Fuckin thieves

Came home Sunday morning to find that my house had been robbed the night before.

It's such a bad feeling, to know that you have been punked by a band of high school boys roaming the street. Around 11 o'clock Saturday night I left the house to stay the night at a friend's house and watch a movie. When we walked got outside, we saw a group of boys skulking around aimlessly by our mailbox. One asked if we were having a party at the house. They must have heard my housemates' band playing downstairs, I thought.

But he asked the question like a bratty teenager would ask his mom for the car keys, as if he was entitled to a party if there was one. I said it was just band practice. This was supposed to sound like it was nothing exciting, friendly but parsimonious at the same time. Instead it probably came off sounding too generous. He said, "Oh, ok," and they all left. I noticed one of them was carrying a big case of golf clubs, but I did not think anything of it. Four people were downstairs, and another person upstairs. The house should be safe.

When I came back home the next day my housemates asked me if I knew where all their stuff was. I said no, and went to my room to discover that a $4,000 video camera I had been using for the past two years was stolen. I knew right away what happened. I said to myself, "Those fuckin thieves."

Looking back, it was so obvious! I should have caught on to their suspicious behavior. But who ever does until it's too late? I figured the boys might have stopped at our house to check out the anarchist newspaper/zine box we have sitting outside, which was intended to attract pedestrian attention. I figured they might have been looking for college parties, which happen nearby every weekend. I figured they could have been playing night-golf, because I have seen frat boys play golf at night before. And I figured the music downstairs attracted them to our house. I guess I was proud to live in an "interesting" house, and so it seemed not worth paying attention to.

"Well, at least you learned your lesson," some friends told me. But what lesson? Maybe people who read this blog can help me out.

One obvious lesson is that you should be vigilant and lock your doors even when people are home. Maybe that is inconvenient and maybe you'll seem paranoid. If you have expensive stuff then your friends will understand. But how friendly should you be to your extended neighbors? Should you be friendly and invite Oliver fucking Twist into your house? Or should you tell him to get the fuck away from your mailbox and if you see him again you're getting out the shotguns? Should you ask him where he lives and what he's doing? Or would that only make friendly people suspicious, instead of making suspicious people fearful? Should you lay booby traps? How many? And if you catch the fucking bastards red-handed, how much (if any) mercy should you give?

As I told my housemate, so long as these thieves steal from us and thereby stop us from being effective community organizers or activists etc., they are no better than the police. Are we supposed to think of this crime as driven by class oppression - as if they're the proletariat stealing from the bourgeoisie? Yes, we have "wealth" in terms of computers, lap tops and cameras. Yes, we are college-educated and make food with quality herbs and spices. Yes, we have a painting by Jean Honoré Fragonard in our living room. Does that make us petite bourgeoisie?

In one analysis, we own the means of production because we make propaganda. We have our own means of production. But this analysis is incoherent. Since the thieves have the means now - it would make them the bourgeoisie and now our roles are switched. Anyone who ever published or created intellectual content is the bourgeoisie. No, we should have a better class analysis than that. If we think of ourselves as petite bourgeois consumers with surplus wealth for the taking, then we must really be confused.

And is it true what Machiavelli says, that it is better to be feared than loved? Some people are simply not interested in what they can gain mutually from friends in a relationship and would rather take from you, no matter who you are, no matter which side you are on. How do you scare the shit out of those people, while making new friends and maintaining your mutual respect for others? How can you tell friends from enemies and what do you tell your enemies?

...

Hold on to the Feeling, Streetlight People

The myth of Obama's "change" is essentially providing protective cover for entrenched forces of racism, sexism and class domination. Barack Obama is a political figure who wants to unclench your fist, whose presidency will highlight the indeterminacy of change and the paradoxical tendency to legitimate oppression by creating a false sense of formal neutrality and equality.

Mark Tushnet wrote that, "It is not just that rights-talk does not do much good. In the contemporary United States, it is positively harmful." He and the other critical legal theorists argued that just having new laws that instated equal rights for people creates fertile "protective cover" for a deeply embedded social hierarchy to thrive underneath.

The obvious example is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution - a paradox which the civil rights movement had to confront many years later. The law is either not enough, or it could never be enough under the existing political conditions. Just so, a president - any president - is either not enough, or could never be enough under the existing political conditions.

Barack Obama is constantly saying that he needs your help to change America, that he cannot do it alone, that change comes from below. He is wrong about this. If he wanted to push America in an undemocratic direction he could get away with it, easily, because he does not operate in a democracy. What he really means is that he cannot democratically change society at all, and that he needs your help entirely. Without a decisive attack on public consciousness through popular action and mutual aid, then liberal legalism - the false hope of protective cover rhetoric - reinforces the myth that social progress still comes from the top.

Don't believe the hype. Liberal legalism creates a sense of 'the self' that is illusory and ultimately destructive, by empowering corrupt institutions as the agents of change rather than participant cooperatives. But how, we should ask, can change come from below in a system that only invests in a hierachy? In the words of Journey, "Don't stop believin'. Hold on to the feeling, streetlight people!"

Athens: We are the Image of the Future

The anarchist movement in Greece is world-renowned, especially now. Anarchist neighborhoods throughout Europe - such as Copenhagen's Christiania neighborhood or Athen's Exarcheia district - have battled with governments to maintain autonomy. Each time agents of government suppression target the neighborhoods, the anarchists strike back. But this time, all over the world.

The bullets that killed Athenian boy Alexis Grigoropoulos this week "may have hit one person, but it was meant for us all," a German anarchist banner read early in the week. The "birthplace of democracy," some people are saying, "has descended into anarchy."

