anarchism

Day 3481, is it possible.

anarchism, Daily picture, My thoughts

Is it possible to organize a society on anarchist principles now? My short answer is no, and my long answer in short is maybe in a future far, far away. I enjoy reading about Anarchism and the ideas about it. So what is the problem? I believe that in an Anarchist society, it should be possible to have no locks, no money, and no police. Can you imagine that now? Many anarchists believe that the material possessions we have now have no real value, and that no one should want them from you because they have for themselves all they really need. An Anarchist knows that the value is made up and created over time; we made it all up. 

As an Anarchist, living in a society that follows Anarchistic ideas demands a lot of discipline and restraint. It has to be clear to such an individual that life is limited and without purpose besides the beauty we can clearly see and produce. This beauty is as limited as our own lives, but we can imagine that the reason we can think, see, listen, and create is simply to do these things. The stars can guide our path and tell us what to do, or we launch the Hubble telescope into an orbit around the Earth and enjoy the spectacle without looking for a meaning in it. No star is there for you.

If you cannot live solely on the beauty of your own art, your mind will seek other nourishment. In most societies around the world, the dishes that are served for the hungry are traditional, with recipes from the past or given by new masters. Is it the fault of the hungry that they cannot create? In our current society, that is most certainly not the case because even if you have hidden talents, very little that motivates us, motivates us to create. Most people have learned to consume not only what we can easily throw away, but also the thoughts we are supposed to think. Creation is dangerous, says the dictator, because it is incapable of doing so.

And who, besides some artists, writers, philosophers, and all those quiet people sitting in the corner, really believe that life is not much more than art and creating art? Art is saying what can’t be said and hoping it finds an ear. We can only hope when we meet, when looking into each other’s eyes, that we both know this…truth?

Day 3480, so little is sharp.

anarchism, Daily picture, Poetry

Yesterday, I posted the “Why I am an Anarchist” manifesto from Nikolai Pavlov, written in 1917. This was written during the Russian Revolution, and as an Anarchist, Pavlov still had a small hope that the revolution would succeed and not end in a dictatorship, as he probably suspected it would. I don’t know this, of course, I don’t know what went through his mind when the communists arrested him, and I have never been close to an ongoing revolution. We don’t share the same world; however, we do share the same power scale. 

It is hard to imagine what it is like to live in another time. I am old enough to have lived without the internet for my first 25 years, and the first 15 years that we had internet were relatively tame compared to the bombardment you have now if you let it in. In 1917, most people in Russia were aware of the events unfolding: a war with Germany and a revolution in the western part of the empire. However, most people who were not directly involved in the war, for instance, because they lived too far from the front, led their lives as they always did, with an occasional news bulletin or stories from travelers as the only source of news.

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Day 3479, Why I am.

anarchism, Daily picture, Quotes

Why I am an Anarchist

Nikolai Pavlov

I am an anarchist because contemporary society is divided into two opposing classes: the impoverished and dispossessed workers and peasants who have created with their own hands and their own enormous toil all the riches of this earth; and the rich men, kings and presidents who have confiscated all these riches for themselves. Towards these parasitic capitalists and ruling kings and presidents there rose in me a feeling of outrage, indignation, and loathing, while at the same time I felt sorrow and compassion for the labouring proletariat who have been eternal slaves in the vice- like grip of the world wide bourgeoisie.

I am an anarchist because I scorn and detest all authority, since all authority is founded on injustice, exploitation and compulsion over the human personality. Authority dehumanises the individual and makes him a slave.

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Day 3324, country above all.

Daily picture, My thoughts

I watched some America news again and realised….America is both the wealthiest country and the poorest country in the world. They truly believe what they tell themselves and don’t realize that there is another world beyond their own. Even well-educated people in America talk about America as being something special. The following quote from Barack Obama, for instance.

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America – there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and asian America – there’s the United States of America.”

In my book, the last people who were so proud of their country were the Nazies in Germany and Italy. Obama is of course no Nazi but for some reason he also worship the flag and obviously need it as some kind of security blanket like the rest does. Or did he had to play that card? And is that not even worse? Obama is probably a decent person, but the constant pledges of allegiance he made while growing up have also had an influence on him. Perhaps he could have said that we are all humans and that all these distinctions are merely made up.

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Day 3314, forty years ago.

Daily picture, Quotes

Radicalizing Democracy

Kick it Over magazine interview question in 1985: You’ve said in your writings that we are undergoing a change as far-reaching as the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture or from agriculture to industry. Could you elaborate on this and talk a bit about why this is occurring now?

Murray Bookchin: The transformation I have in mind is cybernation, genetic engineering, nucleonics, and the sophistication of electronic technology in vast numbers of fields and the development of means of surveillance of a highly sophisticated form. The extent of the transformation is absolutely astonishing. What we find today is a totally immoral economy and society which has managed to unearth the secrets of matter and the secrets of life at the most fundamental level. This is a society that, in no sense, is capable of utilizing this knowledge in any way that will produce a social good. Obviously there are leavings from a banquet that fall from the table but my knowledge and my whole experience with capitalism and with hierarchical society generally is that almost every advance is as best a promise and at worst utterly devastating for the world.

