[atreestump]

I don’t have the plan. I don’t think there is ‘a’ plan. Capitalism was not made by any individual,  group, party or conspiracy with a plan, and it won’t be destroyed that way either. It is far too big, complex, uncoordinated, fast-changing and unpredictable for any plan to grasp. Maybe a conspiracy with a plan can topple and take over a state, but one thing we should know by now is that taking over a state is the last thing that will destroy capitalism. It will be destroyed as the result of many acts by many individuals and groups, scattered in time and space, who may all have very different plans of their own. Though certainly some of them may confer, coordinate, copy and learn from each other.

So all I can do is make my plans, my projects, alone or with friends and comrades, for my actions, which I hope will contribute in some way to destroying capitalism. I will share some ideas that help me in thinking about my projects. Perhaps they will help some others too, or at least spark some fruitful discussions.

1. Capitalism can only be destroyed by other forms of life

If all banks, markets, capitalists, governments, policemen, and the rest of them disappeared overnight, people would recreate capitalism tomorrow.

This is the story of all the ‘successful’ revolutions of the last century. Capitalist values, desires and practices have been deeply dug right into our bodies, and we keep reproducing them. To destroy capitalism, we need to have other ways to live instead.

So destroying capitalism has to involve making different forms of life. That is, developing and strengthening values, desires, beliefs, practices, projects, individual and shared, that break with the norms of capitalist culture and strike out for new ways of living. For me, these must be:

ways of living and fighting in which we seek not to dominate others or be dominate ourselves, in which we constantly fight hierarchy and oppression of all kinds. In which we pursue anarchy.

To be clear, I don’t propose one mass “anarchist culture” to replace capitalist culture. Rather, we can make many different anti-capitalist forms of life, as individuals and as groups. Some of our projects will be quite separate and maybe clash, but some will interweave and support each other.

2. Social war

Anarchic forms of life can’t coexist peacefully with capitalism. I don’t believe it is possible, today, to escape capitalism and create a utopian retreat. Capitalism is an endlessly invasive culture that will leave us nowhere to hide. In any case, I won’t be free in any utopian retreat, while I know that others remain dominated and oppressed. In any case, capitalism is rapidly destroying our whole world. So if we are to make forms of life that can survive and flourish, they have to be ones that stand and fight, and can become powerful enough to destroy capitalism.

So what we are talking about is war. Social war between opposing forms of life. Not democracy, ‘consensus’, or a rational public debate. Capitalist elites use ‘reason’ and democracy when they think these tactics work for them. Or they use any other means necessary, from isolation cells to cluster bombs. We’re not going to win by smiling sweetly at the cameras.

3. Create and destroy

Being at war, I need to think in two ways at once: how to create, strengthen and defend my projects; and how to attack and destroy the capitalist structures that threaten me and those I love. You can’t have one without the other. There is no point making forms of life that will be easily wiped out. There is no point just attacking capitalism without also building alternatives that can flourish.

So, when I make my plans, I will keep this twofold aim in mind: to strengthen and grow my forms of life; to weaken and destroy the enemy. I think this idea, that our struggles are at the same time creative and destructive, has always been at the heart of anarchism. I am fighting both for freedom and against domination.

4. Many methods

What kind of strategies, tactics and actions can work for this twofold aim? Capitalist elites regularly use torture, imprisonment, indiscriminate killing, and other tactics of terror and cruelty. But using these methods would destroy and poison us, turn us into twisted copies of our enemies.

Similarly, if we’re trying to get away from hierarchies, bureaucracies, bosses, leaders, elections, central committees, paid officials, market exchange, alienated labour, and all that shit, then the last thing we want to do is set up organisations that duplicate these features. To make anarchic forms of life, we need to live these values and desires in our practices right now, including in attack.

My basic criteria for thinking about projects, strategies, tactics, and actions flow directly from the twofold aim.

•  Will they help create and strengthen the forms of life I want ?
•  Will they be effective at weakening capitalism?

These are ‘my’ criteria, that are intrinsic to my own aims. They are the only criteria that matter. What don’t matter are ‘external’ criteria or judgements from other value systems that have nothing to do with me. For example, it doesn’t matter: What schoolteachers, journalists, politicians, judges, cops, or other pundits and enforcers tell us is right or wrong, moral or immoral, legal or illegal.

What the fears and social anxieties we’ve incorporated tell us is right or wrong. What supposed revolutionary dogmas, authorities and gurus, whether they quote Marx or Gandhi or Bakunin or whoever, tell us is right or wrong.

