Propaganda Lalaland

Voting vs. Direct Democracy and Consensus

2012-01-26T18:04:00.005-05:00

Thanks Dave!

Something he mentions in the second video which I paid close attention to was the idea that our consciousnesses and perspectives don't really change when we go out and support or vote for political candidates to make the rules for us. It's that same dependency relationship; we're put in an environment where we think all we can do is follow some candidate down a certain path, promoting that politician's stance on every issue without having a discussion on the real issues which affect us and finding ways to take on these problems ourselves. We don't learn anything. No wonder critics of anarchism/libertarian-socialism claim that human beings are so bad at self-management: we rarely ever get to practice it.

I remember, the night before I went to occupy the primary debate I was taken to a Ron Paul campaign party at Jillian's in Manchester by a few friends. It was mostly a spectacle, as is always the case, but I learned some things from chatting with a few people in attendance. There was one woman in particular who told me she had moved to NH with the FSP back in 2010. When I asked her how her life changed since she moved she told me that she was very active with the Libertarian Party and did all sorts of campaigning for Ron Paul in 2008 when she was living in Michigan. Now that she's living in NH she rarely attends political events (she didn't even know a formal Libertarian Party existed in NH), and had only returned to campaigning for political candidates full-time in the past few weeks. When I asked her why that is, she told me that she doesn't feel she needs to be active in top-down politics now that she's living in a state which is much more libertarian. Although she admitted that when she does go back to Michigan to visit friends and family she goes to every Libertarian Party and Ron Paul meet-up in that area. When I asked her why, she told me she didn't exactly know, but insisted that it had something to do with the fact that libertarians are much more a minority in Michigan to the point where an alliance with others who share your political/economic/social views isn't just about getting certain legislation passed; it's about identity and the need to reiterate that identity somehow. I told her - though I had been drinking quite a bit and said some pretty blunt things - that I thought it was kind of sad that people would identify so closely with masters (politicians). She asked me what else we could do to achieve (her definition of) freedom other than support Ron Paul. I told her there's lots of things we could do. We have to build an entirely new system and we have to do it now. Something tells me she never heard that before.

I would recommend watching the videos Dave (buddhagem) mentions in the second video.

Spring Semester

2012-01-24T22:55:00.006-05:00

I'm back at McDaniel now. If all goes well, this should be my second-to-last semester of school. I've started both of the classes in which I'm taking. On Monday (and tomorrow) I have Greek Myth and History. It's not really a course on mythology per se but rather the relationship of mythology to history. Dr. Evergates makes it no surprise that her history courses contain a pretty heavy amount of coursework (for example, our final papers for her class have to be a minimum of 20 pages) but I'm glad she does this, knowing how colleges these days are notorious for grade inflation. Apollonius and Thucydides are two of the writers we're going to read, although she promised she'd assign us some Homer.

The class I had today was Minds and Machines with Dr. Bradley. It touches on metaphysics and some philosophy of science, nothing like any other course I've taken before. First day of class he introduced the questions: what does it mean to have a mind?; Is the mind something we have, or is it something that one does? One of the students brought up the fact that ownership or possession implies that whatever you own can be lost, and you can't exactly "lose" your mind, since the actual loss of your mind would imply that you die. It reminds me very much of online debates over whether one "owns" him/herself or simply "is" him/herself. It also reminds me of some of the things Dr. Jakoby told us during the first days of her Magic and Mysticism class last semester: the concept of the mind being completely separate from the body is very much ingrained in Western philosophical thought (it comes from Plato) while other cultures believe that the mind and the body (and in some cases, the soul) are a single unit.

Tomorrow I have to go talk to Leahy and go over the projects we're doing both this semester and for a few weeks in the summer. I still have a lot I need to do.

My Internet Black-Out Day

2012-01-19T15:01:00.002-05:00

So, what did I do the other day when all the sites I usually go on were down to protest SOPA/PIPA? I went into the city and spent a few hours at the Boston Public Library doing what I promised myself I would do over winter break: that is, start gathering research for my senior thesis on money, economics, and philosophy (namely, how living in a "culture of money" shapes people's values, that kind of thing; I'll probably post interesting tibits on here later on). Whilst at the library I found two volumes of Braudel's work on capitalism and civilization which turned out to be way too much to take in. I also couldn't find the book by Polanyi that I wanted to use. I'll probably end up ordering cheap, used copies of these online since I'm already ordering books by Zelizer and Mauss.

Anyway, I leave for Baltimore on Sunday. Classes start up again the next day. Three independent studies, two classes, and a thesis and I'll be so burnt out by the end of the semester I'll never want to write again.

Mutualism Helped Save Libertopia

2012-01-14T19:58:00.006-05:00

Speaking of the history of your region that you don't learn when you're growing up, I spent the 12th with my friend Matt Cropp (not the Matt from OccupyNH, this Matt is a graduate student at the University of Vermont who runs a blog about credit unions) at the Credit Union Museum in Manchester. What I learned there was absolutely fascinating.

The first credit union in the US was started by Quebecois immigrants in 1908, back when Manchester was a huge center of manufacturing and the Amoskeag Mills were the largest mills on earth. A large number of the city's population lived in poverty. Most of the members of La Caisse Poplaire Sainte-Marie ("Saint Mary's People's Bank", simply called "St. Mary's Bank" today) were workers in those mills, including many child laborers, who were able to get out of poverty and debt due to the services of such an institution. When the mills went bankrupt during the Great Depression, St. Mary's was there to help former workers maintain a decent standard of living. Over time, credit unions were able to do the same for countless numbers of people. The thing is, when you are the member of a cooperative organization, other members become your family, and everyone finds ways to take care of everyone else. You are essentially treated like a human being and not as a number (which, as those of us who have worked for bosses before, will know that the latter scenario is all-too-true in hierarchical workplaces). When big banks refused to give out small loans to working people - since the banks couldn't profit off of interest from those loans - credit unions would. Even today, there are several credit unions and mutual banks in NH which help their members get through hard times. I have even read somewhere on the internet (can't remember where exactly) that there are more people in this state who are members of credit unions than there are people who use the "big banks". Perhaps that's a reason why the standard of living in NH is so much higher than elsewhere in the country (aside from the fact that people here take huge advantage of Boston, of course)?

What surprised me the most is how little of this I knew before, but I guess it makes sense as to why. People in the city saw a problem (that being, worker exploitation and poverty caused by the capitalist system) and worked from the bottom-up to solve it. The credit union slogan was (and I believe still is): "Not For Profit; Not For Charity; But For Service". That should sum everything up; the fact that institutions such as this were not about giving the poor charitable handouts but rather building a culture of solidarity and giving the working-class the means to overcome the system which created their hardships. So incredible!

Matt and I talked about this very notion as we took a break from the museum to eat lunch down the street, the fact that there's a huge difference between solutions based on solidarity (such as the credit unions we learned about at the museum, cooperatives, workers' unions, and other participatory institutions) vs. solutions based on giving handouts. In fact, as Matt pointed out, private charity creates hierarchical relations in its own right, since the receiver of the charity is consistently dependent on donator, who in turn has far more power in the relationship. It's the whole "catch a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish" dichotomy playing out. I mean, there are many people here who contend that "voluntary private charity" will be able to clean up all the problems that the hierarchical, capitalist market system they want to implement can't - but why "voluntary private charity"? Why not "voluntary solidarity"?

Matt knew why. He told me how there used to be many mutual aid-based societies in Europe and the US during the time of industrialization until capitalists pressured the state to shut them down. For example, it used to be that unions would provide their members with health care. Part of the reason why the state took health care over was because they (or more likely, the fatcats who control the state) wanted to take away part of the incentive workers would have for joining a union in hopes that unions would be weakened. The same thing happened to many friends' societies as well. What I take from this is, the kind of statist social democratic policies which are celebrated by the mainstream left are much more in the interest and do way more to help the capitalist class than it does to help people who have been oppressed. It functions nearly identical to that "voluntary private charity" as well; a relationship of dependency forms and those receiving the charity, more often than not, remain stuck their situations. I'm not saying we need to start cutting state services and pull the rug out from underneath everyone, I'm just pointing out that handouts from either the state or private companies or churches function as a band-aid. I also get the feeling that this is yet another reason why wealthy capitalists will never allow a stateless society to form on their watch, as they have way too much interest in using the state to keep the lower classes from revolting and establishing their own alternative institutions/economies. After all, without social classes and hierarchical property relations you wouldn't have capitalism!

Matt was able to get a good amount of research done at the museum before it closed for the day. At the end of our visit, we spent time talking with the woman who runs the place. Matt dished out all the topics he wants to write about: ethnic credit unions, rivalries in the credit union movement, and, most interestingly, the campaigns that big banks took to repress credit unions (it turns out that during the Mccarthy era there were letters sent out which accused credit unions of being part of a communist plot to take over banking, no joke). After the two of us left, and as my mother came to pick me up, I thought to myself: geez, we really need to take some of the propertarians in this town on a tour of this museum so they can learn the history of the place they're settling.

You can check out Matt's blog at: http://cuhistory.blogspot.com/

To Our Comrades Who Fought in Lawrence 100 Years Ago On This Date

2012-01-12T19:28:00.009-05:00

Today is the 100th anniversary of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike (aka The Bread and Roses Strike). As someone who grew up in the Merrimack Valley, I was completely unaware of how important this event is to the region's history until very recently. There was a commemoration in Lawrence today, though I wasn't able to make it because of the snow.

I will remember these brave people who wanted nothing but better conditions and more autonomy, who were then put down by the bosses' hired private militias and the state. Never let it leave your mind that the state works for the rich and no one but the rich. As I'm writing this, there are workers who continue the fight for liberty in Nigeria and in China, as both the economy and the state - just like they did 100 years ago in the Merrimack Valley - have decided that their liberty isn't worth enough.

Solidarity.

Voting Sucks

2012-01-11T05:05:00.009-05:00

I slept through most of the voting hours on primary day, so I wasn't able to go to the new Windham high school to vote. I wasn't planning on doing so anyway. My dad and my brother did though (my mother is a Canadian citizen so she isn't able to) despite the fact that they were both undecided up until they went inside the voting booth. As I figured, both of them voted for Ron Paul. My brother seems like he's very much caught up in the internet hype around the guy, and my dad is concerned about all the spending and debt the country is engaging in, so I wasn't surprised at all. Nothing surprised me about the results either: Romney received around 40%, Ron Paul received 22-23%, Huntsman came in third, and the others did so poorly no one gave a shit. Here is a chart with full primary results by town.

We know that things are going to go to hell, but not because of the actions of a few bad apples which one little election can fix. This entire system, culture, etc. that we live in isn't going to be instantly reworked in four or eight years and certainly not from the top-down. Let's forget the ballot box or the sign waves and look to each other for solutions instead.

The best part about today: all the campaigners and campaign ads/signs will be GONE.

Occupy The Primary

2012-01-09T23:43:00.021-05:00

Fucking crazy!

Early, early yesterday morning I met with my friend Matt (from Manchester) and about ten other activists (all of them active in OccupyNH; none of them were "Ron Paul people" at all) in Concord. Matt had secretly invited me to participate in this day of action a few weeks before. The day was the day of the last big presidential debate before the New Hampshire Primary. We couldn't let this day go uninterrupted. Carefully, we planned out everything we were going to do. Our goal was to get backstage during the debate (possible since two of Matt's friends were ushers and could let us through) and "mic check" the politicians in true Occupy fashion. Other occupiers were set to drop a banner overlooking the debate center. The thing is, most of the people who were in our little circle came from other Occupy events. A few were from Occupy Burlington (in Vermont, my brother's college town nonetheless), one was from Asheville, NC, and another was from Denver.

From Bicentennial Sq. we walked to the Capitol Center for the Arts where the debate was taking place. I chose to leave my purse in another occupier's car, hence the reason I have no pictures or videos of our actions, since we were all told that having any sort of ID or electronic device on you would make your time being arrested even worse. Street demonstrations were already in full-force when we arrived at the Center. There were Huntsman and Ron Paul supporters on our side of the street, most of whom were blocking the steps to the Center's front door. On the other side of the street were Gingrich and Romney supporters. On the far side of the street were union members who were rallying against disgusting anti-union legislation which had just been passed in NH. A few of the union members came over to join us. Vermin Supreme, the true "outsider" candidate, also joined in. He gave me a bumper sticker with his campaign slogan.

The mainstream media was also there. As one reporter and cameraperson took footage of the rallies, I shouted, "The election is BS!"

The reporter put her microphone up to me and asked me why I was there. I started rambling on about the occupy movement, and how I was only here for them, and how the capitalist system and the state will never be fixed so our only hope is to build an entirely new system, and how all of that starts right here with Occupy. I don't remember which mainstream media outlet it was exactly, but I get the feeling that if my words were aired they were severely butchered.

It wasn't too long before occupiers dropped our banner. That was awesome.

Things got even more amusing when the "wedding" began. A young woman dressed in a bridal outfit stood besides a guy wearing a "Bank of America" costume. The woman stated, no one was screwing her harder than BoA, and since corporations are people now she thought she might as well marry it. Hilarious. Oh, and Vermin Supreme did the honor.

Matt finally gave us the que to go. We slowly moved away from the street rally to behind the Center. As we gathered on the sidewalk, a middle-aged woman from our group spoke to all of us. "If you're not looking forward to being arrested, then stay here," she said. No one stayed. We all approached the back of the building. Standing in front of each back door was a security guard. We stood there for a few minutes. One of the guards asked what we were doing. Someone in our group said we were there to meet with the candidates, as it's within our rights to do so. The security guard then told us we needed to leave.

The woman spoke, "Excuse me, but this is public property -"

"No it's not," said the guard. "This is a private event on private property. I'm going to ask you all to leave."

"No, this is public property owned by the Town of Concord," the woman replied. She went on about how the debate was supposed to have been made public but all the invitations to the event were handed out to members of special interest groups and 1%ers beforehand to ensure that the general public had no access. Instead of getting in security's faces, we decided to retreat and plan out what we were going to do. We were bummed.

Ridley, who was there covering everything that morning with his video camera, asked me what happened.

"The tyranny of private property," I said.

"Well, how do you know it's private?" Ridley asked.

"The guards said it's private," I answered. "That's why private property owners love the state. It provides them with thugs to kick people off of it."

We were upset. Our first attempted didn't go as we planned. We went over to the side entrance. The woman and Matt both sat down at the little opening, which was being heavily guarded as well. The woman told those security guards the same thing: this is public property which should be open to everyone.

A bit later we attempted to get in the back entrance once again. Matt had told us that his friend was certainly behind the door and she would let us enter. As we approached the doors once again, security watched us like hawks. I don't remember exactly what happened, but the next thing I knew I saw Matt rush in one of the back doors to try and let us in. The security guard instantly grabbed him. About five or six other security personnel rushed over to detain him. All of us were shouting. We stepped back. The cops had Matt handcuffed and walked him over to the cop car. One of the other occupiers, a young man named Eddie, asked the cop where exactly he was taking Matt. The cop responded by saying Matt was going to be held in the Concord court. All of us were stunned but fired up.

We ran back over to the side of the building. Security was watching our every move.

"The real criminals are inside!" shouted Emily, one of the occupiers who came from Burlington, at the security. "Newt Gringrich, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, all of them are millionaires and all of them are criminals! Arrest them, not us!"

All of us occupiers stood there, some of us shouting more and more at the guards. It wasn't long until we were joined by a few Ron Paul supporters. They were young men - probably younger than I - who held huge campaign signs. Of course, they tried to suck up to us occupiers. Emily tried explaining to two of them that she doesn't support Ron Paul at all because she knows full well of the horrible effects capitalism has on people. Both of these paulbots tried to convince her, in true vulgar libertarian fashion, that the capitalism she's talking about is not the "real" capitalism, and Ron Paul supports "real" capitalism which, apparently, is ethical.

I asked both young men, "So, when has capitalism ever been a free market?"

One of them went a little wacky. "See, that's it," he spewed, "true free market capitalism has never existed. But Dr. Paul is going to lead us towards a true free market."

"How so?" I asked skeptically.

"He's going to get us back on sound money."

Now I had to say it, "There's no such thing as 'sound money'. That's an absolute myth. Anything can be money as long as both parties agree that it's money."

"But gold has been proven to work the best!"

Looking for a good debate, I asked him, "So tell me, how did money originate?"

He paused and said, "Um, I'm not really sure."

His friend to my left said, "Well, see all money has to start off as a commodity. Before money people used barter -"

"Nope," I replied. "Anthropologists say economies based on barter never existed."

"Oh, come on."

"There's this book you should read called 'Debt: the First 5,000 Years' by this anthropologist David Graeber. He proves that the original money was debt. That's all money is. All money is is debt. All of it."

"It is now that the Fed -"

"All of it. Even gold. It's an IOU and nothing more."

Both of them didn't get it.

From there, I had to quickly leave. The other people from Occupy were gathering at the front of the building to plan what we were going to do as the debates ended. We ended up splitting into four groups with each group taking an exit. If that exit was where the politicians were pouring out of, a person in that exit's group would text people from the others to have everyone gather there. I joined Emily and the guy doing the livestream coverage. It wasn't long before we were called.

The scene would gradually get bigger within minutes. For the most part, it was Occupy on one side, and a swarm of Ron Paul supporters on the other. I would say that our side outnumbered theirs by quite a lot. Media, both independent journalists like Ridley and a few from the mainstream press, stood in the parking lot.

Ron Paul came out first. His followers went wild. Above their cheers we heckled him and shouted at the top of our lungs:

‎"Mic check -
The system is broken.
This is not a debate.
The people standing behind us are puppets.
We demand democracy!
Tell me what democracy looks like - this is what democracy looks like!"

Vermin Supreme chased Ron Paul to his car. "Ron Paul, Ron Paul, let me have an abortion Ron Paul. Ron Paul, Ron Paul, you chicken?" he said casually with his blowhorn. At the same time, us occupiers let the millionaire politician have it as his chauffeur drove him away.

We did the same when Huntsman came out. Then Santorum, only we were much more intense for him. The LGTBQ activists in our group wanted to rip that guy a new asshole.

As he drove away we all shouted, "Shame, shame, shame!" By that time, all of us were going nuts.

Before everything died down for good, Eddie gave one more mic check, this one aimed at the Ron Paul supporters on the other side of the street. He talked about the horrible things politicians have done: whither away civil liberties, allow for mass inequalities of wealth, and support extremely bigoted policies towards others. He asked the Ron Paul supporters if they will prove that their politician is truly someone who would oppose all of this. None of them spoke up to answer him. Though as we walked away from the Arts Center a handful of them spurted down the street chanting, "End the Fed! End the Fed!".

I seriously wonder if there's going to be riots in Manchester and Keene tomorrow night after Ron Paul loses the primary. So much for the non-aggression principle.

Ισοκρατια

2012-01-06T15:15:00.015-05:00

Yesterday evening I ventured down to Boston. Once again, I met with my friend Nick, along with his girlfriend Lauren (he had been visiting her in nearby Woburn for their anniversary that week). We headed to the Lucy Parsons Center to hear Cindy Milstein give a talk on the Occupy Movement and its relation to anarchism (the talk itself was entitled "Occupy Anarchism").

The infoshop was pretty much packed that evening. Cindy started off her talk about how the Occupy Movement is really part of a much larger history of anti-authoritarian movements. She emphasized the fact that the use of direct democracy in the decision-making process (as opposed to the ill system of representative democracy) was full of quirks and problems, though in the end it only served to re-affirm her belief in direct democracy. She had been at Occupy Wall Street for a few days during its first week (I recall seeing her at Zuccotti Park during the occupation's one-week anniversary) before leaving to participate in Occupy Philly. For the most part, the occupations felt like an anarcho-communist experiment: no leaders, no money, everyone from every background on earth freely giving and associating with one another without any real leaders. She told us of the medics who would go around helping people for free, and Food Not Bombs comrades who prepared most of the meals. No one would force you to pay for anything or turn you away from what you needed, no one would kick you out of your tent if you didn't pay usury to a parasite; everything - literally EVERYTHING - was based on giving to others. Random strangers became your best friends within hours. From everything she was saying, I felt the reaffirming of my belief that a horizontally-organized, anti-authoritarian, mutual aid-based society can and does work in reality. The order is of course spontaneous but that in itself is what carries it so well. If there ever was a challenge to capitalism, ideologically and pragmatically, this would be it.

What Cindy added is how this movement was truly related the fact that the state-capitalist system is finally rearing its ugly head to the majority of Americans who had been deluded for so long. The fantasy of the state as some kind of protector of the weak and poor is fading away in public consciousness. Even the people who Cindy contended were fairly privileged - that being the white men - were feeling the bogus idea of "the American dream" and the ideals of the rugged individualism leading to financial success slowly dissolving for good. She told us of all sorts of people in Occupy who had been completely non-political for most of their lives until they joined in the activities. Now, she said, we have to move on to bigger and better things. One such plan, she stated, was to focus on creating more commons.

Of course, the movement was not without contention (as most usually are). In Occupy Philly, there existed a huge split between the privileged who had no hard feelings for the police and those who knew full well of the polices' oppressive nature (cops in Philadelphia are some of the worst in North America from what I've been told) on what role they wanted the police to play in this occupation. Cindy also began an anecdote about the Ron Paul people who attended.

Someone in sitting in the chairs asked, "Who is Ron Paul?" She wasn't joking.

Cindy answered, "He's a really awful politician who's running for president. He's racist and pro-patriarchy and just an awful human being."

Everyone in the room, including Nick and Lauren, laughed. Lauren whispered to me that she absolutely abhors the Ron Paul worship.

Cindy went on finishing her anecdote about the Ron Paul people at Occupy Philly. She described them as being rather anti-social to the rest of the occupiers. They never left the little tent with signs read things like: "Crony Capitalism Is Not Capitalism" they set up in a distant corner. The "leader" of the Ron Paul crowd stood outside the tent with a big gun on his belt - not exactly the way to make friends, Cindy said. Later on, however, they attempted to do a few direct actions and came to the social anarchists for support. It was pretty amusing.

The whole room was now going to go into discussion. The first person in the audience to speak started by throwing her finger up at Cindy. She ranted, "First of all, before people can be educated in all this philosophy, they need food on the table and a roof over their head. Grub before philosophy." She went on and on for well over five minutes. "And another thing, enough with this 'you know the movement is getting somewhere when the white cis males are getting involved'." She ended with a nasty, "So all white cis-men in this movement need to shut - the - HELL - up."

The room fell on awkward silence. Cindy looked incredibly disturbed. I thought she was going to cry for a second. Lauren whispered to me about how shocked she was. Cindy appeared to have shaken her emotion off very quickly and gave a very non-contentious response. The woman kept interrupting Cindy, but Cindy remained calm and enthusiastic as she was for most of the night. She told of how the movements try to do both: give people what they need (food, a place to stay, a sense of community and belonging) and spread anti-authoritarian philosophy; not through repetitive preaching but through deeds to others. The most successful liberty-driven revolutions, she stated, were the ones which gave everyone everything at once.

Lauren raised her hand to speak right afterwards. She said very calmly that there are plenty of people who society may label as "privileged" who are just trying to get by, and implied that radicals shouldn't shun them just because they don't "rank" as low on the social hierarchy as others. Cindy also responded to her with a string of positive anecdotes. Someone else in the audience made a remark that he thought Cindy's analysis of the current situation in the US was very condescending. He said that it's usually never a good idea to speak to people like, "You're fucked up". (He told us he works with abusive parents and has seen more pain than anyone would wish to see in their lives.)

Nick gave his views to everyone. He told us about a debate he had on Facebook with others about slut-shaming. Someone else in the audience didn't know what it was. He explained, it's when a woman can't freely express her sexuality; if it's a man with many women people in this culture won't see it as negatively than if it's a woman with many men. What he found is, instead of trying to explain what it is, it's much more effective to talk about the people it hurts. If people realize the effects that hierarchical systems and practices have on others, they will be much more motivated to challenge them.

The discussion lasted for a lot longer than planned. Just like the case with the first audience member to speak, most of the discussion revolved around criticism and discontents that people had with their personal experiences. Certain people said they were worried that the Occupy Movement would end up going down the wrong direction, such as selling out, becoming commodified, or isolating oppressed populations even more.

Once again, Nick spoke up to share his views, friendly but bluntly (as he had done during the argument at Milly's Mingle), "When you address white privilege, you don't have to be condescending. It's not supposed to be about making people feel guilty because they're white. It's supposed to be about pointing out the fact that the culture and the system put you in a certain role because of who you are." Cindy agreed.

The talk finally ended once everyone realized they had gone way over time. People gathered around Cindy to talk with her one-on-one. Nick told me as we browsed the books on the infoshop's upstairs, "It was a good talk. I'm in no way an an-com but I liked a lot of what she said. You have to find a common ground. Voltairine knew that." (Of course, he would reference Voltairine de Cleyre, an anarchist writer whom both of us love.)

Right before the three of us left, Lauren and I came up to Cindy to talk. Lauren, who told me she still felt a little uneasy about some of the things said during the discussion, complimented her. I told Cindy it was good to see her again after seeing her in Baltimore a while back, how I was planning on working at Red Emma's once I get back to the city, and how I used to work at LPC back when the shop was in the South End. I went on about my experiences working at the shop, how strangers would tell me how the system fucked them over, and, just like at Occupy, they became very dear to me the same day we met. I also brought up my experiences at Occupy Wall St., like the time I brought my once-completely-non-political friend Drew from school to the events on November 17th. He turned out to be amazed at the whole thing; when his friend was driving us back to McDaniel from the metro he told him how impressed he was with the mic check and how they were able to organize without specific leaders. Right before we said goodbye, Cindy revealed that Occupy Baltimore is planning to take over empty homes in the city on MLK day later this month. How I wish I was back in time to join them!

As we were walking back to the Jackson Sq. T stop Lauren told us what made her feel uncomfortable during the talk. To her, it seemed like it was all about "fuck the white guy" (she herself comes from a working-class background, from everything she told me). I tried to explain, "You know I go to college near Baltimore where racism is extremely blatant. It's much easier to be poor if you're white than it is to be poor when you're black, but does that mean that all the poor whites want to preserve the system which made them poor in the first place?" She saw what I meant.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T15:25:00.000-05:00

Egyptian Anarchists and Revolutionary Socialists under attack

2011-12-31T15:59:00.004-05:00

Copied from: feartosleep, originally posted on Anarchist News

It's about time! For weeks, several internet sites, and facebook pages that belong to the Muslim Brotherhood, either officially or administered by its members, launched an attack against Anarchists and Revolutionary Socialists in Egypt trying to single them out as inciters of violence and propagandists of state demolition. Today, a member of the Brotherhood filed a lawsuit against three socialists, one of them is comrade Yaser Abdel Kawy, a well known anarchist and a member of the Egyptian Libertarian Socialists Movement. The General Attorney forwarded the lawsuit to the State Security GA, an exceptional apparatus of the legal system that works only under a state of emergency.

