Professor John P.
Clark's The Impossible Community:
Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert
radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by
capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a
mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist -
socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because
its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing
system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of
a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of
history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and
the earth from the
In
the 1950s the aging Rose Bookchin still lived in the old apartment in East
Tremont, the Bronx neighborhood where she and her family had lived since 1920
and where her son Murray had grown up. Rose had been a diabetic for two decades
and was nearly blind. She was incapable of giving herself daily insulin
injections, so every day Murray took the Third Avenue El to East Tremont to
administer them.
He
would step onto the platform, and if he looked to the south, he could see over
the tops of the buildings the trees of Crotona Park. Then down the stairs and
onto the sidewalk, and he stroke briskly past his old street-side haunts: the
kosher butcher, the deli with pickles and whitefish and knishes, the old candy
store, the dairy with its slabs of butter — the old familiar shops were still
there. Most of the kids he’d known in YCL had moved away too, but their parents
still lived here — the buildings were rent controlled, after all, and it suited
them fine. The vacancy rate in East Tremont was less than one percent. Snatches
of Yiddish in the streets came to his ears, as in the old days, a comforting
sound as always. One difference: the farmers from New Jersey who’d brought
their produce over the bridge into the Bronx — they didn’t come here anymore.
Their farmlands were paved over. No one was farming there or in Yonkers now.
If one can follow in detail some very careful steps in starting up mushroom growing especially on a farm and even more so on a farm with permaculture as part of its design, you can feed a whole bunch of people using what you may otherwise throw away. While growing mushrooms the left overs from the production become some of the best compost and soil producer on earth. It may be a science to know too much but you may regulate how much and what you need to know.
We encountered a great set of videos that are the best introduction to general mushroom knowledge based on a community/collective farm in New Hampshire called D-Acres dacres.org which is among the best community projects we have encountered in this English speaking universe. We hope you find the videos informative and get you started on something
Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Portuguese, is
a mass social movement, formed by rural workers and by all those who
want to fight for land reform and against injustice and social
inequality in rural areas.
The MST was born through a process of occupying latifundios (large
landed estates) and become a national movement in 1984. Over more than
two decades , the movement has led more than 2,500 land occupations,
with about 370,000 families - families that today settled on 7.5 million
hectares of land that they won as a result of the occupations. Through
their organizing, these families continue to push for schools, credit
for agricultural production and cooperatives, and access to health care.
Currently, there are approximately 900 encampment holding 150,000
landless families in Brazil. Those camped, as well as those already
settled, remain mobilized, ready to exercise their full citizenship, by
fighting for the realization of their political, social economic,
environmental and cultural rights.
The following is a critique of the content of the above article and aims to open a discussion on the issue of social movements being incorporated within the system when they can not be defeated by physical (violent repression) means. Comments related to the subject are welcome and will be published as soon as possible.
MST is a 30 year old movement in Brazil. It has both class and social characteristics. It is a movement for people without land by the people without land. Brazil is the country with the largest percentage of the population having no access to land. Very counter-intuitive if you consider the vast area of jungle and unexplored forests created by the Amazon. This means that a very small group of people have converted all land to private status. This was done with a mechanism called IMF when the country first started going bankrupt 40 years ago.
This article nevertheless calls the MST movement agriculturists without land, which apart from being poorly written reveals a specific political value. What we can conclude from it is that land is perceived as means of production which utilizes specialized workers to produce for others. Something that as far as we can find about MST it is not. What is odd about the article and drew our attention is the term agriculturists, meaning agricultural workers, which if searched through the net it has not been used before in reference to MST.
Note: truth-out does great work in sharing knowledge about the reasons we should not yet give up any struggle. In this great piece one should not overlook this paragraph: mandar obedenciedo (command by obeying):
to serve and not be served; represent and not supplant; build and not
destroy; propose and not impose; and convince, not defeat, from below
not above.
