Tag Archives: Revolution

The 1% Versus the 99%: Realignment, Repression or Revolution

Posted on by
3

640px-Standard_oil_octopus_loc_color

Wealth Inequality Is Putting the US on Course for a Showdown

By Klaus Marre

Source: WhoWhatWhy.org

The richest 20 Americans now own as much wealth as the country’s poorest 152 million people combined.

That is just one of the findings of noted inequality scholar and author Chuck Collins’s most recent report, “Billionaire Bonanza, The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us.”

In a wide-ranging interview, which will be available in its entirety as a podcast tomorrow, Collins likened the current situation to the “Gilded Age,” the time just before the turn of the 20th century, when there was a similar accumulation of wealth at the top and political power was concentrated in the hands of a few rich men.

And Americans are slowly realizing that the extreme accumulation of wealth at the very top is hurting their own prospects.  But grassroots efforts to redress economic inequality must contend with the political power that comes with great wealth.

This is an unstable situation. With pressure building for change but potent forces stacked against it, there are only three options, Collins told WhoWhatWhy: “Realignment, revolution or repression.”

Rules Rigged, and the Rich Get Richer

Back in the Gilded Age, the country managed to convert the pressure that was building from the bottom up into meaningful changes that resulted in a realignment of political power and the rise of the middle class. Those gains, however, are now being reversed. In fact, a new report found that, for the first time in decades, the middle class no longer constitutes the economic majority in the United States.

The shift toward increasing inequality began in the 1970s. At that time, Collins says (and research shows), “we stopped being an economy in which most people grew together” and instead became a “society that is dramatically pulled apart.”

Wages have now been stagnant for three decades and the median wealth of Americans has actually declined since 1990. At the same time, the rich have gotten richer. A lot richer.

Like the Great Depression in the early 1930s, the economic crisis of 2008 has been a wake-up call for the country. Polls historically have shown that people are indifferent to great wealth as long as they feel the rules are fair and that they at least have the option of moving up the ladder. But for many, the latest crash is changing that perception.

“In the economic meltdown of 2008, people realized the rules are rigged, that the big financial industry people … are tipping the scale in their favor,” Collins said. This has led to a perception that upward mobility in America is stalled — a perception supported by statistical data.

Collins believes that this sentiment has helped boost the candidacies of presidential hopefuls as diverse as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

The collapsing middle class, including groups like recent college students whose prospects are blighted by crushing debt burdens, represents an “angry and mobilized constituency.” These are the people whose dissatisfactions are articulated by populists like Trump.

At the other end of the spectrum, the success of self-avowed “democratic socialist” Sanders shows how fluid the situation is. Collins pointed out that the Vermont senator has been saying the same things for 30 years — but only now are they resonating with a larger proportion of the electorate.

Collins pointed out that Sanders is the only major candidate who does not need a billionaire bankrolling his primary campaign to do well in the polls.

One bloc of voters who can cause a tectonic shift in the near future are millennials, many of whom are resentful of the obstacles they face in pursuing the American dream while paying off their college loans. With 40 million households shouldering a burden of $1.2 trillion in college debt, Collins believes that if this segment of the population were to organize, they could force significant change.

“Otherwise, the machinery of inequality will just keep chugging along as it currently is and it will get more concentrated,” Collins said. In any case, all of the ingredients are there for a major political realignment.

“We’re headed for a showdown.”

[audio http://www.whowhatwhy.org/files/Chuck%20Collins%20WWW%20Final.mp3 ]

http://www.whowhatwhy.org/files/Chuck%20Collins%20WWW%20Final.mp3

Breaking the chains: precarity in the Age of Anxiety

Posted on by
Reply

breaking-the-chainsBy Joseph Todd

Source: RoarMag.org

In our Age of Anxiety, society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty. How do we fight back under conditions of precarity?

­An Age of Anxiety is upon us, one where society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty, fear and alienation. We live with neither liberty nor security but instead precariousness. Our housing, our income and our play are temporary and contingent, forever at the whim of the landlord, policeman, bureaucrat or market. The only constant is that of insecurity itself. We are gifted the guarantee of perpetual flux, the knowledge that we will forever be flailing from one abyss to another, that true relaxation is a bourgeois luxury beyond our means.

Our very beings come to absorb this anxiety. We internalize society’s cruelty and contradiction and transform them into a problem of brain chemistry, one that is diagnosed and medicated away instead of being obliterated at root. All hope is blotted out. Authentic experience, unmediated conversation, distraction-free affection and truly relaxed association feel like relics of a bygone era, a sepia dream that perhaps never existed.

Instead we have the frenetic social arenas of late capitalism: the commodified hedonism of clubs and festivals, express lunches, binge culture and the escapist, dislocating experience of online video games, all underlined by either our desperate need to numb our anxieties or to create effective, time-efficient units of fun so we are available for work and worry.

This is assuming we have work, of course. Many of us are unemployed, or are instead held in constant precarity. Stuck on zero-hour contracts or wading through as jobbing freelancers in industries that used to employ but don’t anymore, we are unable to plan our lives any further than next week’s rota, unable to ever switch off as the search for work is sprawling and continuous.

And if we do have traditional employment, what then? We are imprisoned and surveilled in the office, coffee shop or back room, subject to constant assessment, re-assessment and self-assessment, tracked, monitored and looped in a perpetual performance review, one which even our managers think is worthless, but has to be done anyway because, hey, company policy.

Continuous is the effective probationary period and we are forever teetering on the edge of unemployment. We internalize the implications of our constant assessment, the knowledge that we’re always potentially being surveilled. We censor ourselves. We second-guess ourselves. We quash ourselves.

And thanks to the effective abolition of the traditional working day, work becomes unbearable and endless. The security of having delineated time — at work and then at play — has been eradicated. Often this is because individuals have to supplement their atrocious wages with work on the side. But it is also because traditional 9-to-5 jobs have suffered a continuous extension of working hours into out-of-office time, enabled and mediated by our laptops and smartphones. These gadgets demand immediacy and, when coupled with the knowledge that you are always reachable and thus available, they instill in us a frantic need to forever reply in the now.

And with this expectation comes obligation. Hyper-networked technologies gift our bosses the ability to demand action from us at any moment. Things that had to wait before become doable — and thus are done — in the now. If you are unwilling, then someone is ready to take your place. You must always be at their beck and call. From this, our only refuge is sleep, perhaps the last bastion of delineated time against frenetic capitalism, and one that is being gradually eroded and replaced.

