Dead Kennedys – Halloween You’re dressed up like a clown… 11:22 pm / 31 October 2012 by la quimica de la vida comun
Dead Kennedys - Halloween
You’re dressed up like a clown
Putting on your act
It’s the only time all year
You’ll ever admit that
October 2012
Joseph Déjacque, "The Humanisphere" (Part III) 10:49 pm / 31 October 2012 by Shawn P. Wilbur, at Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule
[I've posted parts of The Humanisphere before, and talked a bit about the difficulties involved. Slowly, but surely, I'm working my way through the work, but not necessarily tackling the sections in order. This is the final section.]
THE HUMANISPHERE
by Joseph Déjacque
Part III
The Transitional Period.
How will the progress be accomplished? What means will prevail? What route will be chosen? That is what is it is difficult to determine in an absolute manner. But whatever these means, whatever the route, if it is a step towards anarchic liberty, I will applaud it. Let the progress take place by the arbitrary scepter of the czars or by the independent hand of the republics; let it be by the Cossacks of Russia or the proletarians of France, German, England or Italy in whatever manner the unity should come about, let the national feudalism disappear, and I will shout bravo. Let the soil, divided in a thousand fractions, be unified and formed into vast agricultural associations, the associations could even be, like the railroad corporations, usurious exploitations, and I will still cry bravo. Let the proletarians of the city and country organize themselves in corporations and replace wages with vouchers [bon de circulation], boutiques with bazaars, private monopoly with public exhibition and the commerce in capital with the exchange of products; let them subscribe in common to a mutual insurance and found a bank of reciprocal credit; let them begin to decree the abolition of all sorts of usury, and always I will shout bravo. Let women participate in all the advantages of society, as she does in all its burdens; let marriage disappear; let us suppress inheritance and employ the product of the successions to dower each mother with a pension for the feeding and education of her child; let us take from prostitution and begging ever chance of occurring; let us take the pickaxe to the barracks and the churches, raze them, and build on their sites monuments of public utility; let arbitrators replace the official judges and individual contract to the law; let universal registration [l'inscription universelle], as Girardin understands it, demolish the prisons penal colonies, the penal code and the scaffold; let the smallest, or the slowest, reforms be given rein, reforms with the scales and legs of a turtle, and provided they are real progresses and not harmful palliatives, a step into the future and not a return to the past, and with both hands I will cheer them on with my applause.
Everything that has become big and strong was first puny and week. The human being of today is incomparably greater in science, and more powerful in industry than the man of the past. Everything that begins with monstrous dimensions is not born viable. The fossilized monstrosities have preceded the birth of humanity as the civilized societies still precede the creation of harmonic societies. The earth requires the fertilizer of dead plants and animals to render it productive, as humans required the detritus of rotten civilizations to render them social and fraternal. The times reap what time has sown. The future supposes the past and the past a future; the present oscillates between these two movements without being about to keep balance, and is drawn by an irresistible magnetic attraction toward the unknown. We cannot resist Progress indefinitely. There is an irresistible weight that will always and despite everything drag down one of the trays of the scale. We can certainly violently resist it for a moment, jolt things in the opposite direct, subject it to reactionary pressures; but when the pressure fades, it will just regain, and more strongly, its natural inclination, and affirm more vigorously the power of the Revolution. Ah! Instead of clinging with rage to the branch of the Past, instead of agitating ourselves about it unsuccessfully and covering our powerlessness with blood, let us allow the social pendulum to swing freely towards the Future. And, one hand resting in the ropes, feet on the edge of the spherical plateau, oh you, gigantic aeronaut who has the terrestrial globe for a gondola, Humanity, do not block your eyes, do not tremble with fright, do not tear your chest with your nails, don’t clasp your hands in a sign of distress: fear is a bad adviser, it peoples our thoughts with ghosts. Raise, on the contrary, the veil of your eyelids and look, eagle, with your pupils: look and greet the limitless horizons, the luminous, azure depths of the Infinite, all these splendors of anarchy universal. Queen, who has for jewels in her crown the gems of intelligence, oh! be worthy of your sovereignty. Everything that is before you is your domain, the vastness that is your empire. Enter there, beautiful human, mounted on the terrestrial globe, your triumphant aerostat, and led by the doves of attraction. Stand, blonde sovereign, — mother, not this time of a sick child, of a love [that is] blind and armed with poisoned arrows, but on the contrary of men in possession of all their senses, of clear-sighted loves, armed with a productive mind and arm. Go, Majesty, fly at your prow your flag of purple, and sail, diadem on the head and scepter in the hand, in the midst of cheers for the Future!...
