Incendiary Times Issue 2 (Summer 2013)

SUMMER 2013 • www.bolobolo.co.za/it • ISSUE #2 • PRICE: R10 - R20 according to means

INCENDIARY TIMES THE ANARCHIST PIN IN YOUR RED BALLOON in·cen·di·ar·y: (a device or attack) designed to cause fires, e.g., ‘incendiary grenades’ / tending to arouse strife, sedition, etc., e.g., ‘an incendiary speech’ / tending to inflame the senses, e.g., ‘an incendiary extravaganza of music and dance.’

editorial | the two pens Dear readers, Thank you! The inaugural issue of Incendiary Times was so well received that it encouraged us to dive straight into putting together the second issue.

While we're not going to commit to a release schedule yet, it currently looks as though you can expect our irregular publication to come out roughly four times a year.

In this issue: Within the slender yet substantial pages of this issue you'll find a thoughtprovoking article on pacifism

by Johannesburg-based anarchist artist Anastasya Eliseeva; an anonymous prose piece on ecological collapse and resistance; a short story on anarchist parenting; a demonstration of the power relations embedded in official dictionaries; an interview with anarchist writer, permaculture activist and witch, Starhawk, author of the utopian classic The Fifth Sacred Thing; a handy guide to green living by the bolo'bolo collective; a fictional debate between a liberal and a radical by Aragorn; a bunch of zine and book reviews; some poems; loads of awesome art

The Two Pens from Anastasya, Shachaf and Siobhan; humour; some excerpts from classic anarchist essays; a bolo'bolo event guide and also some information about the upcoming 2013 Cape Town Anarchist Bookfair (happening on Saturday the 7th of December – we're super excited!)

Quite accidentally, a theme emerged during the editing of this issue: a critical but hopefully also compassionate engagement with modern liberalism and a call to move beyond some of its more problematic assumptions while acknowledging that it shares at least some of its ethos with anarchism.

We hope our discussion will generate reflection and debates and welcome any and all feedback.

Equally accidentally, we stumbled across a gorgeous reflection on the power of radical writing. Originally published in the November 3rd, 1915 issue of the anarchist newspaper Regeneración, The Two Pens was written by legendary Mexican anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón; we hope it gives some sense of what we hope to achieve with Incendiary Times.

May your inkwells never run dry, The bolo’bolo collective

Behind the window of a display case, the gold pen and the steel pen waited for someone to buy them. The gold pen rested indolently in a rich jewel case that increased its glamour; the steel pen confirmed its modesty at the base of a cardboard casket. Pedestrians, poor and rich, old and young, passed again and again by the display case, casting greedy glances towards the gold pen; nobody looked at the steel one. The sun crashed its rays upon the gold pen, which gleamed with sparkles like glowing embers in its chenille cushion; but it was unable to impress even a dim tone of beauty upon the dark proletarian pen. Regarding its poor brother with pity, the rich pen said: “Poor mangy thing! Learn to be admired.”

Accustomed to great struggles for the highest ideals, the proletarian pen deemed it unworthy to answer that foolishness. Emboldened by the silence of the humble pen, the bourgeois pen said: “Why don’t you try, you squalid thing, to look like me, to be a gold pen?” And it shone in its chenille like a star in the satin of the sky.

The proletarian pen could not repress a smile, which angered the bourgeois pen, making it break out in nonsense like this: “Your smile is a smile of impotence. It fills me with pity. Could you be used, like I am, to sign bank notes for millions and

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

millions of dollars? I occupy a place of honor in mahogany and cedar writing desks. In palaces, the elegant writer signs his articles with me. Using me, the minister authorizes important documents for the entire nation. The president endorses his decrees with a signature which only I shall delineate. War is not declared unless an august hand takes me in its fingers, and has me fix its sovereign signature on paper.

Peace cannot be agreed upon with mangy steel pens: they must be golden. With a gold pen, the young aristocrat composes his verses of love to the genteel lady.”

Patience has its limits for a steel pen.

Thus, the modest pen, from the base of its cardboard casket, raised its clear, sincere voice, and, as it was sincere, it was also handsome and grand, to say: “Above all things, the pen is grand because it makes it possible for a great mind to free itself from the prison of its skull, to go out and shake other minds that sleep caged in other skulls. It makes them welcome the great mind with hospitality, granting it entrance. Doors should be opened and accommodations should be furnished for all who bring light, hope, valor... But you, vain pen, you are the disgrace of our species. I would rather break my tips than lend myself to sketching the signature that endorses a bank order for thousands of millions of dollars. An order like this is the result of a pact made between bandits.

My place is not on a mahogany writing desk. I prefer a pine table, upon which the people’s scribe outlines the robust phrases that announce to the world an era of liberty and justice. I am the pen of the people, and like them, I am strong and sincere. The minister does not touch me to underwrite documents that sanction exploitation and tyranny. Neither does

the president grasp me to authorize laws that command slavery and the torments of the humble, nor to order criminal wars, nor to humiliating peace treaties. But when the thinker takes me between his creative fingers, when the poet and the sage touches me with his fecund, anarchist hands, making me engrave in blank notebooks his bright meditations like the idea of class struggle, I feel my molecules tremble with emotion, an emotion that is pure, strong, sound.

This is my pleasure, because, as I am humble, I move in the world of talent, sincerity, and honor. My power is immense, my influence is gigantic.

When the proletarian writer takes me in his hands, the tyrant trembles, the priest is terrified, the capitalist turns pale; but liberty smiles with the smile of the dawn; the downtrodden dream of a better world, and the valiant hand nervously caresses the firearm of vengeance and redemption.

In my cardboard casket, I feel grand and noble. As humble as I may seem to you, I stir people. I knock down thrones, I upset cathedrals, I humble gods. I am light for the darkness of the mind. I am the bugle that calls the humble to arms, and converts them to magnificence. I resound for the revolutionary militia, gathering the brave in the trench and summoning the men to the barricades. You serve to endorse the decrees of the tyrant; I to endorse the proclamations of the rebel.

You oppress, I liberate.”

The crash of a car motor, which broke through the front of the shop, prevented the rest of the proletarian pen’s engaging discourse from being heard.

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“It has been said that ‘today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ (Turbulence 2008: 3). We have reached a stage where it is easier to think of the total annihilation of humanity than to imagine a change in the organisation of a manifestly unjust and destructive society, What can we do?” - John Holloway, Crack Capitalism

Words in revolt.

This issue’s definition from the CrimethInc Contradictionary*.

sys·tem·at·ic (adj)

E

very individual and situation is unique, but it can be useful to look for common threads. Consistently refusing to do so may indicate that one is avoiding coming to terms with an inconvenient state of affairs, such as oppression at the hands of bloodthirsty tyrants. Without an analysis of the dynamics that give rise to such situations, it can be hard to keep oneself out of them (see The Forest for the Trees—or don’t, as the case may be).

Some, upon hearing a critique of the social role of police officers and politicians, protest that it may apply to most of them, but they know some who are really good people: “Sure, we have to abolish governments and all that, but here in [liberal oasis] there are such nice folks on the town council! I feel we should treat them with respect, even if that means calling everything off.”

This brings to mind the story of the man who, tormented by fleas, managed to catch one between his fingers. He scrutinized it for a long time before placing it back at the spot on his neck where had he caught it, to the shock of his companions. His friends, confounded, inquired why on earth he would do such a thing. “That wasn’t the one that was biting me,” he explained.

*

For more definitions, visit www.crimethinc. com/books/contra.html, or pick up a copy of the Contradictionary from bolo’bolo for R170.

ghosts This poetic anonymous piece about ecological destruction and resistance was first published online in 2012.

W

hen we look out at the sky at night, we’re also looking back into the past. The light from distant stars takes so long to reach us that we cannot really be sure that, in reality, they’re still there.