Exharcheia in the 1970s

Greek politicians - from military colonels to business leaders - since the 1970s have denounced Greek rebels as "anarchists," "nihilists" and, in classic Greek disparagement, "barbarians" with no aim whatsoever. The same mantra again this week. But Greece, often considered the birthplace of democracy, is also the site of an ongoing struggle against fascism. The fascists who lost power in the 1970s did not disappear - they simply work behind the scenes. Today's political structure in Greece - "Athenian democracy" for whatever it is worth - owes itself to an anarchist and student movement which organized in the 1970s against a US-backed military regime.

History:



In the early 1970s students barricaded the National Technical University in Athens, law students used radio transmitters to broadcast anti-state communiques, and workers throughout Greece joined the General Strike. The city was in revolt and people gathered around radios to hear students broadcast from the occupied university, "This is the Polytechnic! People of Greece, the Polytechnic bears the standard of our struggle and your struggle, our common struggle against dictatorship and for democracy!"


The military, furious, crashed through the University's barricades with tanks, then beat and killed students and workers near Exarcheia and the campus premises. The military regime was eventually overthrown, in large part due to the student-worker organizing from the campus. Since then Greek campuses were deemed off-limits to government police and military. It is illegal for police to be on campuses.


The Greek anarchists who shouted "This is our life!" just before Army tanks and paratroopers stormed their campuses in 1973, as shown in these pictures, is burned into the memories of many survivors.

What did it take to topple this regime? It was the anarchists, students, and workers who toppled this regime.

Yesterday and Today

But much of what was reported then sounds like what is happening today, and the media is constantly dismissing the youth as hackneyed, easily-angered, aimless etc. Even the BBC wants things to return to normal:

"In Athens, too, shopkeepers are fed-up... there must be something in their head."

But what is in their head - who dares to ask?

While some Greeks may be confused about how this situation exploded out of thin air, the media is telling them which side of the barricades they should be on. They complain that students are "exploiting a legal loophole" to occupy university campuses where police cannot go. What does that mean: People are "exploiting"? the fact some places where the state cannot go exist. Aren't the police exploiting a legal loophole which allows them to be everywhere else?

Consciousness is Born in the Streets

It isn't only who the media calls "self-styled anarchists" getting rowdy this entire week. Workers began an Athenian General Strike early on, and the Association of Employees in the suburb of Agios Dimitrios released a statement urging all Greeks to take to the streets, saying profoundly, "Don't watch the news, consciousness is born in the streets!" and "We are in Civil War: with the fascists, the bankers, the state, the media wishing to see an obedient society."

Comparing reports from Greek media via the New York Times in the 1970s to 2008, three artifacts stand out in similarity.

1. Tens of millions of dollars in property damage caused by rebels;
   
2. Police shot and killed people in the street;
   
3. The government essentially took control of the media and gave the impression that anarchists were a "minority" fueled by "the communists". (This was a US-backed regime, by the way, so anarchists had to be controlled ultimately by communists. Today, of course, anarchism has to be controlled by hormones and nothing else.)
   

For example:

NYTimes abstract archive, April 28th, 1972:

"400 Greek physics students, in open defiance of martial law in Greece, stage silent march from campus at Goudi to main univ bldg in Athens in protest against discrimination in examinations procedures; police attempt to disperse illegal march half-way, but students persevere, advancing in small groups; police forces step in at univ, forcing marchers to flee."

NYTimes abstract archive, November 18th, 1973:

"[President Papadopoulos] asserts that he tried to lead nation toward normality, but that 'anarchist elements, aiming at overthrow of all lawful order and exploiting naivete of unrealistic people as well as self-interest of politicians,' have created dangerously explosive situation; declares his determination to take all appropriate measures for consolidation of law and order; decries Greek politicians for siding with 'subversive demonstrations of nihilistic minority'; invites politicians to recant and think of their responsibilities to nation"

NYTimes abstract archive, November 25th, 1973:

"mil judiciary is carrying out thorough investigation of events that led to student-worker riots; asserts that police estimates of damage caused to private and public property during riots are in 'tens of millions of dollars'; [the secretary of information] says he does not know when martial law will be lifted."

NYTimes abstract archive, December 12th, 1973:

"Greece's mil police asserts on Dec 11 that former politicians instigated Nov student revolt but then lost control to anarchists who attempted to seize power"

Apology

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Western bloc - specifically Britain and the U.S. - admitted that it had puffed up the military regime in Greece, which bloodily suppressed the student movement. Bill Clinton gave an apology for this in 1999. He said in Athens,

"When the junta took over in 1967 here, the United States allowed its interests in prosecuting the cold war to prevail over its interest -- I should say its obligation -- to support democracy, which was, after all, the cause for which we fought the cold war. It is important that we acknowledge that."

Each year there is a commemoration on November 17th to honor the rebellion. Athenian students and anarchists - even some politicians - pay their respect to the Polytechneio students killed in struggles mainly from the 1940s through the 1970s, but also to remember recent struggles. A march that begins every year at the Polytechnic university ends at the United States embassy compound, where the people shout anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist slogans. This picture is from 2008:



There is an old saying. Winston Churchill said "History is written by victors". The revolutionaries who successfully ousted a dictatorship in the 1970s are, because victorious, celebrated in Greek society. They faced a spectacle powerful enough to control the soldiers and the police, but the people revolted. Today that spectacle is even more powerful.

Murder in Exarchia

When state police entered the anarchist district of Exarchia looking to murder some anarchists earlier this week, it was as if the shots were "heard 'round the world". This brought loosely-connected anarchist groups in dozens of cities beyond the Aegean out into the streets.

Here is what happened.