Two sons of the Bourgeoisie, who have partially renounced their bourgeois education and sworn themselves to [the cause of] liberty, Ernest Cœurderoy and Octave Vauthier, together in a pamphlet, la Barrière du Combat, and one of them in his book la Révolution dans l'homme et dans la société, prophesy the regeneration of society by a Cossack invasion. They rely, in order to make this judgment, on the analogy that they see existing between our society in decline and Roman decadence. They maintain that socialism will only be established in Europe when Europe is one. From an absolute point of view, yes, they are right to claim that liberty must be everywhere or nowhere. But it is not only in Europe, it is all over the globe that unity must be made before socialism in its catholicity, embracing the whole world with its roots, can rise high enough to shelter Humanity from the cruel storms, and [bring it to the harbor of] the charms of universal and reciprocal fraternity. To be logical, it is not only the invasion of France by the Cossacks that we must call for, but also the invasion of the Sepoys of Hindustan, of the Chinese, Mongol and Tartar multitudes, of the savages of New Zealand and Guinea, Asia, Africa and Oceania; that of the Red-Skins of the two Americas and of the Anglo-Saxons of the United State, more savage than the Red-Skins; we would have to call all of these tribes from the four corners of the earth to the conquest and domination of Europe. But no. The conditions are no longer the same. The means of communication are completely different than they were in the times of the Romans; the sciences have made an immense step forward. It is not only on the banks of the Neva of the Danube that there now rise up hordes of Barbarians summoned to the sack of Civilization, but on the banks of the Seine and the Rhône, the Thames and the Tagus, the Tiber and the Rhine. — It is from the empty furrow, it is from the floor of the workshop, it is sweeping along, in its floods of men and women, the pitchfork and the torch, the hammer and the gun; it is under the farmer’s overalls and the smock of the worker; it is with the hunger in the belly and the fever in the heart, but under the supervision of the Idea, that Attila of the modern invasion; it is under the generic name of the proletariat and rolling its eager masses towards the luminous centers of the utopian City; it is from Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, Naples, that, raising up its enormous waves and pushed by its insurrectionary flood, the devastating torrent will overflow. It is at the noise of the social tempest, it is in the current of that regenerating deluge that Civilization will collapse in decadence. It is at the breath of the innovating spirit that the popular ocean will bound up from its gulf. It is the [stormy] turmoil of new ideas that will bring down the heads and thrones of the civilized and pass with its level of iron and fire over the ruins. It is this that will drown in blood and flames all the notarized and certified deeds, and the procurers of those deeds, and will make the parceled and appropriated soil a collective whole. This time it is not darkness that the Barbarians will bring to the world, but light. The old order took from Christianity only the name and the letter, but they have killed its spirit; the new will not profess absolutely the letter, but the spirit of socialism. Wherever they can find a patch of social earth, they will plant the seed of the tree of Liberty. They will pitch their tent there, the nascent tribe of free people. From there they will project the branches of the propaganda everywhere they can be extended. They will increase in number and strength, in scientific and social progress. They will invade, step by step, idea by idea, all of Europe, from the Caucasus to Mount Hekla and from Gibraltar to the Urals. The tyrants will struggle in vain. Oligarchic Civilization cede the terrain ascendant advance of Social Anarchy. Europe conquered and freely organized, America must be socialized in its turn. The republic of the Union, this breeding ground of grocerswho award themselves voluntarily the name of model republic, of which all the grandeur consists in the extent of the territory; this cesspool where wallow and croak all the villainies of mercantilism, filibusters of commerce and piracies of human flesh; this den of all the hideous and ferocious beasts revolutionary Europe will have rejected from its breast, last rampart of bourgeois civilization, but where, also, some colonies of Germans, of revolutionaries of all nations, established within, will have driven into the earth the mileposts of Progress, laid down the first foundations of social reforms; this shapeless giant, this republic with a heart of stone, an icy face, a goitrous neck, a statue of cretinism whose feet rest on a bale of cotton and whose hands are armed with a whip and a Bible; harpy carrying a revolver and a knife in her teeth; thieving like a magpie, murderous like a tiger; vampire with bestial thirsts, who must always have gold or blood to suck... finally, the American Babel will tremble to its foundations. From the North to the South and from the East to the West will crash the thunder of the insurrections. The revolts of the proletarians and the revolt of the slaves will crack the States and the bones of the exploiters of these States. The flesh of the politicians and industrialists, of the bosses and masters, the shopkeepers and planters will smoke under the bloody feet of the proletarians and slaves. The monstrous American Union, the fossil Republic, will disappear in this cataclysm. Then the Social Republic of the United States of Europe span the Ocean and take possession of the new conquest. Blacks and whites, creoles and redskins will fraternize then and will found one single race. The killers of Negros and proletarians, the amphibians of liberalism and the carnivores of privilege will withdraw like the caymans and bears before the advance of social liberty. The gallows-birds, like the beasts of the forest dread the company of human beings. The libertarian fraternity will frighten the denizens of Civilization. They know that where human rights exist there is no place for exploitation. So they will flee to the most remote parts of the bayous, to the most unexplored caverns of the Cordilleras.