Although the myriad things that surround us on Earth – rocks and rose bushes and panda bears and grapevines and pigeons and people and rivers and grass and grasshoppers and bluebottles – are each much closer to us than the stars, there is also a sense that, in catching sight of them, we are seeing them as they were, not how they really are. There is a sense in which we are surrounded by ghosts.

A ghost species is one that, while its members might seem plentiful today, has already accumulated an extinction debt. Extinction debt is a term ecologists use to describe the unavoidable future demise of a species – or a large percentage thereof – due to events in the past. So we are haunted, by the ghosts of orangutans, black rhino, Rufous-headed hornbills, blunt chaff flowers, candelabra trees and a million other species we do not yet even know.

May never know.

Even if the struggle to preserve these species was not massively impeded by corporate and state hegemony over the natural world, even if we could shut down all the frack-

in space. Ghost acreage – millions of years of accumulated decayed matter transformed into fossil fuel along with millions of acres of still-fertile land in the poor but resource-rich areas of the world – has given us an entirely false sense of the sustenance available to us. And so there is a phantom carrying capacity that haunts us too – a vast, amorphous emptiness that we seem almost compelled to try to fill, not recognizing that it expands in direct relation to our hubris. Like a housing bubble.

And the bubble continues to expand, past fundamental planetary boundaries: stratospheric ozone, land use change, freshwater use, ocean acidification, aerosol loading and chemical pollution, climate change, biological diversity and nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans. We have already overstepped the last three, and all the boundaries are deeply connected.

There is also one other thing that haunts us. Something that gives rise to all these other ghosts. We are haunted by possibility.

In some ways this is the curse our species carries: to be aware of not only the immediacy of the material world around us but also of the intensive flows and processes underlying this world; of the possible connections we might make between things in order to create something new; of the infinite becomings we

“If we cannot tell ghost from living being then how many other species might be haunting us. Are butterflies still real? African elephants?

Bonobo chimps? Us?” ing and logging trucks and feedlots and coal-fired power plants and tar sands operations tomorrow, even if every single car was removed from the road, these accumulated debts must still be paid. For many species, countless billions of living beings, it is simply too late already.

To fully comprehend this is to be struck by a profound sense of hopelessness, coupled with dread. If we cannot tell ghost from living being then how many other species might be haunting us. Are butterflies still real? African elephants? Bonobo chimps? Us? The night sky suddenly seems a whole lot darker.

We also harvest ghosts, in time and

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

can set in motion. As human beings, then, we see not just the actual world but also an intensive world of lava flows and climactic variations and social unfoldings and extinction debts, and also a virtual world, consisting in the real possibilities embedded within each thing, each being, each connection.

It can be exhilarating to think of the world in this way – to be imbued with this creative power of affect.

Lately, however, we have largely forgotten how to be affected. We have learned to change the world without in turn being changed by it. And when we stop being changed by the world our creative capacities are stifled and stratified. We begin to entrench one set of pathways of change between us and the world

and assume that this is the full range of possibilities. As these pathways become more regulated, we define structures and systems and regulatory mechanisms, and to support them we construct abstractions – complex philosophies and tortuous justifications; finally, in our artifice and confusion, we cede our power to all these.

The singular capacities we each have to create, to change, are sublimated into an acquiescence to the power held over us by abstractions.

By Capitalism. By the State. By progress. By the dominator myth of a homogeneous humanity ruling over the natural world.

As we learn to become subservient to power, as through discipline and control we become its loyal subjects, we also reproduce our relation to it in our engagements with everything and everyone around us. Wherever there is a field of difference between us we turn it on its side to form hierarchies – between genders, between races, between species – and we are forced by the structures we form part of into yet more hierarchies: of class, of ability, of belonging.

But what if these structures, even these highly elaborate, seemingly infinitely extended loci of power, were themselves little more than particularly enduring hallucinations?

Perhaps there is always an outside, always an excess of creative power and power cannot help but produce its own resistance, its own lines of flight away from the overcoding and axiomatizing of the whole of society and towards the open field of possibility. Even other animals resist.

Even gorillas have taken up rocks against encroaching humans. Even elephants have liberated captured buck under cover of night. Every history of power and control is doubled by a history of resistance.

In these histories, some still untold, resistance has taken countless forms and delineated routes of escape across all scales: mass uprisings against the injustices of the current order, personal refusal, utopian poetry, the carving out of small niches of temporary autonomy, the creation of unprecedented artforms, the mapping of subterranean liberatory networks, struggles for recognition by those cast lower down on abstract hierarchies, the pulling up of genetically modified crops, the smashing of automated looms and the torching of bulldozers by the elves in the forest. Occupy and occupations.

Yes, we also resist. We are eclectic in nature: in age, race, class, gender and opinion. We undermine everyday notions of what ought to constitute affinity with our prefigurative, leaderless ethic that emerges so naturally from our everyday interactions. We remain a conundrum for anyone who insists on describing us in the language of left or right, social democratic or neoliberal, socialist or capitalist, reformist or revolutionary.

We are a fundamental challenge to the hegemony – the very reality – of these a priori terms and categories, a call to extend the range of social and (anti-)political possibilities beyond / continued on page 3

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“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” - Paulo Freire

ghosts / continued from page 2

arbitrarily imposed limitations.

A famous old radical once observed that “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views.

That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate,” and so our resistance does not to fall in line with a party line. We do not to have ideological unity. We are not just subcultural. We are not born of privilege. Our identity, our lines, our subcultures, issue from resistance itself. Resistance to the life that has been set out before us, resistance to the dull alienation of the spectacle, resistance to this culture of separation, specialisation, compartmentalisation, domestication. And in resisting we enter, however tentatively, into the field of possibilities that for some of us haunts our waking moments more and more.

Our resistance is a defiant act of togetherness. It is not based on the logic of calculation and acquisitiveness. It does not share the ends of the dominator culture but instead locates and expands the countless cracks within it. It is not an act of submission. It is solidarity. It is an invocation of the intensive flows and processes underlying the actual, a destabilization of the current regime, a shift away from equilibrium through which we might catch sight of the virtual.

To resist, then, is to confront headlong the crisis of imagination between what is and what could be.

To challenge the assumption that what currently exists should necessarily exist. It is to subvert the paradigm of capitalist social relations, of forced participation in our own oppression. To question the legitimacy of the institutions that stand in for us. To deny their hegemony. To no longer countenance the injustice of representation.

At our very best, when we are aimed in the direction of what could be instead of pandering to what is, our individual and collective resistances turn hierarchies back on their side in order to acknowledge the productive differences between us; to see what emerges from their intersection. Our resistance allows us to explore the creative tensions between what is and what could be.

Our resistance is solidarity. Mutual aid. Voluntary relations. Equality.

Freedom. A reclamation of our personal power. Anarchy. ...And so we come together, more of us every day, to recreate the real community we have all but lost, to remind each other of our shared being, our togetherness on this fragile planet. We come together to answer the call, to join in a vital conversation about where we – as individuals, as communities, as a species and as one small but highly consequential part of a once-thriving, now severely threatened bio-community – should go from here.

Or, as the Chilean poet Jesús Sepúlveda says, to plant the first seeds in our cultivation of a garden of peculiarities. Whatever grows out of our coming together, whatever new forms of resistance arise, we should all heed this call to cultivation, whether we choose to plant in the full light of day or illuminated only by the ancient light of distant stars.