5. Dangerous desires

Why talk about social war between forms of life, rather than just ‘class war’? I think the idea of class struggle can still be a powerful one. But if there’s a class war going on at the moment, it’s one-sided: the ruling classes enslaving and murdering the exploited classes without much come-back.

To destroy capitalism you need the desire to fight. Being a worker doesn’t mean you’re born with this desire, or automatically acquire it once you’re working in a factory or a call centre or coffee shop. Working in these places makes you bored and pissed off. But capitalism has found ways to channel that anger and frustration very effectively, providing consumer dreams that feed off it. In the past, workers’ movements that fought against capitalism did so because they actively made new fighting cultures, with dreams and desires all of their own.

This is one really vital point to learn from the 20th century. People’s ‘material conditions’, economic or social situations, by themselves, mean nothing for action. What count are our desires. As long as capitalism includes us within a system based on desires for consumer goods and social status, it has little to fear from us. The danger comes when the system no longer feeds those desires. This is what is happening in austerity Europe right now. Whether because elites can’t afford to any more, or because they think they don’t need to – or a mixture of both – they are pulling the post-war rug of consumerism and welfare away from millions of people. Many millions are becoming newly excluded, dispossessed.

And this is a dangerous move – as it was, for example, when early capitalism dispossessed millions of people from the land. Why is it so dangerous? Because it creates an opening for people to develop new rebel desires that can shake the system apart. But it is only an opening, a possibility.

These dangerous desires don’t appear from nowhere. They need to be actively developed, nurtured, and spread.

6. Propaganda

The greatest force of 21st century consumer capitalism is its power to spread infectious desires. We are up against saturation advertising, TV, facebook, free newspapers, state education, and the habits of a century of consumer culture.

In the past, anarchists were very open about their desire to spread anarchic ideas and desires to more people. For one thing, they lived and loved anarchy with a passion, it was the ‘beautiful idea’, and they wanted to share it. For another, they knew that to have a chance of destroying capitalism they needed more comrades fighting alongside them.

So one of the most common activities of anarchists was what was called propaganda. Propaganda by word: talking about anarchism, maybe informally in the workplace or the bar, or giving speeches, talks and workshops, or ‘soap-boxing’ in the street; and producing and spreading newspapers, leaflets, images, posters, books, etc. And propaganda by deed: examples in action of ways we can live and ways we can fight.

Nowadays many anarchists, and other anti-capitalists too, seem to have gone shy. We hide and guard our ideas rather than spread them. We write and talk only for other sect-members, about boring issues no one outside the ‘scene’ could care less about. Or we use esoteric language and jargon that no one outside the ‘scene’ can follow. We treat newcomers with suspicion, or interrogate them to gauge their ‘political correctness’ before we let them in.

Spreading anarchic desires doesn’t mean we become politicians or Jehovah’s witnesses. I’m not looking for voters, followers, clones, cannon fodder or cash cows. I’d like to make propaganda that stimulates people to question authority and make new projects and forms of life of their own. Some may think of themselves as anarchists, many others not.
 
What I want are comrades: independent individuals who are fighting authority in their own ways. But it would indeed be good to have more comrades.

7. Alliances

Anarchists have always been, and maybe always will be, a tiny minority. Freaks, outsiders, with strange dreams and desires. We are not going to destroy capitalism on our own.

To destroy capitalism we need to work and fight alongside others who share some, but usually not all, of our struggles. We can make alliances that are more or less temporary or enduring , around particular battles and projects. If these alliances are to strengthen and grow anarchic forms of life, they must work without domination.

That means being open about our aims and intentions, not trying to lead or deceive others, but working as equal partners. If we can’t work together, we go our separate ways.

I think the most powerful alliances for destroying capitalism are with those who are dispossessed and excluded by the system, and have their own desires to fight.

8. Organising models

What kind of structures and practices of coordination should we use in our alliances? Here there are more important lessons from history. Mass formal organisations, like the syndicalist federations of old, have repeatedly degenerated into hierarchies and bureaucracies. The most alive and active struggles today have moved well away from these models.

We don’t need central committees, officials, secretaries, membership lists, elections.

This idea is one of those that can sound very strange to people who encounter anarchism for the first time, and even for many anarchists.

The need for centralised order is another very powerful myth. And not just a capitalist myth, it goes back through thousands of years of hierarchical cultures. Don’t we need bosses? (Or even if we give them nice-sounding names, like recallable delegated officials.)

The best way to overcome this myth is to see it disproved in action. I’ve learnt from my own experience that we can coordinate much more quickly, securely, and powerfully as informal groups of comrades, who come together to form bigger networks and alliances when we need to for particular projects. And of course internet communication makes spread-out decentralised networking so much easier than in the past. All the most powerful actions and projects I have seen worked like this.

