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Posts tagged Anarchism

Monday Lazy Linking

Don’t Alter; Abolish!

An Open Letter to Glenn Beck from the AK Press Collective. news.infoshop.org (2010-05-15):

An Open Letter to Glenn Beck from the AK Press Collective Hi Glenn. How's it going? Since Forbes magazine says your annual earnings are in the ballpark of $32 million, we're guessing that it's going pretty well. You can't put a price on defending the little guy, right? We are…

A fantastic piece from AK Press in response to anti-government Glenn Beck’s latest on-screen antics.

Shorter AK: The name of our movement may evoke the kind of question that I hear once in a while: Why do you use the word Anarchist to denote a struggle for total freedom and social peace, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean? To those who ask it, my answer is: For the reason that makes you afraid of it.

Friday Lazy Linking

Wednesday Lazy Linking

  • Why do we have an IMG element? Mark, dive into mark (2009-11-02). On February 25, 1993, Marc Andreessen wrote: I'd like to propose a new, optional HTML tag: IMG Required argument is SRC=”url”. This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, to be embedded in the text at… (Linked Wednesday 2009-11-04.)
  • Molly'sBlog 2009-11-01 22:06:00. mollymew, Anarchoblogs in English (2009-11-01). INTERNATIONAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT-BRAZIL: PROTEST POLICE ATTACK ON THE GA?@c3;161;CHA ANARCHIST FEDERATION: Last Thursday, October 29, police in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre broke into the headquarters of the local anarchist federation, the Federaç?@c3;a3;o Anarquista Ga?@c3;ba;cha (FAG) (Gaucha Anarchist Federation), making arrests and stealing various items of the property… (Linked Wednesday 2009-11-04.)

Rad Geek Speaks: Motorhome Diaries interviews me on agorism and counter-economics

It’s been a couple days since I was hepped to the fact that this video has gone online; but I’ve been delayed by travel and other considerations. Anyway, here is a video of Jason Talley’s interview with me in Las Vegas back in April, focusing on anarchism, agorism, and counter-economics. Judging from the closing title card, it looks like the MD3 have decided to break out the material from the interview on anarchism into a separate video, presumably forthcoming. But, in the meantime, this video has the segments of the interview where our discussion focuses on building the counter-economy as an alternative to electoral politics. Enjoy!

The one thing which I regret not having the time to discuss during the interview — which I would have done my best to break down, were I not already taxing Jason’s very generous allowance of time in what are typically very concise interview segments — is how my sympathies for mutualism and wildcat unionism influence my understanding of the agora, and of the sort of counter-economy that we should work to build: why, in short, I think that libertarians should be especially interested in building, so to speak, Black-and-Red markets. (Red as in workers-of-the-world-unite. Not, of course, as in Konkin’s notion of red market mafiosi.) Of course, Konkin’s original-flavor agorism is already very much in favor of the informal sector, and opposed to the state-collaborationist, state-supported corporate economy; but I think that agorists would do well to look at the kinds of counter-institutions that have historically been associated with the anti-statist and anti-authoritarian Left: fighting unions, direct action on the shopfloor, grassroots mutual aid networks, worker and consumer co-ops, neighborhood permaculture projects, community free clinics, participatory indymedia, CopWatch as a means of community self-defense, LETS trading networks, small-scale gift economies based on gleaning and homesteading (Food Not Bombs, Homes Not Jails, free stores, etc.). And so on, and so forth. To the degree that State privilege and State subsidy have artificially roided-up the rentier-centric, cash-lubricated, centralized, formalized bidniz economy, we can expect the counter-economy (which is the embryonic new society, being built within the shell of the old) to form up in opposite tendencies: egalitarian and decentalized exchange (which Konkin rightly predicted and emphasized), and also significantly more emphasis on informal connections, often based not on contracts or cash-on-the-barrelhead exchanges but rather on practicing solidarity, mutual aid, gleaning, homesteading, and other cashless forms of value-creation and social exchange (which I think Konkin underemphasized and overlooked in various ways). (I hardly expect cash, let alone simple quid-pro-quo exchange, to disappear; I’m certainly not interested in any dogmatic campaign to rub them out. But I do expect the counter-economy, and future fully-freed markets, to emphasize them much less intensely, and much less monomaniacally, than the current state-approved official economy does.) All of which underlines why I think it’s important for radical libertarians to see ourselves as part of the Left; and for that understanding to cash out in serious efforts to work together on countereconomic projects with the folks who ought to be our primary allies — that is, other anarchists — rather than working on the familiar set of conventional-delusional electoral projects together with conservatives and conventionally pro-capitalist minimal-statists, which all too many good radical libertarians have, due to a combination of cultural comfort zones, and statocentric models of political change, wasted their time and resources on in the past.

Anyway, like I said, there may be another interview segment forthcoming focusing on anarchism; if so, I’ll let you know when it drops.

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