*

*T

he garden of peculiarities is a project of humanity. Its visualization consists of realizing the peculiarity of nature. If the original consciousness grew as a result of the recognition of its own death, liberating consciousness will grow as a result of the recognition of its own peculiarity. Life as we conceive of it today will not be erased from the planet as long as we don’t give respite to the empire of “sameness.” The point is to learn to live in the planetary garden without control or authority. And if life is a voyage, it is necessary to let ourselves be carried along with the river’s current without imposing a control to stop it. The current of the river is the current of nature. The social current, standardizing and “mediocratic,” is the electricity of control. To continue in this vein is to die of stress, alienation, anxiety, insanity, hunger, exploitation, repression, and misery. In order to run the rapids it is necessary to learn to live.

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– Jesús Sepúlveda, The Garden of Peculiarities The Garden of Peculiarities is available from bolo’bolo in zine format for R20.

When one follows the silvery movement of each tumultuous and savage drop of water, one is creating contact with the rhythm of the natural world. To follow this cadence, avoiding the rocks is a wise act. To fall from the raft is evidence of discomfort. This discomfort is the incompatibility between control and life. Control engenders fear and impedes life. It unleashes paranoia.

Life, on the other hand, offers beauty and ingenuity as its native fruits. It depends on us to bite the apple and to learn to dream.

The voyage to the garden of peculiarities is one without return. To listen to the murmuring of civilization, once on the correct path, is to fall into the trap of fear. It means losing one’s way, because the only exit is the escape hatch to the highway that leads to the asphalt of standardization. And while every creature needs a dwelling, it need not be made of concrete. The true human lair can be a cabin in the forest that together with other cabins forms a community of peculiarities. Or it can be a neighborhood that tears up the pavement of idiocy and isolation while leaving one or two routes among other neighborhoods. Each constellation of peculiarities will be a kind of commune that guarantees the horizontal autonomy of each community. Only in this way can hierarchy be abolished. And as social practice between social beings, ritual festivities and community celebration will be an integral part of the strategy to combat accumulation. In this way, all surplus that will eventually be created will be enjoyed as a part of the collective carnival.

The garden of peculiarities is a wager made for the conservation of the environment and the survival of the human race. There intuition should light the way. Not being sidetracked depends on us. There is only one path that leads to the heart of life.

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

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“The old world is collapsing under the weight of its own crimes, and is itself lighting the fuse of the bomb that will blast it all away. This bomb will be all the more terrible because it will contain neither gunpowder nor dynamite. It’ll contain compassion and an idea; two forces against which nothing can be done.” - Octave Mirbeau

LOVE is not PACIFISM Anastasya Eliseeva unsettles commonly-held liberal notions of pacifism, posing challenging moral questions and asking us what really is sufficient given the contemporary situation we find ourselves in.

I spend a lot of time on social media. I think it’s a great way of promoting causes and ideas, connecting with like-minded people and getting world news and views directly from the source. For me it’s worth it, even if I have to put up with endless pictures of Miley Cyrus and people’s lunches.

Being an anarchist, I get friended online by a lot of new-age, hippie-type people. We often have a lot in common, like veganism and a deep love of nature. Everything goes really well until I share something about a protest or some impressive action by the Earth Liberation Front, and then all hell breaks loose. “This is wrong,” they say, “this is VIOLENCE!” Violence. The very word fills people with fear and disgust. No empathetic being should be comfortable with the notion of another being getting hurt.

So surely these guys advocating their loving ways have the right idea reprimanding me. Or do they?

I’d like to share my thoughts on violence by challenging some of the popular notions held by pacifists as well as some of the arguments I’ve been hearing a lot recently.

“We need to act out of Love, not Hate. And Violence is hate.”

As radical environmentalist Derrick Jensen says in his seminal book, Endgame, “love does not imply pacifism.”

If you think about it, it’s true. Think of the people you care most deeply about. Your lover. Children. Friends.

Now picture them being attacked by a violent psychopath, bent on destroying them. Will you stand by and watch, unwilling to take part in the violence? I don’t think you’d feel like a very good person.

“In all times and in all places, whatever may be the name that the government takes, whatever has been its origin, or its organization, its essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the oppressors and exploiters. Its principal characteristic and indispensable instruments are the bailiff and the tax collector, the soldier and the prison. And to these are necessarily added the time-serving priest or teacher, as the case may be, supported and protected by the government, to render the spirit of the people servile and make them docile under the yoke.” – Errico Malatesta, Anarchy We live in a violent world. Borders, imposed through violent means, di-

vide it – they came to be as a result of bloodshed, as the strong claimed the land from the weak. People get rich from natural resources that they have taken by force from others.

Those with the financial power place their mark on things that shouldn’t belong to anyone – the land, for example. It’s kind of strange for me to look at a piece of land, so much older than humanity itself, and think; this belongs to someone. A person.

A name is on it, a name placed there with their money. If you want a piece of this land, you have to pay the person whose name is on it. And how do they keep us paying? Through threats of violence: if you decide to live somewhere without paying you’ll be removed violently. In a sense, every time you pay your rent it’s kind of like paying off the Mafia so they don’t come kick your head in. I know that sounds extreme, but it’s not so much more extreme than the idea of land ownership when you really think about it.

The violence of our world doesn’t isn’t just limited to humans, of course.

Capitalist civilization is ever growing, with an ever-increasing hunger.

To feed itself it destroys, with no sense of empathy and with a complete lack of foresight. The very idea that an ever-growing entity feeds off natural resources is obscene, since it’s obvious it will run out soon enough.

Yet we watch our forests shrink, our rivers run dry, our seas becoming polluted and we don’t seem nearly alarmed enough.

I remember how broken-hearted I used to get every time I saw a species go extinct. I used to think to myself: I inherited a world with Japanese river dolphins. How am I going to explain to the next generation that, sorry guys, you don’t get one...we killed it.

By now so many species have vanished that when I look at my baby nephew I really don’t know how I’m going to explain the mess we made to him. Sometimes I want to ask him to fix it all, because he is the future. But I’m sure that once he can speak he will ask me: why didn’t you stop it?

“So you support terrorism?”

That depends. I don’t ever want to see innocent people die. I’m a supporter of the kind of activism that adheres to the first rule of the Animal Liberation Front: no animal, human or otherwise, must get hurt.

But let’s look a little more deeply at

the word ‘terrorist’. Imagine there is a terrorist group that enters your country and starts doing really horrible stuff – polluting the rivers, poisoning the crops, chopping down the forests and killing all the wildlife. We’d be infuriated! The media would go mad.

People would take arms and defend our land from these evil monsters.

Yet, strangely enough, when capitalists and governments does the same thing we’re okay with it and point fingers at those who try to oppose them.

In March 2001 the Federal Bureau of Investigation listed The Earth Liberation Front as the top domestic terrorist threat in the United States. Why? Because they commit acts of arson and destruction of property, carried out against facilities and companies involved in logging, genetic engineering, GMO crops, deforestation and a wide variety of other activities that environmentalists argue are destroying the Earth and its inhabitants. I’m sure many of you agree that these are the kinds of things we should be opposing. The government and corporations are the terrorists here so why are we not defending ourselves?

Do I support terrorism? If I’m using my definition, no. If we’re using the usual government definition, hell yes!

“Violence achieves nothing” Yeah, okay. And signing petitions no one ever sees does? Or maybe clicking ‘like’ on a page will stop global warming? Writing letters to the president is surely JUST the thing that will make him go: wait a minute, I shouldn’t invade this country! I feel like our middle class activism has become what a friend calls ‘slacktivism’ – we sit in our chairs and click on things and pat ourselves on the backs for being good people, but nothing ever actually has to happen.

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

I’m not saying spreading information is not important – during apartheid some wrote letters to let the world know what was happening – but some people also took to the streets or went underground as part of the anti-apartheid struggle. Do you think apartheid would have ended simply because a whole lot of people sent loving energy to the government convincing them to love their brothers and sisters?