Witnesses shown on this Greek news channel several days later said the police had walked down a street in Exarcheia with their guns drawn. A translation is available here. The police cussed at some young people, telling them to "Come here punks, come and settle this." When some kids approached, "Suddenly, without any other intervention, the patrol car abruptly departs and some time later the officers return. They stood in front of the kids and gunshots were heard. One of the kids, fell." They fired three shots to make sure they hit him, since they missed at first. Someone shouted that he was wounded, but "The police turned their backs, as if nothing had happened, and left."

"They will get away with impunity in the courts," echoed anarchists around the world, "but not on our streets."

If this murder was by "by accident" as the police said then I find excerpts from the murderer's 11-page testimony extremely contradictory. The testimony builds a case against Grigoropoulos' personal and moral character. It is a moral justification for his murder. They condemn Grigoropoulos and provide information on his family background, his education, and his friends. They say he was a corrupted youth.

"Justice is", according to Thrasymachus, Socrates' interlocutor in The Republic, "nothing other than the advantage of the stronger."

The defense lawyer for the police - whose office was burned down after this testimony - stated, "It is now only up to the Greek justice to decide whether the youth was justly killed, or not." Juridical tactics in Greece have not changed much since Socrates - who was tried and executed for "corrupting the youth of Athens".



In this picture you can see Greek police firing live ammunition at people in the street this week.

The photographer who snapped this picture for Eleutheros Typos and the Associated Press, Kostas Tsironis, was also fired from Eleutheros Typos for publishing it. The original site (in Greek) where I found that information is here, and a blogger on this site has translated it.

Firing photographers in a time like this is "police news management". In a democracy, you see, the police don't have to actually be looking over your shoulder during rebellion because even moderate sympathizers and the media will police themselves and each other. The obedient society will also look the other way as police collude with fascists.

Neo-nazis and "far right supporters" have disguised themselves as anarchists in order to get amongst them and stab people with knives this week. Most seem to be members of the neonazi group Golden Dawn, a group which kidnaps and murders migrants. Some protesters have been stabbed in Patras, Athens and elsewhere as detailed on Athens Indymedia. Yahoo! News apparently gathered some photos from the wire, but does not provide any further insight.


One student says a mysterious "shadow" state is working with police blessings.

These unreported provocateurs, instructed by police, also destroy small shops in Exarcheia and Patras, blaming it on the students and anarchists. But those people in red and black have targeted only banks and large corporations. Members of Golden Dawn were also encouraged to go ahead and stab demonstrators, many of whom are high school students.

In Patras, before demonstrators had thought about erecting barricades, members of Golden Dawn in collaboration with the police threw rocks and chased people through streets with clubs. "For this reason," says a Patras student in this account, "rudimentary barricades were put together in the streets around the University of Patras". Then: "the neonazis were running with clubs & knives towards the demonstrators." People ran away in terror. The Greek media is calling the neonazi group "infuriated citizens," (implying that the citizenry has sided against demonstrators.)

Another account says that Golden Dawn and the police were "perfectly coordinated", and that the media has also called the neonazis "local business owners" who are "taking the law into their own hands". In the picture below (via Athens Indymedia) the man holding the blue flag is alleged to be a member of Golden Dawn, and minutes later he enters a crowd of Athenians to stab people.

We are the image of the future

In just one night "normality" can die in any society.

Greece is filled with fire. Some are saying that democracy is merely an easier way to lie to people, to give them false representation. "Democracy died because it was built on the backs of slaves. In the country in which democracy was born, a grand apology and solution is being given to the world it poisoned."

If normality dies in other societies around the world, will the shadows take over under the banner of patriotism as they have in Greece? Can't fascism be disguised and rationalized? Who is the shadow? Who can you trust?

Students, future engineers, future doctors, are Greece's future. But they do not want the same future as the rest of Europe; their vision is for a better world. Now Exarcheia is barricaded, streets are barricaded, some 15 universities are barricaded. Athenian hearts, as well as over seventy police stations, burning...

A wall in Athens reads, "We are the image of the future".


The International Anarchist Conspiracy, communique #5:

And What About Tomorrow? An Anarchist Response to "Battle in Seattle"

Two weeks ago I watched the opening of "Battle in Seattle" - the Hollywood film about the WTO protest - at the Neptune Theater in Seattle. I also fliered the movie-going audience with information about the PepperSpray film collective. We were at the film showing because some of the people in the collective participated in the WTO protest. It's how the film collective actually got started. Here is a pamphlet that anarchists have been passing around at the screenings too. I really liked the film and was inspired by it, but it's true that the filmmaker violence-bated the anarchists. Here is a quote from Crimethinc's Screenwreckers Guild:

"The Battle in Seattle website repeatedly belittles anarchists as a “small fringe group” who “managed to steal the show” while focusing only on anarchist participation in the black bloc. Actually, anarchists were involved in all different aspects of the WTO protests including lockdowns, making puppets and cooking for Food Not Bombs. The Direct Action Network, (the group who shaped the protests), was founded and operated based on the anarchist principles of horizontal and non-hierarchical organizing. The media’s attempts to pigeon hole anarchists as “violent” thugs was simply an effort to discredit the strength of anarchist organizing and the successes of direct action."

Pepperspray Productions is also credited in the film because some of them in Seattle organized protester extras for the film.

http://dead-city.org/whatabouttomorrow-print.pdf

A Day of Mournful Overcast 09/12/08

Rule Changes Would Give FBI Agents Extensive New Powers. Carrie Johnson. Washington Post: September 12, 2008.

The Post unveils new rules that are designed to "improve" information gathering between bureaucracies and help detect terrorist threats. But of course, the changes wouldn't be complete without extending the powers to simple, everyday criminal procedures and investigations. It would allow, for example, "agents to interview people in the United States about foreign intelligence cases without warrants or prior approval of their supervisors" and it rewrites the 1976 guidelines which were established after Nixon-era abuses to "restrict the FBI's authority to intervene in times of civil disorder and to infiltrate opposition group." FBI agents monitoring large-scale demonstrations that they believe could turn dangerous also would have new powers.

