Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination: A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Dialectical Communitarian Anarchism as the Negation of Domination: A Review of "The Impossible Community"

Saturday, 30 November 2013 09:50 By Javier Sethness, Truthout

 

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

The Emergence of Eco-decentralism

 

Mumford Gutkind Bookchin: The Emergence of Eco-decentralism

by Janet Biehl        http://www.biehlonbookchin.com/books/

http://www.biehlonbookchin.com

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.

Call-out for actions and manifestations on the 22 February 2014 !

Thursday 6 February 2014, by zadist

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]

Resistance and Sabotage !
This call-out is motivated by:

=> the call-out of the NoTAV movement at Val di Susa in Italy calling for a national day (22 02 2014) of mobilisation and action, each one in their area, city, environment.
=> the call-out of the ZAD movement at Notre-dame-des-Landes in France calling for a national manifestation in Nantes, France

This is a call-out for actions and manifestations on the 22 February 2014 !

• A day of action and sabotage to abolish all those megalomaniacs, devastating projects with the illusions of a durable development, green capitalism, geo-engeenering !
• A day of action and sabotage to regain our freedom and rights to take decisions about our own lives, our environment, our planet,( in a emancipated manner), instead of those in position of global decision-making, who are using the flag of democracy to impose their society of totalitarian power.
• A day of action and sabotage to bring to a halt the destructions and exploitation of entire species, the waste of tons of raw materials and natural resources everyday, justified by the term ’public interest’, while behind it there’s only money, profit and capital.
• A day of action and in solidarity with all those who fight, and for all those that lost their freedom and especially all those that are oppressed or imprisoned as "terrorists" or as simple delinquents.
• A day of action and convergence with all those struggles heading for a different world, where life and common values are worth more than money, competition and dominance.

No border ! No Nation ! No Pasaran ! No more BULLSHIT !

From the ZAD to Val Susa ! From Hambacher Forst to Square Taksim ? From Calais to Lampedusa Hambourg to Exarchia From Heathrow to Atenco From Valogne to Wendland From Niscemi to Mayo Monte Belo to Khimki Fukushima to Tshernobyle From prison to prison

Resistance et Sabotage !

ZAD, France: This is not a camp

Translated by resistrA http://resistra.espivblogs.net/2014/01/zad-france-this-is-not-a-camp/

Jan 27 2014

it’s a pirate look-out

Following various announcements for a possible start of construction of the Notre Dame des Landes airport, a series of articles were released in the press that pretty much regurgitated copy-pasted clichés. One of these articles caught our attention notably. In almost all the articles that would preach the possible eviction and the final catastrophe of ZAD we read “200 people, alter-globalists, continue to camp in ZAD.” The figure might seem rough. The term “alter-globalists” is not a term that the people who chose to fight against the airport and the world of “development” would embrace. But we don’t give a damn about that! For now we will hang on to the bad joke that describes what’s happening here as “camping”.

We don’t want your American dream!

We don’t want your dream, we want ours.  Don’t enforce your dream on us or we will fight you away!

Let’s be frank.  It is your American dream we don’t want,

- we want everyone’s different and self defined dream, the ones you can not sell to us

We don’t want a huge house full of automation,

- we want a little home full of rational simplicity

We don’t want a huge car on a huge highway, over huge bridges and tunnels, for hundreds of miles every day,

- we want simple clean transportation to the few places close by and once in a long while to visit some faraway place of interest, even if it takes too long to get there.

We don’t want huge dams and pipelines, artificial reservoirs, and chemical treatment plants

- we want clean local water from natural resources

We don’t want mass produced industrial food

- we want to locally grow clean, sustainable, organic, authentic, fresh food

We don’t want machines made out of strange dangerous metals from deep inside earth and billions of tons of toxic waste pumped through the fields around your mines,

- we want simple machines made of already plentiful recyclable materials that would last for generations

La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived

Testimonies > La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived 

Friday 18 January 2013, by zadist

All the versions of this article: [English] [français]
 

La ZAD is not a story that is told, it is a story that is lived.