Read the rest here: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/raddemocracy.html

 

Day 3310, fundamentals of Anarchism.

anarchism, Daily picture

FUNDAMENTALS OF ANARCHISM Free Association & Freedom

You can find the text here: https://ia802307.us.archive.org/33/items/zinelibrary-torrent/associat.pdf, and also here and more: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index 

Free Association is the idea that we cannot be free as individuals without having free relationships with others, that no one person can be free unless we are all free and that for each of us to be free we must work together to insure that everyone else is free. In an Anarchist society people would cooperate with each other to achieve the following:

Complete Social Freedom Including Sexual Freedom and Reproductive Freedom: People associate because all participants want to.

Freedom of Speech, Press and Information to include all forms of communication and education.

Complete Cultural Freedom including the freedom of individual tastes, lifestyle, entertainment and other preferences.

Freedom of Movement: All people must be allowed to live where they chose, travel where they chose, shop where they chose (e.g. do business where you chose), recreate where you chose, etc.. This includes the freedom to migrate and immigrate without being restricted or discriminated upon because of your place of birth or the place of birth of your ancestors.

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Day 3301, and yet.

Daily picture, Quotes, Video

And yet we have what purports, or professes, or is claimed, to be a contract—the Constitution—made eighty years ago, by men who are now all dead, and who never had any power to bind us, but which (it is claimed) has nevertheless bound three generations of men, consisting of many millions, and which (it is claimed) will be binding upon all the millions that are to come; but which nobody ever signed, sealed, delivered, witnessed, or acknowledged; and which few persons, compared with the whole number that are claimed to be bound by it, have ever read, or even seen, or ever will read, or see.

Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

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Day 3299, draft.

Daily picture, My thoughts

They say that the earth is not doing well, or, to narrow it down, the people living on this rock are not working together well.

First, the Earth. I am no expert, but even if we all wanted to, we could not destroy the Earth. I doubt that in 500 million years, there will be any trace left of us, and we could not even imagine what will see the sunset by then, but I am pretty sure it is not reminiscing about us while enjoying the colours.

On working together. If you read history in a certain way and combine that with some unattached observations made during your own life, you will know that two or more people working together is more often than not a challenge. Even if you live with the same person in the same house for many years, you will still encounter odd miscommunications that result in late arrivals or worse.

Most of us have also worked in groups, whether at work, in a sports club, or organizing a family event. If you work together enough, a certain rhythm will take over, but I can’t imagine someone who has never felt a slight chaos while achieving a goal. Sometimes you see this happening right in front of you, as someone who is led around, but also when you have been in charge, the feeling of a loss of control will not be unknown to you.

Now extend it to the country you live in. There are good leaders, and the bigger the pool, the larger the chance one of these exemplary leaders will be in charge. But even if this is happening, these people’s organizing skills have to be delegated downwards, and the first layers in this bureaucracy might be staffed by competent people, but soon the first administrators are directly recruited out of the cultural habits of that particular country, and acting accordingly. From a few people to the largest countries, they all had and have their goals, they started in the direction they wanted, and sometimes reached them. However, they all share a low efficiency, a high amount of wasted resources through mismanagement, and incompetence.

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Day 2983, Max Nettlau

Daily picture, Poetry, Quotes

Max Nettlau (1865-1944)

An Anarchist Manifesto

There can be no true humanity, no true self-respect, without self- reliance. No one can help you if you do not help yourselves. We do not promise to do anything for you, we do not want anything from you, we only appeal to you to co-operate with us to bring about a state of society which will make freedom, well-being possible for all.

To do this efficiently, we must all be imbued with the spirit of freedom, and this – freedom, and freedom alone – is the fundamental principle of Anarchy.

Freedom is a necessary condition to, and the only guarantee of, the proper development of mankind. Nature is most beautiful when unfettered by the artificial interference of man. Wild animals are stronger and more harmoniously developed than their domesticated kind, which the exploiting mind of man makes mere instruments of profit by developing chiefly those parts of them which are of use to him. The same threatens to be the case with the human victims of exploitation, if an end is not put to the system which allows the rich and crafty exploiters to reduce the greater part of mankind to a position resembling that of domestic animals – working machines, only fit to do mechanically a certain kind of work, but becoming intellectually wrecked and ruined.

All who acknowledge this to be the great danger to human progress should carefully ponder over it, and if they believe that it is necessary to ensure by every means the free development of humanity, and to remove by all means every obstacle placed in its path, they should join us and adopt the principles of Anarchism.

Belief in and submission to authority is the root cause of all our misery. The remedy we recommend: – struggle unto death against all authority, whether it be that of physical force identical with the State or that of doctrine and theories, the product of ages of ignorance and superstition inculcated into the workers minds from their childhood – such as religion, patriotism, obedience to the law, belief in the State, submission to the rich and titled, etc., generally speaking, the absence of any critical spirit in face of all the humbugs who victimise the workers again and again. We can only deal here briefly with all these subjects, and must limit ourselves to touch only on the chief points.