It sure was expected. While small in numbers, Anarchists in Egypt have been quite prominent amongst the different revolutionary forces taking part in the Jan25 Egyptian revolution. Anarchists are distinguishably vocal on the social media sites, but more importantly they are always in the front lines on the streets whenever revolutionaries take a stand in the face of the brutal crackdown of the state.
[We are a beautiful naive bunch aren't we.]

The uneasy but strong alliance between the Brotherhood and the ruling military junta has been evident since the very beginning. The Brotherhood was the only political force that had one of its members in the legislative committee responsible for preparing the modifications of the 1971 constitution approved by a referendum on March 19th. The brotherhood refused to take part almost in any rally against the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), and in many cases sought to tarnish these rallies and attack those who called for them.

The Brotherhood, had also taken an aggressive stance against laborers in their continuous struggle against the masters backed by the military junta. It has always condemned workers rallies, sit-ins, or occupations, and described the workers fight for their rights as counter-revolutionary and incited by clients of Mubarak's regime.

Poised for a landslide victory in the current parliamentary elections along with the more radical Salafi Islamists, the Brotherhood is keen on getting rid of future opposition, namely socialists. It's easy to know why if one takes a look at the policies that their counterparts in Tunisia have adopted once confident in their new seats in the parliament. It's even clearer when one takes notice of their prominent leaders' (mostly businessmen) statements to the media, especially ones describing the neoliberal financial and economic policies of Mubarak's regime as good and effective, if not coupled with corruption and crony capitalism.

We are sure that these new attacks by the SCAF and its Islamist allies are nothing but an early beginning. A new phase of the Egyptian Revolution is already starting to take shape. This time the true conflict lines will be clear for all after being only clear for some. The Egyptian Revolution will take its true face of a class war of us the proletariat against them, the masters, the military junta, and the conservative fascist Islamists.

I remember one day back in spring 2010, a few weeks before May Day, when I was working at LPC. This man who played in an underground band came in to talk about everything, and the two of us ended up chatting for hours. He brought up the fact that one of his former wives was in Iran working on her dissertation as the 1979 regime change was happening. The surprising thing was, the "revolution" which took place in Iran started off not as an "Islamic revolution" but as a giant uprising against the Shah consisting of marxists, anarchists, western-style intellectuals, and classical liberal types who worked alongside the theocrats to kick the Shah out of power. Then the religious fundamentalists took over and granted all that illegitimate power to themselves. He told me, some of the first people whom these tyrants imprisoned, expelled, or killed were those leftists (anarchists, marxists, etc.) who fought alongside them just months before. As I listened to this man recall what his ex-wife experienced, the first thing I thought of was what happened in Russia after their revolution (as we all know exactly what happened). Old oppression being replaced by a new oppression - it never ends.

In all seriousness though, could anarchist comrades PLEASE stop assuming that authoritarians (be they authoritarian state-socialists, statist reformists, market authoritarians like the "an"-caps you see here in NH, or religious nutjobs) are our allies, especially when every single time we work with them we end up being stabbed in the back? Holding common short-term goals does not equal having common long-term goals. We may fight together against the old tyranny, but as anti-authoritarians we need to fight against the new tyranny as well.

My Christmas

2011-12-28T23:13:00.002-05:00

My Christmas was nothing special this year. My parents and grandfather gave me $300 of free money. They gave my brother and his girlfriend a trip to Foxwoods.

Yesterday I went to Boston to spend most of that Christmas money. The first place I went was the infoshop I used to work at, the Lucy Parsons Center. A few months ago they finally made the move from the South End to Jamaica Plain (near Jackson Sq., still on the orange line). To make things more meaningful, the first person who trained me, Corry, was the one working there that day. I helped her shelve some of the new books they received in the past days. In return, she let me take whatever books I wanted from the 50-cent book box (which was full of marxist-leninist-maoist texts; I'm assuming they had been donated to the shop by the local PSL chapter). I picked out all three volumes of Marx's Capital. I also purchased a few classic gems which I've been meaning to read: Emma Goldman's memoirs and a few others. I had so many books with me that I ended up breaking the little bag I carried them back in. When I got to this little store in Harvard Sq. to buy a new sweater with the remainder of my Christmas money I asked for a big paper bag for the books. It ended up breaking too (on the T no less). It was a very agitating first-world problem.

My birthday is in less than an hour. Yay for me!

Η Αγορά

2011-12-23T23:08:00.005-05:00

The other night I found myself, along with my left-libertarian/agorist friend Nick, spending time at "Milly's Mingle" out in Manchester. I had been invited to the get-together by several free staters online. According to their blog posts and videos, they seemed to portray this evening as one of freely buying and selling goods amongst the eating and drinking. I told Nick we'd be going to a black market, though I'd probably not buy anything since I have no gold or silver to exchange with.

Manchester comes across as a rather cold town (not city). The roads are always grimy and most of the non-brick buildings are painted gloomy grays and mucky blues. People there never seem very friendly, probably because the atmosphere of this place creates a sense of aloofness. It's not much of a place to go, but it's where you do go if you're looking for things to do within the borders of Libertopia. Nick and I spent a bit of time waiting after we arrived at Milly's Tavern. I gave him the book on prison abolition which I picked up at Red Emma's a little while ago. It wasn't too long before Ridley and a few other free staters showed up. Along with Ridley was a free stater named Craig, who moved to NH from the Houston, TX area, a lawyer who told me he was an NH native from Pelham (which borders my hometown of Windham), and another free stater whose name I didn't catch (his accent sounded very similar to a Boston one, so I'm assuming he was from some other New England state, probably Massachusetts; he sat at the end of the table and ordered food).

Ridley asked me how my life was going. I told him everything was going fine, the generic response. I didn't want to get too heavy early on, after all he was the one who suggested I come up here. He asked me what I plan on doing after college. I said I'm thinking about going to grad school for something like comparative literature or anthropology (perhaps I could study the libertarian culture in Manchester, no?), but after that, as I told him, I'll go wherever the wind takes me. I went on by telling of my friends' difficulties in finding jobs. One of my friends has applied to every store with a "HELP WANTED" sign in the Salem area and she still can't find decent work. It's a troubling sign of the times.

The free stater against the wall butted in, "There's no reason why anyone shouldn't have a job. Everyone has a skill other people will pay for. Everyone." He made pounding hand gestures as he spoke.

I said, "But it takes more than just a skill to get a job. People need resources."

The free stater responded by laughing a bit and then said, "See, my thing is, children are taught at a young age to be obedient. They're taught that they don't have the skills to be self-sufficient. The state schools dumb them down and set them up so they're dependent on others. They come out of the education system not knowing what to do except be obedient."

I paused for a moment and then asked him, "You know, I was thinking: I'm a philosophy major in college and a lot of times we imagine different worlds based on different ideas. Like in metaphysics we're always coming up with imaginary worlds. Now, what if we took the next generation of children who are infants right now and brought them up in a society where they weren't taught to be obedient? Like, if no one made them go to school or told them that they had to shut up and take orders from a teacher or anyone? What do you think the system would look like in 18 years when those children become adults? How do you think it would affect the economy?"

He sharply answered with his mouth full of food, "I see it going two ways. On one side you'd have people who are self-employed voluntarily exchanging with each other. On the other side you'd have disaster."

Disaster. It was too obvious what he was trying to get at. The same idea that horizontally-organized democratic workplaces "don't work" because they aren't "efficient", so say the economists, yet with no evidence from reality or history to show why or how. Just the usual a priori reasoning since nothing outside the textbooks proves what you say. For one thing, I can think of many cases in history where autogestion has worked on a large scale (Paris Commune, Free Ukraine, Anarchist Catalonia, the FaSinPat in Argentina, Mondragon, Emilia Romagna, the growing worker cooperative and credit union movement in the US, or just the simple fact that over 800 million people worldwide are members of a coop) where I can find no such example of an economy of hierarchical firms existing without a state.

His assertion begs another question: if the economic system needs a portion of the population to be schooled in obedience, whose children get subjugated and whose children are not? If we accept that capitalism would cease to exist - or just fall apart very quickly - if no one was taught to be subservient, then we'd have to find a way to preserve a hierarchical social order to preserve a hierarchical economic system. It's much easier to think of the economy as a set of voluntary transactions between parties, but when you look at things holistically you start to see how the society in question is far more complex.

"Look," he went on with that same semi-aggressive tone-of-voice, talking to me as if I were a little kid, "it's like this: you have a group of people who are self-employed and they do very well. You have other people who don't have the means to be self-employed but you have people who need others to work for them. Now that boss is offering you work. No one is trying to take anything from you. No one's trying to exploit you. You get what you want, boss gets what he wants. Everything works out. This is all basic economics."

Sure. You get your wage, the boss gets your labor, looks fair on paper. But when you understand what's really going on in this relationship you notice a gross inequality of power. The boss already received the fruits of his labor years ago back when he produced, so now he is entitled to the fruits of the laborer's labor? That doesn't make any sense and comes across as fallacious. You may claim that the theft is not theft because the laborer voluntarily consented, but under what conditions? What's the context? People don't sell their liberty for wages without a reason.

It wasn't long after that Ridley and I went into the other room to do a little interview. Looking back, I should have told him a lot more about my concerns over implementing the kind of system which so many free staters desire to have in New Hampshire (things like the free market acting as karma, or trying to apply a 1770s-style economic model to a 2010s economy, for example) but I thought I did well for the most part. Again, I was trying to hold back on being contentious. This was a friendly conversation without controversy. I spoke about things like using dual-power strategies, building alternative institutions, worker cooperatives, all the activities which us libertarian socialists are doing right now. Cutting social services without providing alternatives, or assuming that "the market" will take care of everything, is a bad idea. I also spoke of all the divides I see within NH's libertarians (which, as I said, were only what I've heard): Rothbardians (libertarian-capitalists) vs. Tuckerites (free market libertarian-socialists) and intellectual types with GMU degrees vs. off-the-grid types. The thing is, in NH (especially among the libertarian crowd, or among everyone during primary time) it's very common to ask people how they define themselves politically. He told me about certain free staters he knows who were elected as state reps and how many of them voted for bills which he considered to be quite anti-libertarian in certain ways. I told him, that's what social anarchists have been saying forever, that it's not the people in power who matter but the institution itself. Overall, I thought my interview was decent. Here is the video:

Afterwards, Nick went off with Ridley to conduct an interview of his own. I sat at the table with Craig and the lawyer. I asked Craig about how it is to live in NH today, seeing as how I rarely hear about the overall living experiences free staters have once they come here. He admitted that financially it's a much harder region to live in: the cost of living in NH is much higher than in Texas, the rent is considerably higher in Manchester than it is in most of Houston, and most of the jobs in NH don't pay enough to the point where many movers have to break with their principles and find an income-taxed job in Massachusetts or Vermont. Even with income tax, a Mass (Boston) or VT salary tends to be higher than a tax-free one from NH, not to mention Boston has many more opportunities for work than Manchester or Nashua.

A lot of these statistics about the quality of life in NH are part of a huge red herring. Most of the people who move to NH from Mass tend to bring their job with them, meaning they still work out-of-state. Unless you're being gentrified out of Mass, chances are you're not going to be moving to NH if you're dirt poor and unemployed in the first place, hence all the data toting NH's (supposed) lack of poverty. (Here is some more evidence for the skeptics who still want to deny NH has any problems.) I would also make the argument that NH's high property taxes act as "poverty repellent" as they help keep housing prices too expensive for most working people. Manchester itself is being carved into a bourgy suburb of Boston with whatever "city" elements it still holds being flattened out. Of course it's not comparable to most other urban areas in the US; it's a town of 110,000 people surrounded by other upper-middle class suburbs and no-man's-lands. Most of these "NH is wonderful because it's not the city I moved from" stories don't really make all that much sense. By all means, it's not an entirely bad place to live; it's just that the statistics and stories championing this area as some kind of Disneyland are misleading or based on half-truths.

I asked both Craig and the lawyer about how the free staters would be able to preserve a libertarian government in NH, especially with all the much more statist Massachusettians moving in. Both of them laughed it off. They explained that all NH's political system needs is a significant minority (to use Nick's words) of libertarians involved in the political system to keep the government from "growing". They assured, it would be very easy to get around a majority opinion if the majority of "shirites" were to turn on the FSP.

I talked to them more about building a new kind of society in NH. Nick told everyone about left-libertarianism and its pillars. The free stater who had been talking to me earlier that night (the one who sat against the wall) was telling us all of his theories regarding human behavior and economics (which, for the most part, were verbatim repeats of the things you can find on mises.org). He went on about the evils of the government on the economy and how regulations fuck everything up. Some of it I agreed with, some of it I didn't. For one thing, it seemed like he (along with the other free staters who were there) were very quick to blame "the government" for everything, as if every problem in society is linked to "the government" in some way, and then the majority of the blame is put on "the government" regardless of the government's actual role in what's going on (it's basically like saying, "If I trip on a banana peel, it's the government's fault for subsidizing the fruit industry; if I have a bad hair day it's the government's fault for regulating organic shampoo companies and forcing me to buy crappy shampoo full of sulfates...," that kind of thing). A lot of problems in society are a lot more dimensional than that.

I looked him in the eye and told him, "Okay, I understand a lot of what you're saying. The power the state has is extremely evil. We need to do what we can to create a totally new society. But I mean too, there's way more forms of oppression in society than just barriers to entry in the market. I mean, you see white privilege, patriarchy, homophobia -"

"Wait just a second," he cut me off. "White privilege? I'm white and I'm not privileged. Are you trying to make me feel guilty?"

"No, I'm just pointing this fact out. You still see a lot of racism -"

"Yes, and where do these people learn racism?"

I tried to explain, "From a lot of -"

"The government," he fired. "It's the government which makes people racist."

"It's not just the government which teaches racism. It's also the media -"

"Oh, but the government owns the media. They own the education system. They own everything." He kept shooting his finger towards me as his voice got more intense.

"But it's also the culture," I tried to explain again. "If you grew up in a society where racism was the norm then you're not going to know anything else. If I'm white I have a much easier time being hired for a job than if I were black or hispanic -"

"No, like I told you everyone has a skill people want to pay for," he said. "In a free market the only thing your boss will care about is your skills. Now, do you agree that oppression is just a state-of-mind?"

"What?"

"Oppression is a state-of-mind. You're oppressed because you think of yourself as oppressed. And a lot of that is the fault of the government."

He was completely missing the point. Even if the state were to disappear tomorrow, the social conditioning it has (most likely) created will remain. Saying that ending the government will end racism is like saying that a forest fire can be put out simply by putting out the match which started it.

"Listen," he continued, "people always want power over others. There's always going to be people with more power than others. People are naturally controlling. Racism will never go away. Now what you're saying should happen is that people should be forced to integrate -"

"I'm not saying that at all -"

"Yes you are. No one has the right to force other people to integrate with people they don't want to integrate with." He was now becoming extremely intense. He talked to me as if he were my parent trying to scold me. I said I feel that his assumption that all voluntary actions have a positive outcome is extremely dogmatic. He accused me of making an argument for statism. On the contrary, I told him, I was making an argument for personal responsibility. There's way more forms of social injustice in the world than the state taxing and regulating you which I feel we can't ignore, and assuming that an unhampered free market will eventually solve everything by itself has nothing in reality to back it up. Markets are akin to karma where you get whatever you put in, not a personal god which grants you goods just for praying.

"Okay, listen," I finally said after a long amount of argumentation, quite loudly, "Listen. When you talk about coming here to New Hampshire to create a new system, it's not just enough to make your system 'free' and 'voluntary' and whatever. You also have to make your system desirable. No one is going to want to fight for your system -"

"My system? How do you know what my system is? -"

"Let me finish. No one is going to fight for your system -"

"But you don't know what my system is. How can you say? -"

I was infuriated. "Let me finish," I shot at him. "Okay, no one is going to fight for your system if it means being worse off than they were under statism. Now I could be wrong. I don't know. But no one is going to want to fight for your system if it means gross inequalities of power and the same oppression. I know, personally, that I will never be free if others are not free."

"Look," he said, now extremely agitated, trying to drill every word of his into me, "there's always going to be inequalities of power. Let me tell you something about psychology. People want to have power over others. It's in our nature. You're always going to see oppression. People are always going to be oppressing everyone else. But what you have to do is remove the state. See, war is very expensive and people only wage it because there's a monopoly on violence. If you made the stakes higher then you'd see oppression go down. Let people move in with their own people -"

Before this guy could go on much longer, Nick jumped in. "Okay," he said, "yes, there's always going to be some forms of oppression. But what Julia is saying is, the state is not the only cause of racism. Yes, the state facilitates a lot of it, but it's also culture. White privilege exists. And it's not about making white males feel guilty. I know that when I walk down the street a police officer isn't going to be staring at me in the same way if I were black. You can't just blame the state. You can't ignore the culture."

I sighed in relief. Nick had put that guy in his place. Ridley taped the end of our argument and with that agreed to take me and Nick back to our homes.

All during the drive back I thought about the things that guy was saying, and how alarming it is that anyone would think such things or want to base a new social system around them. The consensus among the propertarian crowd: the government is the source of every problem known to humankind, the free market and voluntary interaction (as they define it) can fix any of these problems, and the problems they can't fix can never ever be fixed in the first place, so why even try? Though, supposing that we may never have a society completely free of oppression and social hierarchy, is that a reason to not even bother fighting against it and doing what you can to ensure that you can create more social equality? If racism, patriarchy, homophobia, authoritarian family structures, religious discrimination, etc. continue to exist after the state is abolished, then I will continue to fight them. In fact, I'm almost 100% certain that most anarchists would continue to fight these unjust power structures if such things remained in a stateless society as many of them do right now. If the whole mantra of the FSP really is "end aggression", then why do they not see anything beyond the ill actions of the government as forms of aggression that should be ended?

On a side note, since I've been back home I've found myself listening to quite a few lectures by Derrick Jensen. Now, I don't agree with everything he says, most certainly not (for one thing, I don't see civilization as being inherently evil) but I do think he makes some extremely good points which we should all take into consideration. For example, he talks a lot about how capitalism, the state, and (to him anyway) civilization foster a culture of violence where people commit endless aggressive acts against each other and the earth. It goes way beyond politics and economics. I have to agree with that, though I'll say we don't just live in a culture of violence but also in a culture of exploitation, a culture of greed, a culture of dominance over each other. Even "anti-statists" who are so quick to denounce the evils of government (taxation, regulation, monopolies, social control) will then champion a controlling and dominating economic system, or very controlling and dominating social structures, and then try to justify the need for it all.

If that's the case, if you decide to ignore all the social injustice which you have the power to fight, or work towards replacing the old tyranny with a new, then I am not an ally of your project, because that's not the new society I want to create. But that's why you chose to live here NH, a low poverty state with plenty of bubbles and relatively few people of weak populations, so you won't have to see their faces or hear them begging.

People Need A "Why?"

2011-12-19T13:33:00.009-05:00

I'm in love with this video:

Watching his other videos, it's obvious that he's critical of civilization a la John Zerzan and a bit obsessed with Daniel Quinn, though in this video he brings up a discussion-worthy philosophical issue. In real life, we're always asking "what do I do?" or "how do I do it?" but we rarely seem to ask "why do I do it?". Such a way of thinking gives a new perspective. And remember this rant from a few months ago? I'd argue that an emphasis on the "why?" in life may be a nice little antidote to social conditioning.

Out of curiosity - and since I'm interested in anthropology - I'd like to see if there's any cultures which seriously emphasize the "why?" in their philosophy/religion. In philosophy we ask things like, "what exists?" or "what is knowledge?" but rarely "why does this exist?" or "why knowledge?".

Next time you're pondering the meaning of life, or the perfect society, or what you want to be doing 20 years down the road, or when someone tries to convince you to get behind something or do something, ask "why?". See what happens.

A Warmer Early Winter

2011-12-12T19:37:00.004-05:00

Yesterday afternoon I was able to go back to Baltimore City. I had to be at Red Emma's later that night for a meeting, since I'm trying to volunteer there. Downtown Baltimore was like it always is late on a Sunday: inactive, very few cars on the road, very few people mingling on the sidewalks. The city seems to feel a lot smaller than it actually is.

I picked out two books while at Red Emma's: one on prison abolition (for my ethics paper which is due in three days) and Graeber's Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value (for the 40 page thesis I have to write next semester). About an hour after the store closed for the day about ten of the worker-owners came in to start the meeting. Everyone was very welcoming towards myself and Melissa (the other "new edition" who told me she's a women studies PhD at College Park); no one was pretentious or condescending at all. Just that sense of togetherness which I haven't felt in a long time, not even at Occupy Wall St. Their meeting was also very organized, must be proof of spontaneous order. The mediator (whose name I forget) passed around some of the new books the store just received. One, which I was told had just been released that week, was on the Occupy Movement. The other was a revised edition of a book entitled America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz which goes into great length about a new form of economic organization emerging in the US. It turns out the mediator also works for the author as his "day job" down near DC (he told us Alperovitz self-published his book in the area). From what he described, the image of this "new American economy" that Alperovitz gives sounds very similar to Proudhon's mutualism (minus all the anti-statism of course) with more working people who find themselves disenfranchised by the capitalist system moving to worker cooperatives and dissing their usury-banks for credit unions. It would be quite amusing if mutualism does end up being the system that replaces capitalism; perhaps the state-socialists should take notice and give up on vanguardism to get with the times. Though nothing was officially scheduled, I'm going to start training once I come back to Baltimore after winter break. It's going to be fun getting reacquainted with infoshopkeeper and book-shelving.

When I came back to my dorm I Emailed the C4SS group about Alperovitz's book, saying that I intend on reading it and writing a review. I was told that I should try and interview him about the concepts he talks about. If that does happen, I said, it won't be for a while. I'm set to leave the Mid-Atlantic this Saturday.

Elections and Opiates

2011-12-10T18:21:00.024-05:00

Yesterday, while I was attending a Hanukkah party at Gardens, someone brought up the 2012 election. I mentioned how many people are trying to convince me to vote, just because I'd be voting in the NH primary. My friend, who was sitting next to me, told me that she wishes she could vote so the lesser evil of all the Republican candidates would have a better chance at winning. Despite the fact that her views are very much to the left on the political spectrum, and she sympathizes very much with anarchism, she came out in support of Ron Paul, namely because of his (supposed) lesser evil status. She admitted that she knows I don't like the guy at all, since I don't even want a state to exist in the first place, but she feels compelled in her own right to get behind him out of fear that a much bigger asshole will end up taking power. I told her, I would never stop others from voting if they really felt it would do more good than harm, but I highly doubt Ron Paul would do anything he promises to do if he ended up taking power, because he'd be working in the same institutions as Obama and Bush.

Voting appears to be the easy way out for a lot of people. When they have no idea what they can do to fix all the shitty things in our world they resort to getting behind politicians and try to put them on top of the power structure in hopes that they'll do something, even after history shows they rarely ever do. I know a lot of libertarians (both left-libertarians and propertarians) who work on the Ron Paul campaign just because they think they can use the fad to "spread the message of liberty". I don't really see how Ron Paul is converting statists to anti-statists and having them reject statist politics; on the contrary, I see this campaign causing anti-statists to reject anti-state strategies for statist politics. I saw this a lot when I was home in NH for October and November breaks; you'd see people on the side of the street in Manchester holding both the "anarcho"-capitalist flag and a "Ron Paul 2012" campaign sign. So, on one hand (literally) you're telling me that you view the state as illegitimate (which, in all fairness, it is) but on the other you're telling me to vote for someone to take control of this illegitimate state - what? If there's any anti-statist message in that, it's being lost in the perceived legitimization of the electoral process. But above all, do you really think people who have been so conditioned to accept the current system are just going to take up full-blown libertarian ideals after listening to a few Ron Paul speeches? I'd argue that they'd need to see a reason as to why those ideas would work in practice, and that means all of those who desire such a new system would have to do something other than stand on the side of the road with a Ron Paul sign (as in - I don't know - taking up some kind of dual power strategies?). Once again, it all comes back to the idea that working with the current political framework is much easier. Thinking Ron Paul has a magic wand helps you sleep better at night than realizing how fucked up things really are.

It's the same problem that I have with Chomsky: he initially makes you feel good about sitting on your ass. Don't get me wrong, I still hold a high respect for most of what he's said and done, but if you ask him about solutions to the problems he'll keep telling you (or will at least imply) that we have to wait for the right conditions before we can carry out any radical action (apparently, this includes even mutualist strategies like building alternative institutions and such) and in the meantime all we need to be doing is voting for the lesser evil in every election and campaigning for nationalized health care and a higher minimum wage and whatnot. In a way, he's exactly like the marxist intellectuals who contend that people should just sit back, relax, and watch capitalism collapse on its own. Now, I agree that capitalism is in no way sustainable and will inevitably collapse, but the idea that we shouldn't be doing anything just doesn't hold weight. We have no idea what could come after the system we have now; for all we know capitalism could be replaced by neo-feudalism. It's not going to be worth it to do nothing but spread radical rhetoric about how much the current social order sucks all while playing into it through voting and statist reformism. Though I will say that's very much what you would expect a privileged, college-educated American to do. And honestly, Chomsky's words wouldn't bother me so much if he didn't have followers who hang on his every word, who think being a "good anarchist" means being taking up whatever position he takes regardless. Maybe that's why there's so much mental masturbation and not enough action from comrades here in the US, more of a reason why I'm thinking about leaving for Europe or South America once I'm finished school.

Anyway, I go back home in exactly one week and can't imagine how much election bullshit will be present between then and the primary. I'm thinking about wearing a sign reading, "I'M A SOCIAL ANARCHIST; I DON'T VOTE FOR POLITICIANS; NO THANKS" whenever my friends and I go into Manchester.

Blood Gold

2011-12-06T18:57:00.005-05:00

A friend of mine posted this on facebook, and I felt a strong need to repost. From: Raw Story

Up to 40,000 children mine gold in Mali: rights group

BAMAKO — Between 20,000 and 40,000 children work in artisanal gold mines in Mali, Africa’s third-largest producer of the precious metal, Human Rights Watch said in a report Tuesday.

In a statement, HRW said that “children as young as six dig mining shafts, work underground, pull up heavy weights of ore, and carry, crush, and pan ore.”