For those that are out of work the situation is no better. They face the cruel bureaucracy of the Job Centre or the Atos assessment, institutions that have no interest in linking up job seekers with fulfilling employment but instead attempt only to lower the benefits bill through punitive, arbitrary sanctions and forcing the sick back to work. Insider accounts of these programs betray the mix of anxiety inducing micro-assessment and surveillance they employ.

Disabled claimants — always claimants, never patients, insists Atos — are assessed from the moment they enter the waiting room, noted as to whether they arrive alone, whether they can stand unassisted and whether they can hear their name when called. Compounding this is the hegemonic demonization of those that society has failed: if you are out of work, you are a scrounger, a benefit cheat and a liar. Utterly guilty of your failure, a situation individualized in its totality and attributable to no system, institution or individual but yourself.

We are surveilled, monitored and assessed from cradle to grave, fashioned by the demand that we must be empirical, computable and trackable, our souls transformed into a series of ones and zeros. This happens in the workplace, on the street and in various government institutions. But its ideological groundwork is laid in the nursery and the school.

These institutions bracket our imaginations while still in formation, normalizing a regime of continuous surveillance and assessment that is to last for the rest of our lives. Staff are increasingly taken away from educating and nurturing and instead are made to roam nurseries taking pictures and recording quotes, all to be computed and amalgamated so authorities can track, assess and predict a child’s trajectory.

It is true that this does not trouble the child in the same way traditional high intensity rote examination does. But what it instead achieves is the internalization of the surveillance/assessment nexus in our minds; laying the groundwork for an acquiescence to panoptical monitoring, a resignation to a private-less life and a buckling to regimes of continuous assessment.

Britain is particularly bad in this respect. Not only does our government have a fetish for closed-circuit television like no other, but also, GCHQ was at the heart of the Snowden revelations. Revelation, however, is slightly misleading — as what was most telling about the leaks wasn’t the brazen overstep by government institutions, but that few people were surprised. Although we didn’t know the details, we suspected such activity was going on. We acted as if we were being watched, tracked and monitored anyhow.

In this we see the paranoid fugitive of countless films, books and television dramas extrapolated to society writ large. We are all, to some extent, that person. Our growing distrust of governments, the knowledge that our technologically-integrated lives leave a heavy trace and the collection of “big” data for both commercial and authoritarian purposes contributes to our destabilized, anxious existence. An existence that impels us towards self-policing and control. One where we do the authority’s job for them.

Many individuals offer the amount of choice we have, or the amount of knowledge we can access at the click of a button, as the glorious consequences of late capitalist society. But our rampant choice society, one where we have to make an overwhelming number of choices — about the cereal we eat, the beer we drink, or the clothes we wear — is entirely one sided. While we have an incredible amount of choice over issues of little importance, we are utterly excluded from any choice about the things that matter; what we do with the majority of our time, how we relate to others or how society functions as a whole. Nearly always these choices are constricted by the market, the necessity of work, cultures of overwork and neoliberal ideology.

Again we find this ideology laid down in primary education. Over the years more and more “continuous” learning has been introduced whereby children, over a two week period or so, have to complete a set of tasks for which they can choose the order. This is an almost perfect example of how choice functions in our society, ubiquitous when insignificant but absent when important. The children can choose when they do an activity, which matters little as they will have to do it at some point anyway, but cannot choose not to do it, or to substitute one kind of activity with another.

Why does this matter? Because meaningful choices about our lives give us a sense of certainty and control. Avalanches of bullshit choices that still have to be made, as study after study has shown, make us incredibly anxious. Each of them takes mental effort. Each contains, implicitly, the multitude of choices that we didn’t make; all those denied experiences for every actual experience. This is fine if there are only one or two. But if there are hundreds, every act is riddled with disappointment, every decision shot with anxiety.

Compounding this orgy of choice, and in itself another root cause of anxiety, is the staggering amount of information that assaults us every day. Social media, 24-hour news, the encroachment of advertising into every crack — both spatially and temporally — and our cultures of efficiency that advocate consuming or working at every possible moment all combine to cause intense sensory overload. This world, for many, is just too much.

Although we’ve talked mostly about work, surveillance, assessment and choice, there are a multitude of factors one could add. The desolation of community due to the geographical dislocation of work, the increased transiency of populations and the growing privatization of previously public acts — drinking, eating and consuming entertainment are increasingly consigned to the home — shrinks our world to just our immediate families.

Camaraderie, extended community and solidarity are eroded in favor of mistrust, suspicion and competition. Outside of work our lives become little more than a series of privatized moments, tending to our property and ourselves rather than each other, flitting between the television shows, video games, home DIY and an incredible fetish for gardening with no hint towards the thought that perhaps these experiences would be better if they were held in common, if they appealed to the social and looked outward rather than in.

In the same way we could mention the ubiquity of debt — be it the mortgage, the credit card or the student loans — and the implicit moral judgment suffered by the debtor coupled with the anxiety-inducing knowledge that they could lose everything at any moment. Or we could consider the near-existential crises humanity faces, be it climate change, ISIS or the death throes of capitalism; all too abstract and total to comprehend, all contributing to a sense that there is no future, only a grainy, distant image of lawless brutality, flickering resolutely in our heads.

But the crux, and the reason anxiety could become a revolutionary battleground, is that neoliberal ideology has individualized our suffering, attributing it to imbalances in our brain chemistry, constructing it as a problem of the self, rather than an understandable human reaction to a myriad of cruel systemic causes. Instead of changing society the problem is medicalized and we change ourselves, popping pills to mold our subjectivities to late-capitalist structures, accepting the primacy of capitalism over humanity.

This is why “We Are All Very Anxious”, a pamphlet released by the Institute of Precarious Consciousness, is so explosively brilliant. Not only does it narrate the systemic causes of anxiety, but it situates the struggle within a revolutionary strategy, constructing a theory that is at once broad and personal, incorporating one’s own subjective experience into an explanatory framework, positing anxiety as a novel, contemporary revolutionary battleground, ripe for occupation.

It is, they claim, one of three eras spanning the last two-hundred years where we have progressed between different dominant societal affects. Until the postwar settlement we suffered from misery. The dominant narrative was that capitalism benefited everybody; while at the same time overcrowding, malnourishment and slum dwelling were rife. In response to this appropriate tactics such as strikes, mutual aid, cooperatives and formal political organization were adopted.