Anti-war veterans plan coffeehouse near Fort Lewis. Brent Champaco. Tacoma News Tribune: September 12, 2008.

This TNT article is so late, considering that the Seattle PI already reported on the coffeehouse over a month ago. It's sad that one has to read the Seattle newspapers to find out what's actually happening in Tacoma. Tully's Coffee company donated barista equipment to the coffeehouse project, not reported in the TNT story. People are talking about how "seditious" the project is in the comment section.

Turning Point in the Gang Crisis. Tom Hayden. The Nation Magazine: September 12, 2008.

Los Angeles city officials and police chiefs who loathe the idea of gang "peace processes" are now having to put up with paid peace workers and negotiators, many of whom are veterans of early 1990s gang wars. After the Crip and Blood truce of 1992, city and state officials fell through on their economic aid promises to inner city neighborhoods. A few years later the gangs were warring again. Today the LAPD continually harrasses the LA Hispanic population in particular (if you recall May Day 2007). Hayden and allies of the community are considered "thug huggers" by the police chief.

A Campaign Without Ideas. Eugene Robinson. Truthdig.com: September 11th, 2008.

A pro-Obama analysis of the Palin-McCain campaign strategy, which is not about "ideas", says Robinson, but rather about victimization from Democrats and the news media. While not in support of Obama like Robinson is, I also find the accusation that "left media" is victimizes the campaign striking, given that I was struck by a police baton outside of their convention and that this was paid for by a Republican insurance policy that covered up to $10 million in legal fees to be accumulated from policing the protests.

Cleared: Jury Decides That Threat of Global Warming Justifies Breaking the Law. Michael McCarthy. The Independent: September 11, 2008.

Greenpeace activists cleared of charges for causing more than £35,000 to a coal-fired plant. "The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain's green agenda and could encourage further direct action." During the eight-day trial, the world's leading climate scientist, Professor James Hansen of Nasa, flew to Britain to ask the Prime Minister personally to "take a leadership role" in scrapping the idea of a coal-fired future for Britain. Go team!

A Day of Mournful Overcast 09/09/08

OPEC Agrees to Cut Oil Output. Al Jazeera: September 10th, 2008.

With record crude oil prices, OPEC and particularly Saudi Arabia have come under pressure by the United States to increase oil production. But instead OPEC is going to decrease production, raising prices even higher. This is so fucking excellent, thank you OPEC, because right now both Obama and McCain are calling for "offshore drilling" in the U.S. to make up for increases in the price of foreign oil. OPEC of course does not want oil prices to fall by too much, since their customers would then start looking for oil substitutes like solar or wind (like they started to in the 1970s.) So, actually, fuck OPEC.

New Orleans: The City that Won't Be Ignored. Naomi Klein, The Nation Magazine: September 3rd, 2008.

Klein's analysis of the new interest taken by McCain in the Hurricane Gustav situation, but sparing no lenience for Obama or the Democratic Party. The Hurricane should have been a time when we are opposed to offshore drilling, because look at the spill and waste! The increase in offshore drilling brought a decrease in gasoline prices, and both parties supported this as part of an "energy security" plan. "Obama created a political vacuum" by not mentioning New Orleans, which the Republicans have managed to fill using it as a backdrop to their campaign. The morning after Gustav made landfall, Bush called for more drilling, which is now one of the most important campaign issues. Palin's claim to national fame was telling cable shows that "we need to drill, drill, drill." Naomi Klein notes that "Gustav was one of those rare moments when political arguments are made by reality, not rhetoric."

What You Should Know About Psychiatry and Psychiatric Drugs. various authors.

Before you pop that Paxil or Prozac pill on your doctor's orders, there are some ideas you should be exposed to first. Increasing your serotonin, as these drugs are designed to do, leads to lots of adverse reactions, says Anne Blake Tracy in Panacea or Pandora? Mental illness and the way our society views it is entirely wrong, says Thomas Szasz in The Myth of Mental Illness. A Dose of Sanity by Sydney Walker tours of the big bigness side of the SSRI drug industry, and They Say You're Crazy by Paula Caplan critiques the way the elitist psychiatric profession views mental illness. This compilation of books on the topic is well worth looking at.

Power Dynamics, Donovan Bigelow: 2008.

This guy... is sort of ridiculous. But I'm posting his website here anyway. The Seattle area is teeming with ideas involving psycho-social development and psychotherapy. There is a large Freudian community here. And although still in its infancy, "philosophical counseling" is coming onto the alternative psychiatrist scene as a unique way of providing philosophical advice and instruction for the personal and philosophical problems arising out of false beliefs and 'faulty logic'. There is currently a crusade to get the activity going as a 'profession'. Donovan Bigelow provides a Nietzschean version of this method.

Doctrine-Centered Versus Problem-Centered Economics, Post-Austic Economics Network, Peter Dorman of The Evergreen State College: 2006.

This is a pedagogical paper. Bruce Caldwell, an influential economist known for his anti-formalist (or anti-mathematical) teachings in economic methodology, is critiqued here by Evergreen professor Peter Dorman. The post-autistic position (Dorman's) is not that the "level of math" is the issue (referring to Caldwell's argument.) Dorman says that economics should be taught as a set of problems, rather than being taught as a set of doctrines by which to guide students through economic decision-making and problem-solving... Agreed, economic departments claim to be "positive" and therefore the profession not supposed to be about ideology, but they refuse to acknowledge that ideology is in everything they do. Just teach openly, don't preach to us.

A Brighter Shade of Green. Ross Robertson, Enlightenment Magazine: October, 2007.