Thus socialism—first individual, then local, then national, then European, from ramification to ramification and from invasion to invasion—will become universal socialism. And one day there will no longer be a question of the little French Republic, nor of the little American Union, nor even of the little United States of Europe, but of the true, great and social Human Republic, single and indivisible, the Republic of human beings in the state of freedom, the Republic of the united individualities of the globe.
[working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]
{wordless wednesday} 6:31 pm / 31 October 2012 by michele james-parham, at Natural Attachment
Wordless Wednesday 10.31.2012
A follow-up challenge to pro-choice atheists… 4:21 pm / 31 October 2012 by Francois Tremblay, at The Prime Directive
Dear pro-choice atheists…
After the complete failure of your anti-abortion brethren, I would like to address you a challenge as well. If you believe there is a moment (either the moment of birth, or some other moment) where life/beingness/personhood/etc begins (as opposed to the gradual view, which I hold), then can you provide a secular (i.e. not based on the soul or any other spiritual claptrap) argument that demonstrates it?
Note that, as for the anti-abortion advocates, I am not asking you to debate me on the topic. I don’t ask for a valid argument. All I want is a cogent argument, i.e. a series of statements that use evidence to logically demonstrate the truth of the belief in question. I am curious to know if you can do it, since anti-abortion people have failed so miserably at doing so.
I am a gradualist (not to mention pro-abortion), so I don’t agree with you regardless, but can you at least present an argument to defend your view? Like I said as regards to the anti-abortion side, this is a fundamental premise of your position, so you should have no problem justifying it. If, on the other hand, you do not believe in a moment and are a gradualist like me, then the challenge does not apply to you and you don’t need to answer (although I would question why you are pro-choice, but I am not going to debate that here).
Comments are for answers to the challenge only. It is not your personal soapbox. All comments that do not pertain to the challenge will be deleted.
Filed under: Pro-Abortion
Trot Guide November 2012 Update 3:46 pm / 31 October 2012 by @ndy, at slackbastard
SA & SP I’m excited! In a breakthrough for the pseudo-socialist Socialist Alliance (SA), Sue Bolton has been elected to Moreland Council! Sue becomes SA’s second local councillor, joining Sam Wainwright in Fremantle. In Yarra Council, the Labor-loyal reformist left … Continue reading
THE WORKERS HAVE AWOKEN. 2:18 pm / 31 October 2012 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.
I always claim that this blog is about poetry as well as my ranting, so here are three verses from On The 23rd of August by Erich Muhsam, German anarchist, murdered by the nazis in 1934.
Struggle, your satisfaction,
against State and Reaction,
struggle until the day
the spell of power has been broken,
when in every land on the Earth
the workers have awoken.
Brothers, you who for us died,
your blood flows unpacified,
until the masses win.
Class war and class solidarity
shall give into the people’s hands
land, farm tools and factory.
Your longing and your distress
are a whip and star to us,
Sacco and Vanzetti!
Deathless model to humanity,
a free world your memorial:
Socialism, Anarchy!