It also said that many children “work with mercury, a toxic substance, to separate the gold from the ore. Mercury attacks the central nervous system and is particularly harmful to children.”

HRW children’s rights researcher Juliane Kippenberg said children carried loads heavier than their own weight, climbed into unstable shafts, and touched and inhaled mercury, one of the most toxic substances on earth.

Children interviewed complained of regular pain in the back, head, neck, arms or joints, as well as coughing and respiratory diseases.

“One boy about six years old described the pain he felt when digging shafts with a pickaxe for hours on end. Another boy said that ‘everything hurts’ when he comes home after a day?s work underground.”

Many children worked alongside their parents to supplement meagre incomes, while others migrated to the mines by themselves and ended up exploited and abused by relatives or strangers who take their pay.

Some girls are sexually abused.

Children come to the mines from other parts of Mali, as well as Guinea, Burkina Faso and other neighbouring countries, HRW said.

Citing figures from Mali’s ministry of mines, it said the country exported about four metric tonnes of gold every year, worth about $218 million (more than 162 million euros) at November 2011 prices.

Most is exported to Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

The rights group urged the government to implement existing strict laws on child labour and compulsory education, but added that “local officials often benefit from artisanal gold mining and have little interest in addressing child labour.”

It also urged businesses that have not yet done so, “to put in place procedures to ensure their gold has not been mined by children.”

So, can advocates of the gold standard please tell me how going back to gold as a monopoly currency would end imperialism? As it is, there is a huge incentive for companies to do whatever it takes to mine more gold out of our earth (not only to sell it, but just to control it), regardless as to how many human beings they exploit or environments they destroy. If you can't make the connection between the incentive to control resources and the atrocities committed to grab hold of these resources, you have some serious waking up to do.

Edit: if you want to read another reason gold sucks, check out Against Gold as Ideology from the P2P blog.

This Post Ought To Be A Comment On Maynes' Blog

2011-12-02T02:13:00.001-05:00

Once again, the internet has distracted me greatly. I still haven't finished my overdue paper (which was due last week but whatever; I find the instructors here are pretty lenient) nor have I really started my two 10-pagers. Oh well. I'd rather be writing philosophy-related posts on Blogger anyway.

In experimental ethics we finished up discussing The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce. It's a truly great book which I'd recommend to anyone. For one thing, it debunks the notion that human beings are "naturally evil" by explaining how our morality enabled us as a species to survive, and how our intensions are inherently moral ones. I knew most of that stuff already (thanks Kropotkin! - as you would figure) but it was quite fun to hear it being reinforced by a contemporary author. What Joyce concludes though is that, because human beings already have a sense of morality inside them, what we call "moral facts" are no longer necessary. In other words, debating standards of ethics is pretty useless. What a change from these fundie Christians, fundie Muslims, and fundie statists who all insist we need a stick over our heads (be it God or the state) to stop us from killing each other! We spent the last half hour of class debating this very notion: is ethics ultimately obsolete? A friend of mine, who happens to hold similar political views to myself, argued the opposite, that human beings do need to come up with moral outlines and standards of right and wrong since human beings have done pretty shitty things to each other in the past. And he is right about that. In a sense, I don't think that the answer to this lies with looking towards certain ideologies or laws, but rather institutions. Yes, I know I sound like Chomsky, but it makes perfect sense. What I think back to is Zimbardo's prison experiment, which we talked about earlier in the course: good kids did horrible things when they were given a certain role. The same is true of our society; our morality is still there, but as soon as we're placed in a role which gives us dominance over others, say, our moral judgement will be fucked up beyond belief. Put people in a system where greed is the bottom line, or power is the bottom line, and they will do extremely harmful things to others which they wouldn't have done if they were living in an environment based on mutuality and reciprocity. Building new institutions appears to be a much better idea than trying to shove your philosophy down others' throats for one thing. Although within this I will admit that I do hold my own personal beliefs on ethics: instead of always striving to do the "right" thing, we should be focused on shaping our relationships with others around us and what our behaviors and decisions mean within that context (at least in my view anyway). Maybe that's another reason why our society has been going down the toilet for centuries: we're always trying to appease that "stick" instead of looking at each other.

But the fundamental question which we were nearly getting at is much greater. It's actually a question we talk about all the time: will science - natural or social - eventually replace philosophy (or religion)? Does evolutionary psychology or anthropology show us that we don't really need to be going over ethics since we already know what we ought or ought not to do (for example)? Or do the natural sciences really explain the world so well that we no longer need to talk metaphysics and ask why things exist or exist in the manner they do? I tend to think of it like this: what makes philosophers different from anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, economists, mathematicians, and those who study the natural sciences like biologists and physicists? I'd say it's the simple fact that philosophers go beyond and try to see the deeper meaning in everything. It's one thing to study nature and human society; it's another to take a look at nature and human society and ask what the deeper implications of our societal makeup and behaviors are (which is the main reason I'd highly suggest that everyone in higher education - especially those studying the social sciences - study philosophy as well; you will start seeing the world through a much different lens). The natural and social sciences may tell us how certain things happen, but they may not tell us why; that age-old question about the "meaning of life" can never be fully answered. And let's face it: as we continue to study the social and natural sciences we are always finding ourselves with way more questions than answers. All the time we encounter phenomena we can't explain using traditional scientific methods. It's crazy!

Drowning (Either in Thoughts or Schoolwork)

2011-11-30T23:50:00.001-05:00

IIt's crunchtime once again. I feel like my schoolwork is slipping through my fingers. For one thing, I still need to pass in an overdue paper for one class, then I have to write two ten-page papers for two other classes. Gah. Though for the ten-pagers I have some good topics going (one is on the religious aspects of psychedelic drug use and the other is an expansion on my past paper about guilt vs. shame cultures with all sorts of shit about punishing criminals and prison abolition added in). On top of it, I still need to study my ass off for logic and really, really brush up on Greek. After all, I need to be nearly-fluent (or at least as "fluent" as one may be with a dead tongue) in the language by the time I graduate next fall.

I was talking to Dr. Leahy today about next semester and all the things we plan on doing. Basically, she wants me to be researching anarchism and its movements for the whole semester, most likely with a large paper thrown in the mix during the end. In our conversation we were going on and off about how little radical political thought (not just anarchism but also marxist movements and the like) are barely touched upon in academia, not just because their "philosophies from below" but also because they challenge the current status quo (the state-captialist system and all that grows from it). Anyone who has ever taken or taught a courses in political science will know how much the field is pumped full of bullshit. All those questions we should be asking - What is the state? Why does it exist? How did it come into existence? Why did it come into existence? - are never brought up, and the legitimacy of hierarchical political institutions is just "assumed" as if it's some universal truth that has always and will always be unchanged from the beginning to the end of history.

Dr. Leahy often tells me about her time as a college student, when she was once that young radical who read Adbusters while attending punk rock shows in the DC underground. Based on everything she says, it's obvious to me that she misses those days. What a contrast from the world of academia which demands conformity.

This idea hits me every now and then, especially when I think about my own future and what I want to pursue for the rest of my life. I'm looking into graduate schools for comparative literature or anthropology and in the short-term I have a goal, but then everything ends. Right there. So, assuming I play my cards right, I graduate and then what? But that's not the point I'm trying to get to. I know a few comrades who are in graduate school doing PhD work right now. They've decided that their radical worldviews would be best educating college students. I'm not against this obviously, but it raises the question as to whether or not one would be able to go into such a field where deviance from mainstream thought is almost always unacceptable and keep their values. I mean, if you're lucky enough to get a job as a college professor (which is an extremely hard job to get in the first place) you can't exactly teach whatever you want. You usually have to abide by certain standards which require you to "tone down" your views. I wonder how often it is that this obligation to de-radicalize your views in academia leads you to de-radicalizing your social/political/philosophical views all together. How many college professors do you know who started off as anarchists or marxists or other radicals ended up becoming mainstream liberals soon after they got a tenure-track position? That's why I worry (for lack of a better term) about comrades who are desiring to get their PhDs and go into academic fields. I mean yeah, you have the Chomskys, Zinns, Graebers, and Leahys so it's obviously not impossible to keep your values, but there's always that underlying fear that being exposed to such pressure and on top of it being exposed to tons and tons of elite propaganda could cause you to gradually backslide and do away with everything you once valued. That's the reason why I don't think I could ever do what those comrades I know are doing and see if I could put up with the pressure.

But thinking about this shit always leads into a deeper question that I've wondered about. It's not political at all, just something I've been questioning: as our consciousnesses and values seem to progress as we get older and learn and experience more, is there ever the possibility that we can go back? Once we're at the "religious" stage of our existence is it possible that we could flip back to the "aesthetic" stage? What about our moral development - could it also break down? And if it were possible (and I'm sure it could very well be) what would it take for that to happen? Fuck, I'm asking all sorts of complex questions right now to avoid doing my schoolwork and it's digging me into a messy hole. This will have to wait until later. See you.

Portland, OR: Police raid several anarchist squatted spaces

2011-11-28T20:16:00.003-05:00

Copied from: War on Society

Police have raided several Northeast Portland homes taken over by anarchists who claimed they were part of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Police were tipped off about the situation Sunday. Responding officers found that the squatters had changed the locks on the homes.

Inside they found anarchist literature, drugs and weapons, including machetes.

.......

“There’s the body armor in there, the bucket of projectiles: broken up concrete, rocks,” Portland Police Sgt. Jeff McDaniel told KGW. “There was some body-armor-type stuff for someone who might want to fight the police for one of the protests.”

But he explained that most of the protesters were non-violent.

“The sad thing is they’re trying to associate themselves with the Occupy movement, which has basically been peaceful,” he said. “But this clearly shows that [the anarchists] truly want to come down there and cause problems.”

The owners of the homes asked that the addresses not be released.

Police detained one man found inside a home. He said he had lived there for a week. He was given a warning for trespassing.

How the hell is squatting even illegal? Oh, that's right: we have this thing called "private property rights" which enables absentee landlordism. Fuck.

Open Areas, Crooked Canals

2011-11-28T00:03:00.002-05:00

It was a drizzly night that I was ready to return home to New Hampshire for the Thanksgiving break. I spent the entire evening in Baltimore before I caught the bus back. My friend Ross was there. He had been in DC attending a talk by the Institute for Humane Studies (if you know what that organization is), and I had convinced him to travel up to Baltimore for the afternoon to hang out. Before, he was in Auburn, Alabama studying Greek philosophy with Roderick Long. We talked about philosophy, market anarchism, all of those things over Greek pizza. He asked me if I planned to go to Porcfest this year. I responded by saying I wasn't. When he asked me why, I told him I know how out-of-place I know I'd feel if I did go. He encouraged me to be more open and give these new people and their ideas a try. I told him I'd think about it.

I arrived back in "The Shire" the next morning after two three-hour long bus rides and a two hour stop in New York. Aside from the recent call-out of Obama at Manchester Central, nothing much happened in NH between now and the last time I was home. There really isn't much here at all.

Yesterday I went to Nashua with Nick and his friend Jack. Both of them are left-libertarians and agorists (Jack told us how he used to pal around with SEK3 back in the 70's) though Nick's views seem to be far more to the left and far more anti-capitalist. Downtown Nashua is no longer safe to walk around in at night, since it is a mini-police state, but we went down there that evening as it was the site of the Holiday Stroll. One thing which stood out for me was the number of political campaigners. The NH primary is a little over a month away, so it makes sense to see such people flooding the streets. Most noticeable was the group of Ron Paul campaigners with their little signs and balloons. As we walked past them, one of the campaigners reached out to me and asked me if I wanted more freedom, and if so would I vote for Ron Paul. I told him straight-up that I don't want anyone having power over me. As we hurried on by I could hear the kid still shouting all the little slogans at me. I don't feel I need to kiss the ass of a certain politician in order to prove that I love liberty and hate the state's wars, and I don't see why anyone else should have to either. Nick smiled, assuring me that I handled it the right way. He doesn't understand why so-called "anti-statists" resort to voting either. Needless to say, as we kept walking down Main St. we found a plethora of election 2012 pamphlets littered all over the road, mostly for Ron Paul but also some for Perry and Gingrich.

We ended up leaving the stroll and driving Nick down to one of Nashua's many shopping plazas for work. He told us he understands what shit the wage system is now that he's been working in it. Thankfully, the workplace bureaucracy in his workplace isn't nearly as harsh as it is elsewhere. He and Jack talked about the numerous left-libertarian projects they have in mind for later on. For one thing, Nick and his girlfriend are thinking about starting up some kind of cooperative in downtown Nashua as soon as they move to the city permanently and obtain the resources to do so.

After Nick left for work, Jack agreed to drive me back to my parents' place. All along the way I asked him about things we could be doing now to change the system and solve the social problems we see today, especially if our principle is to never use the state. He didn't really seem to know that much. He explained to me that the class system was completely justified, since there will always be a division of labor (meaning, the talented businesspeople will always have more wealth than the untalented people who scrub toilets and sweep the sidewalks) and as such there's no use in trying to "solve" the problem. Instead, he advocated things like the "Basket Brigades" in Manchester-Concord. Though I told him, it's all a band-aid. He didn't seem that receptive, "Things will always be that way." But in this I have to ask, what happens in this society when the toilet scrubbers decide they are sick of the class hierarchy and decide to rebel? Then what will the talented rich do? They'd have to bring the state back in some form to keep the lower classes in control, regardless. I mean, they would have the power to do so, and an incentive. It's a dead-end. Every time you have any kind of social class you will have statism. There's also the fact that if the market acts as a form of direct democracy where people "vote" with their dollars/gold/seashells/whatever then wouldn't you end up seeing the exact same phenomenon of the rich being able to dictate policy? We know that money exists now, class exists now. But that doesn't entail that it will always be that way. We can build a completely new system. If we accept the fact that human society has changed drastically in the past 5000 years, why do we not have an understanding that it can continue to change and evolve into something completely different in the years to come? It seems to me that the whole connotation behind the "there will always be rich and poor people" is one of reluctance to solve or even address the issue. And when it is addressed it's always done through a very oversimplified statement - "the state makes people poor" or "that's just how it will always be". But how can we achieve a stateless society if the class division exists, and thus the rich have the incentive to keep the violent monopoly? Again, it doesn't make any sense.

Maybe I should attend Porcfest this year and ask them these questions?

Occupy Wall Street: Day of Action

2011-11-19T23:51:00.002-05:00

A day of mass protests was scheduled to take place in Lower Manhattan on the 17th with the intent of shutting the city down. The day before, I took Drew, my friend from school, up to New York to participate. We had been planning on bringing a caravan of students from McDaniel to Occupy Wall St. though we weren't able to find anyone else who was willing to come with us.

After staying overnight at Drew's friend's place at Columbia University, we came back to Zuccotti Park in the early morning hours. Already there were thousands of demonstrators gathered across the street. People were prepared for the worst. The events of the past few days were still fresh in everyone's minds. Last week there was a thriving camp full of tents, free food, and a library; now there was nothing left of it but garbage on the sidewalk.

We were all set to shut down Wall St. Our demonstration was going to be split into thirds with each third taking up an intersection to blockade, right as Wall St. employees were coming down there to work.

Drew and I joined the third group of demonstrators. We sat down and waited for things to happen. Already, the police were setting up barricades around us. The street had been shut down and the activists had been herded away from the sidewalks so that Wall Streeters could get to work on time. We didn't care that these people were shouting insults at us, telling us to "get a job", or calling us selfish and "idiotic" for blocking the streets. We were just fed up and wanted to close down everything.

We formed a circle in the middle of our blockade where those who wanted to tell their stories as to why they were here could stand in the center and share. People told us about their massive debts, their foreclosed homes, and the sad state they see our society in. One person, a student activist, told us how she worked in East Africa a little while back and dealt with people suffering from the region's horrid famine. It turns out, she explained, that the entire food crisis was caused by investors who speculated on food prices after the housing bubble. This made the price of staples like wheat and rice rise so high that they were unobtainable for most people who desperately needed it, and thus a famine was created. It's a clear example of how the ultra-wealthy are able to get away with gambling on people's lives, and how these sorts of actions taken by investors on our soil affect millions of people an ocean away. Everything is connected.

Everyone could feel the police presence becoming far more tense by now. This was coupled with the fact that more and more activists began coming into our blockade from the other two. I'm not exactly sure what happened - not even after watching the footage I took - but I just remember the police demanding that we spread out and then stabbing protesters with batons when they didn't. Everyone went wild at that point. The media descended on the NYPD officers the moment it happened.

Not exactly the worst brutality from that day, but it was the first I experienced.

A short time later we all left our blockade and marched down the street once again. Thousands of us stood on the street calling out to others to join us. The cops weren't far behind. They told us we had to get on the sidewalk to unblock traffic, despite the fact that there were too many of us. Suddenly, the police began pushing us and stabbing us to herd us away from the street. Once again, everyone got out their cameras and began recording.

I was caught up in the crowd, as you can probably tell from the video. My purse got caught on someone's bicycle, leaving me stuck as I was pushed around by others who were being pushed by the police. Thankfully, both Drew and I were able to make it to the sidewalk relatively unharmed.

Once that struggle was over the demonstration picked up once again. We turned the corner only to see more demonstrators facing off with the police. Activists were huddled together on the sidewalks while the police patrolled the roads. A paddy wagon stood right in the middle of it all; inside were a handful of demonstrators who had just been arrested.

We chanted all throughout this ordeal. "Shame shame!" "This is what a police state looks like!" "Loosen up!" "Let them go!" As soon as the paddy wagon drove away with the pigs not far behind, we all cheered in relief.

Finally, we arrived back at Zuccotti. Everyone started pouring into the park as the rain began coming down. No one paid any attention to the cops, who were now swarming around us once again. Everyone was thrilled to have recaptured their park after the raid from Monday night. Out of sheer ecstasy, activists started pushing away the police barricades on the park's periphery. It was beautiful.

The barricades were piled on top of each other and made into a trampoline for anyone who wanted to join in. People gathered around to dance and sing. I haven't seen such rejoicing in my entire life.

It wasn't long before I was approached by my Facebook friend Cory (whom you may know as "Anarcho Jesse" from when he was part of the Free State Project and living in Keene; these days he wears a maoist cap with a red star painted black). He told me of the police brutality he witnessed that day and the human chain which people in his contingent formed as a way to counter it. Our conversation had to be put off as we gathered around the human microphone to plan out our next action: occupying the Wall St. subway station. I heard the activist speaking, "For those going to the 2 train, follow that flag." It took me a minute to realize that the flag he was pointing to was my flag and as such I would be the "leader" for the subway occupation. I had no idea where to go until another demonstrator agreed to take my flag and show us the way. When I asked the demonstrator who she was and where she was from she told me her name was Danielle and, like me, was originally from Windham, NH. Very unusual.

We gathered into the subway station and took the first train to the Wall St. station. During the train ride we listened to a demonstrator speak: he comes from a very well-off background while his partner used to work for minimum wage at Border's. When his partner became sick she wasn't able to take time off work to recover, and when she finally became so incredibly ill he had to get money from his father in order to pay for her treatment and take care of her. He asked, what about all the people who don't have his father there to provide a net for them? And what about the fact that Border's went belly-up after years of bad business decisions only to have their highest-level executives ask for millions of dollars in bonuses? It's truly sick.

When we arose from the subway stairs we were met by more NYPD. It turns out we took the wrong stairs out of the station. At the last minute, we decided to march back to Zuccotti. I was told afterwards that the police were roughhousing a few of the demonstrators soon after we left. It was such a fuck up on our part.

While we were walking back to the park I had a chance to talk with the demonstrator from the subway. He held a sign which read "CLASS WAR? YOU BET" on one side and "PRIVATE OWNERSHIP OF INDUSTRY IS THEFT" on the other. He told me he liked my flag and was relieved that there were more anarchists here to keep the protests radical-minded. It turns out he's part of an anarchist theatre collective in New York. When we were almost at Zuccotti we passed the Wikileaks van. It had been pulled over by a cop who was giving a lot of shit to the driver, who looked oblivious to everything that was going on. During this time, I said goodbye to my new-found friend as he insisted on staying with the Wikileaks van to record every move of the cop.

The wind and rain were coming at us much harsher by the time we got to the park. Drew went back to Columbia U. to attend the student demonstration while Danielle offered Cory and I some time at her apartment on Staten Island to warm up before the huge rally in the afternoon. We chose to go along with her.

While at Danielle's place, the three of us watched the footage from earlier that day on the local NYC news. It was apparent that the news media, always possessing their stories pre-report, was very selective of which aspects of the demonstrations they chose to show. It started off with interviews of Wall St. employees who were calling us "selfish" and "mindless" for blockading Wall St. in protest. Then it turned to footage of the lesser incidents of police violence.

I asked Cory once again about his experiences in Keene and why he chose to leave. He gave me an earful about Free Keene and how backwards he views their movement as. He described them as being the "epitome of white privilege" as they only challenge authority as it pertains to them (he pointed out that when libertarian capitalists decide they want to be consistent in their philosophy they make a leap of faith and become libertarian socialists), and choose to do so in a manner which ensures that their privilege isn't lost. Cory told me that he's been ostracized by their movement because of his anarcho-communist and insurrectionist learnings. Many in the Free Keene crowd, he said, are "militant pacifists". They complain about the police in Keene and elsewhere in NH but will not fight it; even more so, they try to silence anyone who suggests that they do fight it. He brought up Peter Gelderloos' book on nonviolence vs. violence to explain why he thinks total pacifism is not only a dead idea but also elitist in practice, where certain slaves serve the purpose of preventing other slaves from revolting. I agreed. It seems evidently clear that if you want a revolution to destroy the old system and replace it with the new, you best be prepared for violence regardless as to whether or not you choose to engage in it. Though I will say, maybe we choose not to fight back because we hold this collective feeling that we don't "need" to, seeing as how much better off we are than so many around the globe. Perhaps we feel that actual sacrifice isn't worth it because we'd much rather be able to come home to a warm bed and a fridge full of food than sit in a cold jail cell for years. (You know that quote, "It's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,"? - well, it's obvious that most people would rather live.) Maybe it's the fact that we assume things really aren't all that bad because we have it so well compared to others, though just because we aren't seeing the majority of violence from the state-capitalist system in front of us every day doesn't mean it's not there. I told Cory, I can't imagine how people in other countries must view the lack of struggle by Americans to create a new system and destroy the old, exploitative one, especially comrades in Latin America, Europe, and elsewhere who take up arms against the state. When injustice happens in this country - or originates in this country - how do we respond? Through boycotts and marches, nothing else, no other forms of resistance. I would argue that these feelings of "we don't need to do anything so let's not" need to go. Appeasing our oppressors with the least radical tactics isn't going to solve the problem at all, and will just end up prolonging it. We might end up getting more taxes on the rich and some kind of guaranteed national income after the Occupy movement is over, but how is that going to anything to change the overall system? What will they get if the same system remains in place here and the rich are still holding on to their power? Just like the Keeniacs, we don't want to give up our privilege. I let Cory know that I admire his desire to take shit to the next level.

The other thing Cory told me about was the attitudes towards others held by the vulgar libertarian crowd he knew in NH. He told me how he and a few others in the Free State Project were insulted and put down by other free staters simply for complaining about their economic situations. Cory said, "They would be like, 'Oh, you aren't paying your rent. Are you a socialist?', like they really care more about you living up to your contract than your living situation." "Socialist" is apparently the biggest profound slur. Before, Cory had told me about his "Don't Tread On Me" flag which had been designed with the libertarian socialist colors and how it was torn down after he hung it outside his place in Keene. I found that quite ironic considering how I know of many free staters who openly identify as libertarian socialists. The only thing is, just like how Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews in zionist Israel find themselves marginalized by the European/Ashkenazi dominated zionist political system, left-libertarians and mutualists in NH find their interests, goals, and strategies to be increasingly obscured within the pro-capitalist controlled free state movement (as I've been told by quite a few free market anti-capitalists who live in NH). He also brought up his experience dealing with free staters who held extremely racist and misogynistic views. For example, he told me of one man who openly complained about how the Arabs and Hispanics moving to NH from Massachusetts were causing NH to become more statist, and then went on to advocate forming "national anarchist" white-only communities. This guy disgusted Cory so much that he refused to let him into his apartment. I responded by telling him I wasn't surprised at any of this.

As we were riding the ferry back to Manhattan we learned that our demonstrations had succeeded in shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for 15 minutes in the morning. Nothing too drastic, but a nice little victory for the day. We also learned that the Wikileaks van we passed by had been stopped because the headlights were supposedly out, and that a guy serving free pizza to the protesters was arrested because he didn't have a license. The police state will find any reason, any reason at all.

When we arrived at Manhattan Danielle split with us to go straight to Foley Sq. while Cory and I went back to Zuccotti to retrieve our friend Darian (in case you don't know, Darian Worden from ThinkingLiberty). I attempted to enter the park, which had lost the vast majority of demonstrators and was being carefully monitored by dozens of cops, but was instantly stopped. The cop told me I wouldn't be able to bring my flag with me, so I had to either give him my flag or wait outside the newly-propped barricades. I chose the latter. Once all three of us were ready, we headed down to Foley to catch the start of the big march. About halfway there we joined the Verizon workers' union.

Arriving at the Foley demonstration felt unreal. There were tens of thousands - I've heard over 35,000 - people in attendance. Unions, students, activists of all sorts, musicians, vanguardist politicians, everyone. Music was blasting, lights were shining all over the place, and the crowd was so tightly packed in you could barely move. Mind you, the cold brought on by the windchill would have been unbearable any other night, but this night was special.

Things were about to explode, I could feel it. The plan was to have all the tens of thousands of people march from Foley across the Brooklyn Bridge. As you would expect, police barricades were set up all along the roads with police making sure everyone was kept in-line. Demonstrators struggled to move out. Cory said to me that was the time for the activists to lift up the barricades and storm through or just push the barricades into the police in the same manner as the police pushed activists off the streets earlier in the day. Such actions would be easily doable. As everyone slowly passed with little police confrontation, Cory told me he was disappointed in their inability to act on the moment. The three of us managed to pile out with the others. We marched past Pace Park where police were also present. We were approaching the Brooklyn Bridge when all of us chose to stop and wait for others to join us. By now, I was so cold and tired that I decided I wanted to find Drew so we could catch the bus and go back to Baltimore. When I called him, he told me he was on the other side of the road. Turns out the cops would not let the demonstrators on the other side cross over. We all waited there chanting at the cops. It took nearly a half hour before the activists on the other side were allowed to go through.