Bright Green Environmentalism, a new word (relatively) to describe a movement that is "less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the 'tools, models, and ideas' that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions." Although protesting does serve an important function however 'bleak' it may seem to Robertson, whose life is a short history of the environmental movement, the message of the paper is in his statement that bright green environmentalism goes beyond Another World is Possible and reminds us that the other world is actually here already, and we have the choice to live it or not. Earth Ship anyone?

Computers Seized From Berkeley Activist Space. Electronic Frontier Foundation: August 28th, 2008.

The Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, CA is one of the longest-standing anarchist infoshops in the country. But just before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, their space was raided at the same time activist spaces were being raided all over Minneapolis and St. Paul. Computers that were used in the production of, for example, the Slingshot calendar system (a popular anarchist pocket calendar), an anarchist radio show and an anarchist newspaper, were seized and have not been returned. Wake up America! This is your war on the "homegrown terrorists", the war on free speech, the war on the Privacy Protection Act.

Towards Anarchism. Errico Malatesta, MAN!: 1930.

An early pamphlet written against the argument that anarchism is "a thing impossible" based on the false idea that anarchism would come about after an immediate revolution. Even at a time when capitalism seemed doomed to imminent collapse (this was the 1930s) anarchists made the claim that change you can believe in must come "little by little" rather than immediately - until the ideas grew in intensity and extension. But, Malatesta says, this does not stop the anarchist movement from opposing all forms of despotism right. fucking. now! So little by little, com padres, little by little.

A Day of Mournful Overcast 09/08/08

I am starting a new section of this blog, called A Day of Mournful Overcast, which will select articles which I have read and would like to pass on to others. The title is also the name of a pamphlet published in 1937 by the Iron Column Militia, an anti-authoritarian/anarchist militia who fought Franco's fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War. Among other things, the militia stood for defending the popular movement and opposed the state in its republican form, broke revolutionaries out of prisons, and resisted being turned into state military units. With that said here are some articles I found worth while.



A Day of Mournful Overcast, Iron Column: 1937.

An argument for the continuation of anarchist resistance against state power in its various forms and against the seemingly inevitable militarization of popular resistance.

How RFID Tags Could Be Used to Track Unsuspecting People, Scientific American: 2008.

Features the radio frequency identification methods and how they are being pioneered in the U.S. and China. By using the same technology to track consumer products in warehouses, government agents, criminals and marketing strategists will have a whole new set of tools to keep us controlled by.

Identification and Tracking of Persons Using RFID-tagged Items in Store Environments, US Patent Office: 2003.

Full text of the 2003 IBM patent that chillingly details RFID’s potential for surveillance in a world where networked RFID readers called “person tracking units” would be incorporated virtually everywhere people go—in “shopping malls, airports, train stations, bus stations, elevators, trains, airplanes, restrooms, sports arenas, libraries, theaters, [and] mu­­se­­ums”—to closely monitor people’s movements.

The Audacity of Rhetoric, Slajov Zizek, In These Times: 2008

The academic rockstar at it again, this time analyzing Barack Obama's use of words and the power of politician's words to influence policy merely from their use.

Pacifism as the Servant of Imperialism, Leon Trotsky: 1917

Though not a Trotskyite myself, the essay does put pacifism in perspective, and could be no less apt today than it was in 1917: pacifism enables the state to perform cruel acts and destroy our freedom.

The Hidden Power of Scent, Scientific American: 2008.

The underestimated capability of humans to smell and discern scents, immune system status, and various genetic preferences unveiled through smell.

Cost of U.S. Wars, Pro Publica: 2008.

Congressional Research Service last week published a study (PDF) calculating the cost of every major U.S. war. Here are the graphical dimensions.

The Only Thing Governments Have Done

Ryan Harvey is a member of the activist folk group, Riot Folk. I was inspired by his song The Only Thing Governments Have Done to create a video using public domain footage from way back when.

A Brief History of the G8

This video is only a prelude to the 34th G8 Summit. More promises had been made this year regarding Africa, Global Warming, TRIPS, Zimbabwe, North Korea, Iran, etc. Very few people expect anything concrete or extensive to be decided at the summits, especially since the countries already have prior commitments which were decided upon at previous summits and have yet to be met. OXFAM and other NGOs are trying to hold the G8 member countries accountable to these promises.

But a stronger position, I believe, argues that the goals of the summit are not even noble, that the foundations of the summits are grounded in undemocratic and faulty methods. There may be no legitimate reason as to why these heads of state should meet in this way, and make decisions that affect all of us, especially without oversight. It is the subtle creation of 'world governance' says the Spanish activist in their video. Though the international press cover the summits extensively, for "smile summitry" as some say, there are few records of what happens in the course of just three or four days. The only evidence we have as citizens under their jurisdictions, are a few public but pithy statements of concern for debt-ridden countries and rogue dictators.

One bit of irony I would like to point out is that Japan's security spending at the summit was dwarfed by the overall spending on hosting the summit. The overall costs turned out to be somewhere around $1.2 billion, including $93 million for an eco-friendly, solar-powered media center for the press to wait. Since the summit is now over, however, "the building will be demolished," says Japan Times. The overall cost of the 2008 summit is nearly equal to the amount given to Africa ($2 billion) after the 2007 Summit in Rostok, though $25 billion was promised by 2010. So in one year, the same amount of money all eight countries can give to Africa was the same amount just one country spent on this year's summit. It is easy to see where their priorities lie.