(Interestingly, I recently read that an attempted assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd, ex-prime minister of South Africa, was greeted by an editorial in long-running UK anarchist newspaper Freedom titled ‘too bad he missed’. This sparked criticism from pacifists in the anarchist movement and a lengthy discussion of the role of violence in anarchist thought and practice. There are many reasons why assassination is not the optimal way to go but frankly, if I think for even a moment about what Verwoerd stood for, I share the sentiment.)

Just a while back, Huntingdon Life Sciences started failing financially.

They were the best-known vivisector in the UK, supported by huge amounts of money, and they seemed untouchable. So what was it that shook this giant? Was it the endless petitions that went around? Or the force of all the middle-class people shaking their heads at how bad they are? No. The protests, people sabotaging their property and other forms of direct action did. They got hurt in the only place they feel it: their pockets. Plus, no bank or insurance or security company wanted to deal with them anymore. It just wasn’t profitable. (Mind you, it is actually questionable whether damage to property can be considered violence at all since property does not feel. Compare this to the violence that was inflicted on the animals inside and suddenly it seems a very fair retaliation.)

“I’ve gone my whole life without violence and this is how much I’ve achieved.”

What a wonderfully middle-class thing to say. The fact is, you’ve probably gone your whole life not paying attention to the indirect violence your life is filled with. Your sweatshop clothes come from violence, but bear no stains. Your house is built on a land that used to be someone else’s, but you don’t have to see them. Your bottled water is not polluted by corporations and your children aren’t dead from drinking it.

In the words of George Orwell (speaking about WWII), “the idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.”

If that’s how you choose to live, you must at least then accept that the rest of the world was never offered the privilege of a violence free life – those in power took it away from them and it is with violence that they are occasionally forced to try to claim it back.

“Innocent people may die. No one can justify that.”

First of all, if you’re going into a protest or starting an action wanting innocent people to die there is something wrong with you. As I mentioned before, I support activism that tries to steer away from causing harm to living beings.

Yes, innocent people occasionally die and I mourn every one of them, just as I mourn the countless victims of the daily actions of corporations and / continued on page 5

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"People may shake their heads wisely today over us and call us dreamers, and say that we had no sense of the reality of history. They fail to see that dreams are also a part of the reality of life, that life without dreams would be unbearable. No change in our way of life would be possible without dreams and dreamers. The only people who are never disappointed are those who never hope and never try to realize their hopes." - Rudolf Rocker

On anarchist parenting, the sea monkey theatre

by Cara Hoffman

I

f you wait until ten o’clock I’ll take you to the coffee place where they pour steamed milk on your cappuccino in the shape of hearts and trees. If you don’t want to wait you can go play, or if you want to go now, we can go now. I can just stop writing this and we can go.

Down the sidewalk outside our place will be that guy who made the sea-monkey theatre. He’ll draw back the blue curtains decorated with crowns and castles, and reveal the aquarium set up on a little metal table behind it.

Then he’ll play the sea-monkeys’ favourite music, which everyone

/ continued from page 4

governments. The massacre at Marikana, for instance, where as with so many protests against injustice, those rising up were violently, brutally oppressed by a police force whose primary duty is to protect not people but money. It’s this system we must fight in order to save more lives like these. Or do we just stand by and let these crimes continue?

“Violence makes us just like the enemy” Only if attacking a man trying to rape a woman makes us a rapist. In each instance, we need to look at motivation and outcome. Those in power use violence for selfish gain: to accumulate assets, money, more power. If we respond by using violence to protect our way of life from their crimes, to protect our world from their avarice, we are nothing like them.

As George Orwell wrote in 1942: “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, he that is not with me is against me.”

If we remain passive, we are doing those in power a big favor; they would love a world full of people who don’t fight back, letting them destroy everything they want.

LOVE is not PACIFISM Here’s my personal favorite: “Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity” I’m not even going to challenge that one. I’m just putting it here because it’s stupid. And, if you think about it for any longer than a second, it makes no sense at all. Sorry, but coming up with a catchy saying, and putting a sexual reference in it doesn’t count as an argument. If I come up with a cute saying, say, ‘being a pacifist is just being passive.’ Okay, it’s not very good, but at least it makes sense.

Sense is good. Use it.

“Are you saying that if I don’t want to do something illegal or dangerous then I can’t make a difference?”

No, that’s not at all what I’m saying.

Many people don’t want to end up in jail – I sure don’t... Asking what the vegan options are is going to be fun! I’m also sure that many people aren’t in the position to risk their lives. There’s still plenty they can do to help bring about change. Plant a garden. Cook for the hungry. Educate children. In fact, just use whatever existing skills you have. Paint a picture. Write. Do whatever you can. Just don’t take a fundamentalist pacifist stand and try to prevent others from doing their bit. That only

knows, is harp music. When he strums the harp, it seems like they are not swimming but flying around their little plastic castle, like fairies or angels. God knows how long sea-monkeys live. But they lead really fabulous lives that we can’t even begin to understand, and their concept of time is nothing like ours. If they die, for example, they can be resurrected. We call it reconstituted – but it’s the same thing as far as they are concerned.

Out in front of the coffee place those girls will be climbing trees.

They’ll be wearing candy necklaces, and their heart-shaped fake tattoos will be a little faded. You can climb while I order our caps, but I won’t put sugar in yours because I don’t want to ruin the steamed-milk picture on top. I’ll put your cup next to me on the bench while you climb until you feel like coming down. And I’ll drink my coffee and smoke and read. Those girls in the tree have learned how to curse in several languages and also how to hang upside-down by their knees. If you want to practice those things yourself, I’ll spot you, or cover my ears.

If we get hungry later, we can eat. And if we get tired, we can go home. And if we get bored, we can make up some jokes. If our apartment was a sea-monkey theatre, the curtains that

concealed it would be decorated with pictures of cars and houses, and the guy running it would play the banjo.

Inside our little apartment, as it would be revealed when the curtains are pulled back, we would be cooking, or playing cards, or talking about things. And the creatures watching from outside, whoever they might be, could read our lips and our expressions. They would say: That one’s the mother, and that one’s the kid. See how she’s laughing when he stands up and does that thing?

They would say: It seems like they are dancing to that twangy music, they way they move their arms around. And they would say: Who knows how long they live, but they lead really fabulous lives that we can’t begin to understand. When they die, for example, they can’t be reconstituted, so every beautiful thing that happens gets added to the next until it has a weight – see how the weight holds them to the floor of their castle so they don’t drift off? It’s the same weight that makes them laugh like that.

At ten o’clock, we can go and do all that stuff, but if you don’t want to you can go play, or stay here. I can stop writing and we can just stay right here.

makes the enemy stronger.

In conclusion, as the famous saying goes, activism is the rent I pay to live on this planet. If your landlord comes to your door demanding rent do you think he will accept letters of compassion or a wave of loving kindness instead? Will you hold a healing circle to make him happy? No. So when life, the real landlord (and not just some human that hijacked the piece of planet), comes by and wants rent, you should pay up. And if the rent life wants is for you to do something about the assholes that are attacking it, do something! Pay up in whatever way you can. And get your friends to pay up too, so you don’t have to pay extra.

Further reading: • • • • • • • • • • •

Peter Gelderloos - How Nonviolence Protects the State Peter Gelderloos - The Failure of Nonviolence Ward Churchill - Pacifism as Pathology Derrick Jensen - Endgame Ashen Ruins - Against the Corpse Machine: Defining A Post-Leftist Anarchist Critique of Violence Craig Rosebraugh - The Logic Of Political Violence: Lessons In Reform And Revolution Vernon Richards (ed) - Violence And Anarchism Alfredo Bonanno - Errico Malatesta and Revolutionary Violence Alfredo Bonanno - Revolution, Violence, Anti-Authoritarianism, A Few Notes Leslie James Pickering - The Earth Liberation Front 1997-2002 Craig Rosebraugh - Burning Rage of a Dying Planet: Speaking for the Earth Liberation Front

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

Page 5

"If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

Assignment 1:

What does anarchism/ anarchist/anarchy mean?