When Drew and I were going back to Upper Manhattan to fetch Drew's belongings, he told me he was very impressed with the way the OWS actions were organized, especially the leaderless aspect and the people's microphone. We weren't able to get back to McDaniel until late Friday afternoon due to a late Bolt Bus and several attempts to find a ride from the metro station in Owings Mills. Nevertheless, he told me that despite all the hassle it was a truly worthwhile experience. I smell an article in the McDaniel Free Press.

OWS Raided

2011-11-15T02:01:00.002-05:00

Liberty Plaza is being raided as we speak. Police are in riot gear and have blocked off the Brooklyn Bridge and most subway stops.

Watch it live: http://www.livestream.com/occupynyc

Stay strong comrades!!! FUCK the police.

***** UPDATE ******

Demonstrators have re-occupied Zuccotti Park.

I will be going back to Wall St. tomorrow evening with people from my college to participate in the day of action on Thursday morning.

Random Ramblings #2

2011-11-14T03:41:00.018-05:00

So, here's something which greatly annoys me: all the time when I criticize identity politics some comrades will get all, "Ew, how can you say that you privileged _______ person?", but then when I check those people's facebook pages and blogs something I see quite a lot of are their posts - surprise, surprise - criticizing identity politics (usually along the lines of, "[Anarcho-] Primitivism is nothing but indigenous identity politics ra ra ra..."). Not that I take this shit too personally, but would someone mind explaining who should be "allowed" to criticize identity politics so we don't fuck up and end up going on a bunch of sectarian mud-slinging debates? Thanks. I'm not trying to be an asshole. I'm simply asking a legit question.

........

Here's another thing I'm really sick and tired of: religious people trying to reason for certain economic systems based on their religion. As if internet discourse on political economy isn't fucked up enough as it is. This is annoying as hell and is completely ridiculous by all means. For example, my friend "Nafisa" (not her real name, of course) tried to make the argument that the global economy would recover if we all did economics the "Islamic way" akin to the economic practices of the Ottoman Empire. Here's the problem: the Ottoman Empire (just like 1776 USA or Grafton, NH) was an agrarian society. The vast majority of people worked on family farms (source). Others were self-employed merchants. The reason the Ottomans didn't have the same problems as most of Europe did during the 19th century had nothing to do with religion but rather the fact that the empire was pre-industrial and wasn't able to industrialize until much, much later in its history. So okay Nafisa, maybe your image of people bartering gold dinars for pottery and carrots in accordance to Islamic Law works perfectly in a little Levantine village, but we are dealing with an industrialized global economy. And once again, there's not enough gold left on this planet to ensure that all of the world's 7 billion people have a decent standard of living.

By the way habibti, money is NOT Islamic gold dinars and it's not silver and its not paper either. Money is DEBT, state debt forced on the masses (though if we're going to have markets and money, LETSystems, not outdated pieces of religiously-ordained gold crap, are the way to go).

.......

For my daily rant about shit that's going on back in my home region: I've seen the recent "Shire Choir" videos featuring free staters protesting the drug war by singing Christmas carols in state-run liquor stores in New Hampshire. Now, the effects of the drug war are absolutely horrid and have caused far more pain and suffering, not just here in the US but all over the world (especially in Latin America, as if that part of the world wasn't being beaten by the stick of US imperialism and intervention enough) so I'm glad people are having the balls to say something about it. The only thing I will say though is that their tactics in this case did hardly anything to change people's minds or draw attention to the real issues at hand and only resulted in them being kicked out of the store with one more incident added to their movement's already stained image. There's also a few factors in this situation which I'm surprised that they, as anti-statists, wouldn't take into consideration. For example, if NH legalizes weed, I would be 99.999% certain that the state would just do what it does with liquor and get a monopoly on selling it, and then use all the money they make from weed sales to ensuring that the state remains funded. If their main goal is "smaller government" then wouldn't bringing a substance on the black market to the white regulated market be detrimental?

Which brings me to a related point: does it ever cross your mind that selling homebrewed liquor on the black market in Manchester or elsewhere in NH would be the one case where agorism would actually work? You can find all sorts of guides online for homebrewing all sorts of hard drinks. Why not take it up? It would certainly drain the state of (some) funds for one thing. I mean, there's no sales or income tax in NH anyway so a black market won't do all that much unless you sell shit that the state clearly has a monopoly on.

.....

My college just got a new Starbucks cafe, in the library of all places. I'm pretty pissed off at the blatant corporate partnership, especially since I know people in the IWW Starbucks Union who can tell me all about the company's bad behaviors. Totally disgusting. To add, students at McDaniel are pissed about tuition raises and the lack of transparency here. Where is our tuition money going? To these corporate projects? Ouch.

I'm sure most people at McDaniel have already heard this but I'll mention it anyway: the new stadium being built on campus had its naming rights bought by a wealthy alumnus who wants to name it "Western Maryland College Stadium". I take it he's butt-hurt about the name change, as a lot of alumni still are. The thing is, McDaniel started off as "Western Maryland College" back when it was established in the 1860s after a locomotive company (that's why we have a train car next to our current sports fields); it would be akin to something like "Bank of America University" today. Crazy.

......

As far as my own personal life goes, Dr. Leahy wants me to help her plan out a course (or two semester-long courses combined into one going for the whole year) on political/social revolutions and revolutionary theories for next year. I told her to include this kickass documentary film on the Spanish Revolution (1936) in hopes of getting these poli sci students interested in anarchism. Though I highly doubt most of the students would embrace the philosophy, simply because they've been so conditioned to believe it's a utopian theory which "doesn't work in reality" (though all the evidence says otherwise) or are otherwise just really apathetic. It's a real shame.

Spring 2012 Classes

2011-11-09T13:54:00.004-05:00

- PHI 3200 Writing in Philosophy and Religion (Independent Study): possibly W 12:00 (Bradley)

- HIS 2266 Greek Myth and History: MWF 12:40-1:40 (Evergates)

- PHI 2221 Minds and Machines: TR 1:00-2:30 (Bradley)

- PSI 3398 Radical Political Philosophy (Independent Study): TBA (Leahy)

- GRK 1102 Elementary Ancient Greek: TBA (Evergates)

- PHI 4492 Thesis in Philosophy: TBA (probably Jakoby)

Everything I wanted. Yay! Now I need to focus on doing well in logic so I can graduate for certain next fall. But if everything works out I should be 100% complete with the philosophy major, so next fall will be all classics courses and McDaniel Plan stuff.

Occupy Baltimore (and Move Your Money)

2011-11-09T10:56:00.003-05:00

The activists from Occupy Baltimore organized a "Move Your Money" event on the 5th where people organized to move all of their money out of the big banks (such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC) and move it to credit unions (you can read about it here; I take it as hardcore proof that mutualism will take the place of capitalism in the near future). We had a very diverse crowd that morning, although we were a bit disappointed when the members of a local union weren't able to join us. Though we were joined by a funky dragon.

We had those transferring their money go first before the rest of us. We knew the banks would probably refuse to deal with these people if they saw a large demonstration behind them. The first bank we went to was Wells Fargo, know for making racist loans in Baltimore and screwing over thousands of the city's residents.

Then we marched to Bank of America (aka Skank of America). Apparently, the people there knew our demonstration was coming, so instead of facing us they played the coward card and shut down the bank for the whole day. Here is the notice they left on the door.

We finished by marching to PNC. By that time we met up with at least ten people who had successfully withdrawn their money.

We came back to the Harbor after all had been done. There were comrades sitting in a circle with a few older adults discussing the movement and where it should go. The man speaking, a middle-aged Arab, started loudly complaining about Obama liberals taking over the movement, but suddenly flipped to complaining about anarchists. He said that the movement should kick all the anarchists out, since anarchists are nothing but "stone throwing troublemakers" who want to turn the occupations into violent ones. I was thinking, yeah that's the way you do it: stereotype an entire group of people who happen to adhere to a certain philosophy based on what you've seen and read in the mainstream media about a minority of those people. Hmmmm, where have we heard this before? I guess the one thing about this guy which pissed me off the most is, he as an Arab should know better than to do that. But I digress. Thankfully, a comrade stood up to him and told the man how full of shit he was. He didn't bother to listen.

Could you imagine though if comrades back in the day refused to use violent tactics to fight the fascists out of fear that the mainstream media would use their actions as a way to discredit anarchism? Isn't it discouraging when we refuse to stand up and defend ourselves against our oppressors and the oppressors of others simply because we're worried about our image? It doesn't matter if we're peaceful or not, the mainstream media will never portray us in a positive light. But I can't help but think how superficial that way of thinking is.

To be honest, I find myself losing faith in the occupy movement. During the first day of actions on Wall St. I can say with all honesty that the crowd was overwhelmingly made up of radicals and had a very strong anti-capitalist message. Now, from what I'm seeing, the whole movement appears to have been harshly de-radicalized. It's no longer about demanding an end to capitalism but rather about creating a kindler, gentler capitalism - as if such a thing could ever exist in the first place - with lots and lots of state handouts (like a guaranteed national income, higher minimum wage, more taxes on the 1%, maybe some debt relief). I'm not impressed. There's a long history of capitalists supporting these kinds of state reforms because they know these policies will prolong capitalism's existence and will do hardly anything to weaken their power overall. They'll be able to tell the radicals, "Okay, we gave you your handouts, now shut up and keep working in the system."

Later on we had a general assembly where a speaker talked about taking over abandoned properties in Baltimore. People in attendance, including myself, were very enthusiastic, though I have my doubts that such a large number of people would participate. There are radicals and homeless in the city who I know would squat those homes in an instant, but I fear that they'd be met with extremely harsh criticism by the same people condemning the Black Bloc in Oakland.

Comrades Burn Down Walmart (Mexico)

2011-11-03T12:49:00.001-04:00

This totally made my day. From culmine via This Is Our Job via guerrilla news:

To all like-minded arsonists and antagonists, the fourth communiqué from the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – Mexico / Informal Anarchist Federation:

Neither exasperated, indignant, nor broken! Arsonists at war against every authority!

All our solidarity with comrade Gabriel Pombo da Silva!

We’re celebrating two months of direct attacks on capital and the State!

Against the system of domination!

For Total Liberation!

Yesterday [26/10/11] at 6:23 p.m., liberatory fire again burned where it hurts most, destroying merchandise. The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF) faction of the Mexican Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI-M), Veracruz section, gave life to liberatory fire at the Wal-Mart located at Universidad and Avenida Las Palmas in the heart of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. With this new attack, we avenge comrade Gabriel Pombo da Silva (held captive in Aachen prison) and demand his immediate release from the German and Spanish states. We also stand in solidarity with our comrade Tamara, with the Bombings Case compas in Chile, with the imprisoned Conspiracy of Cells of Fire compas in Greece, and with all our comrades abducted by the State in Mexico and the rest of the world.

Over the 45 days since forming this new organization for antagonistic struggle, we have lashed out at the system of domination, showing that struggle is possible because the system is vulnerable. We’ve left behind the fear and indignation of the broken, and made the shift to decisive struggle against domination. We don’t want to change capital and the State, we don’t want to change their laws, we don’t want improvements, we don’t want to change technology, we don’t want to change domination. WE WANT TO DESTROY THEM!

The supposed differences between electoral parties don’t matter to us, nor do the lies and promises of Peña Nieto, AMLO, Marcelo, or Vasquez Mota. THEY MAKE NO DIFFERENCE TO US BECAUSE WE FIGHT AGAINST DOMINATION, WHETHER RIGHTIST, LEFTIST, POPULIST, OR REVOLUTIONARY.

Comrades, when the time comes to attack, if you don’t join in then don’t get in the way. This is a struggle until the final consequences, until total Liberation.

Neither exasperated, indignant, nor broken—we are Arsonists!

We are all the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire!

The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire isn’t an ORGANIZATION or a single group. Rather, it is the antagonists’ expression of rage and contempt toward domination and its institutions.

To spread the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, you only need gasoline, matches, and the desire to fight for total liberation.

We have begun the war against the existent order.

Long live antagonistic struggle!

— Conspiracy of Cells of Fire – Mexico / Informal Anarchist Federation

To be clear, I haven't heard anything about this from the mainstream press, but then again I wouldn't expect to. Salut and solidarity!

Hierarchy, "Voluntaryism", and Social Conditioning

2011-10-31T23:20:00.012-04:00

Makes you think, I know.

Today during lunch/brunch my friend Sarina brought up certain things she learned in one of her religious studies classes dealing with the topic of voluntary submission to authority and social hierarchy. She was telling me all about the book she had to read for that class and its chapters on the status of women in Islamic theocracies. Turns out, most of the women coming from that culture not only accept such a strict social enforcement of the gender binary but also prefer it; they want to wear the veils, they want to be submissive to the men in their lives, they want to be put into the box that institutionalized gender roles form. I told her it reminds me so much of nationalism, patriotism, and statism (all defined in the traditional sense), like how patriots practically bow down to the state's flag without realizing how oppressive state power really is.

It really is amazing as to how authority (whether it be social, cultural, political, or economic) is able to prevail simply due to people's willingness to accept it. Even if people truly want to be dominated by those on top of them on a social hierarchy, it still doesn't mean that presence of dominance is healthy or morally justified. It's kind of funny, because last week I was chatting with another friend of mine on the topic of voluntaryism and how it's a joke, even more so when its adherents paint it as the greatest revolution in ethics since J.S. Mill wrote Utilitarianism. The issue occurs (as Ross pointed out quite nicely) that our lives and the situations we face are way too complex to be reduced to a little black-and-white dichotomy between "voluntary"-"involuntary" actions. For one thing, everyone's situation is different; you can't - as Ross also said - assume that everyone is identityless and contextless and possesses no other factors which would affect their voluntarily-made choice. You have no idea if that person choses "voluntary" authority because they've been conditioned to, or because their situation compels them to (think about a thirsty person lost in the desert who voluntarily agrees to whore herself to the shady man who agrees to provide her with water and a way out of the desert in return), or if that person just really loves being ordered around and robbed of their autonomy. If you're going to make the argument that domination of others is perfectly moral because it was voluntarily chosen, then you're going to address all of these different kinds of situations.

I think Derrick Jensen explains this kind of conditioning-to-accept-authority quite nicely:

Greece: A Baptism of Fire

2011-10-26T16:07:00.003-04:00

Copied from Athens Indymedia

Anarchists, riots, and a situation much like the one experienced here in Buenos Aires. I was quite young back then, in 2001, to take to the streets. This time, however, I was ready. Against all odds, I was going —to show support, to show solidarity, to be with the people, to talk with them. And, most importantly, to see it all first-hand.

A Baptism of Fire

Greece had been out of my radius ever since my highschool years, where we had to study the Greek Empire and its cultural legacy, its philosophers, its history.

That was till 2008. December 2008. The news of the killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos swarmed the news wires. The story of a fifteen-year-old kid shot down by a ruthless cop out of the blue triggered feelings of rage instantly. I tried to peruse the facts in detail, hardly able to comprehend the backdrop of such crime. Accounts followed of riots, crude battles with the police, general strikes, and the global sinking of the economy. A word kept repeating itself in most accounts, a name actually, the name of a neighbourhood: Exarcheia.

Next thing I remember is reading about certain guerrilla-style groups, underground cells of individuals —anarchist in nature— who went all the way for direct action. And, of course, the burning Christmas tree. Fucking great. A display of rage to show the world the Greeks were not messing around. This was for real. Merry Christmas, capitalism!

And so, through the net, I read news accounts from independent media, watched videos of fierce battles against the police, and all those marvellous huge pictures of the riots, as if taken from a movie. Only it was not a movie —this was happening to people, common folks like you and me. It wasn’t so great after all.

And then, enter the ‘Arab Spring’. I was planning my long-awaited vacations: Italy, to see the place where I was born, La Spezia, and meet part of my family there; and Egypt, to see the pyramids, and Athens, Greece, to see the Parthenon, the Acropolis. Only I wasn’t really going there for its historical icons. I had other plans in mind. All of a sudden, Egypt is in real turmoil, and travelling there is not advised. As much as I wanted to be there and show support, I was not going. Who knows what would happen?

On the other hand, Athens seemed more appealing. Anarchists, riots, and a situation much like the one experienced here in Buenos Aires. I was quite young back then, in 2001, to take to the streets. This time, however, I was ready. Against all odds, I was going —to show support, to show solidarity, to be with the people, to talk with them. And, most importantly, to see it all first-hand.

This may all sound a little naïve. Nonetheless, later on I became well aware of the culture of squats, anarchism, social centres, and the Polytechnic —that symbol of resistance, a hub of melting ideologies, of knowledge and sharing, which I would finally set foot on and be able to discover by myself.

And I knew which my first stop would be: Syntagma Square.

Reaching Athens by plane from Rome is like flying in can of sardines. The pressure inside the plane is almost unbearable. The air currents seem to be quite strong, making the plane tremble at times as if in a roller coaster. By this time I had already taken several flights, but none compared to this one. Fucking pilot! I was determined to spit on his face upon landing. Who the hell gave him his licence!? I later learned that the air currents create the kind of pressure I experienced on board, making me arrive pale as a ghost, dizzy, and with my stomach revolted —the little breakfast I had taken on the plane, about to spill on the floor in a stream of vomit. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Athens Airport. Thank to the Gods!

And so, after finding an available hotel on Ermou Street, I stumbled into Athenian streets in search of Syntagma Square. I could see the Acropolis from the balcony of my hotel room, yet I knew it was not going anywhere. For those who have not been there, Athens is literally full of people. Monastiraki station is crowded: street vendors, taxi drivers almost getting you inside their cabs, the thousand immigrant faces, the smell of street food stands, coffee, the flea market. It reminded me of Buenos Aires in a strange kind of way. After all, both are capitals, metropolises, and both have a huge concentration of people living in their midst.

The street leading to Syntagma is full of shops, fancy clothes stores, restaurants, and of course, people. Why weren’t they in the square, I wondered? A question partially answered later on during my stay. (Apparently, the permanent influx of people in the square is revitalized constantly, with people leaving, others arriving…)

And there she is, the centre of action, the refuge and battlefield of thousands of Greeks, young and old, fighting for their rights, together. First thing I see is a huge white banner, king size sheet, with a phrase in Greek. I ask one the guys there what it says, and he replies something like “Pirates get out”. I also see another banner reading “En Grecia también se os oye. Democracia real ya”. Some Spanish compañeros have come all the way from Spain in solidarity. I get closer to their little stand —a tent and a little table— to the right of the square and inquire about their activities. I’m amazed at the diversity of people: young, old, children and dogs. Athenian dogs are huge canine figures and they are everywhere. They roam the streets like watchdogs of the people, like guardians of the night. They all have collars around their necks, and are apparently fed by the locals. They have no masters, no gods. They are free.

I move closer and the huge steps of the square are in front of me. I’m thrilled alright. This is it: I have seen this square a hundred times, in pictures, in videos. It looks smaller here, but no less spirited. I climb the steps and join the protesters.

This is my very first demonstration, and deep inside I wanna riot. But it takes only a split second to realize this is not about riots. Not only, anyways. This is about the people; their suffering, their rights, their peace. In front of us we have the lackeys of power. Police in riot gear, and I fear the worst. Yet, a part of me still craves for it. [Late April or early May saw some wild rioting, with some cops burning on the ground; and after I leave, a general strike ends up in a bloody riot]. Yet, I walk about and take some photographs of what I see. Parliament, cops, flags and banners (a man wielding a Communist flag enters the crowd, yelling something, and the people almost literally kick him out of the demonstration —there are no political parties represented, but rather a single people, united in this despair). However, it’s the sounds that shake you to the bone, that make your heart beat faster. “Kleftes! Kleftes!”. I talk to a man next to me, a school teacher. He is taller than me, and he kindly translates their screaming. “Thieves”, he says. And then another, “Ούστ! Ούστ!”. “That’s ‘Out!’”, he describes. And, what is everyone doing with their hands, shaking them this way and that? “That is ‘Malaka’. Fuck off”. There are some huge Greek flags flying around here and there, and a tactic imported from the South American lands: the pots and pans banging. Ah, it feels like home.

And then, enter the rolling thunder. A crash as if the Greek gods of yesterday were getting ready for battle. Zeus must be raging. A thunderstorm, quick and to the point, rages in the skies. And people yell and cheer in support everytime a thunder strikes. People keep on chanting against the politicians inside, in different moods of anger. “Papandreou, malaka, dn irthame gia plaka!”, another chant goes [Papandreou, asshole, we are not here to have fun!]. And so the rain comes, and I hide under the teacher’s umbrella for a while, till the storm settles down, and I return to my hotel.

A naïve fear keeps me out of the streets at night. A silly thing, because there is people there all the time. I’m not quite hardened by these streets yet, I must admit. Not in a foreign country, anyways. But I don’t miss much of the night, for I’m quite tired of walking and travelling and I need some rest.

Next day, after duly visiting the Acropolis, the Parthenon, I set on my walk to Exarcheia. I want to pay a visit to a social centre, Nosotros, and to walk the streets of this neighbourhood, called by burgeoise press “an anarchist haven”. Blabber, yet the posters in the streets are manifest.

I arrive at Nosotros, but it is closed. There is sign on the door, but it’s in Greek and I cannot read. By the door there is poster advertising a music festival, and it’s likely that the folks from the social centre went there to sell their stuff and spread the word. Two girls are walking by and I stop them to ask for help. I ask them what it says on the sign. At first, they were somewhat dubious —they thought I was a junkie asking for change. Apparently there are quite some junkies roaming the streets asking for change for a new fix, and we are approached by one not long afterwards. Rain falls once more, and we take refuge under the little roof of Nosotros. We chat and they strongly encourage me to try souvlaki. In fact, there is a bar next door where they serve it, and there is a guy on the street munching one with concentration, the rain now over. I would later submit myself to the delights of this typical Greek dish. Once you try it, there is no way back.

So I set on my way once again, having said goodbye to the girls —not to see the rest of Exarcheia though, but to the Polytechnic. I have never seen so many anarchist posters on the streets, and I’m marvelled. A huge street banner hangs from lamp posts; it’s in Greek, yet the A encircled at the foot of it needs no translation.

The Polytechnic reminds me of the public university here in Buenos Aires, albeit without the political partisanship of its students. What I see here is a more radical stance, and solidarity with many causes. Yet, I think the causes are one and the same: self-determination, solidarity, respect, freedom. Regardless of language barriers, borders and currencies, we all suffer the same machinations of this capitalist system, and there is resistance, in every language spoken, in every country or nation of this world, and paid in the same kind the workers and students and immigrants and unemployed have, sweat and blood.

I must say, I dare not venture inside; not yet, though. I feel like an outsider intruding in someone else’s home, watching everything, taking a photo here and there of something that catches my sight. I see the posters on its walls, the huge murals, Palestinian flags… So I circle the grounds and move forward. Back to Syntagma.

And so here we are. Now the square is filled with some painted pictures of Mr. Papandreou: as a clown, along with his fellow buffons; on top of a rocket of the USA/IMF and the words “Ούστ” below signalling his (their) expulsion. A huge black flag draped on the side of the square with the words “Et vous, combien de temps allez-vous dormir?” (How long will you sleep?), demanding a call to action; Spanish flags, Egyptian flags, Irish flags… Greek flags. I climb the steps towards the street and I see the people, shaking hands and booing “Ούστ”. And there, to my left, there is a clearing among the crowd, some taking pictures… What is it? I tiptoe and I see a man and his bride walking by the hand among the people. They pass us by and stop for a bonding kiss in front of these makeshift witnesses. Newly weds. Now, that is pride and humility. A Greek couple marrying among their own people, in the square. Everyone cheers them up and applauds.

On my last day I finally walk the very streets of Exarcheia. After visiting the amazing Panathenaic Stadium, I pass Navairnou Park, a community garden, filled with locals just hanging around —a green space among concrete buildings. A breath of fresh air and hope. There is a little space for kids, and at the entrance of it, some William Blake’s quotes: “Prisons r built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion”, and the famous “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”. There is graffiti and some murals too. Drawings and paintings. Mpatsoi, gourounia, dolofonoi. ΜΠΑΤΣΟΙ ΓΟΥΡΟΥΝΙΑ ΔΟΛΟΦΟΝΟΙ (“Cops, pigs, murderers”).

I continue walking in search of a bookstore to buy “Revolt and Crisis in Greece”. I had several addresses, but I end up in a small shop in Valtetsiou Street, a place called Eleftheros Typos, if I’m not mistaken. There are two men inside assisting, and they are both called the same. “We are anarchists, you know?”, one them says after I ask for the book. I was glad to find it, since all the other places I went to were closed, like Aytonomo Steki on Zoodohou Pigis.

Anyways, I got my book, I chatted a while with the anarchists at the bookstore and was again walking down the streets towards a squat, Villa Amalias. I was hoping to find it open, though I knew there was a chance for it to have been evicted by the cops. And so it was indeed.

My hopes of making contact with local anarchists, squats and the like did not turn out the way I’d expected —yet and I am glad it happened that way, because I met lots of people here and there, and I have to say, people have been very very kind, and I feel it is unfair what is happening to them —which, in a way, is happening to all of us.

And again, for the last time, I walk to the Polytechnic, I get inside —from a side entrance—, expecting the call of someone there saying “Where are you going?”. But no one said such thing as I walked the inner pathways, amazed at the enormity of the place. There is not a single wall without some kind of protesting claim on it —solidarity with the peoples of Palestine and Iran, posters, banners, graffiti and those huge murals near the classrooms: skulls, distorted faces, all in coloured designs.

I finish my day and my stay with the people. Syntagma at night is beautiful. Everyone is there, even the dogs! I walk around the crowded square, and I see there is a small assembly in the center. There is a huge circle of people listening to others speak. The Spaniards are still there, and street vendors sell food to the demonstrators. Others bring coffee or beer. I choose the latter and climb up the steps. I mingle with the crowd and end up talking to some Greeks there. One is unemployed, thinking of going to one of the islands for work, though he loves Athens and wants to stay. The other used to be an Olympic runner till he messed up with drugs too much and quit. He had a vuvuzela and played it once when the chanting started. I filled my lungs with air and blew it myself. The deafening sound marking a stand. The cops stayed paralyzed in front, and the Parliament lay there, empty, enduring the screaming and yelling of the protesters.

Some people with laser beams were pointing them at the hotel across the street. Parisitic journalists, too afraid to report from the scene, gathered on their luxury hotel rooms. I, on the other hand, stayed around. I did not want to leave, but I was leaving with the satisfaction of having been here, lent my support to this struggle, and become aware to a much deeper level.

‘Silence is violence’, read a graffiti on one of the walls of the Polytechnic.

Rest assured the Greek people will not be quiet anymore. Their voices still raging for justice, their struggle still pounding in my heart.