This was posted onto YouTube somewhat late. It is part of an episode I created for Indymedia Presents about the history of the G8 Summits and its opposition. Anticapitalistas, a group from Spain, sent me a video which they made in Sapporo about the G8, which is included in the video. I added a brief history of the G8 (skip to 5m, 25s to find that) and an advertisement I found for the G8 Summit in Japan on the German IMC. After last year's summit in Rostok, the Germans seem very excited about opposing the G8. You can find German sources and videos about the G8 all over the internet. For the last part of the video, I added a few words about the indymedia channel which has arisen around the G8 summits themselves. G8-TV.org is the indymedia website devoted entirely to independent and protest coverage of the summits.

Miles and Miles From Orlando

Up to 15 million people around the world may be considered "stateless". That is, having not having any official state record of their status as citizens, nor any official nationality. This usually happens because of ethnic strife or political conflict resulting from a collapse of the state's ability to function. The UN's arm that deals with refugees and statelessness, UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) focuses its energy almost entirely on building or re-building those connections between states and individuals. Numerous committees are setup to end statelessness and naturalize stateless people into states or institutions that will keep them under the protection of a state. But what about political asylees who decide to renounce their state citizenship and do not wish to re-enter the life of state citizenry? One blogger and English-Slovak translator from Orlando, Mike Gogulski, is doing just that.


While currently living in Bratislava, Mike plans to renounce his status as an American citizen and become a stateless person in political protest against war for empire and what he sees as an "express train" to police dictatorship in the United States. With their “anthems blaring” and the complicit American masses “cheering it on”, Mike sees no reason as to why he should be considered a member of the American imperialist system. Since the invasion of Iraq, dozens of American GI war resisters have sought asylum in Canada, but few if any civilians have renounced their citizenship as an act of political protest. Here is what Mike says on his blog nostate.com about the decision.

"I had told myself as long as two years ago that I would renounce when the US attacked Iran, exploded a nuclear weapon, deployed a bio-weapon, declared martial law, annexed a territory or canceled an election. I became very involved for that reason in watching the news closely for signs that any of those eventualities might be approaching. In doing so, however, I’ve come to the realization that I need no more justification."

This possibility raises all sorts of practical questions regarding the leap. How will he participate in the economy? How will he get from place to place? And, if he becomes stuck in an airport for several years as Iranian refugee Mehram Nasseri once was, will he at least have Internet access?

Let's take you through the process. Assuming that the US government approves his renunciation by issuing him the Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States, Gogulski's renunciation will in fact render him “stateless”. He will not be a citizen of the US, a citizen of Slovakia, nor have citizenship under the EU. He will simply be a person without a state.

As stateless and undocumented, he should be able to travel via land (train, bus, car) throughout the EU under the 1985 Schengen Agreement, without any trouble at all since he is living in Slovakia now. But traveling outside this area is likely to be impossible, he says. Eventually he will become a documented stateless person: someone who carries a UN convention travel document as set out by the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and in the distant future Mike admits he may opt for Slovak citizenship if necessity compels him.

But who knows, “Maybe I'll end up like the stateless Somali man I met in the UK, who told me 'No, it's great being free'”. He and the stateless man met unexpectedly at an airport, and Mike was curious as to whether his friendly interlocutor had experienced difficulty with his statelessness. But if “the Schengen Zone is to be my cage,” Mike says, “I think it's large enough for me. There's enough to explore within Europe to last a lifetime.”

The UNHCR people may run into Mike in Bratislava at some point, he says, and they will be “less than amused” seeing treaties enacted to protect refugees and stateless persons are being used in the service of political protest, “let alone by someone who thinks the UN should be abolished.”

If it is not obvious already, Mike Gogulski views politics in a radically different way than most people in the United States or Europe do; he describes his philosophical point of view as “individualist anarchism”. On his website he has signed a short document entitled An Anarchist's Declaration, in which he outlines his perspective on power relationships and the use of tyrannical political systems to spread evil throughout the world. The philosophical influences that inform Mike's state renunciation are individualist anarchists like Murray Rothbard, and anarcho-capitalists like Frederic Bastiat, Albert Jay Nock and Robert Nozick.

Mike is also wary of state identification methods. In less than a hundred years, he says, the world has gone from being a place where an official identification card did not exist to one in which people who lack identification “are effectively unpersons”. Since the New Deal plans enacted by Roosevelt in 1935 the Social Security Number has become one of the primary ways in which the United States identifies its citizens, something which came about slowly and unexpectedly.

Over the past couple of years the US Department of Homeland Security has been considering a more comprehensive plan to identify its citizens with a national ID card, a “real ID”, which would simultaneously curb terrorist activity and create a national system to digitally store detailed personal data on individuals. The Real ID Act of 2005 has been widely protested by individualist anarchists of all sorts.

In the abstract, Mike says everyone suffers under Statism, which is a “civic religion” that cements our views about the moral and political legitimacy of the state. Statism sacrifices individual liberty and promulgates a set of beliefs in favor of the state. What the “state” is, Mike says, can be summarized as “an institution which claims a monopoly on the initiation of violence in a particular territory.” He agrees with Lysander Spooner, an individualist anarchist, who once said that the state sovereigns were really no different than “bands of robbers and murderers.”

The estimated 15 million stateless people today are in this situation because of war or other forms of government oppression. But it would be quite unfair, Mike says, to consider his situation in the same category as theirs. Mike expects some inconveniences as a result of becoming stateless, yet the 15 million other stateless people “generally have their entire lives ruined for them. There's no comparison there.”
So simply becoming stateless is not exactly Mike's objective, he tells me. “I'm interested in exploring being stateless, but I wouldn't be renouncing my citizenship if I weren't so disgusted by the US government.“ He wants to divorce himself from the US partly as atonement for the guilt he feels at having paid taxes to support mass murder and oppression around the world and at home. He says he wants to publicly call attention to US atrocities and some citizens' dissatisfaction via the media, and to use it as a platform to speak to the cause of liberty.