You are sleeping, this is a dream.
After an hour and a half on the road, we arrive at Notre-Dame-des-Landes. We park in a small parking lot, across from the town hall. A graffitied road sign loudly proclaims “ZAD”; we are not very far.
If, regarding urbanisation, the acronym ZAD means “Zone d’Amenagement Differé”(Zone of Deferred Development), for us it takes different meanings. The 2000 hectares upon which Vinci plans to build an airport and companion road network have been re-baptised “Zone à Défendre” (Zone to Defend) by the project’s opponents. This project will not be realised. The project’s opponents already are envisaging the future and the possibilities of putting their desires into practice. Coming from a defensive position, they now fight “for”, for a “Zone d’Autonomie Définitive” (Zone of Definitive Autonomy).

The Effective Extremist Collective

... they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored ...

"First, social-psychological studies of small groups show that "moral exemplars" -- those who stand outside the general consensus and at first are labeled as "extremists" -- can often be very effective, but with one important qualification: they can't be too extreme or else they will be ignored. Thus, the trick for any social change agent is to be just extreme enough to be an "effective extremist."

Second, historical case studies of social change show that a very small number of highly organized and disciplined people, drawing great energy from their strong moral beliefs and supreme confidence in their shared theoretical analysis, can have a big impact."

What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change
by G. William Domhoff
March 2005

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html

Review of “Recovering Bookchin” by Andy Price

By Debbie Bookchin and Bea Bookchin On March 7, 2013 

Author/journalist Debbie Bookchin and ISE Board member Bea Bookchin offer this in-depth review of Andy Price’s new book, Recovering Bookchin (New Compass Press, November 2012):

In his important new book Recovering Bookchin, Andy Price has set himself a formidable task: he takes up the corpus of criticism of Murray Bookchin that developed during the last 20 years of his life and disentangles the valid, content-based criticism, from the many ad hominem and polemical attacks against Bookchin, showing how the latter were used to almost completely obscure the former and cast aside Bookchin’s substantive critique. Equally important, Price addresses the content-based criticism, in the process illuminating the richness of Bookchin’s theoretical and political philosophy and restoring him to his rightful role as one of the most important radical thinkers of the second half of the twentieth century.

While such a task might have resulted in a book reserved for those already familiar with Bookchin’s work, that is not the case here: Price, a senior lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University, U.K., provides such a clear rendering not only of Bookchin’s thought, but also of the concerns of Bookchin’s critics, that his book serves also as one of the most cohesive and readable introductions to the philosophy and social theory of Murray Bookchin.

After describing the enormous impact that Bookchin’s ideas and writing had on radical political thought prior to 1987, Price focuses on two specific periods of Bookchin’s work. The first begins with the Gathering of American Greens conference in Amherst in 1987 that initiated the social ecology vs. deep ecology debate. The second begins eight years later in 1995 with the social anarchism vs. lifestyle anarchism, and subsequently, anarchism vs. communalism debates. Price provides a detailed summary of the long literature in which these debates and argumentation took place and shows that Bookchin’s criticisms of these two movements stemmed not from an egotistical desire to protect his turf, or some kind of querulous argumentative streak, as his critics contended, but were compelled by the need to defend and explicate the philosophical and political implications of his life’s work.  These interventions by Bookchin, Price explains, were “a direct philosophical and political expression of his own theoretical foundations.”

Murray Bookchin’s social ecology: communalism as evolutions path to self-consciousness, freedom and ethics

Murray Bookchin’s social ecology: communalism as evolutions path to self-consciousness, freedom and ethics

huhtikuu 30, 2010 Tekijä svantemalmstrom

Another article written by Jyri Jaakkola translated to english. Jyri was killed in Oaxaca, Mexico 26.4.2010.

Murray Bookchin’s social ecology: communalism as evolutions path to self-consciousness, freedom and ethics

In Elonkehä’s number 10/03 Olli Tammilehto pointed to John Clarks and David Watsons attempts to combine deep ecology and social ecology. The basics of deep ecology are most likely familiar to Elonkehä’s readers, but what is social ecology?

Social ecology is typically connected to Murray Bookchin, an American, and I will discuss his ideas in this article. According to Bookchin nearly all ecological problems are social problems. Ecological crisis is caused by the capitalist society, but it has deeper roots in social hierarchies. Social ecology proposes replacing state and capitalism with an ecological society, that is based on relations without hierarchy, geographically decentralized communities, ecotechnology, organic agriculture and human scale production facilities.

Social ecology denies a clear division or a inevitable opposition between nature and humanity or society. Movement from nature to society is gradual and basic problems that pit society against nature are growing within social evolution – not between nature and society.