After the postwar settlement, until around the 1980s, a period of Fordist boredom ensued. Compared to the last era, most people had stable jobs, guaranteed welfare and access to mass consumerism and culture. But much of the work was boring, simple and repetitive. Life in the suburbs was beige and predictable. Capitalism, as they put it, “gave everything needed for survival, but no opportunities for life.” Again movements arose in opposition, positioned specifically against the boredom of the age. The Situationists and radical feminism can be mentioned, but also the counter-culture surrounding the anti-war movement in America and the flourishing DIY punk scene in the UK.

This period is now finished. Capitalism has co-opted the demand for excitement and stimulation both by appropriating formerly subversive avenues of entertainment — the festival, club and rave — while dramatically increasing both the amount and intensity of distractions and amusements.

In one sense we live in an age of sprawling consumerism that avoids superficial conformity by allowing you to ornament and construct your identity via hyper-customized, but still mass-produced products. But technological development also mean that entertainment is now more total, immersive and interactive; be it the video game or the full-color film watched on a widescreen, high-definition television.

Key to this linear conception is the idea of the public secret, the notion that anxiety, misery or boredom in these periods are ubiquitous but also hidden, excluded from public discourse, individualized and transformed into something unmentionable, a condition believed to be isolated and few because nobody really talked about it. Thus to even broach the subject in a public, systematic manner becomes not just an individual revelation but also a collective revolutionary act.

I’ve seen this first-hand when running workshops on the topic. Sessions, which were often argumentative and confrontational, became, when the subject was capitalism and anxiety, genuinely inquisitive and exploratory. Groups endeavored to broaden their knowledge of the subject, make theoretical links and root out its kernel rather than manning their usual academic ramparts and launching argument after rebuttal back and forth across the battlefield.

But more than this, there was a distinct edge of excitement, the feeling that we were onto something, a theory ripe with explosive newness, one that managed to combine our subjective experiences and situate them in a coherent theoretical framework.

However, we must be critical. To posit anxiety as a specifically modern affect, unique to our age, is contentious. What about the 1950s housewife, someone mentioned in one of the sessions, with her subjectivity rigidly dictated by the misogyny and overbearing cultural norms of the time? Didn’t this make her feel anxious?

Well, perhaps. But if we take anxiety to mean a general feeling of nervousness or unease about an uncertain outcome — with chronic anxiety being an actively debilitating form — then we can draw distinct differences. Although the housewife was oppressed, her oppression was codified and linear, her life depressingly mapped out with little room for choice or maneuver. Similarly with the slave — surely the universal symbol of oppression — hierarchies aren’t nebulous but explicit, domination is ensured by the whip and the gun, the master individualized and present.

This is in stark contrast to the current moment. While it is obvious that oppressions are distinct and incomparable, we can nevertheless see that the fug of the 21st century youth is of a different nature. Our only certainty is that of uncertainty. Our oppressor is not an individual but a diffuse and multiplicitous network of bureaucrats, institutions and global capital, hidden in its omnipotence and impossible to grasp.

We aren’t depressed by the inevitability of our oppression, but instead are baffled by its apparent (but unreal) absence, forever teetering on the brink, not knowing why, nor knowing who we should blame.

Similarly it is bold to claim that anxiety is the dominant affect of Western capitalism, tantamount to pitching it as the revolutionary issue of our age. Yet if we analyze the popular struggles of our time — housing, wages, work/life balance and welfare — they are often geared, in one way or another, towards promoting security over anxiety.

Housing for many is not about having a roof over their heads, but about security of tenure, be it via longer fixed-term tenancies or the guarantee that they won’t be priced out by rent rises that their precarious employment can’t possibly cover. In the same way struggles over welfare are often about material conditions, but what particularly strikes a chord is the cruel insecurity of a life on benefits, forever at the whim of sanction-wielding bureaucrats who are mandated to use any possible excuse to remove your only means of support.

Anxiety is also a struggle that unites diverse social strata, emanating from institutions such as the job center, loan shark, university, job market, landlord and mortgage lender, affecting the unemployed, precariously employed, office worker, indebted student and even the comparatively well-off. Again we find this unification in the near-universal adoption of the smartphone and other hyper-networked technologies. All of us, and especially our children, are beholden to a myriad of glowing screens, flitting between one identity and another, alienated and disconnected from our surroundings and each other.

This is not to say a movement against anxiety itself will ever arise. Such a rallying cry would be too abstract and fail to inspire. Instead, anxiety must be conceptualized both as an affect which underlies various different struggles, and a schema within which they can be assembled into a revolutionary strategy.

So, what is our tangible aim here? In part it must be to reduce the level of general anxiety so as to increase quality of life. Yet if we are to take a revolutionary rather than a mere humanitarian approach, this drop in anxiety must in some way translate into a rise in revolutionary disposition. In certain ways it obviously will. If there is a public realization that large swathes of the mentally ill are not as such because of their unfortunate brain chemistry but instead because of a misconfiguration of society, people are already thinking on an inherently challenging, systemic level.

Similarly, conflict with the state or capital — be it on the street, in the workplace or inside one’s own head — tends to be high-impact and anxiety-inducing. A drop in general anxiety will make it more likely that individuals will engage in such moments of conflict and, crucially, experience the intense radicalization and realization of hegemonic power that can only be achieved through such visceral moments. But a second part to this, hinted at already and integral to giving the struggle a revolutionary edge, is to emphasize that there is a public secret to be aired. As well as combating the sources of anxiety, we must say we are doing so; we must situate these struggles within larger frameworks and provide education on its systemic nature.

Thus, any strategy would need to be both abstract and practical. On one hand we must explode the public secret by raising consciousness. This would require a general onslaught of education, including, but not limited to, consciousness-raising sessions, participatory workshops, articles, books, pamphlets, leaflets, posters, YouTube videos and “subvertised” adverts. The emphasis would be to educate but also to listen, to intermingle theoretical understanding with subjective experience.

The second part would be to strategically support campaigns and make demands of politicians that specifically combat anxiety in its various different guises. When it comes to work, the abolition of zero-hour contracts, the raising of the minimum wage in line with the actual cost of living, and the tightening of laws on overwork as part of a broader campaign to assert the primacy of life over work, of love over pay, would be a good start.