On nostate.com Mike includes a list of Renunciant Resources for anyone else interested in exploring statelessness. We will be following Mike's progress as he becomes stateless and will post any important updates as it pertains to the situation.

Originally posted on The Melon.

What Is Today's Socialism?

Few socialists today equate socialism with a centralized public ownership and planning of the economy. Or to put the point in broader terms, few socialists conceive of socialism only as a "mode of production".

If socialism had to be characterized in a single phrase it would be a movement of human liberation, in which the transformation of the economic system is only one element, and itself gives rise to diverse choices in the construction of a different type of socialism.

In reality, scientific socialism - articulated in the work of the Bolsheviks - set out to achieve state power and transform the economic system, to destroy the rich potential of the instruments of the popular struggle and liberation created in revolutionary Russia. The tyrannical rule of the Soviet party system was exactly as Trotsky had predicted years earlier, and something the Russian anarchists had understood well. Though socialists today do not echo Lenin's order for "unquestioning submission to a single will" in the "interests of socialism", do they not appeal to the same transformation of the economic system as one of the primary elements to further the interests of socialism?

It should not be surprising that after a hundred years of socialist failure, socialism is still primarily sought out in terms of transforming economic systems through involuntary distributionist planning as a "mode of production", though socialists themselves rarely equate socialism with centralized public ownership and the like?

That is, today's 'democratic socialists' are loathe to equate their visions of society in scientific socialist terms, but scientific planning is still central to their thesis. And where voluntaryist popular struggle fails and continues to fail - and we should wonder why - the democratic socialists have become the managers of the increasingly centralized state capitalist systems: the managers of the corporate economy, the arbiters of state power, the bureaucrats inside the ideological institutions. In summary, 'the people's representatives'.

Bakunin once said, "the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled 'the people's stick.'"

Advocating Overthrow of Government

"Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or

"Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or

"Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—

"Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction."

- U.S. Code of Law, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 115, Section 2385, "Advocating Overthrow of Government". Cornell Law.

"Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

- Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 2nd paragraph.

Free Market is an Oxymoron

Responding to Muser in the last entry, I agree with you that "free market is an oxymoron" because the status quo is talked about as free trade or free movement in action.

Free trade is commonly set in opposition to "fair trade".

But in my opinion when you study what fair trade literature is saying, it is actually advocating the freest system of trade. They want no agriculture subsidies; they want developing countries trading with developed ones; they want the right to unionize in developing countries; they want alternatives to the IMF and World Bank. As an advocate of "free trade", then, I share opposition to organizations that pretend to promote "free trade" but in fact control our lives. I think the global aspect of trade is positive, globalization is not such a bad idea. The basic idea is anarchist: that man is by nature good, but institutions can be corrupt and control the people.

Anarchist Story-Telling

Perhaps you should read for yourself what I'm talking about. The International Anarchist Conspiracy and its splinters and various copy-cats have adopted a new narrative by way of independent media.

A while ago a series of "communiques" like this one from the IAC related to the readership by way of wizardry and witchcraft (as they called it). I thought this was pretty hilarious. Anarchists were referred to as witches and wizards possessing strange forms of revolutionary magic; minutemen and other klansmen were referred to pejoratively as "muggles" as in, yes, Harry Potter. Other fantasy metaphors are used as they see fit, since they see their ideological narrative is sort of like casting spells on capitalists and breaking the spells of the spectacle.

Sometimes you'll read in one of these communiques that something happened that actually didn't happen. You ask yourself, wait - did the wizard actually blow up a bank? How do you know what part of it is real and what isn't? That probably makes a lot of people angry who want to know really bad whether it actually did happen or not. Especially the police. And they read that kind of stuff seriously. That makes it even more hilarious. So, on the one hand I find it really imaginative and clever, and on the other hand really cynical.

Seven Habits of Highly Effective Anarchists

These habits are meant for anarcho-agorists working to transition

their societies "from here to there". It is also a pun on

Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

1) Be an individual. The first step in the micro strategy starts with yourself. A participatory polis and economy can be achieved by individuals who are innovative, take risks, and to the degree which they are comfortable, autonomous. Individuals create a fruitful marketplace of ideas. They also create the kinds of marketplaces and the kinds of public spheres which are only possible through their consent.

2) Scheme with the end in mind. Keep in mind your macro strategies. The goal is to create a lively polis where governance is not imposed by force. Therefore every action can be seen as aimed toward that end.

3) Put the Revolution first. Visible imbalances are symptoms of the greater problem which is the state apparatus itself. The state has become the object of immense politicking, lobbying and control. The agorist addresses deep-seated structural problems such as patriarchy, coercion or the institutions of torture, with a consistent position proclaiming that society's movement away from statism and towards agorism ought to be accelerated and this will undermine its practices.

4) Reflect on rights. The anarcho-agorist reveals the contradictions in the state through a reflection of individual rights. The principles of 'liberalism' in general are built upon assumptions about the arbitrariness of the state and the primacy of individual will. Every interaction in a society that is coercive is therefore viewed from an external point of view, and it is this very idea that individuals have rights and want to use them which the state condemns as subversive.

5) Seek first to counter. Counter-institutions and counter-cultures cannot gain substantial ground in a society dominated by modern conditions of production and their ideologies. As long as the state offers incentives obtained through coercion, counter-hegemonic options will be less attractive to those who do not see the larger picture. Direct political action and education serve therefore as a starting point for the creation of a society which will eventually sever its ties to the surplus-sucking bureaucrats who have stolen your community.

6) Agorize! Agorists recognize that effective change will not take place through political reform alone, so seeking first to agorize and strike the state's centralized power at its root will be the most effective long-term tactic. Agorization includes forming labor unions, forming tax-resistances, creating sanctuary cities and anarchovillages, forming security alliances to counter the state's, creating participatory institutions that fulfill the same needs as coercive institutions, and otherwise severing local ties from arbitrary state and federal authorities.

