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

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(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.

Simplified Sewage Community System (or Sewerage as the Brits call it)

Good public information doesn't come easy these days and many utilize it for profit and often find a way to eliminate it from public eye.  Quite often this happens with information published with public money funding academic studies for which industry later purchases the rights and patents.  For this reason when we find good information we copy it and preserve it before it vanishes.

Sewage systems and clean water access has for centuries been the largest by far source of health improvement to urban populations.  Medicine is quite overstated as a significant component of health, not coming even close to clean water and safe sewage systems, food, shelter, and working conditions.

http://youtu.be/7rD0bd5WlFk

Simplified Sewerage

This web site is aimed at giving support for the publication PC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design and it accompanying Windows based design program. Links are also given to publications on this and other low cost sewerage systems NOW AVAILABLE IN SPANISH AND IN PORTUGUESE AND IN FRENCH (as of 19 Jan 2011) see the download page 

 

Introduction

How to get the manual and Program

Simplified Sewerage Description

PC-Based Design Program

 

Introduction PC-Based Simplified Sewerage Design was published by the School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds, UK, in January 2001. It is a manual and windows based design program for use in the design of the simplified sewerage system. It was published with the aim of promoting the use of simplified sewerage throughout the developing world. To quote the preface of the manual:

"Simplified sewerage is an important sanitation option in peri-urban areas of developing countries, especially as it is often the only technically feasible solution in these high-density areas. It is a sanitation technology widely known in Latin America, but it is much less well known in Africa and Asia. It is the purpose of this Manual to disseminate this technology more widely in the developing world, so that it can be used in peri-urban sanitation programmes and project to improve the health of poor communities. However, simplified sewerage is not just for peri-urban areas - it can be successfully and appropriately used in middle-and upper-income areas as well. We hope that this Manual serves its purpose of making simplified sewerage better known throughout the developing world, and that the PC-based design program contained herein facilitates the hydraulic design calculations."

How To Get The Manual and Program The manual and program are both available to be downloaded from this site.

1. The manual in .pdf format can be viewed or downloaded here and
2. Details of how to download the design program can be found here.

If you require a copy of the manual and program on CD please send a request either via e-mail to Professor Duncan Mara <D.D.Mara@leeds.ac.uk> or via post to this address:

Prof. D Mara School of Civil Engineering University of Leeds Woodhouse Lane Leeds LS2 9JT UK

Note that there is a limited supply of printed manuals and CDs. Simplified Sewerage Description Simplified sewerage is an off-site sanitation technology that removes all wastewater from the household environment. Conceptually it is the same as conventional sewerage, but with conscious efforts made to eliminate unnecessarily conservative design features and to match design standards to the local situation.

November 17th 1983 ... rewinding 30 years of constant revolution

If we only loved one thing about the Zapatistas it would be the clean refreshing feeling that comes in their writing.  Inspired by ideas of Europe and by the ideas and struggles of native people instead of producing through a dialectic blend even more complexity for us to digest, they create from 0 something new and simple.  Instead of complicating what for centuries seems too complex to implement, they implement what it was so simple to implement to begin with.  But as every major human discovery has in the past, the notion of "why didn't I think of that before", for 30 years they are continuing to discover new ground and content so fast that we must forget what we are and what we do in order to comprehend the significance of their discoveries.

Here is a sample of what we are (and probably failing) trying to convey:

Original source from the jungle

nov192013

REWIND 3.

REWIND 3.

Here we explain the reasons behind this strange title and those that will follow, narrate the story of an exceptional encounter between a beetle and a perplexing being (that is, more perplexing than the beetle) and the reflections of no immediate relevance or importance which occurred therein; and finally, given a particular anniversary, the Sub tries to explain, unsuccessfully, how the Zapatistas see their own history.

November 2013
To whom it may concern:

WARNING – As noted in the text entitled “The Bad and Not So Bad News,” the writings that preceded that text had not yet been published. Ergo, what we are going to do is “rebobinar” (that is, “rewind” the tape) to what should have appeared on the Day of the Dead. Having rewound, you may then read in inverse order the inverse order in which the texts will appear and that way you will…hmm…forget it, I’ve even managed to confuse myself. The point is that you get the gist of the “retrospective” perspective. It’s as if one is going in one direction but later returns to see how they got going in that direction in the first place. Got it? No?

Building a Home with the Earthbag Technique

Step-by-Step Earthbag Building
by Owen Geiger http://www.instructables.com/id/Step-by-Step-Earthbag-Building/

This Instructable explains each main step of construction for building vertical earthbag walls. Videos on my Earthbag Natural Building YouTube channel demonstrate the process.

For those who don’t know, earthbag building uses polypropylene rice bags or feed bags filled with soil or insulation that are stacked like masonry and tamped flat. Barbed wire between courses keeps bags from slipping and adds tensile strength. The final plastered walls look just like adobe structures. Thousands of people are now building with bags to create their dream homes, home offices, shops, resorts, rootcellars, storm cellars and survival shelters. Non-profit organizations are building schools, orphanages, emergency shelters and other structures.

I got involved with earthbag building when the Indian Ocean tsunami hit Southeast Asia in December, 2004. As the director of Builders Without Borders at that time, I searched all available affordable, sustainable building methods and decided building with bags was the most practical. They’re flood resistant (used for flood control), earthquake resistant (passed an ICBO shake table test), bullet and blast resistant (used for military bunkers), and now engineer and code approved plans are available. Just search for earthbag house plans on the Internet.

Gold, Copper, Iron, Petroleum, Uranium, Water, and now Bitcoin

The world has gone mad or what we thought as sanity is not really

far from madness?  This is how silly their value system is that one does not really need to dig mountains, melt ore, have vaults, and make laws and rules to create value.  One can seat on their PC and harvest/mine coins that are not made out of any matter, use them to buy and sell material goods and services, and get wealthy collecting those virtual coins that no state and central bank in the world regulates.  Yes, gold coins are just as silly but cost lives and do tremendous damage to the land their harvested from.  The question we ask is not whether such a currency can replace other currencies or be used as a universal currency for international trade but whether this "value" system is as silly as any of capitalism's value systems. 

Here we have a description and summary of what this late madness of virtual currency is by a globally respected economics journal "The Economist".  The longer this phenomenon lasts and the longer states are unable or unwilling to control and repress it the more the traditional value systems prove their irrationality.  Thousands, millions maybe, died in battles and wars over gold and other resources so states and the elites behind them can maintain domination over land and lives.  For what?  For regulating, usually to their benefit, the accumulation in wealth, power, and control, based on a virtual and irrational value system.  Bitcoins have reduced

Another Kind of Revolution

November 06, 2013

Another Kind of Revolution

The Mapuche’s Struggle for the Land

by JOHN SEVERINO

In the aftermath of the inspiring popular uprising in Argentina at the end of 2001 and the battles that blocked neoliberalism in Bolivia from 2003-2005, the Left came to power in governments across South America—most notably in Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, and Bolivia—in a series of electoral upsets that were quickly hailed as revolutions. In hindsight, these victories prove to be less than convincing. The new revolutionary governments institutionalized social movements, turning them into mere appendages, they continued cutting down the rainforests and displacing indigenous peoples in the name of progress, they supported free trade agreements, used paramilitary or police forces against student demonstrators, expanded the exploitation of gas, oil, and coal, and imprisoned dissidents. Business as usual.
The cynicism of these new governments should not have come as a surprise. True revolutions do not happen overnight, and they are not delivered by politicians. The kind of transformation that ends exploitation, misery, and the destruction of the environment, and that allows people to organize their own lives and fulfill their needs in freedom and dignity comes about in an altogether different kind of way.