Luigi Celentano,

Buenos Aires,

September 2011.-

Police Attack Oakland Demonstrators With Tear Gas (Video)

2011-10-25T23:29:00.003-04:00

ACAB. It really shows something when peaceful demonstrators are met with tear gas and eviction (methinks the pigs need to be confronted with more than signs and cameras). The police are clearly a tool of the elite class to protect property and power. What other reasons would they have to attack peaceful protests against the capitalist state? It's fucking disgusting.

Stalinists Attack Anarchists in Greece

2011-10-21T20:21:00.000-04:00

This is a photo sent to me by a Facebook friend of mine, concerning the recent general strikes in Greece. He told me that the stalinist party had deliberately shut down the roads to parliament, in an attempt to block anarchist comrades from demonstrating in front of it. In response, comrades attacked the authoritarian state-socialists, and were then attacked much more ruthlessly by the stalinists. In other Greek cities, the stalinists attacked other protesters (including union members). They were essentially were doing exactly what the police do. To quote my friend, "The play with the Machiavellian logic 'the prince should be fear and not loved. If both loved and feared even better'."

This has been said so many times but it's worth saying again: authoritarians (be they political, economic, religious, or social authoritarians) are not our friends. Yes, we may share common goals in the short-term, and we may work together on accomplishing those goals, but we need to keep in mind that their bottom line is power which we, as anti-authoritarians, reject.

How many times does history show this? Remember what happened at Kronstadt when the Bolsheviks massacred comrades in "defense" of their "revolution" (it wasn't a revolution but a coup; the real revolution happened in the Ukrainian Free Territory)? Even if those accusations were true, it wouldn't have mattered - the revolution (if there was one) died just then. It doesn't matter what the state-socialists will tell you. The same thing happened in Catalonia: state-socialists murdering anarchists in the streets and sabotaging what was a prime example of workers' self-management. How many more times do we need to be backstabbed before we wake up?

Here's a video:

Occupy The Shire

2011-10-20T14:16:00.002-04:00

Though I had been traveling back to New Hampshire from Baltimore by bus on the big day of action and was unable to attend any of the demonstrations, I spent Sunday in Manchester with the city's mini-demonstration in solidarity. I brought a sign reading: "CAPITALISM = VIOLENT MONOPOLY = STATISM".

My friend Matt directed me to the pre-General Assembly going on, where a handful of people discussed the issues they wanted to raise and the direction they wanted the rally to go in. One of the people speaking, a large young man dressed like a biker, was a libertarian, quite possibly a free stater. He insisted that the entire rally should serve as an anti-war demonstration since that's the one thing everyone in attendance could agree on. The person taking notes seemed a little reluctant but jotted it down anyway. I butted in, saying that if we're going to turn this into an anti-war rally we can't overlook the profit aspect of war and how wars are waged to control resources and people for profit. The libertarian was pretty irked. He accused me of sectarianism and said words like mine would only divide the people there. "To me, profit is not a bad thing," rushed out of his mouth. He went on about how corporations are a "legal fiction" created by the state, as if every single business would behave like angels if only the state wasn't there to protect or subsidize them.

Matt and I spent our time hanging out, discussing the action from the past few days. We knew most of the people here were either free staters or people with right-libertarian tendencies. Others were mostly working people or students whose views were much more in-line with ours.

Something Matt and I both noticed was a flag propped up in the middle of the park. It was styled identical to the traditional anarchist red-and-black triangle flag, only instead of red it was blue-green with an elaborate pattern designed within the color. We went up to it to see what it was exactly. The possessor of the flag approached us. He said the flag was blue-green to express individualism; for him, red is the color of collectivism and blue-green is supposed to be the opposite of that. I found that a bit strange: if your entire goal is to achieve freedom, how can you be truly free if everyone around you is still in chains? Isn't every kind of social organization "collectivist" in its own way? I didn't question him though. He was a really nice guy.

I saw him again a little while later as Matt and I were standing on the sidewalk with other activists. He told us he didn't think his explanation of his views was concise enough. He said he's part of a movement that combines ecology and permaculture with revolutionary market anarchism (agorism). I asked him about agorism and how efficient he thinks it would be in attacking the state. He said it all comes down to how many people chose to join in and participate. When people chose to participate in the "white market" they are funding statism. He used the exact words "building a new society within the shell of the old" (which originates from the IWW constitution, actually) and I agreed with him, though I said I'm not sure that the solution has to be completely market-based. I told him that I say "freed markets" because I sometimes doubt whether or not there can ever be a truly free market system. After all, I said, market economies were first established through force by kings (states) as a way to keep people in submission. He said, quite boldly, that he believes any "voluntary" human actions are part of the market. I thought that was absurd. I asked him where he got this idea from, and he said from austrian economics which, according to him, explicitly states that all voluntary actions are market actions while all involuntary actions are statist ones. I still didn't get it. I asked him, "So, me giving my friend a back rub out of affection is viewed the same way as consumerism?", and he said yes. In a sense, it's like talking with religious nuts, like the nutty Christians from my high school, nutty Jews from CSUN, or nutty Muslims from the anti-war/pro-Palestinian groups I used to work with; they will tell you that the shape of your hand is "proof" that their version of "God" exists. I don't understand...

But we agreed that leaving everything up to "the market" is not enough. I told him that I believe a lot of what our new society will come down to is the values we chose to hold and base our new institutions off of. That includes doing away with the fascination of property and profit. The way I see it is, if we still hold true the idea that "more stuff" equates to "more freedom" and define how "free" we are based on what we own (as opposed to who we are and what we do as people) then there will always be an incentive to create monopolies and have a state to enable their creation. My friend Ross wrote that faith in the market is not enough, that we need to expand our moral awareness if we want to have a free society because we will be no freer if we don't. You could make the argument that a freed market would be like karma; if we support firms that do wrong, it will come back to bite us. As Ross said, so much of what the market supplies is what we demand. The whole idea that all businesses would have to put people before profits if the state didn't exist to protect them only works if the people are responsible enough to go after those businesses that do wrong. It's not enough to simply attack the state, build new institutions, or create a completely free market. We have to show people that basing a society on mutuality rather than selfish desire for stuff is not only much better for each other but also much freer; create conditions where the love of profit is outweighed by the love of freedom and love of each other. Let's put it this way: if I can make more profit for myself with a patent monopoly, then why would I want the state to blip out of existence if it meant more competition and less profits for me? If I love owning more property than I use, why would I want a stateless society where "property rights" outside of active personal use would no longer exist? What if I'm a capitalist boss whose income comes from the exploitation of others - why would I want the state to disappear, or why would I join in with the anti-statists in abolishing it? The idea that the state will go away once everyone "stops believing in it" is naive and oversimplified. He was uneasy about my conclusions though. I get the feeling that he, too, holds a love of property. There always seems to be this overriding consensus that 51% of the people around are trying to steal everything they own - it's completely bogus even today. If I knew my community was always going to be there for me, and loved me, why should I care about how much many material objects I own? (Read some anthropology books if you want some evidence for this.)

It was only later during the demonstration that I realized this young man was a friend of one of my other friends. I went up to him as he was setting up his sleepover tent and asked him if he was who I thought he was. Turns out I was right. He told me he was originally from Texas and moved up to Grafton back when the village was an agorist haven. Now most of the original agorists have left and the scene there has mostly died out. Most of the "activism" there now, according to him, revolves around top-down political campaigns. Both of us agreed that it's totally useless: even if Ron Paul was elected president he wouldn't be able to do anything, and even if he did strip the government down to its "constitutional minimum" the institutions and conditions would still be in place to start the cycle of "big government" all over again. It turns out he was a very nice guy who shares a lot in common with myself. I told him that people we both know are planning on creating some kind of (mutualist) cooperative community in the Merrimack Valley. He was interested.

I hung out with Matt and a few others at the end of the day. We sang along with the man who brought his guitar and talked with a few women who were Manchester locals.

"Your sign is backwards," I heard someone nearby say sharply.

"No, I think it's being held the right way," I replied, trying to sound naive.

"It wasn't capitalism that created statism. It was statism that created capitalism. The economic system would never have happened if it hadn't been for the state."

Well, if you read Dr. Graeber's book you'd understand why markets in general would have never existed if it hadn't been for the state!

"Yeah," I said, "and that's why these corporate bosses are going to be the first people to resist statelessness."

This guy went on about all of his agorist activism (though unlike my earlier conversation buddy he was pretty blunt about everything) and insisted that it's going to be what drains the rich and the state. He even went so far as to say that sites like Craigslist and eBay will create a stateless society, since there's no taxation involved. I told him I was very skeptical of his expectations that black and "gray" market activism would be enough in themselves. He kept insisting that black and gray markets have become "huge" in NH since the Free State Project began, even after I told him I had no idea they were even present in the area to begin with. The two of us went back and forth about why we feel the other is full of shit in many areas. He asked me what I thought the solution is and what I was doing to solve the problem. I told him the first thing we need to do is organize, just like we were doing right there and then in the park. Bring people together and build solidarity networks. Then we need to start taking over unused properties and workplaces. He insisted that organizing expropriations would take too long (despite the fact that people did it in the past in a quick amount of time) and a much better idea would be to get as many people as possible to more to this magical agorá so that the state and capitalists start to drain. I asked him how long that would take, or how realistic it would be since most people in NH have no clue that this (metaphorical) agorá exists in the first place. He also told me that he's living in a squatted home owned by Deutsche Bank and did so as a way of fucking with the police. In his lexicon, "squatting" is called "homesteading", much more akin to neo-lockean principles than classical anarchist ones. I kept telling him of my initial skepticisms. I have no idea how NH is more free now that the state government is dominated by self-proclaimed anti-statists. He told me I'd see it sooner than later.

**** Update: arrests have been made in Manchester.

My friend Matt, who was arrested, said the arrests were due to "criminal trespassing". More proof that the police primarily exist to protect property.

Shame, Guilt, and Punishment

2011-10-18T02:44:00.006-04:00

It's very unusual when a project you take on for school leads to you realizing that a pre-existing belief you've held has evidence to back it up...

In my experimental ethics class we had to write a five-page paper about a certain issue in ethics using philosophical "evidence" and documented empirical evidence on the topic. I chose to research "shame-cultures" and what having a society dominated by shame (in contrast with societies dominated by guilt, such as our own) means for ethics. At first, I approached the topic with a pretty negative view. Most of what I've heard about shame-cultures comes from reading Ancient Greek myth (such as Oedipus stabbing his eyes out in shame, that sort of thing). However, when I started going through the anthropological evidence my views shifted. What I found in my research was absolutely fascinating. Here's a few samples from the journal article I used, "Revisiting Shame and Guilt Cultures: a Forty-Year Pilgrimage" by Millie Creighton:

"Shame involves the awareness of inadequacy or failure to achieve a wished-for self-image which is accompanied by, or originally arises from, the fear of separation and abandonment. The development of shame precedes the development of guilt and 'is in fact one of its important precursors'... Shame begins early in infancy during what is referred to as pre-oedipal phase. During this phase the developmental task required of the human infant is the task of bonding to the mother or primary care-giver. The anxiety associated with shame arises from the fear of separation or loss of the loving parent... Feelings of guilt are generated whenever the boundaries of negative behavior, as established by the superego, are touched or transgressed. The unconscious threat in guilt anxiety is not abandonment but punishment or retribution." (pg. 285-286)

Creighton also compared the culture of the United States (a guilt-culture) and Japan (a shame-culture") and pointed out each culture's ideas of individualism and collectivism.

"An emphasis on shame sanctions is consistent with the high value the Japanese place on group-oriented cooperative action as opposed to independence and individuality. Shame, possibly evidenced by its emergence during the bonding stage, is more profoundly associated with the fear that one's inadequacies will result in the loss of union or expulsion from the group.... Shame is a more effective sanction in a society where rejection or ostracism from the group generates a greater anxiety than the fear of punishment... An emphasis on shame sanctions would be consistent with the Japanese world view and its corresponding emphasis on situational ethics. Influenced by certain Judeo-Christian beliefs, traditional Western discipline has been concerned with conquering the evil tendencies in individual people. A concern with inherent evil would result in an emphasis on guilt sanctions to restrain from evil... It is possible to state metaphorically that depending on the culture one belongs to morals are incarnated either as 'God' or as 'Group.' Americans are more likely to view morality in absolute terms based on principles of right and wrong that are not considered to vary with the situation. Japanese morality tends to judge the value of an act in a situational context based on its impact on significant relationships. One cannot argue that people who have internalized a particularistic morality cannot have consciences or do not feel guilty at doing something they believe to be wrong. Given this type of morality, however, it seems probable that feelings of shame over failure to live up to the expectations of specified role relationships, upon which high positive value is always placed, would outweigh feelings of guilt as having committed an act that somas is, and sometimes is not, a transgression of moral boundaries." (pg. 295-298)

(You can read the full article here, if you can access JSTOR on your internet.)

What stands out about the evidence Creighton gathered is how it concludes that the feeling of shame - which is internalized and which stems from fear of rejection from one's society or those whom one is close to - do far more to raise awareness about one's moral responsibility to others than fear of "the stick" (which creates guilt) does. The thing is, punishment doesn't really do anything to change who you are as a person, but the fear of ostracism by those around you does. It's a truly fascinating concept which needs to be looked into more, in my opinion.

So right before we finished our papers, I chatted about the topic with my friend Derrick (who is also a philosophy major). He pointed out that you see the same thing here at McDaniel where we have an "honor code-culture", meaning that fucking up on your academic performance not only results in getting a lot of shit from the administration but also from others the 1,500 or so student body as soon as the news travels. He compared that to how things like plagiarism are handled at big state universities (I'm assuming UMD and Towson) where students are given pretty harsh punishments but no one else really cares, and - as proof that punishment doesn't solve all that much - plagiarism is still rampant. You don't have the sense of community among the students that you (somewhat) have here at McDaniel, and I'd make the case that this causes a lot of students to not really care about how they're seen by others (which is essentially what shame is, the internal feeling of seeing all the horrid things about yourself through the eyes of others).

But this is what the research really reminded me of:

"Crime is not a thing in-itself, not a plant without roots, not a something proceeding from nothing; and the only true way to deal with it is to seek its causes as earnestly, as painstaking.... Punishment is a failure. And it is a failure not because men do not hunt down and strike enough, but because they hunt down and strike at all; because in the chase of those who do ill, they do ill themselves; they brutalize their own characters, and so much the more so because they are convinced that this time the brutal act is done in accord with conscience. The murderous deed of criminal was against conscience, the torture or murder of the criminal by the official is with conscience. Thus the conscience is diseased and perverted, and a new class of imbruted men created. We have punished and punished for untold thousands of years, and we have no gotten rid of crime, have not diminished it....
"Let us have done with this savage idea of punishment, which is without wisdom. Let us work for the freedom of man from the oppression which make criminals, and for the enlightened treatment of all the sick. And though we may never see the fruit of it, we may rest assured that the great tide of thought is seeing our way..."

("Crime and Punishment", taken from The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader, pages 151-172.)

Oh Voltairine, you are amazing (of course, I don't agree with a 100% pacifist stance, but still). Pretty funny how comrades were saying this shit for decades before all of these anthropological studies proving their ideas to be rooted in reality came out. It really gets you thinking. To make another connection,in another of my philosophy classes, Dr. Jakoby told us of one culture in western Africa (I forget which one exactly) that, when someone commits an act of murder in their society they gather around that person and say all the wonderful things about that person. Can you imagine that? What a change from our culture where we have such faith in the idea that "the stick" will solve every wrong in society. Not only does it seem pretty immoral (in most cases anyway) but it's also terribly unproductive when it comes to solving the problem. Fear of ostracism from your community seems like it would do far more to deter unjust acts than being locked in a cage would.

We should keep in mind, however, that the whole shame-rejection ordeal works when the society is pretty close-knit and people have a large stake in holding strong relations with others. I'd guess that our culture would have to be re-shaped in this way if we'd want to abolish the punishment of criminals. I definitely think it could happen, although we'd have to do a lot to create the right conditions. Reader, what do you think?

(One last thing: for more info, check out the wikipedia article on the Prison Abolition Movement.)

One More Night in Liberty Plaza

2011-10-11T00:34:00.001-04:00

On Saturday afternoon I once again arrived in Manhattan to join the Occupy Wall St. demonstrations. The protests were still in full-swing, although by this time of day they had died down a bit.

I went across the street to meet up with a dear friend of mine whom I hadn't seen since last year, my friend Paul. Around that building were pools of cops looking ready to pounce in on the Plaza at any moment.

Paul had been in NYC since Friday night. He had barely slept due to all the commotion. He asked me how the demonstrations were the first day and why the activists were in Zucotti Park as opposed to the actual Wall St. I explained how the police blocked off Bowling Green during the middle of the first day, and how we all had to retreat to the Plaza to avoid arrest. I admitted that the whole thing is ridiculous. Activists need to have the balls to disobey the pigs if they want to see things get done. I told him about the copycat demonstrations going on in Baltimore, saying how much I wished the demonstrators there would move their rally from the Inner Harbor to the neighborhoods full of barred-up abandoned homes and squat those buildings out of resistance. That would do a hell of a lot more to "stick it" to the masters in our system (in this case, the absentee landlords who own those buildings and the state which protects that absentee ownership). And the fear of arrest - well, all those people were arrested for marching on the Brooklyn Bridge, for doing nothing but walking in a blocked-off area. We know the cops will find any excuse to arrest dissenting activists for anything, so why not be arrested for going above and beyond? I told Paul that I find it ridiculous in the first place that people who are bent on challenging the system would willingly obey police and abide by the "rules" (such as having a permit to protest or respecting the police barricades). Demonstrators in New York should have gone over the barricades and truly occupied Wall St. regardless of how many hundreds of cops would have come out to stop them. People in Egypt, Tunisia, Greece didn't respect police; why should we? Paul pointed out that the only major problem with this plan of action is that the police would be able to stop it from even happening if they knew something was about to go down. In other words, there would have to be a way to mass-mobalize activists within a few minutes before the pigs caught on to it. So let's brainstorm: how would we organize a mass takeover?

Whilst walking over to get some drinks, we spotted this:

Paul and I always discuss philosophy every time we're together. He was telling me how he thinks the best thing we can do for right now is to educate others about different societies we can create (he's very much into historical materialism). We may not live to see capitalism and the state destroy themselves, so we need to leave something behind for the next generations who might just. "Karl Marx isn't dead - he's alive right here," Paul said as he pointed to the activist-filled plaza across the street.

Later that night we set up camp near one of the falafel stands. There were pigs standing a few feet away from us which we mostly ignored. Everything was calm until we were approached by a reporter and press photographer. We asked them where they were from, and they answered us with New York Magazine. The reporter asked us the typical questions: why we were here, what do we hope the outcome of this is, and how others we know are responding to us being involved in this. Paul, ever the marxist philosopher, told him that capitalism needs to be understood in its historical context. Most of the answers I gave the reporter revolved around being a college student, how so many people at my college hold the apathetic attitude of "what will this accomplish?" because they've been conditioned in such a way to think that, and how people I know are going to graduate school simply because they want to put off having to pay their student loans. Paul laughed at that remark. It's so messed up you'd think it was a joke. Hell, the whole system is messed up yet no one wants to explore why, or they want to put the blame on scapegoats (like the Federal Reserve - something Paul pointed out after seeing all the "END THE FED" signs and chalkings around the Plaza) instead of analyzing the system's internal flaws and contradictions. The reporter ended our interview by telling us how this may be going in a full-page spread in the magazine. After he left Paul mentioned that while just having our words published would be amazing, we should always keep in mind that the press already has the story it wants to print before the interview even starts, as Chomsky likes to say.

The two of us didn't sleep at all that night. He asked me about Baltimore. I told him I love the city personally but a lot of it is crap; the public transit is terrible and jobs are scarce. Pretty much the only way the city is being "revived" is through gentrification. Neighborhoods which were once predominantly black and working-class are now full of white hipsters, locally-operated corner stores have been replaced by expensive vegan restaurants and trendy clothing stores, the whole baggage. And let's face it, I told Paul, it's not like these hipsters are bringing industry back into the city. They're cashiering at Whole Foods, not using their labor in factories producing commodities with actual value. The only people who have any fun with gentrification are the landlords. Paul remarked that hipsters are landlords' best friends, since wealthy yuppies tend to follow them into every "hip" neighborhood. And the process certainly doesn't do anything to solve the issue of the city's poverty or unemployment; it just moves it around to somewhere else.

"See, Baltimore was once a thriving, industrial city," Paul pointed out, "but now capitalism won't let it go back to what it once was. The city is done. Same thing with Detroit. Capitalism won't allow Detroit to go back to what it was in the '60's. That's what capitalism does."

I had to agree.

New York woke up at dawn to the sounds of bells, horns, and sirens. Cops resumed their places around the Plaza as everyone began waking up. By that time Paul and I were so tired that we didn't want to hang around any longer. We took the subway back to our bus stops and headed back to where we are living for the time being.

Thank You Ross!

2011-10-03T20:22:00.017-04:00

I felt very refreshed last night reading this article written by my (facebook) friend Ross. Originally from C4SS (a left-libertarian website):

Ron Paul claimed on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on September 26th that market discipline is stricter than government discipline. This claim depends upon a number of institutions being set up wherein the true costs of production and consumption are actually being internalized by those doing the producing and consuming rather than being spread between hapless taxpayers as they currently are.

Now, Ron Paul definitely thinks these institutions should replace our current framework as one can see if one watches the extended interview. In it he elaborates upon his position regarding how he believes stronger property rights and a free market would serve environmental ends. The merit of this ecological argument will not be examined in this op-ed; however, this abstraction of the market needs to stop immediately.

We are “the market.” We are all “market forces.” We are the ones Ron Paul is proposing to have more power to discipline wrongdoers via torts, direct action, voting with our dollar and protest. Libertarians do not believe in delegating this authority away from ourselves as that act of concession will lead to regulatory capture and the centralization of power and economy. The market is absolutely not an external process we can afford to just sit back and watch transpire before us.

The “market” itself is conventionally viewed as a concept which symbolizes the aggregation of all acts of production and consumption committed under the institutions of private property and its subsequent division of labor and the price mechanism. When this process is unhindered by unwise barriers (government-enforced or market actor-endorsed) it generally allows for people to clear goods very successfully and to great material gain for all participants. However, the acts of producing and consuming in and of themselves have no moral content. All a free market means is that what is effectively demanded will be efficiently supplied, and if we demand garbage then we will have garbage. This freedom to choose connotes the responsibility to choose well or the world in which we might live may not be very much better than the one we have now.

Simone de Beauvoir writes astutely in The Ethics of Ambiguity, “… the present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action; we can not avoid living it through a project; and there is no project which is purely contemplative since one always projects himself toward something, toward the future; to put oneself ‘outside’ is still a way of living the inescapable fact that one is inside; those French intellectuals who, in the name of history, poetry, or art, sought to rise above the drama of the [age of World War II], were willy-nilly its actors; more of less explicitly, they were playing the occupier’s game. Likewise, the Italian aesthete, occupied in caressing the marbles and bronzes of Florence, is playing a political role in the life of his country by his very inertia. One can not justify all that is by asserting that everything may equally be the object of contemplation, since man never contemplates: he does.”1

This freedom to choose is seen by most people with the same immobilizing terror which the existentialists rhapsodized upon. If we want our freedom to choose poorly, we must be wise enough to choose well. Faced with the responsibility to pay attention to the world around us and actually decide for ourselves what to support with our money and moral approval; with what to cherish and what to rally against for the sake of one’s principles, it is no real surprise that people generally favor delegating their role as a punishing or rewarding market force to someone with political power. “I have to think?! Get this terrible burden of responsibility away from me!”

Freedom is work, and there is no abstracting one’s self out of the market as if it were some independent process outside of ourselves that “will take care of everything.” The market is us. Push us toward a better world by demanding wisely if you can bear it, as anyone who would dare call themselves an adult should be prepared to do. Otherwise, we truly are not ready for the freedom Ron Paul and our American platitudes have prepared us for.

I completely agree with his overall assertion that we should be aware of the impact that we have on our society, and where our moral responsibility lies. The conditions in which we're living in now are far more complex than their oversimplified explanations found in your economics textbook. If we're going to participate in creating a new society - and once we achieve that new society - there's going to be a lot that we'd have to do and keep in mind.

All the time I hear the argument that the only thing which needs to be done in order to achieve a free society is get rid of the state, with the assumption that the currently-existing market institutions working within a "free market" (however you define it) will just resolve all these social problems by themselves without any further input, kind of like magic. Aside from the fact that these conclusions don't necessarily follow with the premises, the overall explanations are extremely vague with very little evidence from history or reality given to support them. (I know a lot of theories discussed in politics/economics are more a priori than anything, but still.) Once again, I would argue that while ending state control along with money and land monopolies and all those are necessary, we also need to be active in building alternative institutions and doing what we can to weaken the grip that the corporate fatcats have on us, probably more so than beating up on the Fed and whatnot. The conditions present in our society are far more complicated than just "the government is fucking up everything" and creating a free society will take far more measures than just attacks against the state. And in a lot of these cases, it's not even the actual state (the institution which holds the monopoly on violence) that's being targeted but rather the government. Abolishing absentee ownership of property would do far more to weaken the violent monopoly than handing over police, prisons, roads, schools, etc. to private investors (which is one of the reasons why I'm such a huge proponent of squatting as a major form of activism).

Which brings me to another point which both my friend and I have talked about: because - as many have pointed out - corporate bosses benefit so much from having a state, they’re going to be the first ones to resist any kind of transition into a stateless society. If they knew the state was going to die out along with all of their monopolies, they’d be doing everything they could in their power to keep it alive, or, if it did die, they’d just find a way to resurrect it. In other words, you’re never going to reach a stateless society just by going after the state (or not even “the state” but just “the government”; giving away state assets to private companies only transfers the monopoly on force to different masters) anyway; you would have to be active in going after the ruling class as well. They’re the ones who would have every incentive and the means to keep a statist society. When I ask the people on the Free Keene blog about how they'd prevent the creation of a new statism by the rich, they naively shrug it off by making an ambiguous statement: "No one would ever want to revert back to statism once they're in a stateless capitalist society!" I'd say that would be true when no one within the society would have the incentive to bring back the state, but I'm talking about a society where a certain number of people would. It's going to take a lot of action and understanding on our part.

NYPD Shut Down Brooklyn Bridge During Wall St. Protests

2011-10-01T21:51:00.003-04:00

Solidarity with the protesters! And fuck the police.