For those out of work, underpaid or precarious, the introduction of a basic citizen’s income would represent a revolutionizing of the job market. In one move it would alleviate the cultural and practical anxieties of worklessness — ending the bureaucratic cruelty of the job center while removing the anxiety-inducing stigma associated with claiming benefits — while simultaneously allowing individuals to pursue culturally important and revolutionary activities such as art, music, writing or (dare I say it?) activism, without the crushing impossibility of trying to make them pay. When we look to housing obvious solutions include mandatory, secured five-year tenancies, capped rent increases and a guarantee of stable, suitable social housing for those who need it.

There are many more reforms I could list. You will notice, however, that these are indeed reforms; bread and butter social democracy. Does that mean such a program is counter-revolutionary? A mere placatory settlement between capital and the working class? No, it does not. Revolution does not emerge from the systematic subjection of individuals to increased misery, anxiety and hardship as accelerationist logic demands. Instead it flourishes when populations become aware of their chains, are given radical visions for the future and the means to achieve them. It is when leftists critique but also offer hope. It is when the population writ large are included in and are masters of their own liberation; not when they are viewed as a lumpen, otherly mass, of only instrumental importance in achieving the glorious revolution.

Look at the practicalities and this becomes obvious. How can we expect individuals to launch themselves into high-tension anxiety-inducing conflicts if the mere thought of such a situation causes them to have a panic attack? How can individuals, in the face of near panoptical surveillance and monitoring, combat the overwhelming desire to conform if they aren’t awarded some freedom from the practical anxieties of life? How are we to think and act in a revolutionary, and often abstract, manner if the very real and immediate anxieties of work, home and play fog our minds so totally?

This is not to say freedom will be given to us. It must always be taken, and we must not rely on electoral politics to hand us the revolution down from above. Nor will true struggle ever be an anxiety-free leisure pursuit. Genuine conflict with the state and capital will always entail danger, stress and the possibility of intensified precariousness.

Nevertheless, the dismissal of electoral politics in its totality represents abysmal revolutionary theory. The pursuit of reforms by progressive governments being bitten at the heels by sharp, vibrant social movements can produce real, tangible change.

It was what should have happened with Syriza, and it is what will hopefully happen with the new Labour leadership in the UK. And if, as individuals and communities, we are to puncture the distress, precariousness and general sense of cruel unknowing so particular to the moment in which we live, if we are to overcome the avalanche of bullshit and reclaim our confidence, if we to construct and disseminate a distinctly communal, hopeful revolutionary fervor, such changes are imminently needed.

 

Joseph Todd is a writer and an activist. Find more of his writings here or follow him on twitter.

Insurrection and Utopia, Part 1: “We are Eating From a Trashcan; This Trashcan is Ideology.”

Posted on by
4

AsoskW4CMAAPEf9

By Dr. Bones

Source: Gods and Radicals

It all started innocently enough. A friend asked me a question on facebook:

“How can you advocate anarchic revolution when your political vision is so far in the minority?”

The underlying premise was a good one: In a country of 300+ million, how can you call for the upheaval of society, the breaking of societal and political bonds, when so few would readily identify as Anarchists/Socialists/Communists/Leftists/Anti-Capitalists/What-have-you? It’s a question often thrown at the Left and unfortunately many haven’t fully wrapped their heads around it.

In a way it’s a watermark. For an ideology or political vision to go from outright dismissal and laughter to being asked to provide real world examples of what would be done if it came to pass is a sign of growth; it is a signal, an omen, that the winds are beginning to blow in our favor and many want to know what might lie ahead. It’s one thing to talk about “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” but it’s quite another to discuss how restaurants would be run democratically and without profit or what exactly people might “do” on a day to day level in a classless, stateless society.

Still, the question is not an easy one. We could argue that it is the one question that has always plagued and nagged the Left: “Well that’s all good and well, but how do you plan to achieve this? How does such a world become born?” Staunch Marxists rely on a religious belief in the inevitable procession of history, Syndicalists will rail about the need for increased unionization, firebrand Neo-Bolsheviks plot to simply take power and liquidate class enemies, while the newly minted faux-left “Democratic Socialists” will hem-and-haw about passing enough laws to magically change the balance of power.

All of these options present difficult problems. History has been shown to be anything but inevitable (every year since 1914 has been “Late Capitalism”), a worker-owned McDonalds is still a site of exploitation, nobody ever bothers to explain just where all these people ready to kill for the Revolution are to come from, and the ludicrous doctrine of the Sandernistas that the wealthy and powerful will simply submit to higher taxes and the rule of law is so preposterous it’s only response should be derisive laughter.

So, where are we? Where do we go from here? How are we to change the world?

I start first with a question: Whose world?

You Can’t Teach an Old Carrion-Eater New Tricks

Society, technology, language, and culture all bear the birth marks and forms of the ideological underpinnings of the system they emerged from. Marx notes:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.

The Ruling Class, whether Capitalist or State Socialist, informs and projects its will and vision onto the rest of society by the sheer nature of being the dominant force in that society. Of course we can see this politically, but Marx notes this extends also into ideas, culture, anything that could be identified as a byproduct of human interaction and thinking.

The iron steel resolve and blatant disregard of human life so typical of the fearsome Bolshevik Commissar was not so much traits born as traits cultivated; ideals taken within the individual and digested. These cultivated traits came directly from the ideological call for early revolutionary Bolsheviks to identify themselves as “hards,” to be tough, to be ruthless and uncompromising in their goals; when they took state power it become propagated on a cultural level. This meme, this political trait, spiraled out and became a creature, a position, a symbolic figure to be adored/feared all onto its own. It transcended its existence as a mere “idea” or feeling about how party members should behave.

Uber, the trendy internet-based taxi service, could have just as easily manifested into the world as a collectively owned, worker-managed co-op. The internet platform itself is not that revolutionary, the people and tools to create the business were there all along and yet….it did not. Instead Uber emerged and was formed through an ideological lens that made sense to the Ruling Class and by a CEO who’s practically a poster boy for modern capitalism:

“Let’s consider how Kalanick treated his Uber taxi drivers in New York. When he was trying to convince them to break the law to boost Uber’s footprint in the city, Kalanick offered yellow cab drivers free iPhones and promised to “take care of” any legal problems they encountered with the TLC. A few short months later, when the service was forced to close, those same drivers received a message to come to Uber HQ. Reports the Verge ‘Multiple drivers said Uber called them into headquarters, claiming they needed to come by in order to get paid and would get a cash bonus for showing up. When the cabbies came in, Uber surprised them by asking for the device back, informing them that taxi service was no longer available in New York.’”