Categories: Anarchism
Thinking Like a State and Otherwise 10:02 am / 31 October 2012 by Parenthesis Eye, at The Implicit & Experiential Rantings of a Person
The topic of anarchists voting, or not voting, has been coming up a lot lately. This is happening, of course, because the national Presidential Elections are coming up soon here in the U.S. More locally, pertaining to Minnesota in particular, there are two big amendment thingies that will be coming up for a popular vote as well. I have personally decided to vote for the Green Party candidates for president and vice president, and a group that I am connected with, the MARS Collective, has decided to publicly take a stand regarding the amendments that are to be voted on here in Minnesota. This all leaves some people, both anarchists and non-anarchists alike, reacting with a confused and surprised “What the hell?!”
I have decided to vote for the Green Party not because I am wanting there to be a “Green President” (or any “president” for that matter), but more as a way to publicly protest against both the Democrats and the Republicans while at the same time adding a little bit more weight to a general lefty public voice (assuming that that is a useful thing to do). The way that I view it, what I personally think about the topic of elections and politics in general are expressed by me when I talk about it and write about these subjects. Voting does not really express what people think and feel about things, it is simply just raw numbers being tallied up by a bureaucratic machine. Votes are in essence devoid of any real meaning in and of themselves – they are just that are put out there that other people can interpret and put whatever meaning they want to on them.
Given that the Green Party is usually thought of as being in favor of lefty things, adding one more number to their name could (and I am hoping would) be registered in the public eye as being a little bit more known support for lefty things. This is the same logic as going to protests or having political bumper stickers. It’s purely symbolic, and that may or may not possibly contribute to some positive social change. But in the end I do not think that it is all that important or interesting.
When looking at the topic of anarchism and voting, I think that it is important to examine – what is the state, per se? After all, voting and electoral politics over all are primarily functions of the state, they are one part of the general state apparatus (at least for the states that use a representative democracy system). The state is a social institution of organized force, control and coercion, and it is maintained and perpetuated by people acting in accordance with it, going along with it, and just generally playing the game by the rules that are drilled into us from birth. The state exists because you, me, and millions of others both believe in it and act accordingly.
To abolish the state, then, requires the opposite of all that. To abolish the state means that people stop believing in it and stop playing along. This means not voting, yes, but it also means so much more than that. It means not paying taxes, not following laws, not getting government-issued I.D.s, not using government-issued currencies, not filling out government-issued paperwork, and basically not operating based on the symbol structures that are set up and arranged by governments. It means counter-economics, basically.
The idea behind all of this is basically to “ignore” the state as much as possible, to “do your own thing” instead. It can be said that “laws” do not exist, but people with guns who are willing to forcefully put you into cages do. Relatedly, “money” also does not exist, but starvation does, as do those same aforementioned people with guns who are willing to put you into cages. All of these institutions are based on collectively agreed-upon social meanings that we choose to ascribe to things, and our willingness and ability to play along with them. Or not.
I view the act of voting as being a situation where people are being told that those folks who have their guns and their cages and who are making threats at you, as well as all those people who are playing the game of “money” and the whole series of chain-reactions of cause-and-affect that go along with that, could possibly maybe make certain choices and go in certain directions if you perform a particularly designated mass ritual and mark an “X” in one box or another. That’s super. But ultimately, so what?
There comes a time when it’s appropriate to put down the games, to turn off the entertainment, and to face the real world with the real people that are in it. And this brings me to Leah-Lynn Plante. This person, along with Matt Duran and Kteeo Olejnik decided to not play along with one of the games set up by the state, a game called “grand jury investigation”. As a result, people with guns forcefully put them into a cage. Now Leah-Lynn Plante is out of that cage, while the other two are still there, and it is currently unclear whether this was because she decided to start playing along with the state’s game or not.
This brings me to a point that I wanted to make – to be rigorously and consistently against the state, to absolutely refuse to go along with that whole thing, to live a life based on “counter-economics” essentially, is to completely be putting your life on the line. They can kidnap, torture and kill you – that’s what states do, it is a part of their basic function. To be against that, one needs to make a personal assessment and a personal decision of what one is willing and able to do. It must be understood that not everyone is at all times up for taking such enormous risks.
One of the things that was publicly known about Leah-Lynn Plante was that she struggled with various mental health issues. With that being the case, she may have decided to at some point start prioritizing her own mental health and well-being over consistently resisting the state and the various demands that are associated with it. If that is the case, I would urge there to be compassion and understanding for how she could make such a choice. Not everyone is cut out for being a public sacrificial martyr for a cause.