Less Stuff = Greater Happiness

2011-09-29T13:21:00.000-04:00

From the video description:

Richard Heinberg- whose latest book describes The End of Growth- isn't looking for when the recession will end and we'll get back to "normal". He believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to prepare for a "new normal".

The problem, according to Heinberg, is our natural resources just aren't so cheap and plentiful anymore, and he's not just talking about Peak Oil, Heinberg believes in Peak Everything (also the title of one of his books).

Heinberg thinks for many, adjusting to a life where everything costs a bit more, could be very hard, but he also thinks the transition to a new normal might actually make life better.

"Particularly in the Western industrialized countries we've gotten used to levels of consumption that are not only environmentally unsustainable, they also don't make us happy. They've in fact hollowed out our lives. We've given up things that actually do give us satisfaction and pleasure so that we can work more and more hours to get more and more money with which to buy more and more stuff- more flatscreen tvs, bigger SUVs, bigger houses and it's not making us happier. Well, guess what, it's possible to downsize, it's possible to use less, become more self sufficient, grow more of your own food, have chickens in your backyard and be a happier person."

I don't agree with everything in this video (most notably the notion that escapist, superficial-ish lifestyle politics should be the main basis of social change) but it is something we should be taking into consideration. I know that individual possession will always be a fact of life - and I'm not against it whatsoever - I do feel that a society much less fixated on ownership of stuff would be a much more positive society overall, especially since putting so much emphasis on ownership of "stuff" (as opposed to human relationships or what we do for our communities) always has a habit of creating authoritarian and anti-social tendencies as you are in constant fear of losing what you own. It was the ownership of impersonal private property which lead to the State's formation in the first place if that's any indicator of what the "MINE!" attitude can do.

I just don't see how being able to own things not intended for active personal use is considered a "freedom" in the first place (mind you, this is coming from someone who grew up in an area where the majority of the population is very materialistic and obsessed with owning more than they can use). The contradictory part is, ownership can destroy freedom. We all know about the power relations landlords have with tenants and so on (which is why I couldn't comprehend the fact that the hosts who interviewed me for that radio show were defending landlords, like it's a much better idea to have society premiss the presence of authority than to question property "rights"). And really, I would never say that a gift culture which holds most things in common would be any less free than the society we currently live in. I'll write more about this once I gather more research for my senior project and have more information on the topic.

I get the feeling that more people from my generation have an understanding of the system than they get credit for. Heck, after reading this you'll understand why. There's even classmates of mine whom I would never expect to hold any kind of radical social views. In my history class (19th Century Europe) we were talking about industrialization and all the shit it caused, and when the professor asked us if things like massive inequalities of wealth and horrid economic conditions were still going on in the world a classmate brought up the fact that those things are still going on right here in US cities. People have an understanding of the system. That much is true. We just need to find ways to defeat the system and create a new one.

We're going to be talking about marxism and anarchism in my history class tomorrow. I'm preparing myself for the truckload of strawman arguments and loaded questions which will be coming my way.

I'm on Diaspora!

2011-09-28T23:51:00.002-04:00

If you're on Diaspora and want to add me to your contacts, you can find me at: juliariber@joindiaspora.com.

I have no idea how to work this thing. I'm trying to find out how I can transfer all the photos and videos I have on my facebook page over to my diaspora page (after all, Facebook is about to go down the toilet pretty soon, not that it hasn't already with all the spying and tracking).

If you want an invite, let me know and I'll send you one.

Trader on BBC News: 'Goldman-Sachs Rules the World.'

2011-09-27T10:02:00.003-04:00

Wow.

But really, is there any surprise here?

There's always going to be people trying to profit during a recession, usually by installing fear into people and then insisting that they have the "solution". It's just like all the people trying to sell you gold as they claim the US dollar is on the brink of collapse (which is something I agree with, though I would argue that gold and silver are shitty alternatives and the "buy gold now" crowd obviously have a pretty big agenda).

Update: for the record, this has not been proven to be a hoax.

Return to Wall St.

2011-09-25T20:17:00.017-04:00

Before I tell you my experience, here's some footage taken by friends of what happened earlier Saturday morning before I got there:

93 peaceful activists were arrested, simply for marching in "the belly of the beast". Go figure that the criminals who inhabit Wall St. don't want that kind of attention by activists.

I was able to get to Wall St. later that afternoon. As I was heading to Liberty Plaza I was informed that the Wall St. metro stop was blocked off, so I had to get off at the Fulton St. stop and walk a little. Lower Manhattan was now the most policed place in the country; everywhere were police barriers, checkpoints, and pigs. The actual Wall St. itself was completely blocked off. Other streets were also blocked but had open sidewalk, though a pig stood before each entrance. Certain sidewalks, such as the ones near the Federal Reserve of NY bank, were blocked off with "detour" barriers. I felt like a Palestinian living in the West Bank sans the guns pointed to my head. To make things even weirder, there were very few others walking around that area, which I found odd for Manhattan on a Saturday afternoon.

When I arrived at the Plaza the first thing I noticed were the cops standing all alongside the Plaza's periphery. It's kind of hard to believe why a non-violent demonstration consisting of close to a thousand activists would demand that much "security", especially when there's no indication that this would be anything but a non-violent demonstration. The activists who were in the plaza were talking non-stop about the brutality from pigs and arrests from earlier that day. The first activist who approached me for conversation handed me a surgical mask and a jar of vinegar to dip it in just in case in the pigs decided to
tear-gas the entire plaza. Some pointed out the fact that the pigs standing around the plaza had put on orange vests, which signifies mass-arrest.

Aside from the feeling of preparedness, everyone at the plaza was doing their own thing. I saw Cindy Milstein was there sitting in a discussion circle with other comrades. Some people were playing music. Some people were already crashing out. Others were making signs using slabs of cardboard and paint. I decided to join in the sign-making.

This is the first sign I made:

A short time later we had a general assembly. The people speaking gave us legal advice about what to do if any one of us was arrested sometime later. We wrote down the phone number for the Manhattan branch of the National Lawyers' Guild on our arms just in case.

I spent most of the night talking with my friends Guy (from Brooklyn) and Nelson (from Boston). Guy was telling us how a group of Black Bloc activists from either Detroit or Miami were supposed to show up. He said they should occupy the Wall Street Journal building in protest of our event's lack of coverage by the mainstream media (how awesome would that be?). He also gave us the news that all 93 of the people arrested earlier were going to be released without any charges. Such a relief.

The pigs kept watching us into the night. At 3AM there were five pigs watching my area from the sidewalk and even more watching the other sides. Really? Sleeping demonstrators need to be spied upon? I swear, the whole point of the police presence is intimidation. The ruling class who hires these thugs knows they have to install a culture of fear to prevent people from challenging their power. I know, our demonstrations aren't going the extra mile to do that, but they're a start. The pigs are going to scare people out of doing something bigger and more effective; after all, if they're going to engage in brutalizing people engaged in a peaceful march who knows what they'll do to people doing things far more extreme. Maybe that's why a lot of frustrated people in this country don't engage in mass demonstrations and riots like people do in Greece, Spain, the UK, Chile, Argentina, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, etc. etc.; they're far more afraid of armed thugs sticking guns to their heads than they are of exploitation and poverty because they've been conditioned in that way. That and skepticism; people hold that "so what is this accomplishing?" mentality to the point where they're not going to do anything, because they keep assuming their actions will do nothing (in one of the philosophy classes I took last semester we read an article talking about this very thing; that all the "critical thinking" we're told to learn has turned us into a "generation of debunkers" who hold skepticism as the highest form of intellect rather than genuine critical thinkers. As a result, a lot of people who would have the urge to do something refrain from doing anything). A lot of times that is the case, but even smaller events can build up to something bigger (though I would hold something like the Occupy Wall St. demonstrations as having a far more impacting effect than, say, the antics of the middle-class, privileged people in Free Keene which are supposed to raise awareness about the drug war).

I barely slept at all that night. When I left my resting area to get coffee the Channel 7 News was already set up next to the plaza. Later on, people were passing around the Sunday issue of the New York Daily News. The events from the previous day had made the cover.

I had to leave the plaza earlier than I wanted to be able to catch the bus back to Baltimore. As I walked back to the Fulton stop I passed all those blocked off streets. Nothing but pigs and barriers.

I have a feeling it's going to remain this way for months as the demonstrations continue.

Marx Voted Greatest Thinker of the Millennium

2011-09-23T10:38:00.003-04:00

On a lighter note...

This is old news from a few years ago. Of course, Marx took all of his theories on exploitation from Proudhon the anarchist, but I'm not complaining. The shit Marx wrote about should be even more important today now that we're seeing capitalism collapse before our very eyes.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-09-18T22:21:00.040-04:00

I arrived in New York City an hour before the events officially started. When I came up from the subway, I immediately noticed a young man with several protest signs for the demonstration. He told me his name was Jason and he was one of the event's main organizers. Soon we were joined by other participants, another main organizer whose name was Lisa and - I couldn't believe it - David Graeber himself. By that time the police had blocked off a good portion of the street. As they work for the same people we were there to demonstrate against, the cops weren't about to just let us have the streets for ourselves.

All of us walked over to Bowling Green. The number of cops surrounding the streets kept increasing. Once we arrived at the park we assimilated into the large crowd that had already shown up. All sorts of people were there: anarchist comrades, union activists, members of bolshevik-style political groups, generic anti-war/anti-corporate activists, Ron Paul nuts, Larouche's douches, everyone. Activists handed out pamphlets which mapped out where we were going to march and occupy.

Of course, I joined up with comrades who were gathered around the infamous bull. Spontaneously, we paraded around it.

The cops had blocked off the statue itself. We thought it was odd that they would take such measures to protect that thing instead of us.

It wasn't long before the media started showing up. All of us were documented as we marched around the bull. I was interviewed by a guerilla network that was broadcasting the event live on the internet. By that time, hundreds of people were there, each one expressing their own grievances brought on by the economic system.

My own time got pretty interesting when I found myself debating a Ron Paul supporter who was in attendance. He was there to convince the demonstration's attendants to support the Ron Paul presidential campaign. I asked him why he was so much more faith in a politician than in the people acting from below (such as all of the people at this event). He went on and on about all the wonderful things his favorite politician might just do if put into power. I kept challenging him on it until a young black radical came out from the crowd to debate him with me. The radical made the point that Americans are always turning to "the white man" for salvation and are never taking matters into their own hands.

The Ron Paul supporter continually asked, "So what can we do? What can we do?"

The black radical gave his answer. "Just stop," he bluntly replied. "Just stop. Stop consuming. Stop paying taxes. Stop contributing to the system. Just stop it. We all need to stop it."

Even though I personally believe that we should also be fighting the system head-on, I can't disagree with the notion that we all need to stop feeding our oppressors. I mean, if you're opposed to the Federal Reservve, then stop using its money and stop the consumerist lifestyle of yours. If youre opposed to taxes then find the loopholes to stop paying them. Don't wait for your fairy godparent (Ron Paul) to come and save you by taking up a position where he has power over you. But then I have to ask, is expecting everyone to just stop all that realistic? I mean, just take a look at the values people have been conditioned to hold, including the values of so-called "dissidents" like - dare I say - the right-libertarians who have taken over the anti-war movement and parts of the anti-corporate movement (because, you know, corporations aren't the "real capitalism" that they promote). We worship money. We worship gold. We worship private property. We worship "stuff". We care so much about shit that's only going to give us the illusion of happiness and satisfaction. We don't care about others the way we care about our "stuff", it seems like. If there's any place where that attitude is most apparent, it was right over there on Wall Street.

Soon afterwards, the police set up barricades all around us. Wall Street was blocked off completely. Just shut down. We were told that "location 1" on the map that was given to us when we first arrived was changed because we would be risking arrest if we marched over there. In response, we retreated into the park and the sidewalk outside the Museum, where we gathered into a bunch and chanted, "No justice, no peace, FUCK CORPORATE GREED," and, "This is what hypocrisy looks like," as we pointed towards the office buildings where the corporate fatcats lurk on weekdays.

A short time later, the organizers got most of the demonstrators together to hear speeches by each one. As usual, the talks were mostly the same idea expressed ten different ways. I spent that time at the open mic in the park where David was speaking on money and debt. Turns out debt is what this entire economy is based on and has been since the 1600's. Talk about an "ouch".

The person who spoke after David was also someone of note. He spoke about how these movements, those being the anti-war movement, the anti-capitalist movement, the anti-corporate movement, the anti-state movement, the environmental movement, etc. are too full of privileged people who are too afraid of giving up their privilege in order to make an impact. The only way that a movement will ever succeed is if people make real sacrifices. Now, he wasn't talking about "sacrifice" as in "staying overnight in jail" but actual sacrifice. Do what needs to be done regardless of what happens to you. Do whatever you can to leave a dent in the system. Don't just base your "activism" on little itty bitty changes to lifestyle, but fight.

Finally, it was time to march down the street. Since Wall Street had been completely shut down by the police, we had to move to Liberty Plaza. It was still surreal. Cops were watching us from the blockaded street. We all shouted, "Who are you protecting?" and, "This is what a police state looks like!". To add, the skies were gray and rain seemed to be on the way as well.

We poured into Liberty Plaza still chanting and shouting. The police were vultures, standing all around the perimeter of the park. I stood on a stone bench with others who were holding flags. I didn't really care who saw me since comrades were right there in case something happened.

I was approached by a journalist who identified himself as an Argentine who works for French media. I told him the reason why we were out here protesting, that Wall Street is the central of global corporate greed. He asked me if I was staying overnight. I told him I wasn't since I have college obligations. He informed me that the demonstrators wouldn't be able to stay on the actual Wall Street since the entire street was to remain barricaded.

Later, I was interviewed by a guy from Political Fail Blog. He asked me what I would like to see happen. So I told him I want to see the capitalist system abolished, the rich's privilege revoked, and the state dissolve. He asked me again, what would I like to see happen in regards to this event. I said I hope that this event is able to raise awareness to others about how shitty the system really is, especially considering how Americans in particular happen to be very apathetic in regards to political and social action. Just the sheer unity of the demonstration should be enough to encourage people to do something.

Unfortunately, I couldn't stay and camp out overnight. I walked back to the subway to get to Penn Station and go back to Baltimore. As I left I saw that the police were still there, still guarding every corner of the street as well as that precious bull.

Here is the article from AP in which I'm quoted. My name is incorrectly given as "Julia River-Hitt" though (at least they got the "Julia" and "22-year old philosophy student" right). I'll upload the videos I took once fuckbook stops being idiotic and takes less than an hour to upload a 1:30-minute video.

I read online that the actions today were even bigger. Wall St. was shut down! How I wish I was able to stay. Anyway, stay strong comrades.

Senior Project Brainstorm (Economics, Epistemology, and Social Relations)

2011-09-16T15:50:00.009-04:00

Today I was able to get the copy of Georg Simmel's The Philosophy of Money which I had ordered off the internet a few weeks ago. Now I have something to read on the bus when I go to NYC tomorrow.

Since my background is in political and economic philosophy, I'm thinking about doing my senior thesis on the way in which the economy we live in (that being a profit-driven capitalist system that thrives off of consumerism) effects our epistemological views as well as our social relations with others and the natural world. I would use Simmel, David Graeber's new book on money and debt, and, of course, Marx's Capital (fetishism of commodities, etc.) as sources but I'd also like to get all different views on the subject.

In the "Mutualism" group on Facebook I asked whether or not a mutualist market economy (as opposed to a capitalist one) would change people's consciousnesses for the better, and, while a capitalist system clearly fucks up people's relations with each other, would a mutualist system improve those ways in which we relate to each other (since mutualism, unlike capitalism, emphasizes cooperation and reciprocity)? Most of them said yes, it might just change our social relations for the better, since we would be dealing with others on a fair and equal basis. I know that market economies get a bad rap when it comes to their effects on human relations, but I don't think that always has to be the case.

I'd look at anti-market-anti-capitalist views, pro-market-anti-capitalist views, and pro-capitalist-pro-market views to get a well-rounded understanding. (Did I mention this paper has to be something like 40 pages?) Of course, this won't be for a while so I have time to do research and think up exactly what I want to do.

Institutional Roles and Responsibility

2011-09-13T16:17:00.017-04:00

We talked about Zimbardo's prison experiment in my experimental ethics class today and how the participants, who were otherwise "good kids", turned into tyrants as soon as they were given the role of prison guards. The instructor even read excerpts from a diary by one of the college kids who took up the role of a guard. The entry from Day #1 said,"..... I am a pacifist...."; the entry from Day #5 went on about giving a harsh punishment to a prisoner who was a "troublemaker".

Most of the time, when you take a course on ethics in college, what's emphasized is what the individual does. In some respects I can understand (I mean, there's always going to be situations where we share in some degree of responsibility over what's happening), but personally I think it's much more important to look at the external factors which influence us to do what we do.

So, for example (and you knew this was coming), if I'm given the role of a rent-a-cop in a stateless capitalist/"voluntaryist" society, is me claiming to adhere to the sacred non-aggression principle enough to prevent me from abusing the power I'm given over the people the boss tells me to "watch"? To what extent does the situation I'm placed in determine how I act?

Then again, the argument can be used in a way to vindicate everyone from any kind of moral responsibility. Let's say the CEO of a company that pollutes nature and exploits other human beings is really a good person at heart but works in a system where profit is the bottom line and is thus compelled to forget any values he has in order to maintain his position within the system; does that mean he should be exempt from any kind of moral responsibility for his actions because it "wasn't really him" but the overall system which caused him to do those things? I hear this argument a lot from pacifists who assume the only strategy you need to take to ensure justice is "drain" the powerful without fighting them head-on; that you can't fight the corporations or politicians because they only do what they do because of the overall system. Obviously, there's truth to this, but I'm not buying the "let the CEOs off the hook" thing 100%.

What do you think? Are people morally responsible for their actions if they did what they did simply due to the roles they were given? To what extent does "the situation" or "your role" outweigh your responsibility (and vice-versa)?

Ten Years Later

2011-09-11T12:46:00.007-04:00

Ten years ago, the violence that the US perpetrates all over the globe finally came back to its shores.

I don't remember where I was exactly when "I heard what happened", and I couldn't really care. What happened that day happens all the time in Palestine, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, the Congo, Colombia (and usually with US backing). It's also worth noting that far more people die as a result of neoliberal economic policies (starvation, workplace-related deaths, suicides brought on by horrid working conditions) than from acts of terrorism committed by guerilla organizations.

It's just sick when remembrance turns into some nationalistic celebration. What's even more disgusting is this constant notion that the US was this good little country that never did anything wrong to any other nation, and thus it was attacked purely out of some irrational, religious-fueled hatred. Baloney. Terrorism is the natural result of empire. Hijackings, bombings, shootings, labor violence, etc. doesn't just grow out of nowhere. If you want to end terrorism then stop terrorizing.

Fun With Greek

2011-09-08T23:24:00.018-04:00

When you study a new language, you discover the way in which certain words are used and the words in which they originated from. If you study Ancient Greek or Latin you'll come across the roots of many of the words we use in English, and may find that the roots of those words give you a whole new insight on the English words they created. And like the person whom I overheard at Red Emma's last weekend who brought up that certain East African languages use the same word for "I" and "we", I am convinced that language may help us get a clearer understanding of a culture and what they value(d).

Here are some of my favorites:

* ἀγορά - We know this word to mean "marketplace" (like, ahem, agorism which originates from this concept of a completely open market) and groups of commodities sold at the market, but it was also used to denote an open area where people would gather, or simply just the gathering of people into an assembly. So its use is both economic and social. Hmmm.

* κοινωνία - This translates as "society" (for instance, my favorite work by the modern Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis is called «Η φαντασιακή θέσμιση της κοινωνίας» The Imaginary Institution of Society) or "community". Now, an adjective with the same stem, Κοινωνικός, translates as "generous" and "sociable".

* οἶκονόμία - Economy. Comes from a combination of the words οἶκος "house" and νόμος which means "law" or "management", so the word "economy" literally implies "house management". Dr. Evergates told me this before I looked it up on Wiktionary.

* ἀρχή - This one is pretty insightful. Not only does it mean "power" or "authority" (hierarchy) but it's also the word for "beginning", "first" (also denoting order).

My name in Ancient Greek is: Ιουλία (pronounced yoo-LEE-a)

In Modern Greek it is: Τζούλια (which is pronounced identical to "Julia")

Modern Greek is a lot different than Ancient, actually, but a good deal of the vocabulary is the same. It's the pronunciation and the articles which are the most unlike each other. I've heard that Modern Greek is easier to learn because it isn't nearly as complicated a language.

I'll add to this list later on. Dr. Evergates told me that she'll have me reading Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek (yay, philosophy major!) in my third semester of the language (I can't graduate until next fall anyway).

UK Judge: Squatters are Good for the City (I Can Feel Hell Freezing Over Right Now)

2011-09-08T14:29:00.002-04:00

Squatters could be good for us all, says judge in empty homes ruling

Squatters are not criminals and could be good for society, a judge has ruled in ordering a London council to make public a list of empty homes in its area.

With police backing, Camden Council argued that disclosing the list risked unleashing a wave of criminal damage, arson, drug-related crime and organised “stripping” of vacant properties.

But Judge Fiona Henderson emphasised that squatters were not law-breakers and said official concerns were outweighed by the “public interest in putting empty properties back into use”.

The tribunal ruling means Camden Council must now comply with a Freedom of Information Act request by Yiannis Voyias of the Advisory Service for Squatters for a list of empty council-managed and private homes in the borough.
Camden’s lawyers argued that disclosure of the list would compromise “the prevention or detection of crime”, while police said there was a link between squatting and a range of crimes, including vandalism, drug use and threatening behaviour. The council said almost all squatting involves criminal damage in breaking in and argued that squatters should not be allowed to “jump the queue” for scarce public housing.

The council also said that the number of squatted properties in Lambeth nearly doubled after a list of long-term empty homes in that borough was made public.

Judge Henderson accepted that disclosure of the list was likely to have “a negative impact on the prevention of crime” and would probably increase the number of properties squatted and “be of use” to organised criminals.

However, emphasising that “squatting is not a crime”, she said there was a lack of evidence that squatters were the source of more anti-social behaviour than rent-paying tenants.

She added: “The tribunal does not consider that any perceived social disadvantage of living next door to squatters, or the costs of eviction of squatters, are matters that the tribunal is entitled to take into consideration since squatting is not illegal”.
While the list would be of use to “professional” squatters — who aim to be as inconspicuous as possible — its disclosure was unlikely to increase the drink or drug-fuelled “opportunistic crime” associated with empty properties, she said.

Mr Voyias argued that making the list public would “rejuvenate the empty homes debate” and promote transparency, accountability and “public understanding”. It would put pressure on the Government to tackle the waste of resources represented by empty property.

Mr Voyias also said that academic researchers, homelessness charities and even English Heritage would benefit from disclosure of the number and location of unoccupied homes.

Ordering Camden to disclose the list, Judge Henderson said: “The tribunal accepts that bringing empty properties back into reuse is a priority for the Government and the council.”

However, she said the argument that squatters will be able to “jump the queue” for housing had “no bearing” on the prevention of crime.

The publication of the list would also “bring buildings back into use sooner and the housing needs of additional people would be met”.

Source

Simply amazing to hear someone who works for the ruling class make this kind of decision.

Return to Baltimore

2011-09-07T23:42:00.009-04:00

I went back to Red Emma's for the first time in months during the weekend. I followed my usual routine: browse the bookshelves for a while, purchase a few books, then sit down with a sandwich and a coffee and start reading, and perhaps chat with a few others. I picked out two books, both of them anthologies, and continued to look around the shelves for an hour. I overheard the person who was co-running the store for that day talk with a visitor at the counter. The visitor was telling him about language and what it says about the social makeup of a culture. For example, the visitor explained that in several languages found in eastern Africa the word "I" is identical to the word "we", so when you say "I" in these languages you are also saying "we". Those kinds of aspects in language, he said, make you wonder about the social values (especially when it comes to things like politics and economics) held by that group or culture.

Though I am fascinated by anthropology, and will admit that I've learned far more about human behavior from reading about the subject than from reading about psychology or sociology, I have never put that much stake in it for anything beyond study. I mean, it gives you facts about human nature and different types of social organization among cultures, but it doesn't give you answers or solutions. For example, you can read about the practices of certain groups of people and get a clear understanding of why economists are dead wrong when they claim that societies would fall apart if, say, most things were held in common (which you can find billions of examples of), but it won't tell you how we in our society can change our social organization to make our society more like theirs. It tells you that our social structures are not universal and that many other cultures do certain things better than we do but it doesn't tell you how to get from here to there. It's just like philosophy in that way; we talk a lot about the dichotomy of what we are vs. what we ought to be, but these ideas don't really seem to be worth the discussion unless there's a way to apply them to our reality.

Hmmm, what do you think?

I left the infoshop with my books a few hours later. By this time, I was all buzzed from the extremely strong coffee that all I wanted to do was wander around downtown aimlessly. I walked over to Mt. Vernon Sq. and sat on a bench under the statue of George washington which peers over the city like some eternal guardian. I read a few passages and poems from one of my books (The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader) and started getting overwhelmed from a mix of the emotion in the text and all the caffeine. The very center of downtown Baltimore is scenically very nice and almost enchanting; it's what that part of the city represents (an island of privilege surrounded by a sea of economic depression) that I can't stand. But I am positive that there will be a time when downtowns will be accessible for all, and homes will just be places to live without any kind of status attached.

I love the city. I'd rather be here than stuck in my dorm all day. Why can't the McDaniel shuttle run every day?

'Silver Circle' Movie (Being Filmed A Few Miles From My Hometown)

2011-09-01T18:58:00.010-04:00

The producer asked me via the Free Keene blog to write a quick post about this, so I did. Here is a quick preview, on location in Manchester, NH.

The biggest issue I take with the "end the Fed" crowd is how they portray the money monopoly as if it's an isolated issue when it's really a part of a much larger issue (that being, the capitalist system in general). Simply going after money monopolies without going after other aspects of the system with the intention of creating some kind of giant change to the system would be the equivalent of trying to overthrow a monarchy simply by assassinating the king's biggest thug; yes, it's something that needs to be done to achieve your end goal, but it's just one aspect of what you need to do when there's a lot more that needs attention. Capitalist bosses need a money monopoly as a way to maintain their control over the working class (especially since, without a centralized currency the working class would be able to create their own means of exchange or economy such as barter notes or gift economies or whatever they decide on). If the Fed was ended tomorrow - without any other kind of mass mobilization from the people from below - the capitalists and their pawns in DC would most likely find some other way of maintaining the monopoly. It's also worth mentioning that the Fed was established as a way to save capitalism from itself. No ruling class wants to keep dealing with all the problems that are inevitable to the capitalist system (which do happen regardless if you believe Marx or not).