This is how Uber is evolving, this is how the entire concept other companies will build off is evolving: through actions committed under the dictate and logic of a particular ideology. Taken as gospel or rejected as too harsh new companies will only differ themselves in shades from this first “business plan” and mold their own social and economic arrangements within this ideological parameter. Even the technologies, once thought to be “pure” of politics develop along political lines.

“In an even stronger sense, many technologies can be said to possess inherent political qualities, whereby a given technical system by itself requires or at least strongly encourages specific patterns of human relationships. Winner (1985, 29–37) suggests that a nuclear weapon by its very existence demands the introduction of a centralized, rigidly hierarchical chain of command to regulate who may come anywhere near it, under what conditions, and for what purposes. It would simply be insane to do otherwise. More mundanely, in the daily infrastructures of our large-scale economies — from railroads and oil refineries to cash crops and microchips — centralization and hierarchical management are vastly more efficient for operation, production, and maintenance. Thus the creation and maintenance of certain social conditions can happen in the technological system’s immediate operating environment as well as in society at large.”

What’s interesting is the feedback loop this creates: technology is warped and shaped by the society(and thus dominant ideology), while at the same time the society becomes molded by the technology.

“As technologies are being built and put into use, significant alterations in patterns of human activity and human institutions are already taking place … the construction of a technical system that involves human beings as operating parts brings a reconstruction of social roles and relationships. Often this is a result of the new system’s own operating requirements: it simply will not work unless human behavior changes to suit its form and process. Hence, the very act of using the kinds of machines, techniques and systems available to us generates patterns of activities and expectations that soon become “second nature.”…

Winner gives several examples of technologies employed with intention to dominate, including post-1848 Parisian thoroughfares built to disable urban guerrillas, pneumatic iron molders introduced to break skilled workers’ unions in Chicago, and a segregationist policy of low highway overpasses in 1950s Long Island, which deliberately made rich, white Jones Beach inaccessible by bus, effectively closing it off to the poor. In all these cases, although the design was politically intentional, we can see that the technical arrangements determine social results in a way that logically and temporally precedes their actual deployment. There are predictable social consequences to deploying a given technology or set of technologies.”

In effect we our trapped in a web: We exist in a world not only molded and shaped by a Hierarchical and Capitalist mentality, but the very tools we use including our social selves maintain and reinforce this artifice. The ideology molds the world which molds the people which molds the technology which molds the world which molds the people, etc, etc, etc. As Slajov Zizek points out even those who wish to rebel against the system seem doomed(as if by design?) to remain within it:

“If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who ‘really want to do something to help people’ get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing.”

Even if State power is seized, if the old masters are cast out, the very throne itself acts like a cursed object and corrupts those that sought to destroy it. People who fought for the worker’s emancipation end up crushing strikes, Greens end up debating just how much depleted uranium to bury underground and how much to fire out of tanks, anti-austerity Leftists end up dispatching riot police to break up protests, the list goes on and on throughout history. The simple truth is you can take the most noble pauper and make him a king, and he may be a great king, but he must still maintain certain conditions(however unjust) by simply being king. The more he becomes attached to this position the more “pragmatism” takes over, excusing acts once thought unthinkable in the name keeping the current conditions going if only to “continue to do good things.” Hugo Chavez and Castro can speak all day of “people’s liberation” but the fact is people aren’t liberated if simply holding a different opinion is so threatening to your revolution they have to be jailed. And thus the throne lives on. While the Kings may change shape or party color the throne of the State and Capital continue to exist, continue to propagate exploitative and domineering cultural memes, social conditions, and technological apparatus.

But there is hope, even on the hinterlands of the oh-so-popular activism of today, in that seemingly bizarre behavior the State displays when people, protests, and organizations are met with overwhelming force.  Why can millions march up and down streets freely “as long as they do not get close to a certain limit” of behavior? What is this Hedge, this boundary we must cross? What is this line so jealously guarded?

Push it to the Limit

Remember the Cuban Missile crises? Where the big bad Soviet Union brought us within an inch to war, ready to point nuclear warheads stationed in Cuba right at us? And how it was only through tough diplomacy and American bravado that we got them to turn around? No? Good, because it didn’t happen like that at all. The Soviets, arming an ally after a recent American-backed invasion, made the deal, not us: Remove the missiles stationed in Turkey(a country that shared a border with the USSR) pointed at Moscow and they would do the same. Kennedy liked the deal and took it. This brought horror to the Military-Industrial establishment; they saw it as backing down to the Soviets. Remember that ideology bit? They didn’t see it as two individuals avoiding nuclear war; their ideological lens would not permit them to. They instead saw it in a hierarchical, dominating dialectic: we had been submissive towards another power. But the Soviets didn’t see it that way, and neither did much of the world, and therein lay the true danger: a new way of thinking, a shift in vision had been displayed and put into practice. And this would not stand.

Others have covered just how against the grain Kennedy went, and how often those who went against him howled for war. I leave the fact that one of those two combatants is dead under your feet for you to play with and ponder. I could mention that right when Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King started talking about “economic justice” and planned on occupying DC until the Vietnam war was ended he too ended up dead. Interestingly enough his family won a wrongful death suit(full court transcripts available) alleging the government killed him. But I’ll instead stick with “accepted” facts like the long history of COINTELPRO, an FBI program specializing in infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. And this wasn’t a kids games either.

“Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.

Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad “dirty tricks” to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists. They used bad-jacketing to create suspicion about targeted activists, sometimes with lethal consequences.

Legal harassment: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, “investigative” interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.

Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The object was to frighten or eliminate dissidents and disrupt their movements….

The FBI also conspired with the police departments of many U.S. cities (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Philadelphia, Chicago) to encourage repeated raids on Black Panther homes—often with little or no evidence of violations of federal, state, or local laws—which resulted directly in the police killing many members of the Black Panther Party…In order to eliminate black militant leaders whom they considered dangerous, the FBI is believed to have worked with local police departments to target specific individuals, accuse them of crimes they did not commit, suppress exculpatory evidence and falsely incarcerate them.”

Anyone who thinks this has ended is sorely mistaken. Really, really mistaken.

“Participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.”

