this major failing... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In the last several weeks, the Trump Administration has pushed for both a tax cut on the wealthy as well as an increasingly unpopular health care plan. Now, after a series of blunders, calls for impeachment in both corporate parties are growing. Wanting to know more about what this means for the rest of us, we caught up with Peter Gelderloos to try and make sense of it all.
IGD: Several days ago, Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey. What led to his firing and the Trump administration’s decision to do so? What are the broader implications of his dismissal?
“Trump’s ship is sinking a little faster, and that he’s going to have a much harder time recruiting skilled administrators.”
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The Neighborhood Tour
Every neighborhood in Barcelona seemed to have at least one resident historian, an old militant who collected newspaper articles and stories, fliers and posters from protests, to add to old archival materials and the memoirs of earlier generations. The veterans of the revolution and the long resistance against Franco were dying off, the gentrification of the city left no reminders of past struggles even as the new urban architecture facilitated greater social control. The surveillance cameras, the wider streets, the buildings without balconies, the enclosed parks, the dumpsters without wheels — these were all direct responses to us anarchists and rebels and our history of riots and sabotage, yet each chang... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Proponents of an ideology typically fail to distinguish between those who have not yet encountered the new ideas they offer, and those who have absorbed these ideas and moved on. The very point of an ideology is that you’re not meant to move on from it; however every ideology, at the very best, has only been a resting point in an onward theoretical journey.
Anarchism, I would argue (perhaps simply because I don’t wish to move on from it), is more a body of thought, a legacy and tradition of revolt aiming towards total freedom from all coercive authority. Its various ideologies—syndicalism, primitivism—have constituted resting points, while a few guiding principles have remained permanent, but by no means ahist... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The fact of the matter is, capitalism treats animals horribly. While many civilizations have normalized abusive behavior towards animals, capitalism tops them all in the intensity, frequency, and invisibility of apathetic exploitation mixed with repeated moments of sadistic cruelty. And while many civilizations have also destroyed their local environments, capitalism, as a global system with an unprecedented level of technological power, is the first to carry ecocide to a global scale. Sheerly in underspoken quantitative terms, the biodiversity and biomass of Planet Earth today is the lowest it has ever been in human history. There is obviously a connection between capitalism’s abuse of animals, its destruction of the environment, and... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) 1.
We are told we live in the richest and most democratic country in the world. Our rights include freedom of speech and religion, and freedom to vote for our leaders. Our country possesses more wealth than any other — more wealth in fact than much of the rest of the world combined. On TV and in real life, we see Americans with huge houses, expensive cars, plenty of state-of-the-art gadgets, and memberships to golf courses or ski resorts.
But we all know that this is not the whole picture. It is more like an advertisement. Though our neighborhoods are segregated, rich from poor; white from black, latino, and Native American, few people are unaware that most Americans do not live like the people on televised sitcoms. Peop... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Spain’s municipalist parties suffered a major setback at the May elections — their own actions and inactions are largely to blame for the loss of support.
On May 26, citizens across Spain went to the polls to vote in municipal and European elections. The results were widely seen as a setback to the municipalist wave that swept Spain’s major cities four years prior. Carlos Delclós published one explanation{1}, focusing on the gap between their hype and their policies and how the Catalan independence movement has upset the landscape. To put it simply, parliamentary majorities are now all but impossible, given that the divide between Left and Right has been further divided by a perpendicular axis, the one betwee... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) August 23, 1927. Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists accused and convicted of a double murder in the course of an armed robbery, are sent to the electric chair. Ten thousand mourners come to pay their last respects, twenty thousand take to the Boston Common in protest, and many thousands more march in the streets or attack US embassies and banks around the world to honor their passing.
Historian Paul Avrich convincingly argued that the two were innocent of the robbery and murders, and were the victims of a judicial lynching. The evidence was spotty, the media convicted them in advance, and the judge didn’t even hide his political vendetta against the two.
On the other hand, Sacco and Vanzetti were probably engaged in othe... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) This pamphlet has been written and compiled by Peter Gelderloos, based on a series of workshops about the prison system facilitated by Patrick Lincoln and Peter Gelderloos between 2004 and 2006, at universities and activist conferences across the East Coast. The research, outline, and content of these workshops (and consequently this pamphlet) was formulated by Peter and Patrick, who are anarchist organizers in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Feel free to quote, copy, or reproduce this pamphlet in whole or in part, especially if you’re going to distribute it and, spread the word.
— Signalfire Press, 2005
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This is for Earl, Mike (Rodriguez), and Ase. Y’all have taught me so much, and you helped me ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) XIII. From Clastres to Cairo to Kobane: Learning from States
Through the course of this book, we have looked at several models of secondary and primary state formation. Primary state formation, rare in world history, is a process by which a society with no knowledge of existing states forms a state through autochthonous processes. Secondary state formation, much more common, is when a society develops a state influenced or aided by an already existing state. We might refine the latter category by detaching from it a third one, tertiary state formation, which requires direct intervention and administration by a fully formed state, in order to restore state power to previously statist populations in which state authority had been weake... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)