I've never understood the hype behind gold and silver. Both metals are, in fact, fiat currencies. God doesn't tell you how much your gold or silver is worth; people prescribe value to each. Plus, the environmental impact of extracting gold and silver is a huge burden on our earth. If gold or silver become the primary currency, you can bet that the mining companies would have a field day extracting more of that stuff from the ground, causing horrid environmental destruction in the process.

I highly doubt that a gold standard would ease other monopolies or end the wars. The US engaged in imperialism while on the gold standard and would continue to do so if the gold standard was brought back. Maybe it would make it very, very tough for the government to pull the economy out of future crises, thus paving the way for some kind of revolutionary activity from us lefties, but I couldn't see a gold standard making capitalism "good" again. But here we go again: "It's never the system that's inherently flawed; it's just the aliens meddling with the system who are causing it to go bad. All we have to do is banish the aliens and then the system will start working like it did before."

Anyway, I hope the film crew finishes their outdoor scenes before the weather changes.

Zinesters

2011-08-31T21:09:00.003-04:00

In one more bit of news, a facebook friend and I are collaborating on articles for a zine that we plan on publishing and distributing around radical centers. So far, we're coming up with articles that debunk the myths that a hierarchical economy means more freedom and a horizontally-organized economy means less. We already have some good stuff thought out.

I told him once it's published he should send me quite a few so I can distribute them in Bmore and DC radical spaces. I also said I'll be willing to send a few copies to a comrade in Keene for him to give out right in the "belly of the beast".

I'll keep everyone updated.

We Meditated in Philosophy Class Today

2011-08-31T20:48:00.003-04:00

This afternoon in PHI 3365 (the Magic, Mysticism, and Philosophy course) we took a few minutes in the middle of class to go outside and meditate. The idea was to find something in nature to concentrate on, and as you took deep breaths you focus on the beauty of whatever that thing is. I chose to focus on a cluster of leaves from the tree near the street, though that picture taken during sunset hardly does it justice.

We were discussing the kinds of paradigms found in Western philosophy and culture, most notably its hierarchical aspects and how we, as products of Western culture, are conditioned to think in such ways. A lot of other cultures, the professor told us, do not have these kinds of hierarchies; not just between people but also in nature as well. Personally, I'm no primitivist and I don't think it's entirely realistic to condition an entire society to think in such a way (I mean, even hunter-gatherers who live on the same level as everything else in nature kill animals for a meal, for example) but it is an interesting premise. A little later, Dr. Jakoby brought up western epistemological framework applied to consumer culture and what it means in a larger context. I responded by mentioning that people in our society tend to define themselves and base their identity on what they own as opposed to who they are as a person, which is the direct result of rampant consumerism. So yeah, consumerism fucks up our consciousnesses quite harshly. Now, Dr. Jakoby knows my views pretty well from the class I took with her last semester and takes interest in them, so I never have a hard time telling her how I feel about certain concepts.

Before class, my friend Melanie and I were having a conversation at GLAR (McDaniel's dining hall) where we did our own critiquing of certain ideals found in Western (particularly American) culture. We were talking about anarchism, and Melanie told me she thinks abolishing private property would be a good idea, because it would cause people to become less greedy for stuff. The fact is, excessive ownership can easily lead to domination (compare and contrast the meditation exercise of being in harmony with everything around us and the idea of being able to dominate everything around us). I posted this already on the Free Keene blog (which is, once again, advocating that town commons be privatized) that absentee landlords are capable of behaving just like the state, as they have total dominance over the property they have entitlements to and are able to point a gun to the head of anyone that's on their property. It's a really shitty thing that I wish people would talk about more often in academic settings.

In other college-related news, my professor in Europe in the 19th Century wants everyone to read all 200 pages of Dickens' Hard Times and write a six-page response in the next few weeks. I get the feeling I'm going to be one of the few people in that class who actually - um - understands the main points of the text. Thanks Proudhon and Marx!

First Day of the Semester

2011-08-30T12:29:00.002-04:00

The classes I had yesterday went pretty well. I had to get up super early (for me, anyways) to catch Dr. Evergates before her first class so she could give me the Greek book. I spent the rest of the morning looking through it and taking notes. Turns out Ancient Greek isn't too hard to understand; it's much easier than the German classes I took in high school (probably because Greek has the same kinds of verb conjugations as German).

The first class I had was Europe In the 19th Century. There's about 25 people in that class and only a handful are history majors/minors. It's a survey course so the topics discussed won't be too in-depth. I noticed how the syllabus says we'll be spending a few weeks talking about industrialization and how it permanently shaped society, including all the new social ideologies that came about because of it. Interesting how the primary textbook and the course packet in that class brings up utopian socialism, marxism, and - yes - anarchism. Let's just hope no one tries to strawman the hell out of them.

The next class was Elementary Logic, which is being taught by one of my advisors. He signed me into the class no problem. The first thing he had us do was explain why we were taking this course. Most classmates admitted that the only reason why they chose this course was to satisfy the "reasoning" requirement that McDaniel makes all students complete. I told everyone that I took a logic class nearly identical to this one back at CSUN, and because I barely passed (my class participation was the only thing that saved me from failing since logic is very, very hard; then again most students do end up failing logic the first time taking it) I needed to take it again as a requirement for my major.

About an hour after that I had a special topics in philosophy course, Magic, Mysticism, and Philosophy. We're going to be talking about shamanism, gnostic forms of the abrahamic religions, vision quests, and how they relate to epistemology and other aspects of philosophy.

My only class (Experimental Ethics with Dr. Maynes) today starts later this afternoon. Can't wait.

Come On Irene

2011-08-27T14:02:00.003-04:00

So I'm back at McDaniel in little ol' Westminster. Hurricane Irene is starting to hit us now. Thank god my dad was able to leave before the storm hit. I'm also pretty thankful that my college has a generator, so if worst comes to worst we'll still have power and internet. I'm sure everyone back home is stocking up on the four Gs: guns, gold, groceries, and generators.

Wouldn't it be funny if the only two places where Irene leaves serious damage are downtown DC and Wall Street? (Then again, activists in the US wouldn't have anywhere to protest.)

Countering the Glenn Beck Rally in Manchester

2011-08-24T22:21:00.008-04:00

In response to the "Restoring Courage" rally by Glenn Beck in Jerusalem, a zionist organization right here in NH called "NH4Israel" held their own rally in Veterans' Memorial Park in Manchester this evening. The whole thing reeked of nationalist garbage and mindless love for the state (US and Israel). My activist buddies from the area and I decided to counter.

At first, the extremely misinformed people at the "courage" rally ignored us. Then we were stopped by a few people from the press (most likely the Union Leader). I told them we were here to remind the people attending this rally what they're showing support for, how I feel it's my responsibility to speak out about US support for Israel and how anti-human it is considering how the taxes I'm being forced to pay are funding it, and how all of us in our group wanted to show support for the Palestinians being killed by US-made weapons.

Things really heated up when this one guy, an admitted Christian zionist, approached us and debated with us for a while. The videos should speak for themselves:

It's just sad how good people can be so suckered into the lies propagated by the media.

But anyway, we got the press we wanted. Garrett Ean from freeconcord.org got some video of us and the rest of the rally. I'm leaving NH tomorrow to head back to school.

Keene

2011-08-21T20:11:00.012-04:00

I spent the most of yesterday in the lovely Keene, NH to finally check this place out. I had never been there before despite living only an hour and a half away, and with all the hype centered around the "Free Keene" movement I thought it was worth a shot. It was a beautiful day and people were everywhere on the sidewalks of Keene. There were also lots of tourists whom you could just tell were from New York or Connecticut just by how they were dressed. When I first arrived at noon, I noticed the weekly anti-war demo out in Central Square. I didn't join them though since I felt a little uneasy doing so.

I wandered around downtown Keene as I waited for my friend Thom. The only things I saw with any kind of political message were the numerous Ron Paul stickers on the road signs. Here I was expecting to see Gadsden or black and gold flags outside every other house, but no. Keene doesn't appear to be a "libertarian" neighborhood the way Newton, Mass is a "Jewish" neighborhood (you'll see more Israeli flags than American ones there, for example). I get the feeling that the locals are mostly non-political and the town itself is centered around the State College, not unusual political ideologies or heterodox economic theories. Wasn't it Lew Rockwell who called Keene the "libertarian capital of the world"? Not sure, but on the surface it didn't seem that way (at least, not during the time I was there). Perhaps this place will be way more active once the primary comes into full swing and the roads really start to fill up with campaign signs and stickers. Yeah, rabid support for politicians makes me puke, but whatev.

Even so, I can't help but wonder what's going to happen to the mainstream libertarian movement in the US if Keene really did become a huge hotspot and all these people choose to move there. Wouldn't that just lead to mainstream libertarian groups and parties becoming less active elsewhere? Not sure.

I caught up with Thom later that day. We talked about the anarchist movement in the US, how sectarian people can be, all the different philosophies we were interested in (turns out both of us have some kind of respect for the primitivists even though we both find them a little nutty), and all sorts of other things. He told me he just doesn't understand the right-libertarian ideology at all. They claim to support having "voluntary authority" or "voluntary hierarchy" - who would willingly choose to be on the bottom of the hierarchy? (Then again, that's a fundamental part of capitalism: "voluntarily" agreeing to sell away your liberty just to survive.) It's also kind of ironic, since one of the reasons why the state still exists is because the people have voluntarily chosen on their own free will to accept the state's authority (I mean, they've been conditioned to, but still).

There isn't too much else to say, but Keene is a hip little place and I may come back during school breaks if I can find any way to get back there.

Random Ramblings

2011-08-20T00:37:00.004-04:00

Something I wonder about is how some forward-thinking individual in Western Europe would have made a case for capitalism 600 years ago during the time of feudalism. Chances are, the person he would have been talking with would have said told him that feudalism is the only system that works, is mandated by God, is rooted in human nature, is the only system that keeps society in order, has always existed in history in some way, and will be around until the end of history. I can only imagine.

.....

I absolutely love it when right-libertarians try to argue that social anarchists are "statists" and not anarchists at all, since a lot of them use violence and force to achieve their ends (which, apparently, is akin to "statism", as the right-libertarians would tell you that any violence equates to statism).

So I tell them, "Would that make capitalist businesses 'statist' as well, since they use violence against people and mother earth all the time?"

And they say, "Corporations are the result of the state. The only reason they do that stuff is because the state exists."

I follow up with, "Yeah, and I could make that same argument as well, that violence from social anarchists is the result of the state. The only reason they engage in violence in the first place is because the state exists."

They'll usually say, "You don't understand. Corporations are violent because the state gives them subsidies. If they weren't getting anything they wouldn't be violent at all."

And I'll tell them, "Uh-huh. And I'm sure the Mafia is a wonderfully peaceful organization since they're not receiving any subsidies from the state."

......

This might earn me some flack but I'll say it anyway: I get really annoyed when I'm talking with authoritarian bolshevik-types (like Maoist Third Worldists) and they keep going on about hypothetical world revolutions which may or may not occur. How about we talk about things we could be doing now to move towards socialist goals? I mean, regardless as to what happens in India or what happens in Mexico, your landlord is still going to come around tomorrow and you're still going to be facing your boss at work (I'm not saying we should ignore third-world struggles, I'm just saying you can do way more about the shit happening in your city than shit happening an ocean elsewhere). When I would go to ANSWER/PSL meetings back when I lived in Los Angeles I remember how most of their talk on activism was just about recruiting people into their party and voting their party members into power, not about helping Susan deal with her landlord or preventing Jose from being unjustly fired by his boss.

I feel the same way about Ron Paul supporters. If you really want to advance liberty (or whatever "liberty" means to you) why the FUCK are you putting all of your eggs in one basket with this guy and spending hours every day campaigning for him? Even if he does get elected, he's not going to be able to end the Fed, go back to the gold standard (since there's not nearly enough gold left on this planet for that to happen), get rid of the CIA, FBI, NASA, and everything else, allow states to secede, and la ta da dee da. Why? Because in order to do that he's going to need the okay from his party and then the House and Senate. He can't wave a magic wand and implement everything he wants to do within days. And even so, if he takes power he'll be working in the same political institutions with the same power structure that exercises force over others. What makes you assume his conscience won't go down the toilet once he's given the role of "the decider"? My friend Nick (who is a left-libertarian) made two videos on youtube explaining why it's a waste of time to vote in the first place. Regardless as to whether or not "Dr. Paul" becomes president, the tax collector is still coming around tomorrow to take more money from you so the state can afford more police, prisons, and military. How about directing your activities towards things we could do aside from putting faith in politicians?

Speaking of which....

.....

Dear Free Staters: for the love of god, PLEASE stop comparing modern-day New Hampshire to Medieval Iceland, Medieval Ireland, Early Pennsylvania, the Wild West, or whatever other "example" you have of stateless capitalism working. You're trying to compare a bunch of Vikings running around Iceland's countryside to a small city like Manchester with 100,000 people whose lives are much more complex. It doesn't make any fucking sense. By your logic, I could base an entire case for anarcho-communism on the fact that hunter-gatherer societies worked, or a case for mutualism based on the fact that Medieval Arab societies had a pretty nice thing going on (they had free markets which didn't charge usury). Yes, there's truth in all those scenarios, but no dice. The question isn't: "Have these systems worked in the past?" but rather: "Can you apply this kind of system to our society as it is and make it work?"

......

I've been feeling really sad this entire summer. I didn't get to visit someone whom I deeply care about (he is very reclusive), my study abroad was canceled since my parents can't afford it, and on top of that everyone around me is angry about the state of the economy right now to the point where every day I'm hearing someone complain about money. But the one thing that keeps my spirits alive is the thought of revolutionary activity, or that I may live to see capitalism collapse in on itself (like Marx predicted) and see a new society emerge. So every time you feel down (like I have been for months and months) remember that you're alive when something may very well happen.

.....

One more thing:

For the trolls who keep attempting to leave comments like: "OMG ur idiocy makes me lol. ur an idiot u don't know shit about politics" realize that the only person's idiocy whom you're exposing is your own. If you have a legit criticism you want to give, then be my guest and say it, but when you rely on attacking your opponent using cheap insults understand that you're not exactly making your point.

And for the record, if you're going to post a quote by a historical or modern-day public figure, make sure you give some context to the quote. The one thing I notice a lot about certain quotes I'm sent is that they lack context.

....

Anyway, I'm off to Keene early in the morning. Comrades and I have a lot to plan.

Bookfair in Providence

2011-08-13T20:09:00.030-04:00

I attended the Foo Fest in Providence in Providence, as many comrades were going to set up tables as part of the mini-bookfair within the festival. I had also been in Providence the previous night to attend a presentation by a CNT member at Libertalia, though I wasn't able to stay overnight in the city. During the presentation, the young man from the CNT told us via the translator (he spoke very little English himself) that the radical union in Spain stands up for the rights of workers without resorting to using the state, as they fully realize that the state is a tool of oppression and not the way to achieve liberty and autonomy.

Most of my time at the bookfair was spent talking to the collective members of Wooden Shoe Books (an infoshop in Philly). I picked out a few books for a friend of mine whom I haven't seen in over a year. One of the members of their collective, who goes by the name of Thom Sy, is a student at Keene State College in the Shire. The two of us had friended each other on Facebook a while ago. Thom was there with his friend T.J. (another social anarchist from Keene whom I also met through Facebook).

As you would figure, I asked Thom and T.J. a great deal about their encounters with the free staters in Keene. Thom told me of one incident involving a young woman having her boobs painted in the middle of Central Square, and how the cops came to give her a ticket for indecent exposure. He said though that the Keeniac's antics are not the biggest problem in Keene by far. In the past few years, he said, the the number of homeless in Keene has increased substantially, most of them former New Yorkers who came to NH because they assume that NH's low rate of unemployment means there's a treasure chest full of jobs waiting for them. But Thom and T.J., like all social anarchists, have a vision of bringing justice for these people; they plan to start a squat project as a way to give the homeless permanent shelter. I said that I wonder how the right-libertarians would react if an anarchist squatter commune were to appear on their turf; I'd guess that they would be okay with it only if the buildings squatted were owned by the state, for if they were owned by an absentee landlord the act of squatting would be viewed as one of "aggression" (even though they themselves live in illegally-parked buses and RVs in order to avoid paying NH's ridiculously high property tax). Thom and T.J. agreed. They implied that the biggest challenge they'd face wouldn't be finding abandoned buildings (there's lots of them in Keene, apparently) but the ideological opposition and lack of support from other townspeople. Keene State College, they said, is mostly made up of rich, preppy white kids from Boston, New York, and Connecticut who are more interested in getting wasted than in participating in solidarity work for those who have been fucked over. Very little awareness of social issues exists on their campus.

We spoke more of the right-libertarians in Keene, and right-libertarian philosophy in general. For us as anarchists, it feels extremely disheartening to see how the whole concept of anarchism has literally been hijacked and twisted by those who appear to be highly misinformed. Not only did they steal the words "anarchist" and "anarchism" but also our symbols (like the circle-A and the diagonal flag), our culture (DIY-culture, zines, the "underground" flavor), and even our history (as they try to prove that all the social anarchists couldn't have been "real" anarchists because they incorporated the use of force against capitalists and the state in order to achieve their goals; just like how they claim "the rioters in Europe aren't anarchists because real anarchists respect and love private property so much and would never, ever destroy it" bullshit). In a sense, it's just like how after the zionists colonized Palestine they proceeded to steal Arab culture after they stole their land; "Israeli hummus", "Israeli tabbouleh", "Israeli hookah", "Israeli keffiyeh". The same thing seems true in this case. And what's even more upsetting for us is how the right-libertarians try to combine traditional anarchist notions of freedom from authority and dominance with capitalist consumer culture and commodity fetishism. "Freedom" means being able to own as much stuff as you possibly can, or to buy up as much raw milk and fireworks as you can. Kind of like what Erich Fromm said about how the system creates a very materialistic view of ourselves to the point where we judge ourselves and others on what we have as opposed to who we are. It seems like a very superficial concept of "freedom" in my view, especially when there's far worse deprivation of freedom (such as people denying you the things you need to survive due to the fact that you can't afford them, as your wages are so low and rent is so high) going on right in our communities. Thom and T.J. also joked about the sheer individualism found in right-libertarian thought, and how they claim to "see only individuals" and not groups made up of individuals. Of course, this kind of thinking is just odd to comprehend. We associate with others and form "collectives" every day, we do things as groups every day. Human beings are not islands.

I told them to invite me to Keene sometime before I go back to college, which is in nine days. They said they'd keep me updated on the squat situation. Let's hope it works out.

Colbert the Survivalist

2011-08-11T18:10:00.002-04:00

This is too funny.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

My father, who is a huge economics buff, is keeping me informed about how global markets are fairing since the market did a nosedive a few days ago. Turns out the price of gold skyrocketed right after it happened, and then went down again the next day.

That's a major flaw of our economy: so much of it revolves around gambling on fictional values (i.e. interest/usury and stocks), and since no economist has a crystal ball and can only make assumptions based on history or "models" you have no idea what your investment will end up bringing you. The solution in the short-term would be to bring manufacturing jobs, which create actual value and not just fictional ones, out of Vietnam and Thailand and back to Maryland and Iowa. Quit subsidizing corporate giants and create favorable conditions for self-employed people and cooperatives. Abolish patens and absentee property ownership bullshit and end attacks on unions. That'll play out much better in the long run than running up to the Upper Valley with a sack full of gold.

Re: Rioting: NOT a Form of Protest or Activism

2011-08-09T16:43:00.011-04:00

Response to this stupid fucking post: http://georgedonnelly.com/opinion/rioting-not-a-form-of-protest-or-activism

People in the UK are rioting because they are fed up with the authority of their political system. This entire event was the natural outcome of years of racism, police brutality, and state policies which hurt the working people. As a self-described "libertarian" you of all people would understand how the rioters in the UK feel. But of course, they're not handling the situation the way that those who strictly adhere to the philosophically lacking "non-aggression principle" would. The fact remains that these youth are sick and tired of being marginalized by a system that doesn't give a shit about them. The people in power refuse to hear their voices so they've done the only thing they can do. When the people take to the streets, they show the state that they are not afraid of it. It's the same when any oppressed group use force directly against their oppressors.

Now let's talk about your solution to the overall problems of statism. Do you honestly believe that the state is going to just shrivel up and die once everyone holds an anti-statist philosophy? It won't. Those on top of a hierarchical power structure will always find a way to re-legitimize themselves in the eyes of the people they rule over. Even if you convinced millions of people to disown the state, that in itself would do little to nothing to weaken the state's power (or the power of the capitalists who control it and who hold every incentive to preserve it). And let's face it: if the whole plan of action is to convince the masses to stop "believing in the state", then in essence you've already won. Congress' approval rating, for example, is the lowest its ever been. Same thing with the president. People overall, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum, are fed up with the way things are - I mean, why do you think 11,000 people have signed up to move to New Hampshire because they think this place is Mises' wet dream?

You said, "People just need to learn how to organize better. With organization, dedication and continual effort, comes success. It has been done, is being done now and will continue to be done."

I notice how you didn't give any kind of strategy beyond that. So people get "organized" - now what? What kinds of actions do you propose people take to fight the system? Do you think they should all move to NH if they can no longer take the oppressive system any longer, as if every single one of them has the information, resources, and will to do so? Do you advise that they run around downtown Keene naked and scream like two-year olds once the cops grab them, and then post the video recording on YouTube to get all the sympathy votes? That's a joke. You speak of no other solution to these problems except ones which, judging from history, have no chance of eroding the iron grip that the state and its masters have.

(And trust me, if the Keeniacs were doing what they do to the Keene police - the "civ-dis"- to the police in cities like Boston or Philly, their asses would have been brutalized by now. Police in towns of less than 30,000 people like Keene are easy to take action against, because they have nothing to do in the first place.)

I think it's safe to add, your words show an example of why no one takes "anarcho"-capitalists and "voluntaryists" seriously: your views are so far removed from the current reality that no one has any good reason to take you seriously (especially when you present yourselves as all deep and philosophical when nothing you say has any basis in history or reality). When you expect everyone to just buy into your fantasies of a stateless capitalist utopia (and then denounce them as "statists" if they don't) without providing any solid empirical evidence as to how or why your vision would lead to a better society but just assumptions, you set yourself up for mockery. Face it, the state will not "evolve out of existence"; it needs to be challenged head-on (and in more ways than just smoking pot in the town common and refusing arrest once you're stopped).

You said, "Your preventive aggression concept is no different from the idea of preventive war-making that has the people of Iraq in a terrible bind. You should know better."

Are you serious? Are you really that up to your eyeballs in shit that you truly believe resisting an unjust and tyrannical system is the equivalent of committing genocide against people to take control of their natural resources? The concept that you use is a textbook example of a false analogy: A uses force to accomplish its goals; B uses force to accomplish its goals; therefore, the use of force by both A and B are identical. Would you say that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising or Nat Turner's Rebellion were on the same level as US imperialism? Of course not. Resistance against your enemy is not the same as a deliberate act of mass-murder for the sole reason of making profit and expanding power. Furthermore, my original argument wasn't advocating pre-emptive attacks; it was advocating the use of a lesser act of force to end a bigger act of force. Remember that resistance is self-defense, something not even adherents to the NAP disapprove of. Claiming that wars and genocide are on-par with the acts of the rioters is a fucking stupid thing to say and makes you look like a raving looney.

History shows us that "peaceful evolution" has little to no example of working, and I would like you to provide me an example of where it has. A 100% non-violent revolution without any use of force whatsoever just isn't going to work. Any time you call for great social and political change, you're going to need some use of force, even if it's just things like workplace expropriations, general strikes, or small rebellions against arms of the state. When evaluating whether or not the use of force is justified, think of it this way: would you be morally right for using some kind of force if your action would put an end to a greater use of force that was being committed against you and others around you? I would think so, and I'm sure most of my buddies in philosophy class would say so.

As far as I'm concerned, your contempt for these people seems like it has less to do with aggression and far more to do with your and your propertarian buddies trying to redefine anarchism. You hate the fact that anarchism has a history of full-blown resistance (much of it involving what you would define as "force"), and the fact that many of anarchism's theorists advocated violent means as a tactic to fight against the authority of state (and capitalism). Even some individualist anarchists advocated for some kind of insurrectionary activity. But the fact is, you can't redefine established social philosophies and you can't strip away at history. Comrades fight now in the UK as they fight in Greece, Belarus, Mexico, and in Chile as they fought in Ukraine, Argentina, Catalonia, and - gasp! - the U$A.

I'm not saying violence is a one-size-fits-all solution, and I would never advocate violent acts as a first resort, but in some cases I just don't see any other way, especially when "talking" continually falls on deaf ears.

So anyway, have fun shoving your cell phone cameras in the faces of the Manchester PD with your free stater buddies all while denouncing actual anti-state activities in Europe. I'm sure if the police in any town in NH were really as bad as you and the Keeniacs make them out to be, you'd be on the streets rioting as well.

30,000 Blog Views!

2011-08-07T14:14:00.005-04:00

Since Saffo did a similar post, I thought I'd do one too. I've had this blog since my last semester of high school, but Blogger didn't start counting stats until last year sometime (and I had no idea you could check your blog's stats until my friend DL told me of such). So, since then I've reached over 30,000 views.

My five most popular posts are:

Wikileaks, Greece, and Political Lies - 1,732 pageviews (most likely from an influx of people arriving at the post from googling 'wikileaks greece')

"60 Minutes" Reports on Jerusalem- 1,280 pageviews

Message From Comrades In Egypt - 916 pageviews

"But It's Not Going To Work!" - 580 pageviews

What If Free Keene Were "Socialist Anarchists"? - 357 pageviews

Popular search keywords include: 'wikileaks greece', 'green terror meme', 'julia riber pitt', 'salwa bugaighis', 'anarchism in egypt', 'rachel marcuse', 'red emma's', and 'rand paul is awful'

Thanks to everyone who reads and comments.

Media Reform Protest in Boston

2011-08-05T12:21:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I spent most of the day in Boston. The first place I headed was, as you would expect, a small, impromptu political demonstration in front of the Massachusetts State House (near Boston Common). This time the focus was on media reform and against the amount of domination Rupert Murdoch has in the mainstream media. There's a few groups in Boston which are focused on putting an end to corporate monopolization of the media.

My friend, Michael Borkson, took this video of the demonstration.