7) Wield your shield. The state will stop at nothing to prevent you from succeeding from its power. Pogroms (mass arrests) may occur if the state believes the threat of losing its power is great enough, or that "widespread anarchy" may come about. Violent revolution is not necessary, only insofar as the state does not provoke one, though a fundamental tension will brew between individuals who deny the state's institutions and the concept of citizenship which may require allegience to various institutions. At this point, collectivized security operations, like extensive neighborhood watches, to protect against the state's marauders may require diversified defensive tactics.

Free Markets and No Markets

There is a peculiar situation that many rural laborers find themselves in, where the free market gives them no incentive to trade on the world market or the local market. If institutions and infrastructures do not make trade easy, then the laborer simply does not trade, and produces everything for themselves.

Do-It-Yourself production on the one hand is somewhat romantic. But it's causes are usually due to opportunity costs, not the voluntary Thoreau-ian ideals of agoristic artists and communalists. There is nothing wrong with romantic self-sufficiency, but for most rural laborers the higher standard of living through trade compels them out of autarky and into the market.

So trade is compelling, but rural laborers face unfavorable trading conditions, preventing them from trade. One economic explanation can be traced back to the "poor but allocatively efficient" hypothesis of Theodore Schultz in 1964. He said what farmers are really limited by are certain constraints that make it impossible to earn more income by selling labor or goods on the market. Laborers are optimizers like anybody else, and they're efficient at what they do, but they have all kinds of constraints the keep them in the autarkic production scheme. They might like to have mobility, but these constraints prevent them from trading at all (or at least very minimally.)

Neo-liberal economists have been surprised that rural markets often don't exist. The Reagan-Thatcherite Gospel was that markets simply needed to be freed from state control, and this would lead to open markets and prosperity. Everyone loves to point out what was wrong with that idea, often concluding that the idea was wrong about everything. But that idea was just too simplistic. Eliminating state control does not necessarily lead to trade. (Reagan-Thatcherism also was not for eliminating state control either--ahem--like military expenditures.)

The literature from the 60s and 70s was often overlooked during the 80s because of it was seen as too Keynesian. And the Theodore Schultz's hypothesis which came out of that era was one important part in understanding why rural economies aren't too eager to join world markets, and therefore could not be forced into doing so by state-building policies of Reagan and Thatcher.

Articles in the economic literature asked the question "Why are peasants persistent?" The New Institutionalist answer was that there are overwhelming transaction costs and information asymmetries that prevent the peasants from reaping the benefits of trade. They may have to travel for miles to the nearest city or trading center, without using roads, or cars, or donkeys. They may be robbed, or hampered by weather and health conditions. There's information asymmetries: they might not even know what the prices are, and it might not be worth their time to find out. They might not have information-sharing devices (like cell-phone towers in rural India) to find out who wants to buy their produce or where to meet them.

The abundance of asymmetries and costs in rural markets is therefore crucial. The point at which transaction costs, or the expected transaction costs, is more than the price -- then rural laborers simply stay at home. This creates a system in which free world markets exist, but rural laborers cannot get to them, and would not want to get to them, because making their own products is better for them.

What is Participatory Democracy?

There is a misconception among students at my university about what Students for Democratic Society stands for politically. Some think it stands for communism, some think socialism. Others think Marxism. This is all wrong.

SDS is basically an expression of participatory democracy. This is a democratic system of governance where members participate in the political decision-making process at many many levels. There is usually an emphasis for action in the public sphere. The emphasis is on the community and what is important to the broader range of community participants.

It can also mean that all members of a society have a voice and veto-powers in decision-making politics. Majority-based voting would not count as participatory since this excludes minority-based votes and group-differentiated votes from the decision-making process. So that means representative democracy is not participatory either.

Participatory democracy typically works by building consensus on legally-binding decisions and other decisions about policy. If consensus cannot be reached, these laws or ordinances cannot be passed since they violate individual and group-differentiated rights.

Many participatory democracies can choose to be socialist or communist or other ways of thinking about wealth, and there is no contradiction. All the decision-making can happen within a socially cohesive group of people, and the sources of decision-making are connected to the social bond.

Under the participatory framework, I would consider myself a socialist. But this should not be perceived as being a totalitarian, since that is against the principles of participatory politics. The broader framework I operate in is a form of libertarianism, with an emphasis on community-based participatory politics. In other words, this can be seen as a form of anarcho-syndicalism.

World Federalism Is On The Rise

Borders will one day dissolve. Take the European Union for example. It doesn't care about border between it and the nations it will soon absorb, such as Turkey and the Balkan countries, because they will soon be one. Nations and institutions in Europe develop cooperative and positive-sum arrangements. It was only 60 years earliers that Europe tore itself apart, and today it's the world's most powerful economic and political union. Unionization through regional federalism is becoming more popular and more feasible than the kind of political globalization we see through international organizations such as the United Nations. Talk of "reform" in the UN might be implausible. In fact, a restructuring of the UN might be impossible. Perhaps we need to abolish that un-democratic body and rely on regional organization instead. After all, that's how nations are making decisions already.

Federalism works well with Constitutional Democracy. The basic principle of federalism is that policy matters fall under the authority of local governments. "Soft" federalists will tell you that some policies do but others actually fall better under international and national authority. But I don't accept that. Local authority is always better. The trend in organizations like the EU, hopefully, will be an international recognition and fostering of this idea. So it will be international federalism. Call it International Localism--or at least that's the idea. The current international structure gives too much power to these national decision-making bodies, and not enough to local and international bodies.