Hierarchical decentralisation through markets is one of capitalism’s strongest powers. Non-hierarchical decentralisation – informal self-organisation – including using network methods that we are still learning and developing, is one of ours.

Admittedly, what we maybe don’t know how to do – yet – is scale up these methods to deal with major infrastructure. For instance, a new Paris commune – if that is something we want to see. Which doesn’t mean we can’t learn how.

9. Attack

Ideas and desires only survive and grow when they are put into practice. Capitalist desires are reproduced by being enacted, lived a thousand times over everyday at work, at home, in the market. In the same way, to make new ways of living means living them right now.

For example, a very important one: we can only develop fighting cultures that are able to destroy capitalism by actually carrying out attacking actions, right now. If we just dream and wait for the ‘great day’ when we rise up and make the revolution, meanwhile bowing our heads and accepting the system, we are training ourselves to be passive consumers and slaves. Only action will break our habits of passivity. Acting to attack capitalism has to be right at the heart of the cultures we are making. It plays a number of vital roles:

•  It weakens the enemy.
•  It strengthens us by strengthening our desires.
•  It strengthens us as we learn about what works and what doesn’t, and develop new kinds of action.
•  It strengthens us by spreading our desires and practices: the most effective propaganda is to spread examples of how we can fight.
•  It strengthens us by helping us form alliances: e.g., it shows potential allies that we are serious.
•  It can strengthen other groups and allied cultures, as we learn from each other. E.g., if we act in ‘replicable’ ways that can be imitated and spread, and if we share information, skills and knowledge.

10. Terrains of action

Of course, in all these respects, some actions are going to be more powerful than others. There is no universal hierarchy of good and bad actions or projects: what matters is how, in a particular situation, what we do strengthens our forms of life and weakens those of the enemy.

Here are just a few examples of different contexts of struggle in capitalism today:

•  Classic tactics of workers’ movements have included strikes, factory sabotage, takeovers or occupations. These tactics are still very present and powerful in parts of the world where industrial production remains a major part of life – for example, in regions of China where industrial action is thriving. I am not saying that they are not still relevant in countries like the UK where there is little industrial production, but they are not going to be the big front lines of struggle that they once were.

•  In rural regions, and particularly highlands and other areas that are hard for states to control, rebel movements have been able to occupy and defend whole areas of territory. For example, these kinds of struggles are still going on in indigenous areas of the Americas, or in Kurdistan.

•  But what about a city like London, which has no industrial production and no mountains? It’s hard not to feel like this city is about the most difficult terrain you can get, with the world’s most advanced surveillance, policing and control systems, and a pretty solid culture of apathy.

But consider:

•  One of the key infrastructure nodes for global finance, with billions flowing through its capital markets every day. Concentrated in the centre of the city: the ‘Square Mile’ of banks and exchanges, and the hedge fund quarter of Mayfair. Heavily dependent on advanced technologies, an overloaded transport network, and compliant service workers.
•  The world’s biggest concentration of billionaires, oligarchs, third world tyrants and their offspring, arms dealers and warlords, and other blood-soaked bastards.
•  Thousands of refugees and exiles, often from war zones destroyed and depopulated by said bastards, many with their own strong traditions of struggle.
•  Surrounding the moneyed quarters, a population increasingly unemployed, excluded, dispossessed, gentrified, evicted, sanctioned, raided, beaten, tasered, and otherwise fucked over.

After 2011, the lid stuck down with ‘total policing’ and 1000 prisoners, but for how long ? In some ways, London is a paradigm of many global cities. Not factory cities, but new mercantile hubs of financial power and money-laundering for ‘super-rich’ world elites. These cities are key nodes for global flows of wealth and power. Like mercantile cities of the ancient and medieval past, their vulnerability and fear is not industrial action but urban unrest, the ‘mob’.

These are just three examples of different terrains of struggle.

Individuals and groups active in these zones might follow very different strategies and tactics, and develop quite different organising structures. But perhaps they can also learn a lot from, and inspire, each other.

And also: imagine what kinds of links and alliances revolutionaries could form between these different zones. For example, rural ‘free territories’ sometimes link up with and act as bases and zones of retreat and education for industrial and urban movements. (And the very existence of ‘free territories’ has a great symbolic and inspiring power.) Or what if workers in the ‘developing’ world find ways to coordinate actions with people in the global cities where their products are financed and the profits laundered?

