It has been a very sad August when we allow the media to affect us. Thousands of people dying unnecessarily, in war and conflict, in protests and on the streets, from Missouri to Gaza, from Kurdistan to Damascus, from Donetsk to Santiago, armies, states, police, brutally slaughter their perceived enemies. In Syria the latest count of deaths since the uprising begun has reached 170,000 people and with the ISIS the numbers are climbing. In Gaza 2,100 is the last count in a few weeks. In Ukraine it is questionable what the numbers are but lately different sides refer to 2,000. In Africa the numbers are never so important to the western media to report, until the Ebola epidemic came and the media took an interest as far as this epidemic may cause a threat elsewhere. Yet there is one constant statistic that not many are reporting in the mass media. Over 60,000 people a day, nearly half being children, are dying from the simple cause of the lack of nutrients and clean water. Meanwhile if one is to divide the annual world production of corn (alone) by the population one will find the corn produced alone can prevent death from hunger. An enormous amount of food is produced worldwide, maybe "too much" according to economists who are waged by corporations that benefit from the rise of the price of commodities.
We re-examine education and physics as tools for actual community organizing, building, and communal problem solving
The Institute's Rooms
Showing posts with label Anarchism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anarchism. Show all posts
Aug 27, 2014
Jul 8, 2014
Why is there a lag in our publishing activity
First, and not least, we do not get paid or receive any money from doing this, nor did we undermine the project as something quick and simple. Certainly we would be able to do more if there were more of us doing it, so if you have developed an interest in getting involved let us know. Sometime horizontal organization is slow and complicated in terms of production. Each one of us must convince and be convinced of a proposal to do something. And this we do neither consider a luxury of a problem, quite the opposite we are critical of those who operate under a hierarchy, an authority, and produce.
Judging by certain polemics it would seem that there are anarchists who spurn any form of organisation; but in fact the many, too many, discussions on this subject, even when obscured by questions of language or poisoned by personal issues, are concerned with the means and not the actual principle of organisation. Thus it happens that when those comrades who sound the most hostile to organisation want to really do something they organise just like the rest of us and often more effectively. The problem, I repeat, is entirely one of means.
Errico Malatesta October 1927
So it is not only important to us to do something or do it quickly, but to find the acceptable ways to do it. If we were to develop specialists, hierarchy, authority, to do something, the value of the product would be all lost as we have returned to the state of affairs we are so eager in departing. So among the other, real life projects we are engaged in, our digital project has fallen back in priority, while we are constantly reexamining what we have done so far and where we want to go with this. And this must take time.
Jan 30, 2014
From Fire to Autonomy: Zapatistas, 20 Years of Walking Slowly
Saturday, 25 January 2014 09:28
By Andalusia Knoll and Itandehui Reyes, truth-out.org
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).
Dec 7, 2013
Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination
A Review of "The Impossible Community"
Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout | Op-Ed
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.
Oct 9, 2013
What is Communalism?
by Murray Bookchin -- September 18, 1994
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.
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