Organic Revolution
14th August 2005, 08:57
Carwil James: Anarchy in action for our people
Wednesday, May 04 2005 @ 01:40 PM PDT
Contributed by: carwil
Views: 1142
Anarchist OpinionWhy talk of revolution when it's easier to believe that we're living out an apocalypse? Dreams of empire are being raised while nightmares of prisons, missile strikes, and starvation spread across our homelands. Mortality looms not just for individual human beings, but for whole cultures, forests, languages and nations.
by Carwil James
[This article first appeared in the zine of San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist People of Color. Its views are the author's.]
Why talk of revolution when it's easier to believe that we're living out an apocalypse? Dreams of empire are being raised while nightmares of prisons, missile strikes, and starvation spread across our homelands. Mortality looms not just for individual human beings, but for whole cultures, forests, languages and nations.
And the invitation comes to us, in so many ways, to sell ourselves into the system. To grasp for the bling-bling when our cousins still have chains around their feet and gold mines leach poison into Africa's Great Lakes. And the invitation comes to be an overseer and a jailer in Iraq while prisons consume our neighbors here at home.
But revolution is not about reading what the future holds without our action, but about considering what it could be, fueled by our defiant creativity. And about bringing that possibility into the realm of the real.
Revolution refusal as a matter of the mind and the heart to take existing society as permanent, and the decision instead to make them history is needed here, for us. Not in spite of the looming disasters, but because of them.
The self-poisoning of our cities overwhelmed by cars, choked by oil refineries and fossil-fueled power plants, divided by class, policed by racism, deadened by it meaningless forms of work need not persist. We who build and rebuild our cities every day can design them as well.
Neither should our border continue, a continent wide scar of razor wire, concrete bricks, and armed soldiers that ultimately separates no one from anyone else, but guarantees that our meetings are clandestine, hostile, cruel or oppressive. A line written in our blood, now marked by factories that burn young mestizo women's lives and belch acrid smoke. Passports didn't exist until the 19th century and, like the apartheid passbooks, they can end in the 21st.
Our dizzying ability to create little tyrannies in homes, in back alleys, with a badge or a gun, in small minded acts of hatred can also be confronted and undone.
We are all having our time stolen, used for purposes not our own. We all have histories of being ripped away from home, and the chance to resist another generation of enforced exile. We all have a stake in a world where our lives are our own. We all could breathe easier without the accompanying threat of hate. It's really a matter of sharing ways of how to get there.
For me, anarchism a way of envisioning revolution without permanent leaders, hierarchy or statesis one. Anarchism is the scariest and most hopeful of revolutionary theories because it answers the dilemma of who will confront the big questions and solve our collective challenges with a single, clear and impossibly difficult answer: us. Not us, the anarchists or the revolutionaries; but us, this society; us, the people in front of you.
In a vast, technologically coordinated, hyper-specialized world, this runs counter to our shared wisdom that problems are far larger than ourselves, and must be passed on to others. Specialization acts as a shield from all the difficult questions: someone else will instruct us on making the transition away from fossil fuels, will confront and disarm the torturers, will orchestrate the survival of a language or of an ecosystem, will frame a culture that is not suicidal. And if no one does, it's no one's fault.
Wrong, says the philosophy of anarchism. We will decide what to build or not build on the factory floor, to accept or embargo shiploads of cheap commodities made in factories like prisons. We will take our desires as goals and build lives, and projects, traditions, homes around them. We will decide whether to be taught the hate necessary for a fourth world war, for the creativity necessary to prevent it and pull together something altogether different.
Reclaiming power on this scale is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. It suggests that human possibilities are far more open than we've thought, but also that we are and have been far more responsible for the conditions of our world than we might like to believe. No matter, there's a huge amount of work ahead and we are best when we get to it and not worry about the implications of it going undone for so long. Rather, we need to focus on how to organize ourselves to make the things we want to see real.
Anarchism has chiefly been a critique of two great institutions for organizing collective activity: the economy and the state. Both have directed vast collective efforts for centuries, offering creativity and choice to relatively few. And both must overcome people's natural resistance to being bossed or sold, to do things they have little joy in and less control over. In answer to them, we can point to what is not being done and accomplish it without driving that accomplishment by orders or money.
There are of course a thousand ways of doing this, ways that have been a part of every culture that is ever existed. What remains is to drag these possibilities into the light to show what they can achieve.
Colombia's indigenous movement has taken a tradition of collective action called minga and directed it towards bringing people together, gathering themselves into a multitude and facing the armed actors who threaten their autonomy and their rights. Argentine unemployed workers have pioneered tactics of roadblocks to win concessions, assemblies and community centers to erode and overcome self-blame for their poverty, and new collective workshops to survive and make their ramshackle homes more permanent. Maoris, Gwich'in, Catalans and the Ecuadorean indigenous have built autonomous education systems to bring their once-declining languages back from the brink. Strengthened by this activity, some in the Amazon have gone on to burn out oil drilling platforms as self-designated protectors of ecological parks. Others have led their colonizer-descended countrywomen and -men to redefine their nations as pluricultural: an indigenous-black-mestizo Ecuador, a Maori-English-Asian Aotearoa /New Zealand. Squatters have fought a battle of wills with speculators in one of the hottest real-estate markets in the world, Barcelona, while providing ground for a moneyless culture of resistance.
What emerges from these efforts is not just experience and autonomy, though that is important enough, but also new identities in action: ways of conceptualizing one's life that are every bit as real as worker or soldier or patriotic. More real, in fact, if you consider that they are self-consciously ruled by those creating them, more fluid, and in constant redefinition. With such an active form of resistance, it is much easier to imagine rising to the daunting challenges of our apparently pre-apocalyptic times.
Carwil writes and designs for Fault Lines, newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center (www.indybay.org) and for falseignorance.info.