Speaking in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, on a cold drizzly New
Year's Eve, the Zapatista Comandante Hortensia addressed the crowd:
"Twenty-five or 30 years ago we were completely deceived, manipulated,
subjugated, forgotten, drowned in ignorance and misery." She was
communicating the official words of the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) on the 20th anniversary of their rebellion, when
thousands of indigenous people rose up in arms, took over dozens of
major towns and villages in this southern state, and declared "enough is enough, never again will there be a homeland that doesn't include us." Comandante Hortensia went on to explain how over the past two
decades, they have constructed their own autonomous government, complete
with their own health and education system, based in the indigenous
traditions of their ancestors. Despite the continual efforts of the
"neoliberal bad government" to displace them from their land, the
Zapatistas have successfully recuperated thousands of acres of land on
which they have constructed communities that are governed "from the
bottom up." Community members participate in rotating government
positions that operate under the democratic principle of "mandar obedeciendo" (commanding by obeying).
(Image: Bloomsbury)Professor John P. Clark's The Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert
radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as
prosecuted by capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the
intervention of a mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or
communitarian anarchist - socio-political movements. This project is
only "impossible" because its realization is heterotopic - inherently
contradictory - to the prevailing system of domination, such that it
demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of a different, liberated
world: that of the "third great epoch of history," in Clark's vision,
when "humanity finally frees itself and the earth from the yoke of
dominion." Taking equally from Buddhism as from dialectical philosophy,
Clark stresses the importance of enlightenment, mindfulness and
awakening as preconditions of revolutionary political praxis. And
although he implicitly seems to agree with the overall thesis of the (anti)catastrophist line developed by Sasha Lilley and company,
he also affirms the productivity of a commitment to truth that squarely
confronts the profoundly shocking, traumatic and even convulsive nature
of such truth: the very first page of his preface acknowledges the
sixth mass extinction in which terrestrial life is at present entrapped
and notes the "horror" of a capitalist world in which billions go
without the basic necessities of a good life. Advancing the philosophy
and practice of communitarian anarchism as an exit from the depraved
present, Clark dedicates much of his text to examining the
anti-authoritarian and cooperative spirit of humanity, as embodied in
many of the customs of pre-modern or "traditional" societies, as in the
history of Western revolutionary movements. In this sense, Clark does
well to distance himself from the Eurocentrism advanced by many Western
radical thinkers, including social ecologist Murray Bookchin, whose
imprint on The Impossible Community is otherwise nearly palpable.
Seldom have socially important words become more confused and
divested of their historic meaning than they are at present. Two
centuries ago, it is often forgotten, "democracy" was deprecated by
monarchists and republicans alike as "mob rule." Today, democracy is
hailed as "representative democracy," an oxymoron that refers to little
more than a republican oligarchy of the chosen few who ostensibly speak
for the powerless many.
"Communism," for its part, once referred to a cooperative society
that would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in
which each contributed to the social labor fund according to his or her
ability and received the means of life according to his or her needs.
Today, "communism" is associated with the Stalinist gulag and wholly
rejected as totalitarian. Its cousin, "socialism" -- which once denoted a
politically free society based on various forms of collectivism and
equitable material returns for labor -- is currently interchangeable
with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.
During the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political
spectrum has shifted ideologically to the right, "anarchism" itself has
not been immune to redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism
is being divested of its social ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy,
an emphasis that is draining it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite
individualism -- marked by an advocacy of lifestyle changes, the
cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and even an embrace of outright
mysticism -- has become increasingly prominent. This personalistic
"lifestyle anarchism" is steadily eroding the socialistic core of
anarchist concepts of freedom.
Professor John P.
Clark's The Impossible Community:
Realizing Communitarian Anarchism (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a masterful work, one which seeks to invert
radically the destruction of nature and oppression of humanity as prosecuted by
capitalism, the state and patriarchy by encouraging the intervention of a
mass-confluence of anarcho-communist - or communitarian anarchist -
socio-political movements. This project is only "impossible" because
its realization is heterotopic - inherently contradictory - to the prevailing
system of domination, such that it demands the abolition of hegemony in favor of
a different, liberated world: that of the "third great epoch of
history," in Clark's vision, when "humanity finally frees itself and
the earth from the 