The case of Leah-Lynn Plante and the issue of anarchists voting is related in that we all, as individuals, have to determine for ourselves how much and in what ways we want to play along with the games of the state. We each determine what things we go along with, which mass functions we want to act in accordance with, and what meanings we want to ascribe to things. We each choose what lines we will draw, and what lines we will or will not cross.
In the case of the two Minnesota amendments, I plan on voting “no” on both of them, but for different reasons that other folks commonly give for this. “Voter I.D.”, just like any other kind of government-issued identification, is just one more form of state control and an arbitrary set of bureaucratic hoops to jump through that I would like for people to avoid. And the institution of “marriage” is not something that I want to have frozen in place, but instead see it be played with and experimented with. Of course let’s have same-sex marriages, but why stop there? How about having three or more people be married to each-other? How about having whole communities of people be married to each-other? To me, the focus should be on encouraging new forms of closeness and commitment between people, not on abiding by government laws.
So yes, I will vote, but in the end that is not all that important. The elections will come and go, and other rituals and demands associated with the state will come up as well. Time and time again I and other anarchists will be confronted with these realities, and will need to choose how we want to respond. We each need to determine for ourselves what choices are most in integrity with our values, what battles we want to fight, and when it will be best to save our energy to fight another day.
I do not want to establish universal moral codes or standards for all anarchists to follow regarding voting, or anything else for that matter. At its base this is a matter of individual responsibility and choice, and from that foundation we can then come together to determine what projects we can create that are more interesting than those that we have been presented with.
DISSENTING VOICES WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. 9:10 am / 31 October 2012 by ann arky, at annarky's blog.
Now as the financial Mafia put the boot in to the Greek people, it is impossible to even attempt to hold onto the thinest veneer of the illusion of democracy. Day by day the state comes down harder and harder on any form of dissent, more and more the gap between the people and "their" government grows ever wider. The powers that be don't even like to be seen in public, it only generates bad publicity for them. The so called elected representatives of the people don't want to have anything to do with the people, it is all corporate finance that matters.
We should never lose sight of the fact that how the state acts in Greece is not unique to Greece. As austerity bites here and in other countries across Europe, each state will take the necessary action to force through the dictates of the Troika, that collection of vultures, leeches and parasites in the form of the IMF (International Mankind Fuckers) ECB (European Corrupt Banksters) and the EC (Endemic Corruption). Make no mistake, they are the rulers of Europe, the elected governments are there to manage the Troika's plans for the creation of a European sweatshop economy to compete with their Eastern rivals.
More from Teacher Dude's Grill and BBQ:Monday, October 29, 2012Today the text of the 3rd memorandum of agreement eliminating public provisions was released. Simultaneously today, one day after the arrest of a journalist for releasing a list of tax-dodgers, a young man was arrested in Corfu island because he published in his web-blog photos of police officers having very friendly encounters with neo-Nazis. Earlier in the morning the management of the state TV channel (ERT) announced that from tomorrow the presenters of its morning news show are going to be replaced. The reason is that the two journalists commented on the attitude of the Minister of Citizen Protection (police) who was threatening that will sue foreign newspapers for writing that the anti-Nazi activists were tortured in the Police HQ. The two journalists were discussing about the coroner’s diagnosis which was released confirming that proper torturing of the 15 anti-Nazi activists did occur in the police HQ.
Perhaps it is appropriate that Thessaloniki, which this weekend celebrated the 100th anniversary of its liberation from the Ottoman Empire looked like a city under siege. For three days the centre of Greece's second largest city was the objects of draconian security measures designed to avoid a repetition of last year's peaceful protests which closed down the annual military parade and forced the president of the republic to flee.Read the full article HERE:
Mindful of the fact that the event lead to the resignation of the then prime minister, Giorgos Papandreou just weeks later the current political leadership decided to make sure last year's events were not repeated.
As a result 2,000 extra police were drafted to protect prime minister Antonis Samaras and president Karolos Papoulias as they visited Thessaloniki over the weekend. The security measures for the Oxi Day parade were so tight that no even the parents of high school pupils taking part were allowed within the 1 km “dead zone” that surrounded the VIP stand and effectively isolated the parade from the vast majority of citizens who'd turned out to follow it.
Categories: Anarchism
Strung Out – Bring Out Your Dead. 5:00 am / 31 October 2012 by pappmensch, at brainm0sh
Hehe, wirklich klasse!