Juta se woordebook/Juta’s Dictionary 1932 (p.353) anarchist: oproermaker, anargis. anarchy: regeringsloosheid, anargie.

The Family Word Finder (Reader’s Digest) 1975 (p.41) anarchist n. Anarchists burned down the palace: rebel, revolutionary, insurgent, terrorist, mutineer; syndicalist, nihilist.

Ant. loyalist, tory, conservative; disciplinarian. anarchy n. 1 Any form of government is better than anarchy: absence of government, disorder, lawlessness, chaos. 2 Anarchists dream of an ideal state of anarchy in which people will be completely free: utopia, the millennium.

Ant. order, discipline, authority, government, organization, control; regimentation, subjection.

{

{

Direct back-translations: 1) referingsloosheid = without government; 2) anargie = anarchy. Hey, they got it right! (I don’t think they

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South Africa 1932: a new coat of arms is approved, Athol Fugard and Mimi Coertse are born, Daisy de Melker is hanged for murder, James Barry Munnik Hertzog is Prime Minister and replaces Dutch with Afrikaans as official language and Dutch as second official language.

He also removed Black voters from the common voters roll.

All of these lumped together? Anarchist does not equal terrorist. Government equals terrorist. Oh, but censorship was asserted quite heavy-handed during this period still, so of course nobody could tell the truth. Old Jacobus Johannes Fouché is the second President of South Africa at this time and a member of the National Party. He’s about to be followed B.J. Vorster. Happy times ahead!

(NOT!)

The Word Power Dictionary (Reader’s Digest) 1996 (p.41) anarchy anarchist; anarchic, anarchism lawlessness, disorder, especially from an absence or lack of government; complete absence of control.

{

Examples: The revolt led to anarchy (n) in the country.

The bomb was thrown by an anarchist (n).

There was an anarchic (aj) state of affairs after the coup.

Anarchism (n) is the theory that all forms of government should be abolished.

English/Afrikaans Dictionary (Reader’s Digest) 1996 (p.677) anarch oproerleier. anarchical anargisme, wetteloosheid, anargisties. anarchist n. anargis, voorstander van regereringloosheid. anarchist a. anargisties. anarchy regeringsloosheid, anargie; wetteloosheid, ordeloosheid, wanorde.

The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought 1999 (p.30) anarchism. A political movement advocating the abolition of the state and the replacement of all forms of governmental authority by free association and voluntary cooperation of groups and individuals. Anarchists disagree about what specific relationships the future society is to be based on, and about how it is to be achieved. Contemporary libertarian writers describe themselves as ‘anarchocapitalists’ and base their hostility to the State on the inviolability of each individual’s ownership of himself and his property.

Historically anarchists have been hostile to private property as ordinarily understood. The first English anarchist, William Godwin (1756-1836), was uninterested in political action and wished the ‘euthanasia of government’ to result from individual moral reformation; more commonly, anarchists have advocated some form of direct action. Their Marxist critics have complained that this is inimical to good organization and effective tactics.

Proudhon (1809-65) and Blanqui (1805-81) divided the allegiances of the 19th-century anarchists in France, the former wanting peaceful change, the latter and advocate of spontaneous insurrection. Bakunin ledthe anarchist wing of the First International; his quarrels with Marx and Engels destroyed the organization in 1876. Bakunin’s enthusiasm for insurrection and spontaneity degenerated into a romantic and suicidal craze for ‘propaganda by the deed’ which swept Europe and America at the turn of the century.

Johann Moser’s obsession with creative possibilities of dynamite was characteristic of the period, but even Malatesta, Kropotkin and Emma Goldman were tempted by the thought that assassinating the rich and the powerful would lead to a workers’ revolt and thence to the anarchist utopia.

{

Direct back-translations: 1) wetteloosheid = lawlessness (see above); 2) ordeloosheid = disorderly; 3) wanorde = disorderly. Thanks for the repetition there – us anarchists didn’t get it the first time because we’re all about causing chaos! (Well, chaos for governments certainly! But no, we’re actually very organised. That’s why we get things done while the rest get lost in red tape.)

{

Yes, we still are! Give the land back you rich bastards out there!

{

Contradictionary: a bestiary of words in revolt 2013 (pp.19-20) Anarchist – In theory, an anarchist is a person who believes that all coercive hierarchy should be abolished in order that everyone might practice complete self-determination. In practice, it matters little what a person believes should occur, as even the most rapacious executives entertain idle notions about how things ought to be – couched in hymns about “peace on earth and goodwill towards men,” for example. Ideally, therefore, an anarchist would be a person who seized her destiny in her hands in such a way that others gained control of their destinies as well.

It follows that no one is properly an anarchist, but that we all aspire to anarchism.

{

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{ { {

Well, now we’re getting somewhere.

However, this short history of anarchism doesn’t even begin to describe it. And for your information, anarchocapitalist is an oxymoron, moron.

Another word politicians love as much as ‘chaos’ and ‘utopia’ when asked about anarchism.

Thank fuck, they got it right!

After 1900, anarchism ceased to make much impact on the politics of developed countries. In revolutionary Russia, however, Makhno defied the Bolshevik armies for most of the Civil War, while anarchists held power in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. In France, the hold of anarchist ideas on the left has never quite died out; anarcho-syndicalism was a powerful force in trade union circles until World War I, and in the ‘events’ of May 1968 anarchism rather than orthodox Marxism ruled the day. The terrorism which the far left practiced during the 1970s was based on an orthodox hatred of capitalist society, but the expectation of insurrection was anarchist. Of much greater intellectual interest has been the continuing revival of individualist American anarchism associated with writers such as Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick. For further reading: G. Woodcock, Anarchism and Anarchists: Essays (1992).

Collins Concise Dictionary 2004 (pp.49-50) anarchism n. 1) Political theory. a doctrine advocating the abolition of government. 2) the principles or practice of anarchists. anarchist n. 1) a person who advocates a society based on voluntary cooperation and the abolition of government. 2) a person who causes disorder or upheaval. anarchy n. 1) general lawlessness and disorder, esp. when thought to result in the absence or failure of government. 2) the absence of government. 3) the absence of any guiding or uniting principle; chaos. 4) political anarchism.

{

If by ‘complete absence of control’ you mean we decide about how we would like our lives to look collectively, allowing ourselves freedom to govern our own lives without impeding on the freedom of others, yes, indeed, then this is correct. And by now we’ve entered the post-Apartheid years with Nelson Mandela keeping us starryeyed about governments. As indeed he still does, come to think of it.

{

{

Yes!

Direct back-translations: 1) oproermaker = rioter, rebel insurgent; 2) anargis = anarchist. Well, yes, sometimes we are rioters, rebels and insurgents because direct action is one of our primary ways of causing change. OMG, does this mean we’re opposed to a government? I mean, really? People can’t lead themselves.

Look at the mess we’ve created with the world. Well, true, but perhaps the mess is the result of structural arrangements and relations which create hierarchical power distribution.

What if we were all equal from Day 1?

If by ‘lawlessness’ you mean without government, without the military, without the police or any other disciplinary institution, then yes, us anarchists are lawless indeed.

Now who the fuck thought this one up?

Ahem, this certainly didn’t work out for us, did it?