Let me translate that for you: “We are actively studying political movements, identifying people whom might actually change things and are using propaganda techniques to change the conversations they have as well as they views they hold to better suit the military’s domestic strategy.” Let that one sink in.

Truth be told we may never fully know how deep the rabbit hole goes. But there is a unifying factor here: the State clamps down hard whenever the ongoing narrative, the ideology itself is shown not to be the only one. They’re afraid of ideas, because these things are what sparks action. The greatest threat to the system isn’t just learning things aren’t what they appear to be, but beginning to imagine a world where things are different. If something is outside the “parameters of acceptance” for the dominant ideology it presupposes that there are limitations to the system; if there are limitations to the system it can become old, worn out, made useless, and ultimately replaced.

So the Ruling Class will violently defend it’s doctrines at all costs. Can we beat such an invincible enemy, an enemy whose literally shaped us all our lives?  How can we achieve that? Can we ever free ourselves and stop eating out of the trashcan of Capitalist Ideology?

Follow me down a rabbit hole of our own making, lets…article6

 

Dr. Bones is an 8 year practitioner of the Southern occult tradition known as Conjure, Rootwork, and Hoodoo. A skilled card reader and Spiritworker, Dr. Bones has undertaken all aspects of the work, both benevolent and malefic. Politically he holds the Anarchist line that “Individuality can only flourish where equality of access to the conditions of existence is the social reality. This equality of access is Communism.” He resides in the insane State of Florida with his loving wife, a herd of cats, and a house full of spirits.
He can be reached through facebook and at drbones@gmail.com

Revolution is On Doorstep in the US

Posted on by
2

poverty_line_america

By Valery Kulikov

President Obama just like any other US politician is particularly keen on criticizing human rights situations in other countries, while glorifying the ideals of “American-style democracy.” Moreover, these topics are not simply the prime topic of his speeches, but the basis for meddling in other countries’ affairs under the guise of “promoting democracy”. To carry out these operations the US has been heavily funding a countless number of NGOs and when those fail to stage a coup d’etat – usually a military intervention follows. This was the case in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and a number of other states.

The true value of money

Posted on by
Reply

index

Economics needs a revolution.

By David Orrell

Source: Adbusters

This sentiment has been expressed by people from the physicist turned hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud (in a 2008 paper), to the Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane (in a 2014 foreword for Manchester’s student-run Post-Crash Economics), to activist groups such as Kick It Over. So what would such a revolution look like?

Perhaps the archetypal model for a scientific revolution is the quantum revolution that shocked the world at the turn of the last century. In the space of a few short years, almost everything that was known about the nature of matter was overturned. The Newtonian view of the world as a predictable machine crumbled with it.

Except, that is, in economics – which continues to base its models on quasi-Newtonian economic laws.

A peculiar feature of orthodox economics is that money is treated as an inert medium of exchange, with no special properties of its own. As a result, money is largely excluded from macroeconomic models, which is one reason the financial crisis of 2007/8 was not predicted (it involved money). In many respects, when viewed through the lens of quantum physics, money behaves a lot like matter – and acknowledging that behavior promises to do to economics what quanta did for physics.

The main insight of quantum physics is that matter is composed of entities which behave in some ways as waves and in other ways as particles. This novel insight countered the Newtonian view that billiard ball-like atoms behaved independently of each other. A beam of light, for example, is an electromagnetic wave but it is also a stream of particles known as photons. At a quantum level, matter is fundamentally dualistic: neither the particle nor the wave description is complete by itself.

The same can be said of money, which turns out to have quantum properties of its own. Money is strange stuff, when you think about it – but because it has been around for millennia we rarely do. Consider for example a U.S. dollar bill. On the one hand it represents a number – in this case the number one. On the other hand it is a physical thing which can be possessed, exchanged and above all valued (even lusted after, if there are enough of them). It therefore lives partly in the abstract world of numbers and mathematics and partly in the real world of things, people and value.

The same is true of any money object that we use for payment. Here “object” could refer either to a physical object – such as a coin – or a virtual object, such as 1.2107 bitcoin (BTC) sent from a phone. What makes such objects special is that they have a fixed, defined value in currency units.

While seeing money objects as things with a fixed monetary value might appear trivial, it turns out to have complex and contradictory properties that feed into the economy as a whole. In particular, they combine two aspects, abstract number and real world value, which are as different as waves and particles.

For example numbers are subject to mathematical laws – such as compound interest – and can grow without limits, while in the real world natural processes tend to be subject to bounds. In 1850 an American lawyer did the math and calculated that five English pennies invested at 5 percent compound interest since 0 AD would have accumulated to 32 billion spheres of pure gold, each equal in size to the Earth. This is a useful exercise for anyone who thinks that gross domestic product (GDP) can grow forever.

Numbers can be negative, as in debts, but (as the English physicist-turned-economist Frederick Soddy pointed out) there is no such thing as a negative number of objects. You might be underwater on your mortgage but you can’t own a negative house. Throughout history the frightening ability of negative debt to grow without bounds has been responsible for forcing people into economic slavery.

Numbers are hard and precise, like the particle aspect of matter. Real-world concepts such as value are diffuse and fuzzy, like the wave aspect of matter. By combining these two aspects in a single package, money objects are our contribution to the quantum universe.

The dualistic nature of money explains its frequently paradoxical behavior. In the early 2000s, cheap credit in the United States meant that even low-income people could afford their own homes. Some cashed in and sold their houses at the top of the market. For them the money was real – they could go to the bank and withdraw dollar bills. But when the credit crunch kicked in most of the new money disappeared into the ether, as if it had never existed. Money seemed to be both real and unreal at the same time – a sensation familiar to anyone who has studied quantum physics.

Just as quantum physics overturned Newtonian physics, so a reexamination of money promises to disrupt economics. The reason that critics are calling for fundamental change is that neoclassical economics has failed to provide answers to problems such as wealth inequality, financial crises and environmental degradation – which is unsurprising if it treats money as nothing more than an inert, Newtonian medium of exchange. The tendency of money to clump and accumulate with a small group of creditors, or for financial markets to be inherently unstable, or for GDP growth to be valued over the environment, becomes clearer when we acknowledge the vital, active role of money and the tension and discrepancy between numbers and the real world that drives it.

Of course, one should not underestimate the resistance of economists to adopting new ideas, however the worldwide student movement calling for change is unlikely to go away. Economics is primed for a quantum revolution of its own.