It's just amazing, how far removed the mainstream news is from actual news. Tabloid garbage like Casey Anthony gets far more press on CNN and Faux than the famine in Somalia or the tragedy in Norway (or the wars, or the economy). The problem is, independent media is usually suppressed by these corporate monopolies, so it can only reach so many people by itself. Hopefully though, more people will start getting their information from independent sources as opposed to mainstream ones.

Help Out AK Press!

2011-08-03T17:42:00.003-04:00

The anarchist book publisher is asking comrades to help them out, as they do not have close to the amount of resources that corporate publishers do and rely a lot on volunteers to publicize their works. Here is a list of suggestions for helping their titles reach a larger portion of the population (from the AK Press blog):

5 Easy Ways You (Yes, You) Can Help AK Press:

1. Review AK books online:
Are you an Amazon.com customer? We won’t judge! Write Amazon reviews or make Amazon reading lists of AK Press books you’ve read and enjoyed—this helps increase our online visibility and makes it more likely that someone will stumble onto (and buy) one of our books that they might really enjoy. Are you on Goodreads? Do you have your own blog? Anywhere you can review our books online is a great help. And if you don’t mind sending us a copy of your review (or pointing us to it online), we’d love to see what you have to say!

2. Talk AK up around your town:
Do your local library and your town’s bookstore have our books? Stop by and ask—and maybe even drop off a copy of our catalog (we’ll send you catalogs, just ask!). Do you know of a coffee shop, food co-op, etc. that would be a good home for a stack of AK Press catalogs? Let us know and we’ll send you some to put out there! Is there a local publication where you could publish a review one of our books? Drop us a line and we’ll send you a review copy!

3. Get AK into your school:
If you’re in school, you have a number of unique opportunities to help us out—and a built-in audience! Ask your school library to order AK Press books. Show your favorite AK Press titles to professors who might be interested in using them for future course readings (they can contact us to get a copy to look over!). Write reviews of our books in your school’s newspaper. Talk to academic departments or student organizations about bringing in an AK Press author as a speaker. Use that coveted student organization funding to start up a reading group, lending library, or infoshop! The list is almost endless…

4. Become an AK tabler, or start your own distro:
Do you attend local shows, conferences, or political events that might benefit from a table of AK Press books? Do you go on tour with your band? We’d be thrilled to set you up with a wholesale account, talk you through the ordering process as much as you like, and help you spread the word about the events where you will be tabling. Not quite ready for wholesale ordering? Just let us know what events you’ll be attending, and we can send you some freebies (catalogs & stickers) to distribute.

5. Start a reading/study group:
Even small-scale outreach helps! Could you round up a group of friends, or start up a reading group as part of your political organization, or hell, even start a virtual reading group online? Put in a group order for an AK Press book (or one of our distributed titles) and we’ll give you our reading group discount! We’re also happy to suggest relevant titles if you have a particular topic of study in mind.

I'm going to try and help them out once I get back to Baltimore (they have an office there). A few AK titles in the Hoover Library couldn't hurt either. My friends Sarina, Hilary, and Dr. Leahy could help me out with this as well.

Feminist's Response to Ridley's Videos

2011-08-03T14:54:00.004-04:00

Youtuber NuclearNight (now known on youtube as "iremythpurr") made a video response to Ridley's videos of our protest at Planned Parenthood last week. She makes some damn good points.

I highly doubt Ridley was trying to be malicious though. He just comes across as someone holding the usual "sense of entitlement". The people who made remarks in the comment section of his video, however, were another story (but youtube comments aren't exactly academic journal material anyway, so yeah).

No State Solution in Gaza (by Libcom.org)

2011-08-02T10:59:00.002-04:00

I am posting this Article because to many "anarchists" embrace nationalist and state solutions.. and end up being groupies for Socialist parties, Marxists and arab nationalists..

Anarchists are Internationalists, we reject the state, any state, we reject nationalism and we reject any government. Anarchists are social revolutionaries who seek a Stateless, Classless, Voluntary, Co-Operative Federation of decentralized communes based upon social-ownership, individual liberty and autonomous self-management of social and economic life. The problem is that almost the entire "left", including some Anarchists, is completely unaware of Anarchism's easily understood, and formed, structural alternatives of the Catalyst group, anarchist concensus, and the mass-Commune.
http://www.a-revolt.org/Code/introduction_anarchism.html
so stop being Groupies (and useful idiots) to these marxist parties and nationalists.. and be an anarchist..

No state solution in Gaza by Libcom.org
http://libcom.org/library/no-state-solution-gaza

Statement distributed by the Manchester and Sheffield Anarchist Federation groups on the conflict in Gaza, in solidarity with the victims of the conflict, and for internationalism.

One thing is absolutely clear about the current situation in Gaza: the Israeli state is committing atrocities which must end immediately. With hundreds dead and thousands wounded, it has become increasingly clear that the aim of the military operation, which has been in the planning stages since the signing of the original ceasefire in June, is to break Hamas completely. The attack follows the crippling blockade throughout the supposed ‘ceasefire’, which has destroyed the livelihoods of Gazans, ruined the civilian infrastructure and created a humanitarian disaster which anyone with an ounce of humanity would seek an end to.

But that's not all there is to say about the situation. On both sides of the conflict, the idea that opposing Israel has to mean supporting Hamas and its ‘resistance’ movement is worryingly common. We totally reject this argument. Just like any other set of rulers, Hamas, like all the other major Palestinian factions, are happy and willing to sacrifice ordinary Palestinians to increase their power. This isn’t some vague theoretical point – for a period recently most deaths in Gaza were a result of fighting between Hamas and Fatah. The ‘choices’ offered to ordinary Palestinian people are between Islamist gangsters (Hamas, Islamic Jihad) or nationalist gangsters (Fatah, Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigades). These groups have shown their willingness to attack working-class attempts to improve their living conditions, seizing union offices, kidnapping prominent trade unionists, and breaking strikes. One spectacular example is the attack on Palestine Workers Radio by Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, for “stoking internal conflicts”. Clearly, a “free Palestine” under the control of any of these groups would be nothing of the sort.

As anarchists, we are internationalists, opposing the idea that the rulers and ruled within a nation have any interests in common. Therefore, anarchists reject Palestinian nationalism just as we reject Israeli nationalism (Zionism). Ethnicity does not grant “rights” to lands, which require the state to enforce them. People, on the other hand, have a right to having their human needs met, and should be able to live where they choose, freely.

Therefore, against the divisions and false choices set up by nationalism, we fully support the ordinary inhabitants of Gaza and Israel against state warfare – not because of their nationality, ethnicity, or religion, but simply because they're real living, feeling, thinking, suffering, struggling human beings. And this support has to mean total hostility to all those who would oppress and exploit them –the Israeli state and the Western governments and corporations that supply it with weapons, but also any other capitalist factions who seek to use ordinary working-class Palestinians as pawns in their power struggles.

The only real solution is one which is collective, based on the fact that as a class, globally, we ultimately have nothing but our ability to work for others, and everything to gain in ending this system – capitalism – and the states and wars it needs .

That this seems like a “difficult” solution does not stop it from being the right one. Any “solution” that means endless cycles of conflict, which is what nationalism represents, is no solution at all. And if that is the case, the fact that it is “easier” is irrelevant. There are sectors of Palestinian society which are not dominated by the would-be rulers – protests organised by village committees in the West Bank for instance. These deserve our support. As do those in Israel who refuse to fight, and who resist the war. But not the groups who call on Palestinians to be slaughtered on their behalf by one of the most advanced armies in the world, and who wilfully attack civilians on the other side of the border.

Neither one state nor two states, but no states
Whoever dies, Hamas and the Israeli state win

Couldn't have said it better myself. That's one of the reasons why I embraced anarchism two years ago; I couldn't help but notice how the bolshevik-style activist groups I used to work with were incredibly nationalistic. They weren't nationalists for the US or other imperialist states, of course, but they certainly were extremely nationalistic towards what they deemed as "anti-imperialist" states. That same irrational love for the state which binds so many Americans to supporting wars and other forms of oppression carried out by the US and its corporate masters is the same love that nationalists of all sorts have for whatever state(s) they are loyal to. It's only when you realize that the hierarchy remains the same no matter who is on top that you begin to wake up from your delusional fantasy.

Fall 2011 Courses

2011-07-31T15:02:00.007-04:00

This is what I'm going to take once back in school:

- HIS 2219 (19th Century Europe): MWF 11:30-12:30

- PHI 2233 (Elementary Logic): MWF 12:40-1:40 (Haven't officially registered, but my advisor, who is teaching the course, said he'd save me a spot.)

- PHI 3365 (Magic, Mysticism, and Philosophy): MWF 2:20-3:50

- PHI 2265 (Special Topics in Philosophy: Experimental Ethics): TR 2:40-4:10

- GRK 1101 (Elementary Greek): TBA

-Thesis in Philosophy (????????)

(For the record, I would be learning Attic or Koine Greek, not the Greek that's spoken today. So after a few courses I'd essentially be able to read Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sophocles, Plutarch, and the Bible but not any of the blogs to come out of Exarchia.)

I have no idea how my senior thesis is supposed to go. I already have a few different topics in mind (one is about how radical philosophy shaped similar student movements during the 1960's, like the Situationist Internationale) but I have no idea if I can officially get started on it or not. I'm actually thinking about doing some kind of independent study with Dr. Leahy on radical political philosophy during the spring, but I'd need to see if that would technically count as a philosophy credit or not.

I still need to figure out how I can graduate by next spring. Having this much coursework in such a short amount of time is going to suck.

Three Dead, 30 Wounded in Squatter Eviction Clash (Argentina)

2011-07-29T21:43:00.003-04:00

From feartosleep:

Argentine officials say three people have been killed and 30 wounded during a clash that erupted when police evicted about 700 squatters from an agricultural company’s property.

Thursday’s violence in Jujuy province involved unemployed and homeless families squatting on land owned by Ledesma. The company is a leading producer of sugar, paper and fruit juice.

Hospital director Roberto Maizel says one police officer and two squatters died. He says 11 other officers suffered gunshot wounds.

Maizel says the squatters were organized by a group that advocates for Argentina’s jobless and landless. Activists responded to the eviction by breaking windows and painting graffiti on the provincial government’s offices in Buenos Aires.

This is how we could describe global capitalism in a nutshell: all of your rights end where a landlord's so-called "rights" begin. The squatters had every moral reason to protect their homes from the state and its capitalist masters. I give them my full support.

Sunday's Protest for Planned Parenthood (Concord)

2011-07-26T19:16:00.001-04:00

On Sunday, I joined other activists from New Hampshire in protesting the removal of state funds from Planned Parenthood. Though you may think this is a bit of a contradiction for an anti-statist to be protesting over the lack of taxpayer funding, the fact is that health services are being cut before an alternative has been set, which ultimately leaves many people to go without (it should also be worth asking why there are only two choices, taxation or deprivation, in this to begin with, but such a thing would take a long, complicated explanation). It's also worth noting that if reckless state spending is the issue, cutting the massive military budget, US aid to Israel, or corporate welfare would be a far better place to start than cutting the things others are dependent on. It's just more evidence that the state does not and will never work favorably for the majority of people it rules over.

Already, when I arrived at the demonstration, everyone was focused on the presence of Dave Ridley (the free stater who does the Ridley Report on youtube where he goes around to various events in NH and captures them on camera). He approached some of the activists; they asked him not to record them. He approached my friend Dan, and Dan gave him a pretty good response to his questions. I butted in, asking him a hypothetical question about what he would say if working people felt as though the removal of services they depend on constituted an act of aggression against them (since he is very much in to the whole "anti-aggression" stance and, like me, regards taxation as a form of such).

Here is the video Ridley took of us:

Compare with the raw footage I took at the same time (always remember, when someone records you, you record them):

After Ridley left, I took my sign which read "CUT WARS NOT OUR HEALTH" to the sidewalk. I talked to the other activists in attendance, who were mostly anarcha-feminist types from the surrounding area. One of them told me all sorts of funky statistics on women's health, stating that if "pro-life" means preventing abortions, then Planned Parenthood is the most pro-life organization out there since they do more to prevent abortions by providing birth control and educational resources than most of the self-proclaimed "pro-life" organizations do.

Our rally didn't really get any coverage from the mainstream press in NH, but we were featured in an article on FreeConcord.org (along with Ridley's videos, of course). I just think it's weird how the free staters in Concord and elsewhere write as if they had no idea that residents of NH who are dependent on state-provided services exist, as if the entire population concentrated in this set of borders is too "libertarian-minded" to resort to using the state. But I digress.

Providence, RI Solidarity for Pelican Bay Prisoners

2011-07-21T23:58:00.006-04:00

We held a solidarity demonstration in downtown Providence for the prisoners on hunger strike at the Pelican Bay prison. A fairly large group of local activists turned out to let the prisoners know they are not alone in their efforts for dignity.

A common theme which came up when talking with the other activists was the cruelty of the prison system and how the biggest victims are always those from marginalized populations (the poor, ethnic minorities, immigrants). In California - and I remember watching documentaries on this when I lived in LA a few years ago - people can be thrown in jail for the rest of their lives for petty drug offenses (like selling crack in order to pay rent to parasitic landlords) due to the "three strikes" law. I actually remember the video we watched about the California prison system in Intro to Sociology at CSUN: a female prison warden was interviewed about the flaws in the legal system, and she admitted that if she had known what the "three strikes" law would have lead to (that being, overcrowded prisons with horrid conditions) she would have never voted for it.

Our demonstration had cops watching us from every angle. I suspect their large presence was due to the fact that our rally was about the prison system. Thankfully, our confrontations didn't result in anything too drastic.

Later, we moved the rally from outside the Federal Building to the maximum security prison in Cranston. The thing looks like a castle surrounded in barbed wire. At first, we stood on the other side of the street, but then decided to cross over to the prison lawn. As soon as we set everything up, a cop came out and told us to get off the grass; it's the prison's private property and they don't want a demonstration anywhere near them. We retreated to the sidewalk where we spent the next hour.

The pigs were even worse outside the prison than they had been at the Federal Building. Men in suits came up to some of the activists and asked them all sorts of questions about why they were demonstrating and why they're against prisons. Way across the grass, behind the prison fence, cops were recording us. It made me wonder, if these cops are allowed to record us, why is it illegal for us to record them?

Fire to the prisons!

(A good resource for updates on the prisoners' strike: BreakTheChains.info)

Analysis of Alex Jones and the "NWO" Conspiracy

2011-07-18T12:14:00.002-04:00

My buddy, the Maoist Rebel from Maoist Rebel News, did a very good analysis from a hegelian/marxist viewpoint on Alex Jones and his bullshit conspiracy theories. Take a watch.

The thing is, Alex Jones, his cult-like followers, and those with similar views don't see the system for what it is, as they've been conditioned to believe that the system is supposed to work a certain way and in doing so results in all sorts of freedoms and prosperity for everyone. When the system doesn't work that way, they assume it's because of some alien - some "other" - deliberately fucking the system up. Maoist Rebel explains it much better.

Messages for Those in Prison

2011-07-17T22:15:00.005-04:00

I started writing to Greek political prisoners yesterday. I told my friends, this anniversary of the 1936 Spanish Revolution should be spent remembering those who fought for freedom and those who continue to do so.

Addresses of the prisoners can be found here. In order to address an international letter to Greece, simply write GREECE in all capital letters on the end of the address. The address can be written in English or phonetically using the Latin script. I believe it costs 94 cents to mail a letter to Greece.

Solidarity transcends borders. We should do what we can to support our comrades overseas and let them know they are not alone.

International Land Grab

2011-07-11T07:34:00.003-04:00

TheFreeOnline:

A massive international land grab is now underway as investors and national governments buy up millions of acres of farmlands in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It amounts to an unprecedented and novel set of enclosures of worldwide land, much of it customary land that rural communities use and manage collectively.

Hundreds of millions of rural poor people rely upon the land for their families’ food, water and material — but they don’t have formal property rights in the land. Those rights typically belong to the government, which is authorizing the sale of “unowned” lands or “wastelands” to investors, who will then use the land for market-based farming or biofuels production.

The implications for global hunger and poverty are enormous. Instead of commoners having local authority to grow and harvest their own food, they are being thrown off the land so that large multinational corporations and investors can feed their own countries or make a speculative killing on the world land market. A commons is converted into a market, with all the attendant pathologies.

The 2008 financial crisis and the recent round of rising food prices on world markets have spurred much of the interest in buying up arable lands in poor countries. Food-insecure countries figure they should take care of their own future even if it means depriving commoners in poor nations thousands of miles away. So Saudi Arabia is spending $1 billion for 700,000 hectares of land in Africa for rice cultivation. South Korea is buying up 700,000 hectares of African land as well. India is assembling investment pools to buy up farmlands.

These are some of the disturbing facts to be found in Liz Alden Wily’s remarkable report, “The Tragedy of Public Lands: The Fate of the Commons Under Global Commercial Pressure,” released by the International Land Coalition in January 2011.

Taking the commons by force - where does this sound familiar?

Let it not slip our minds that lands were always better off when held in common.

Maybe This Will Come In Handy For Later

2011-07-08T00:00:00.003-04:00

Being stuck at home for the past few days has made me think about what I should be doing in the next year or so to ensure that my life works out the way I want it to.

Since my parents cancelled my study abroad plans, I'm going to have to go back to Maryland in the fall. According to my program evaluation, I only need 38 more credits - which comes out to nine classes and my senior thesis - before I can graduate. If I can do five classes this semester including a few independent studies and another Jan Term I could possibly be done my the spring. I also asked a friend of mine from Red Emma's if I could join their cooperative and help out. I need to start working again.

So I've given a lot of thought as to where I want to live after I graduate, most likely New York, Boston, or Providence - or at least a city in the northeast where a lot of comrades reside (probably not Baltimore though, can't see myself actually living there). The grad schools I'm looking at are in or around all of those cities.

Yay for me.

Worker Co-operatives Working Quite Well in the UK

2011-07-05T01:47:00.003-04:00

From The Guardian:

Co-operative sector has grown by more than 25% since credit crunch – report
• Turnover in 2010 of £16.1bn
• Membership of groups nearing 10 million

From Scottish cyclists to Yorkshire farmers, thousands of Britons have turned their back on dog-eat-dog capitalism and opted to do things for themselves, according to a new report which shows the turnover of co-operatives has grown by more than 25% since the credit crunch.

Ed Mayo, the secretary general of Co-operatives UK, which represents the sector, said: "We've seen lots of new-start co-operatives emerge, which reflects a DIY type of culture."

Until recently, the co-operative was regarded as an outmoded model. But since the limits of shareholder capitalism were brutally exposed in the recession, their all-in-it-together approach has won new converts.

"One of the things that comes out of the credit crunch is: how do we avoid this lemming effect of everyone doing exactly the same thing?" said Mayo.

The annual report from Co-operatives UK, to be published this week, shows that while big players such as the John Lewis Partnership and the Co-operative Group have been performing strongly, a new generation of smaller, grassroots organisations has also grown up.

Co-operatives UK highlights the examples of Seven Hill Farmers, a group of lamb producers on the North York Moors who banded together after the foot-and-mouth disease crisis to get a better price for their products, and Energy4All, which works to establish community-owned windfarms to generate local energy.

Villagers are taking over local shops and pubs to rescue them from closure; football fans are setting up their own clubs in an effort to return the sport to its roots; and credit unions are stepping in where the big banks fear to tread. Between them, Britain's co-operatives now have almost 10 million members, and their turnover in 2010 was £16.1bn, up from less than £13bn in 2008.

Ged Holmyard of the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-operative, which was founded in the 1970s and now owns a chain of stores, says worker ownership creates a special kind of culture.

"From the start, the ideology of our founders was that a workers' co-operative was an intrinsically good thing," he says. "It gives everyone a stake in the business." If the shops have had a good year, every employee in the company gets the same cash bonus, and the ratio between the highest- and lowest-paid workers is five to one – much lower than in most firms.

Some MPs, including Chuka Umunna from the Treasury select committee, are urging George Osborne to consider a mutual model for bailed-out bank Northern Rock, which the chancellor plans to put up for sale before the end of the year.

Mayo, who recently wrote a report for the government on the possibility of mutualising the Post Office, said: "it's been really disappointing on Northern Rock that they haven't seen the wider benefits of a co-operative."

Proof that firms with a horizontal model of organization can work in reality.

Another "Independence Day" (Sigh)

2011-07-04T18:39:00.005-04:00

Fourth of July is just eye-rolling. Today in Boston the T was crowded with people dressed in the most looney red, white, and blue outfits you could imagine (think the excessive way people were dressed during the Bruins parade but with different colors) all to pay tribute to the "independence" of their rulers. As if replacing one oppressor with another is a cause for celebration. But I digress.

If that sounds incredibly cynical, I'll move on.

In my Philosophy Around the World class from last semester we touched on the idea of nationalism vs. cosmopolitanism. I remember asking the question as to what constitutes a "nation" considering how national borders are always changing and "national identity" changes with them. Every set of political borders that exist in the world today are completely artificial. There is no god (whether you believe in God or not) who draws lines in the dirt and says, "Okay, everything to this side is the United States, everything to this side is Mexico." No. Other students pointed out that borders are slowly being erased as technology advances and enables us to connect with others thousands of miles away. In all, I think that we need to start moving beyond the notion that we are all "American" and start thinking of ourselves as citizens of the world... Take up a more internationalist approach to our understandings. Those who remain nationalistic need to start realizing that the USA isn't going to be "Number 1" in the world for much longer, maybe even as soon as within 30 years. Internationalism is going to happen sooner than later.

The only thing I want to see on the Fourth of July barbecue is a nationalist flag.

Should Greece Default?

2011-07-03T03:11:00.005-04:00

Awesome interview with Dr. Harvey. I met him in Baltimore last year and he's amazing.

I'm still upset I'm not going to Greece anymore, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop following the situation there.

.....

2011-06-29T20:09:00.002-04:00

So now my parents are telling me I can't study abroad, not because of the riots all over Greece but because "we don't have the money". They just contacted McDaniel the other day and told them I'm coming back for good next semester. I'm disappointed as hell.

The only reason we (allegedly) don't have the money is because my parents lost hundreds of thousands of dollars when the stock market crashed in 2008. Playing stocks is basically a form of gambling.

I'm just so angry right now I don't even know what to say.

Libertalia Sunday

2011-06-26T22:22:00.019-04:00

When everyone else was coming home from PorcFest, I headed down to Providence, RI for an open house at the new radical space. Libertalia, as it's called, is located on the second floor of the Providence Jobs With Justice building, a short walk from downtown.

As I was taking the commuter rail down to Providence, I was struck by the sight of all the abandoned buildings adjacent to the railway. There were so many of them, especially in the Attleboro area where old mill buildings have been sitting abandoned for decades. Some of them were covered in street art. I couldn't help but ask myself why this existed here in the Boston Area where the local economy is supposedly hunky-dory. I'm used to seeing abandoned properties all over Baltimore and the surrounding region, but not here right outside of Boston. I was thinking, let's squat some of those places!

Once I arrived at Libertalia, everyone was preparing for the open house. The space is pretty funky, a little smaller for a radical space but full of the essentials nonetheless. They had shelves of pamphlets and newsletters across from their library full of leftist books.

I talked with Gray, one of the organizers of the space, about actions in Providence. He told me how several solidarity and mutual aid organizations exist in the city and how active they all are. He told me of one group that's active mostly around the more poverty-stricken Latino neighborhoods which fights police arrests. If you get harassed or arrested by the cops, members of this group will show up to help you out.

Gray asked me a lot about what's going on in New Hampshire. I told him about the number of right-wingers who have moved here and how they're trying to pass all this legislation which limits the power of public-sector workers, much like what happened in Wisconsin. He asked me if I know any left-libertarians (yes, he actually said "left-libertarians") in NH, telling me how he tried looking for leftists among the many Free State Project members but found none. I told him, next time there's a massive Free Stater gathering in Manchester I'll invite him up and we can search for them together.

Nothing like forming an alliance between the mutualists/left-libertarians in NH and anarcho-communists from Boston and Providence. Comrades are so divided it's sad. Generally, anarcho-communists and mutualist don't like each other, syndicalists/radical unionists and insurrectionists don't like each other, the more intellectual types and the more illegalist types don't like each other, and no one likes those primitivists, but when we put aside our feelings towards violence and market economies we can get shit done. Projects like radical spaces and infoshops are proof of that. But yeah, if we could get everyone on the anti-statist left in the region together we'd be able to get a lot of shit done.

I stayed for a while before going back home. A dear friend of mine who had told me he would be there never showed up. I was feeling really crappy by the time I left.

Nashua Demonstration and Banner-Making

2011-06-26T03:08:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, I joined my friends Dan and Stefanie for a demonstration in Nashua. We were supposed to have picketed in front of the Bank of America, but since it was just the three of us who showed we ended up joining with a few anti-war protesters in front of the Nashua mayor's office.

Afterwards, Dan drove us up to his friends' place in Pittsfield (which is a small town halfway between Concord and Laconia). We were preparing to create politically-themed banners, which we would drop over several highways in NH. We figured with all the anti-worker legislation coming into existence - and the fact that all eyes will be on this state until after January 2012 - now is the best time to raise awareness to the public about these issues.

Local media, beware!

Happy Liberation Day!

2011-06-25T20:29:00.000-04:00

Celebrating the 75th anniversary of revolution.

Propaganda Piece Detained for Five Years

2011-06-25T04:10:00.003-04:00

Let's be honest here: Gilad Shalit is worth way more to the Israeli government in captivity than he is freed. Once he's out of Gaza, Israel can no longer use his story to rile up nationalist feelings among the people it rules over nor can it use him as a card to play for international sympathy.

We shouldn't forget that the IDF routinely captures Palestinians, many of them civilians and children, and keeps them in dungeons for years. It should also be noted that Shalit, like most soldiers in the IDF, has blood on his hands as well as Hamas. To even imply that he was "innocent" in this situation is a joke.

I'll let Dr. Finkelstein finish my thoughts:

On a bit of a side note, I once had a friend who told me about his time visiting his cousins in Israel. He was a young teenager at the time. He told me that the one thing which really stood out for him during his trip was how in Israel all the young adults are soldiers (military service is compulsory) and how militarism is everywhere in Israeli life. If a guy wants to get a girl, he shows her his gun; you see soldier characters on Israeli children's TV. I remember him saying to me, it's so hypocritical that Americans go on and on about how Palestinians allegedly teach their children to hate when in Israel the military is everywhere. Everyone is either in the army, was in the army, or will be in the army. No wonder so many Israelis gladly support war and massacres with that kind of militarism imbedded within their culture.