{

Yes, but they never had an idyllic utopia in mind. Go read their histories and you might get some idea of what they were up against. Oh dear, the dictionaries have gotten lost in fantasy fiction. But also not. Perhaps they should read 1984 or Do androids dream of electric sheep? or The dispossessed. But then again, if they keep using the word ‘utopia’ enough times, people might realise that anarchism is completely unrealistic. I mean, what the fuck would we do without other people telling us what to do and how to live our lives and what jobs are good and where we should live? (Well, I can think of many things and I promise you they don’t involve shopping malls or golfing!)

Well, sometimes, when it’s needed, like when the Animal Liberation Front burns down laboratories that test on animals in cruel and inhumane ways because of some arbitrary hierarchy that supposes we (also animals, just with opposable thumbs and Theory of Mind), have the right to subject other animals to whatever we like, including eating them. Eat the rich is what I say!

(That includes governments in case you were wondering – think how many people we’d be able to feed and give homes to.)

Yay, we have a clear definition of anarchism/anarchist/anarchy! Thank you crimethInc; we really do love you!

{ {

{

YES! YES! OH GOD, YES!

And no, this assignment shall not be given a mark as we don’t rate people to show that some are better than others.

Instead, we recognise that everyone brings something to the table and that if we can work together, we can make the changes we want to see.

Oh dear, evolution hasn’t done much for general ignorance.

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

And there you have it folks, none of us are proper anarchists, but we try, every day, to make political and ethical choices which bring us closer to anarchism and allow for more people to have access to power and choices regarding their lives. Occasionally, we’re even known for not throwing bombs and give away free food to people. For more info, see the bolo’bolo website for FOOD NOT BOMBS events if you are keen to do something that will actively bring you closer to anarchism.

{

HANDED IN BY SHAN’T TELL

Page 6

To begin, let’s imagine an appropriate setting...

Liberal: What beer is that you’re drinking?

Anarchist: Some local micro-brewed IPA. Really hoppy, but good. What’s that, a Windhoek?

Liberal: Windhoek? Fuck that! I would never support a huge corporation like Namibian Breweries. This is a locally brewed Belgian-style ale...I don’t know why anyone ever drinks mass produced beer when there’s so much better stuff available. Don’t they realize what they’re supporting?

Anarchist: Well, mass produced beer doesn’t cost R30 a bottle. Some people don’t really have a choice: when they want a beer they go for the cheapest option.

Liberal: But why? The turnout was great.

We really showed them!

Anarchist: Showed who, exactly? Two hundred of us walked down a street holding some placards and shouting a bunch of random slogans at passersby.

What exactly have we accomplished?

Liberal: We spoke truth to Power. If more people march and share the truth about GM foods then Monsanto will have to change their practices. We might even force them to shut down altogether if we can encourage enough people to buy organic! Why were you even there if you’re so pessimistic about the whole thing?

Anarchist: I don’t know really...sometimes I tag along to these things because I also feel strongly about the issues, but lately I’m increasingly demotivated by the fact that it’s just a bunch of liberals doing some weekend tithing.

Liberal: Whoah, back up there! What’s wrong with being a liberal? Are you saying you’re a conservative or something?

Anarchist: Of course not. I’m an anarchist, which means I agree with a lot of liberal values; freedom and equality, for instance. I just have a very different understanding of what these terms mean and how to obtain them. For starters, I don’t think consumer activism is going to help very much, nor do I think polite protests where we ‘speak truth to Power’ are particularly effective, even if I participate despite myself occasionally.

Liberal: I don’t know much about anarchism, but doesn’t the anarchist Noam Chomsky spend most of his

instantly.

Liberal: But it makes perfect sense to me.

I don’t understand what you’re suggesting is wrong with any of this.

Anarchist: Well, that’s one of the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment humanist tradition classic liberalism comes from: that society is just a bunch of rational individuals who can choose to interact in any number of ways and that education and informed debate and sharing truths and better ideas are thus the best ways to change things. Not only does this completely miss out on the oppressive material relations of power that structure any given society, it also fails to recognise how we’re all at least partly indoctrinated by these same structural relations. In other words, when we think about making change often we’re just reproducing the logic of current arrangements of power.

Liberal: Okay, you’ve lost me now...

Anarchist: It’s simple: what are the embedded assumptions of the kinds of activism we’ve been discussing, like consumer boycotts, peaceful protests, speaking truth to Power and so on?

For one, there’s this view that you can use market forces to create a kinder capitalism. However, this perpetuates the idea that capitalism is the only option and that market forces work in our favour.

Peaceful protests and sharing truths for their part assume the existence of some benevolent other – a state or a group of compassionate shareholders or something – that exists in our interests and can be changed through rational persuasion or ‘moral force’ or the invocation of abstract ‘rights’. And, of course, this kind of activism also relies heavily on middle class levels of material comfort: not everyone can choose what to buy and not everyone is comfortable enough to have the daily negative effects of capitalism and the state hidden from them. Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is that we need to critique and dismantle the structures themselves instead of just trying to fix them from within. I’m also arguing that, to some extent anyway, the ways in which we think about changing things reflect the extent to which we’ve internalized the values of society as it currently exists, kind of like how Stockholm Syndrome works.

Liberal: That doesn’t make sense. We live in a democracy and we really do have rights: they’re in the Constitution.

If we don’t like how it’s working right now we can just vote for someone else.

Also, surely we can fix capitalism? It’s just messed up right now because some people got too greedy, like the banks and giant corporations.

Liberal: Well then they shouldn’t drink.

Everybody has a choice not to support corrupt corporations.

Anarchist: What, like the corrupt corporation that manufactured your car?

Liberal: It’s a hybrid! I’m voting with my wallet for eco-friendly transport.

Anarchist: (holds head between hands and lets out an audible sigh.)

Liberal: What’s that supposed to mean?

Anarchist: Sorry, I didn’t mean to appear cynical or judgmental. I guess I’m just exhausted from today’s protest.

To be honest, I find these things really demotivating.

time speaking truth to Power? I don’t understand what’s wrong with showing people what’s really going on.

Anarchist: For starters, Chomsky might sometimes align himself with anarchism but he also tends to lapse into a kind of activist liberalism. What I mean is, he makes this assumption that if we can just show enough people the truth, like examples of non-transparency and corruption within the US political system, or how countries act in defiance of international law, or how a certain president said one thing and did another, this will somehow magically change things. Whether it’s Chomsky doing this or Naomi Klein or projects like Wikileaks or whatever, they all fall into the trap of thinking that society is changed through rational discourse: if we just all knew the truth, we’d opt out of the current system

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

Anarchist: What is democracy?

It’s supposed to be a transparently functioning political system that upholds individual sovereignty and protects us from harm but in practice it looks more like a way of maintaining a class system.

When you look at the Constitution, what you’ll mostly find are a bunch of negative freedoms – freedoms from various forms of unnecessary imposition, coercion and so on – and far fewer positive freedoms or freedoms to...You know, principles of equality and mutual support that would enable each of us to reach our full potential. In fact when you explore it more closely, you’ll find that the modern political and legal systems in so-called democratic countries, with all their laissez faire principles, function primarily to pacify us while supporting the interests of a tiny capitalist class by protecting private property and the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth. The state and capital participate in all sorts of collusive practices both straightforward and byzantine in order to achieve this and if / continued on page 9

Aragorn Eloff talks to his imaginary liberal friends about resistance, prefiguration and why democracy and magical thinking.

not fanning the flames of revolutionary change, desperately trying to maintain some tiny glimmer of light amidst the growing darkness of a planet gone mad, we’re often forced in situations where we have to explain our radical ideals to all manner of well-meaning but occasionally deeply frustrating people who, like us, seek a better world. Usually the most frustrating of these people are not the right wing free market fundamentalists or the tinfoil hat brigade but, somewhat counter-intuitively, those who describe themselves as ‘liberals’.

Perhaps this frustration stems partly from the fact that, at first glance, there seems to be a considerable amount of overlap between the views held by anarchists and the liberal ideals of freedom, equality, tolerance and so forth.