— David Orrell is a mathematician and author. His latest book, Truth or Beauty: Science and The Quest for Order, explores the role of aesthetics in science. He is currently working on a book about money.

Billionaire Fears The Poor RIsing Up Against The Rich

Posted on by
1

By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

Source: Popular Resistance

A billionaire finally had a epiphany and told all his wealthy friends about it.

Johann Rupert is the filthy rich owner of Richemont, a luxury goods company that serves as parent company to jeweler Cartier. His net worth tops out at nearly $8 billion making him part of the 1% of wealthy people who are greedily taking control of most of the world’s wealth to the detriment of poor people and the middle class.

According to Oxfam, an organization that fights poverty, the richest one percent are on pace to control more global wealth than the rest of the 99 percent combined by 2016. And it doesn’t show any signs of stopping.

Unsurprisingly, most of the billionaires in the world live in the United States, where they hire armies of lobbyists to influence the passage of government policies that help them keep their vast wealth and keep it growing. Meanwhile, other nations, despite having a few billionaires, have more regulations designed to narrow the income inequality gap.

Nevertheless, the system that allows the rich to keep getting richer isn’t doing anything for the rest of humanity as most people around the world continue to struggle to make ends meet. While the wealthy continue to make more money, everyone else is making less, which is starting to cause social unrest and upheaval that worries Johann Rupert.

Rupert now fears that the greed of the 1 percent has gone too far, and the thought that one day the rest of the world will grab their pitchforks and torches makes sleeping more difficult for him.

How is society going to cope with structural unemployment and the envy, hatred and the social warfare? We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.

Rupert revealed his terror at the Financial Times Business of Luxury Summit in Monaco, and frankly, he is right to fear this scenario.

There are 7 billion people in this world and only a few hundred grotesquely wealthy people. As people become more desperate to care for themselves and their struggling families in a world where rich people are making more money they don’t need off the backs of the working poor, it won’t be long before people get so fed up that they literally band together to bring down the greedy assholes who care more about owning the world than they do about everyone who lives in it.

That especially applies here in America as income inequality has cast millions of Americans into a never-ending cycle of poverty that becomes harder to escape year after year while the super-wealthy continually try to roll back policies such as minimum wage laws and other benefits in order to engineer a cheaper workforce through legislation. In other words, wealthy businessmen are treating the rest of the world as nothing more than slave labor put on this Earth to keep themselves rich.

Eventually, people will get sick and tired of the game that rich people are playing. They will rise up like Rupert fears and come for them. And then they will wish they had shared the wealth instead of hoarding it all for themselves.

Indulge . . . & Undermine

Posted on by
Reply

Crimethinc._boat_logo

Source: CrimethInc.

Have you noticed—exhortations to indulge yourself are always followed by suggestions? Adherents of doctrines seek footholds to claim territory within you, salesmen grasp for handles to jerk you around . . . from new-age prophets to advertisers, from pornographers to radicals, everyone exhorts you to “pursue your desires,” but the question remains: which ones? The “real” ones? Who decides which those are?

This just makes it clear what’s going on: a war for your soul on every front. And those much talked-about desires are all constructed, anyway—they change, they’re dependent on external factors, culture, the whole context and history of our society. We “like” fast food because we have to hurry back to work, because processed supermarket food doesn’t taste much better, because the nuclear family—for those who still have even that—is too small and stressed to sustain much festivity in cooking and eating. We “have to” check our email because the dissolution of community has taken our friends and kindred far away, because our bosses would rather not have to talk to us, because “time-saving” technology has claimed the hours once used to write letters—and killed all the passenger pigeons, besides. We “want” to go to work because in this society no one looks out for those who don’t, because it’s hard to imagine more pleasurable ways to spend our time when everything around us is designed for commerce and consumption. Every craving we feel, every conception we form, is framed in the language of the civilization that creates us.

Does this mean we would want differently in a different world? Yes, but not because we would be free to feel our “natural” desires—no such things exist. Beyond the life you live, you have no “true” self—you are precisely what you do and think and feel. That’s the real tragedy about the life of the man who spends it talking on his cell phone and attending business seminars and fidgeting with the remote control: it’s not that he denies himself his dreams, necessarily, but that he makes them answer to reality rather than attempting the opposite. The accountant regarded with such pity by runaway teenage lovers may in fact be “happy”—but it is a different happiness than the one they experience on the lam.

If our desires are constructs, if we are indeed the products of our environment, then our freedom is measured by how much control of these environments we have. It’s nonsense to say a woman is free to feel however she wants about her body when she grows up surrounded by diet advertisements and posters of anorexic models. It’s nonsense to say a man is free when everything he needs to do to get food, shelter, success, and companionship is already established by his society, and all that remains is for him to choose between established options (bureaucrat or technician? bourgeois or bohemian? Democrat or Republican?). We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice—and it is up to you to create these situations. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution.

And those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere—and everyone plays a part in it, consciously or not. “To be radical is simply to keep abreast of reality,” in the words of the old expatriate. The question is simply whether you take responsibility for your part in the ongoing transformation of the cosmos, acting deliberately and with a sense of your own power—or frame your actions as reactions, participating in unfolding events accidentally, randomly, involuntarily, as if you were purely a victim of circumstance.

If, as idealists like us insist, we can indeed create whatever world we want, then perhaps it’s true that we can adapt to any world, too. But the former is infinitely preferable. Choosing to spend your life in reaction and adaptation, hurrying to catch up to whatever is already happening, means being perpetually at the mercy of everything. That’s no way to go about pursuing your desires, whichever ones you choose.

So forget about whether “the” revolution will ever happen—the best reason to be a revolutionary is simply that it is a better way to live. It offers you a chance to lead a life that matters, gives you a relationship to injustice so you don’t have to deny your own grief and outrage, keeps you conscious of the give and take always going on between individual and institution, self and community, one and all. No institution can offer you freedom—but you can experience it in challenging and reinventing institutions. When school children make up their own words to the songs they are taught, when people show up by the tens of thousands to interfere with a closed-door meeting of expert economists discussing their lives, that’s what they’re up to: rediscovering that self-determination, like power, belongs only to the ones who exercise it.