11. Infrastructure

Effective action requires infrastructure and resources. To grow strong forms of life we need:
•  Spaces to meet, learn, think, plan, welcome new people. Historically many kinds of spaces have played these roles: cafes and pubs, meeting halls, free schools, social and cultural centres, festivals, fairs, camps, picnics (a tradition of Spanish anarchism), hiking clubs, …
•  Spaces to live, sleep, hide, recover.
•  Resources for production and spread of information: printing presses, publishers, computers, servers, distribution networks, libraries, study groups, …
•  Resources for action of all kinds.
•  Transport infrastructure: e.g., vehicles, garages and repair workshops, cross-country and cross-border accommodation and travel networks.
•  Communications infrastructure and secure networks.
•  Means to live: food and drink and all the basics we need to survive and keep healthy and well.
•  Health: access to medics, medical supplies and equipment, all resources to care for our bodily and mental health.
•  Education, training, sharing of skills, knowledge and arts of all kinds, for struggle and for life.
•  Music, art, dance, spaces for social life and community, places to get lost in nature, all things that bring us joy and keep us strong without dominating or exploiting others.

Well resourced movements or networks can dramatically increase our capacities for action. To give a very basic example, in a city like London we have an everyday struggle just to survive. To pay rent and bills. Or spend much of our time just on finding, maintaining and defending precarious cold squats. To bring together friends and comrades scattered across the city.

To make spaces that are welcoming for people outside our existing ‘scenes’. To find peace and beauty to replenish energ y and soul in a desolate urban landscape. We can end up becoming burnt-out city drones, or we just abandon the field – thus a transient turnover of comrades who don’t stay for long or make commitments.

What if we could have the spaces and resources to feed, nourish, house, equip, teach, support and inspire each other? Just developing some of this basic infrastructure could dramatically strengthen our movements in the city.

Again, there is no universal hierarchy of means that are best for doing this. The same criteria apply for actions and practices we use, for example, to find food, equipment and shelter. Do these practices strengthen the culture we are making ? Do they empower us to attack? Again, it is only ‘our’ criteria that matter. Not how a means is judged by external standards of the dominant culture. For example, many anarchists have found using illegal means to fund themselves both very effective, and a powerful part of creating cultures that challenge authority. Others create cooperative structures for housing, employment, transport, etc. But these are methods, not dogmas. In many situations it might be more empowering to stably own or rent a building, open a cafe that sells food, or do paid work.

In thinking about these questions, we can also look to what potential our practices have for future development. For example, as capitalism hits increasing economic and ecological crises it could get harder to live off work, welfare or other scraps in big cities. We may need to develop new skills of expropriation and self-reliance.

12. Acts of creation and destruction

To sum up, here are a few things we can think about in terms of making, strengthening, and growing our forms of life:

•  Building infrastructure and resource chains.
•  Learning and training new skills.
•  Studying, thinking, alone and together, experimenting with new ideas.
•  Propaganda: sharing desires and practices with others, particularly those being dispossessed by capitalism.
•  Making alliances: finding and getting to know other rebel groups and
individuals.

The forms of life we make need to be fighting cultures, which do not hesitate to attack. Acts of attack may involve, to note some very broad points:

•  Attacking capitalist infrastructure and resource chains, means and spaces.
•  Constantly outwitting, pre-empting and overcoming enemy tactics and attacks.
•  Uprooting and overcoming capitalist values, desires and practices in our own lives too.
•  Propaganda: undermining capitalist values and desires.
•  Undermining capitalist alliances: helping divide elites and their accomplices.

13. Dare

It’s good to make plans and think strategically about what we’re doing.

But above all, it’s good to act. And the most powerful and surprising outcomes often come completely unexpectedly. Experiment, take risks, try new things, dare. If you don’t, what kind of a life do you have to lose?

‘Our hope was folly, but then revolutionists have their heads a little out of…equilibrium. And without this folly the world would never change, and revolutions would perhaps be impossible.’

[hr]
This concludes the series of threads I wanted to create about capitalism, I will share more resources soon.

[thetrizzard]

Something that the mainstream media isn’t covering that you may find interesting

http://www.cvltnation.com/anarchists-vs-isis-the-revolution-in-syria-nobodys-talking-about/

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Socrates]

Very interesting. In the previous thread I mentioned how the Arab spring is about anti-authoritarian ideas that are butning as far away as Brazil – good to see a follow up of this.

This could be the real reason the west is descending into mayhem.

[Anonymous]

Still a hot one!

[Anonymous]

Let’s discuss again.

[Anonymous]

Let’s discuss again.

[Author]

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