After all, most liberals are, just like us, uncomfortable with violations of autonomy; for the most part they’re sensitive, compassionate folks who express a visceral discomfort with exploitative social relations. Many liberals are passionate environmentalists and animal rights activists and some edgier liberal-minded folks may even refer to themselves as ‘activists’ and support Occupy-style practices like ‘direct democracy’ and ‘consensus’. In practice, however, our ways quickly part, due mostly to the seemingly incommensurable assumptions each of us hold about how oppressive social relations function and how best we can eradicate them.

For this and other reasons, anarchists tend to dismiss liberals out of hand, often choosing not to participate in liberal events like protests, petitions and so on. Being slightly more optimistic than this – or possibly hopelessly naïve – I like to think that in the heart of at least some liberals there lives, even if deeply buried under decades of indoctrination, pessimism and apathy, an anarchist waiting to be set free. In the spirit of liberating these theoretical anarchists from their liberal shackles I’d like to indulge in something equally hypothetical: a fictitious conversation between a stereotypical representative of each camp that, for all its cliché and binary oversimplification really does sum up and reflect both the tone and the content of the innumerable discussions – and heated arguments – I’ve had with real liberals over the years. My hope is that even where I’m at my most dismissive, this discussion between imagined parties will still be of some small use to those of us seeking to dismantle hierarchy and domination as they really exist in the world we share.

Scene: A diverse-looking group of vaguely alternative people, most of them between the ages of 18 and 40-odd, are sitting around a small, overburdened table in a loud, smoky bar somewhere in Observatory, Cape Town. It’s early evening and there’s cause for celebration: the group, most of whom don’t really know each other well yet, spent the day at a well-attended and lively protest against evil GM corporation Monsanto.

Placards waved and chants chanted, it’s time to bask in the glow of victory. At the corner of the table closest to the window, a conversation strikes up between two of the protestors; one of them, our hypothetical anarchist, is a young, foreign-sounding woman with shoulder-length dreadlocked hair and numerous tattoos wearing a t-shirt that reads “until all are free, nobody is free – Mikhail Bakunin.” Our imagined liberal, who is about the same age, is dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt that look – not obviously, but still perceptibly – carefully matched, as though he shops for outfits instead of individual items of clothing.

Liberals, can we

B

eing an anarchist can be pretty exhausting sometimes. When we’re

RIOT yet?

"At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned." - Cormac McCarthy

Page 7

"The real enemy is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives." - Bob Black

Book zine reviews “Twenty volume folios will never make a revolution. It is the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared.” – Voltaire

I

t’s been twenty years since I encountered my first zine, but I still remember it vividly.

Although the role of a zine in an internet-saturated society is in some ways substantially diminished, there’s another sense in which there’s simply no replacement for the cheap, tactile, easily reproducible stapled A4 foldovers that still populate the shelves of so many anarchist libraries and infoshops. bolo’bolo is no exception here; continuing the proud tradition of DIY publication that goes back to at least the punk scene of the mid-70s (and as far back as Thomas Paine if Vicky Vale, author of the quintessential coffee table guide, Zines, is to be believed) we’ve downloaded, copied, written and designed well over a hundred different zines, all lovingly bound in brightly coloured card covers and retailing in our infoshop for between R5-R20 apiece (there are also a bunch of free ones we managed to sneak from someone’s work when the boss wasn’t looking, anarchists that we are). While we sell a lot of books at bolo’bolo, we’re just as enthusiastic about these zines, viewing them as an accessible way to introduce people to new ideas. Books, after all, can be unwieldy and expensive, but a R5, eight or so page pamphlet on what anarchists think about climate change, who with even a passing interest in the subject wouldn’t grab one?

As a little homage to zine culture, even in the reasonably vapid hipster form that seems so common in Cape Town these days, here are a couple of reviews of zines we stock at bolo’bolo. If you have a zine – or even an idea for one – that’s relevant to the bolo’bolo ethos, get in touch and we’ll add you to our rack.

Refusing to wait: anarchism and intersectionality (Jen Rogue and Deric Shannon) R5

Mutual aid: An anarchist concept at work in Southern Africa (Stefanie Noire) R5

Too often, and not, it must be said, for no good reason, anarchists are seen by other radicals as mired in the worst kind of class reductionism, trying like good sectarian Marxists to force all other relations of hierarchy and oppression into a single critique of capitalist economic relations. Fortunately, however, we also have nuanced and non-dogmatic folks like Rogue and Deric on our team, encouraging us to instead think of oppressive social relations like racism, sexism, heterosexism and so on as forming a web of intersecting forces that needs to be addressed as a complex system without reducing everything to one central strand. In Refusing to wait, they argue compellingly for the usefulness of the intersectionality model for contemporary anarchism and, as a secondary task, reverse the analysis and ask intersectionality theorists whether or not they might perhaps benefit from

This is one of our best-selling zines, and for good reason. Steffi, a one-time anarchist anthropologist, explores Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid, a radical reading of Darwin’s idea of the survival of the fittest and a touchstone for most anarchists.

Looking at historical and contemporary South Africa, Steffi finds many examples of mutual aid embedded in the practices of different indigenous cultures, from the Bushmen right through to modern day African traditions of ubuntu/hunhu.

It is especially rewarding to have the often-abused notion of ubuntu presented within an anarchist context, with the implicit suggestion that a real, full practice of ubuntu would entail anarchist social relations.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (CrimethInc) R5 A typically humorous and biting critique of the mundaneness and normativity of middle and upper class life by the enfant terrible of North American anarchism, the CrimethInc ex-workers collective.

If the following is a diagnosis of your particular malaise – and as usual, CrimethInc are right on the money with their analysis – then never fear, a solution is provided in several of the other CrimethInc training manuals we have available for purchase: “Do you drift from one hobby to another, fruitlessly seeking a meaningful way to spend the little “ leisure time” you get off from work? Does your partner endlessly redecorate the house, going from one room to the next until she can start over at the beginning again? Do you agonize constantly over your future, as if there was some kind of track laid out ahead you— and the world would end if you turned off of it? If the answer to these questions is yes, it sounds like you’re in the clutches of the bourgeoisie, the last barbarians on earth.”

Capitalism, a very special delirium (Deleuze and Guattari) R8 Zines are a great way to repackage essays, interviews and other materials that might not be as accessible as an author’s main publications. In this undated interview the infamous poststructuralist philosophers of deterritorialization, schizoanalysis and flux explain their analysis of capitalism with unprecedented clarity, applying Marxist theory and psychoanalysis in bold new ways in order to demonstrate the uniquely machinic ways in which capitalism functions and how it doesn’t rely on any ideology at all. If you’re looking for an entry point into the political philosophy of the 21st century, this is just the text.

Reserved Yesterday I came home After journeying slowly I arrived without a bang Oh Africa A travel weary mother’s son alone.

Oh Africa, my Africa In search of so many memories How I wish I could wipe away your tears Desperate to regain the scattered remains Eliminate your suffering Hungry for a visual reintegration with my roots Return you to your former glory This land Here where the dust of my ancestors’ bones lie.

Help you to reclaim your exalted place

In the annals of this epoch.

Each day I listen to you and wonder how easily I knocked at the door

your humanity is cast asunder.

But no-one appeared We’ve defeated the colonial slave master You claim that we get only what we deserve with I knocked again To be ruled by mindless martyrs thousands lying dormant and in reserve.

Then a bouncer came.

And greedy, blood-thirsty bastards

Whose only desire is personal power Each day I look at you amazed how you remain so False smiles and epaulettes Achieved through the murder of innocence completely unfazed by the poverty and suffering I had to pay a tourists’ fee And callously maintained with armed intolerance. beyond the electric fence that helps you to feel To set foot or lay a wary eye

less tense.