Wednesday, May 04 2005 @ 01:40 PM PDT
Contributed by: carwil
Views: 1142
Anarchist OpinionWhy talk of revolution when it's easier to believe that we're living out an apocalypse? Dreams of empire are being raised while nightmares of prisons, missile strikes, and starvation spread across our homelands. Mortality looms not just for individual human beings, but for whole cultures, forests, languages and nations.
by Carwil James
[This article first appeared in the zine of San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist People of Color. Its views are the author's.]
Why talk of revolution when it's easier to believe that we're living out an apocalypse? Dreams of empire are being raised while nightmares of prisons, missile strikes, and starvation spread across our homelands. Mortality looms not just for individual human beings, but for whole cultures, forests, languages and nations.
And the invitation comes to us, in so many ways, to sell ourselves into the system. To grasp for the bling-bling when our cousins still have chains around their feet and gold mines leach poison into Africa's Great Lakes. And the invitation comes to be an overseer and a jailer in Iraq while prisons consume our neighbors here at home.
But revolution is not about reading what the future holds without our action, but about considering what it could be, fueled by our defiant creativity. And about bringing that possibility into the realm of the real.
Revolution refusal as a matter of the mind and the heart to take existing society as permanent, and the decision instead to make them history is needed here, for us. Not in spite of the looming disasters, but because of them.
The self-poisoning of our cities overwhelmed by cars, choked by oil refineries and fossil-fueled power plants, divided by class, policed by racism, deadened by it meaningless forms of work need not persist. We who build and rebuild our cities every day can design them as well.
Neither should our border continue, a continent wide scar of razor wire, concrete bricks, and armed soldiers that ultimately separates no one from anyone else, but guarantees that our meetings are clandestine, hostile, cruel or oppressive. A line written in our blood, now marked by factories that burn young mestizo women's lives and belch acrid smoke. Passports didn't exist until the 19th century and, like the apartheid passbooks, they can end in the 21st.
Our dizzying ability to create little tyrannies in homes, in back alleys, with a badge or a gun, in small minded acts of hatred can also be confronted and undone.
We are all having our time stolen, used for purposes not our own. We all have histories of being ripped away from home, and the chance to resist another generation of enforced exile. We all have a stake in a world where our lives are our own. We all could breathe easier without the accompanying threat of hate. It's really a matter of sharing ways of how to get there.
For me, anarchism a way of envisioning revolution without permanent leaders, hierarchy or statesis one. Anarchism is the scariest and most hopeful of revolutionary theories because it answers the dilemma of who will confront the big questions and solve our collective challenges with a single, clear and impossibly difficult answer: us. Not us, the anarchists or the revolutionaries; but us, this society; us, the people in front of you.
In a vast, technologically coordinated, hyper-specialized world, this runs counter to our shared wisdom that problems are far larger than ourselves, and must be passed on to others. Specialization acts as a shield from all the difficult questions: someone else will instruct us on making the transition away from fossil fuels, will confront and disarm the torturers, will orchestrate the survival of a language or of an ecosystem, will frame a culture that is not suicidal. And if no one does, it's no one's fault.
Wrong, says the philosophy of anarchism. We will decide what to build or not build on the factory floor, to accept or embargo shiploads of cheap commodities made in factories like prisons. We will take our desires as goals and build lives, and projects, traditions, homes around them. We will decide whether to be taught the hate necessary for a fourth world war, for the creativity necessary to prevent it and pull together something altogether different.
Reclaiming power on this scale is simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. It suggests that human possibilities are far more open than we've thought, but also that we are and have been far more responsible for the conditions of our world than we might like to believe. No matter, there's a huge amount of work ahead and we are best when we get to it and not worry about the implications of it going undone for so long. Rather, we need to focus on how to organize ourselves to make the things we want to see real.
Anarchism has chiefly been a critique of two great institutions for organizing collective activity: the economy and the state. Both have directed vast collective efforts for centuries, offering creativity and choice to relatively few. And both must overcome people's natural resistance to being bossed or sold, to do things they have little joy in and less control over. In answer to them, we can point to what is not being done and accomplish it without driving that accomplishment by orders or money.
There are of course a thousand ways of doing this, ways that have been a part of every culture that is ever existed. What remains is to drag these possibilities into the light to show what they can achieve.
Colombia's indigenous movement has taken a tradition of collective action called minga and directed it towards bringing people together, gathering themselves into a multitude and facing the armed actors who threaten their autonomy and their rights. Argentine unemployed workers have pioneered tactics of roadblocks to win concessions, assemblies and community centers to erode and overcome self-blame for their poverty, and new collective workshops to survive and make their ramshackle homes more permanent. Maoris, Gwich'in, Catalans and the Ecuadorean indigenous have built autonomous education systems to bring their once-declining languages back from the brink. Strengthened by this activity, some in the Amazon have gone on to burn out oil drilling platforms as self-designated protectors of ecological parks. Others have led their colonizer-descended countrywomen and -men to redefine their nations as pluricultural: an indigenous-black-mestizo Ecuador, a Maori-English-Asian Aotearoa /New Zealand. Squatters have fought a battle of wills with speculators in one of the hottest real-estate markets in the world, Barcelona, while providing ground for a moneyless culture of resistance.
What emerges from these efforts is not just experience and autonomy, though that is important enough, but also new identities in action: ways of conceptualizing one's life that are every bit as real as worker or soldier or patriotic. More real, in fact, if you consider that they are self-consciously ruled by those creating them, more fluid, and in constant redefinition. With such an active form of resistance, it is much easier to imagine rising to the daunting challenges of our apparently pre-apocalyptic times.
Carwil writes and designs for Fault Lines, newspaper of the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center (www.indybay.org) and for falseignorance.info.