You can read the rest here: https://archive.org/details/anarchy_is_order_2003_nettlau_manifesto/mode/2up

You can read more about Max Nettlau here: https://iisg.amsterdam/en/about/history/max-nettlau

 

Day 2982, Toward Dialogue.

Daily picture, Quotes

Neither Victims nor Executioners was a series of essays by Albert Camus that were serialized in Combat,[1] the daily newspaper of the French Resistance, in November 1946. In the essays he discusses violence and murder and the impact these have on those who perpetrate, suffer, or observe. Wikipedia

Albert Camus

Neither Victims nor Executioners
Toward Dialogue

 

Yes, we must raise our voices. Up to this point, I have refrained from appealing to emotion. We are being torn apart by a logic of history which we have elaborated in every detail–a net which threatens to strangle us.

It is not emotion which can cut through the web of a logic which has gone to irrational lengths, but only reason which can meet logic on its own ground. But I should not want to leave the impression… that any program for the future can get along without our powers of love and indignation. I am well aware that it takes a powerful prime mover to get men into motion and that it is hard to throw one’s self into a struggle whose objectives are so modest and where hope has only a rational basis– and hardly even that. But the problem is not how to carry men away; it is essential, on the contrary, that they not be carried away but rather that they be made to understand clearly what they are doing.

To save what can be saved so as to open up some kind of future–that is the prime mover, the passion and the sacrifice that is required. It demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly, whether humanity’s lot must be made still more miserable in order to achieve far-off and shadowy ends, whether we should accept a world bristling with arms where brother kills brother; or whether, on the contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped than we are.

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Day 2980, Emma.

Daily picture, Quotes

“Do not all theists insist that there can be no morality, no justice, honesty or fidelity without the belief in a Divine Power? Based upon fear and hope, such morality has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self-righteousness, partly with hypocrisy. As to truth, justice, and fidelity, who have been their brave exponents and daring proclaimers? Nearly always the godless ones: the Atheists; they lived, fought, and died for them. They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself.”
Emma Goldman, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Day 2228, liberty.

anarchism, Day's pictures

Mikhail Bakunin

Federalism, socialism, anti-theologism (speach 1867)

Federalism

We are happy to be able to report that the principle of federalism has been unanimously acclaimed by the Congress of Geneva…. Unfortunately, this principle has been poorly formulated in the resolutions of the congress. It has not even been mentioned except indirectly. . . while in our opinion, it should have taken first place in our declaration of principles.

This is a most regrettable gap which we should hasten to fill. In accordance with the unanimous sense of the Congress of Geneva, we should proclaim:

  1. That there is but one way to bring about the triumph of liberty, of justice, and of peace in Europe’s international relations, to make civil war impossible between the different peoples who make up the European family; and that is the formation of the United States of Europe.
  2. That the United States of Europe can never be formed from the states as they are now constituted, considering the monstrous inequality which exists between their respective forces.
  3. That the example of the now defunct Germanic Confederation has proved once and for all that a confederation of monarchies is a mockery, powerless to guarantee either the peace or the liberty of populations.
  4. That no centralized state, being of necessity bureaucratic and militarist, even if it were to call itself republican, will be able to enter an international confederation with a firm resolve and in good faith. Its very constitution, which must always be an overt or covert negation of enduring liberty, would necessarily remain a declaration of permanent warfare, a threat to the existence of its neighbors. Since the State is essentially founded upon an act of violence, of conquest, what in private life goes under the name of housebreaking—an act blessed by all institutionalized religions whatsoever, eventually consecrated by time until it is even regarded as an historic right—and supported by such divine consecration of triumphant violence as an exclusive and supreme right, every centralized State therefore stands as an absolute negation of the rights of all other States, though recognizing them in the treaties it may conclude with them for its own political interest….

That all members of the League should therefore bend all their efforts toward reconstituting their respective countries, in order to replace their old constitution—founded from top to bottom on violence and the principle of authority—with a new organization based solely upon the interests, the needs, and the natural preferences of their populations—having no other principle but the free federation of individuals into communes, of communes into provinces, of the provinces into nations, and, finally, of the nations into the United States of Europe first, and of the entire world eventually.

You can read the rest here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/reasons-of-state.htm

And about Michael Bakunin here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin

 

Day 2180, cultivation.

anarchism, Day's pictures

Josiah Warren

True Civilisation (1863), Chapter II, self-preservation

91. Before we begin to probe the festering mass now called “civilization,” let us prepare ourselves with all the spirit of forbearance which the case allows, that we need not add any unnecessary pangs to the already exhausted and dying patient.

92.” I know,” says B., ” that you do not admit analogies as proof, but is there not some indication of the Divine Law in the large fishes eating up the little ones, and in spiders spinning webs to entrap flies?

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Day 2165, Pyotr.

Day's pictures, Poetry

There were too many

so his death was not mourned

I am so disappointed that we still live in a world where a single person can have so much power that he (it is hardly ever a she) can start a war. I don’t believe in a higher power or that there is a reason for why we are here. If you think this through, you have to conclude that we are humans living on a planet and not humans living in a country that is all just made up and has no basis in reality besides a habit we all share for a couple of hundred years.

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