Shout it over the rooftops: Culture can belong to us. We can make our own music, mythology, science, technology, tradition, psychology, literature, history, ethics, political power. Until we do, we’re stuck buying mass-produced movies and compact discs made by corporate mercenaries, sitting faceless and immobilized at arena rock performances and sports events, struggling with other people’s inventions and programs and theories that make less sense to us than sorcery did to our ancestors, shamefacedly accepting the judgments of priests and agony columnists and radio talk show hosts, berating ourselves for not living up to the standards set by college entrance exams and glamour magazines, listening to parents and counselors and psychiatrists and managers tell us we are the ones with the problems, buying our whole lives from the same specialists and entrepreneurs we sell them to—and gnashing our teeth in secret fury as they cut down the last trees and heroes with the cash and authority we give them. These things aren’t inevitable, inescapable tragedies—they’re consequences of the passivity to which we have relegated ourselves. In the checkout lines of supermarkets, on the dialing and receiving ends of 900 numbers, in the locker rooms before gym classes and cafeteria shifts, we long to be protagonists in our own epics, masters of our own fate.

If we are to transform ourselves, we must transform the world—but to begin reconstructing the world, we must reconstruct ourselves. Today all of us are occupied territory. Our appetites and attitudes and roles have all been molded by this world that turns us against ourselves and each other. How can we take and share control of our lives, and neither fear nor falter, when we’ve spent those lives being conditioned to do the opposite?

Whatever you do, don’t blame yourself for the fragments of the old order that remain within you. You can’t sever yourself from the chain of cause and effect that produced you—not with any amount of willpower. The trick is to find ways to indulge your programming that simultaneously subvert it—that create, in the process of satisfying those desires, conditions which foster new ones. If you need to follow leaders, find leaders who will depose themselves from the thrones in your head; if you need to “lead” others, find equals who will help you dethrone yourself; if you have to fight against others, find wars you can wage for everyone’s benefit. When it comes to dodging the imperatives of your conditioning, you’ll find that indulge and undermine is a far more effective program than the old heritage of “renounce and struggle” passed down from a humorless Christianity.

To return, finally, to the original question—yes, we too are making suggestions about which desires you pursue. We would be scoundrels to deny that! But we would be scoundrels not to make these suggestions, not to extol freedom and self-determination in a world that discourages them. Exhorting others to “think for themselves” is ironic—but today, refusing to oppose the propaganda of the missionaries and entrepreneurs and politicians simply means abandoning our society and species to their control. There’s no purity in silence. And liberty does not simply exist in the absence of control—it is something we have to make together. Taking responsibility for our part in the ongoing metamorphoses of the world means not being afraid to take part in the making of our society, influencing and being influenced as we do.

We make suggestions, we spread this propaganda of desire, because we hope by doing so to indulge our own programmed passion for propaganda in a way that undermines an order that discourages all of us from playing with our passions—and so to enter a world of total liberty and diversity, where propaganda and power struggles alike are obsolete. See you on the other side.

Related Video:

Another World is Possible

Posted on by
Reply

original

From the Spanish Civil War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, anarchism pushes for a new social order

By Tommaso Segantini

Source: Adbusters

The Spanish Civil War that occurred between 1936-1939 is always remembered as the fight between the Republicans and Franco’s nationalist semi-fascist forces. However, the war was marked by another, extraordinary event; in 1936, the year of the outbreak of the civil war, the world witnessed the first glimpses of an anarchist revolution. Sam Dolgoff, an American anarcho-syndicalist, stated that the Spanish Revolution “came closer to realizing the ideal of the free stateless society on a vast scale than any other revolution in history.”

The revolution was led by the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), a confederation of anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist trade unions. A significant part of Spain’s economy was collectivized and put under direct worker’s control. In Catalonia, workers controlled more than 75% of the economy. We should not imagine Soviet-style forced collectivization, but, as Sam Dogloff said, “a genuine grass roots functional libertarian democracy, where each individual participated directly in the revolutionary reorganization of social life”. George Orwell, who has served as a combatant for the CNT, was able to document the revolution as a first-hand observer. Two short passages from his Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, illustrate superbly the spirit of the revolution: “[T]here was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine,” and “many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves and no one owned anyone else as his master.”

Unfortunately, the Spanish anarchist utopia did not last long. The anarchists were crushed by a temporary alliance between all other political parties (including the Communists and the Socialists) and the brief—but real—experience of an anarchist society faded away.

However, an important lesson can be drawn from the anarchist utopia of 1936: another world is possible (which is also the slogan of the World Social Forum). Before discussing anarchism’s possible role in the resistance to the capitalist world order, let’s shortly retrace last century’s main stages of the capitalist system’s consolidation: elites have won the long-lasting struggle against the working class; this was achieved firstly by granting workers some benefits after World War II, notably through the implementation of welfare systems in the West, then by fragmenting them with the increase in specialization of labor and the growth of the service industry during the post-Fordist period and finally by assessing the knockout blow through neoliberal policies, which erased hard-fought social and economic rights, diminished trade unions’ bargaining power and weakened their influence.

The libertarian revolutions of 1968 have also ended up in disappointment. Hopes brought by the “New Left” political movement that emerged from the demands of students, activists and workers, came to a close when economic powers and politics colluded in the 80s, removing the last glimmers of hope that change could happen from within the current political system. The 1980s also marked the beginning of the neoliberal era (deregulation of the financial system, erosion of welfare states, privatization programs, financial crises, cuts to public spending).

Finally, the fall of the Berlin Wall represented the end of the last bastion of ideological resistance against capitalism: communism. Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man main thesis was emblematic in the representation of the world we faced and still face today: the triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism marked the end point of mankind’s ideological and political evolution.

We live in a historically specific cultural paradigm, shaped during the course of the last century through mass media, popular culture and advertising, which converged together and formed our consumer culture and in an economic and political system structured to serve the interests of a small elite. In this scenario, anarchist thought has a dual function of resistance: as a challenge to the neoliberal ideology, and as a possible concrete utopia that can guide us in the construction of a valid alternative social order.

The most accessible ground for us, “the 99%,” through which a radical change can be achieved, is that of ideas. No economic or political revolution can bring genuine change without, stated Serge Latouche, an advocator of the degrowth movement, “the decolonization of our minds” from the ideological framework we find ourselves in. Anarchism challenges the ideas, the dehistoricized and naturalized assumptions, and the taken-for-granted norms of today’s society. In an anarchist society, solidarity would replace individualism; mutual aid would prevail on competition; altruism on egoism; spirituality on materialism; the local on the global. Changing the current global framework of rules first necessitates an individual ideological liberation that can only come through self-awareness. To free our body we must first free our mind.