On my natural heritage where these strangers reign.

Where now are the people’s leaders?

Where are the revolutionary ideals?

Each day I wonder what goes through your mind All of the breathtaking splendor Gone and buried in the blood-soaked hinterland and ask myself are you really so blind?

That they travel so far to see Decaying beneath the greater corporate carnage I try to fathom the depths of your uncaring heart Is mine, but no longer belongs to me Crushed to dust by the relentless grind only to realize that you exist in a world apart. All of this that God bequeathed to me.

As we all look on so helpless.

Each day I pass by you on the street disdainfully I am the son of the native Stand tall sisters and brothers looking at me from head to feet with an Slave and masters’ mistress Honour the memory of the father and mother expression of suspicion distorting your face and Whore to my brothers’ sisters Together we can stem the tide the fear you project makes my pulse race.

A slave still, to all that I feel.

Let the children live with pride

United we will dream again What is it that you perceive; do you look forward But still I paid, I went and saw Free once more of poverty’s bane. to death’s reprieve; will your children be able to No-one remembers anymore

love mine after being exposed to your prejudice The rock beneath my soles Once more to claim our place in the sun for all this time.

Didn’t even touch my feet.

Without fear of persecution and harm

Our voices must be raised as one Each day I defeat your ignorance as I strive to Yesterday I came home Ubuntu! Uhuru! We will chorus freedom’s song understand the nature of the bigoted arrogance And today I paid a cover-charge Now, now! Oh Africa, my Africa that has shaped this beautiful land.

To look upon what God bequeathed to me Where the struggles carry on.

All of this that was mine, but no longer belongs to me.

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

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It wasn’t the content of Lolita17 that inspired me so much though; it was the idea that anyone with access to scissors, glue, a typewriter (or PC nowadays), a couple of pens and a photocopier (and many an office photocopier has served as clandestine midnight publisher) could make their voice heard. Not that anyone was necessarily listening, mind you, but that wasn’t important – the medium itself was liberating! It put media back in the hands of everyday folks so that they could express themselves in whatever way they saw fit and express ourselves we did. Upon encountering Lolita17, my gang and I quickly hacked together 20 copies of the first issue of Another Reason To Cut Off An Ear, a teenage rant on anarchy (which we didn’t understand too well back then, all things considered), industrial noise music, the temple of psychick youth, chaos magick and psychedelics (with a strong, if unintended, subtext of angst, anomie and alienation). More issues followed.

We changed the name of our zine to SMi2LE. We discovered the early ‘90s Joburg zine underground, populated by the likes of Backstreet Abortions (a vegan anarchist publishing/distro collective), Damn New Thing (a slick early rave culture zine that echoed “Mondo2000” in its techno-enthusiasm) and the unspeakably offensive, abominably poorly spelled comics of Yeoville crust punk legend Alan Bomb. At some point, of course, the magic died, the photocopier broke, the crowd split and we all moved on, going our separate ways. The sense of possibility awakened by those early forays into DIY counterculture, however, has remained.

– Three poems from Mikey Wentworth’s a love letter to the epoch Available from bolo’bolo for R80.

Page 8

“Where do you want to go, my heart?” “Anywhere - anywhere, out of this world.” - CrimethInc

/ continued from page 7

Liberal: Hmmm...I get that, but you keep going on about these structures as though everything is predetermined and we have no agency. That doesn’t sound right at all.

I mean, if I was born poor I could choose to work hard at studying and then get a bursary to attend a good university and get a decent job out of it. People are only as free as they want to be. What we need to be doing is raising consciousness!

Anarchist: The liberal myth of the ‘boy made good,’ of the person who lifted themselves out of abject poverty by their bootstraps, actually supports what I’ve been saying about oppressive structures and the power relations that flow through them. After all, if it was as simple as people working hard to better their lives then millions of people would be moving out of the townships and into middle class houses in the suburbs. One certainly can’t argue that there’s not an incredible amount of hard work and perseverance displayed by some of the poorest people in our society, even if there is also the obvious

apathy, resentment and resignation that goes along with being on the receiving end of hierarchical social relations. In fact, however, there’s very little class migration in any capitalist, statist society, which is precisely why they make Disney movies when it does happen. It’s kind of like playing the Lotto – the magical thinking of ‘we can lift ourselves out of poverty’ allows us to forget how messed up things are and how powerless we feel to change them. Also, even if people who were able to work really hard were able to lift themselves out of poverty more often than is the case, it would be kind of like hosting a race between ten people and then, leading up to the race, training one of them to function at peak performance and shooting the other nine in the kneecaps. Not really the kind of fairness liberals are supposed to value, is it?

By the way, I’m not saying that structure determines everything and that we have no freedom. In fact I think it’s more like what the philosopher Michel Foucault said: that these shitty power

“Sometimes there’s absolutely nothing you can do within the system.

How would a social justice activist work within the North Korean system, for instance? Stalinist Russia?

Apartheid South Africa?”‘ relations and oppressive structures are everywhere but they actually rely on our freedom. In other words, they’re a way of filtering our free action – our personal and collective power to do stuff – into ends that aren’t in our interests. In short, we have agency but it doesn’t operate in a vacuum: we have to remember to continually interrogate the ways in which our sense of agency, how we think about ourselves and our real, material capacities are all informed by hierarchical arrangements of power within our current society.

Liberal: That’s all a bit complicated for me. Also, wasn’t Foucault just one of those postmodernist charlatans? There’s a book that debunks all those French relativists.

Also, I still don’t get what’s wrong with protests. If what you’re saying in your roundabout way is simply that we can challenge capitalist brainwashing and encourage people to use their agency then surely a protest is a good way to do that?

Anarchist: Yes and no. On the one hand, sure, we can share some critical insights at protests, or at least suggest that another way of doing things is possible, which is probably why, despite myself, I end up at so many marches on Saturday mornings.

On the other hand, I sometimes feel as though protests function – albeit perhaps only accidentally – as a pressure valve for social unrest: give the masses a chance to vent their anger in a safe, patrolled environment and make them feel like they’ve achieved something (for

example, you can let them hand over their petition or memorandum, or hang a banner, or plant a symbolic tree) and you’ll exhaust many people’s capacity for participating in activist movements while simultaneously reinforcing the idea that this is an effective or even sufficient way to produce meaningful change. Even as a way of making demands, which I don’t think is a particularly good way to change the world; peaceful protests fall kind of short. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, power concedes nothing without a demand and I like to think he meant a real demand backed by real force, not just the polite performance of a demand by obedient citizens. Anyway, that’s only in the context of a politics of demand; anarchists are far more interested in practicing politics – or more precisely anti-politics – away from capitalism, the state and so on, in a way that subverts these structures and maintains the possibility of entering into open conflict with them along class and other lines.

Liberal: But this makes it sound as though you don’t want to work within the system at all! Surely you’re just alienating yourself from everyone by being so extremist. It also sounds kind of unrealistic. If we’re realistic we have to accept that this is how things currently are and work to slowly reform them from within.

Anarchist: The anarchist aversion to reformism and working within the system comes from hard-won experience.

When effective reforms have taken place it’s been mostly as a necessary response to non-reformist politics, like when a government changes a law to prevent a revolutionary outbreak. The rest of the time, reforms serve to safely divert the desire for change into reproducing – and even further legitimating – current forms of hierarchy and domination.

It’s like the difference between animal welfare and animal rights: welfarists are always criticising rights activists for being too radical but all that welfare achieves, with its slightly bigger cages and slightly ‘kinder’ forms of confinement and killing is to make people feel less upset about the exploitation of other animals, which in turn serves to further entrench the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally ethically problematic about this practice.

Also, sometimes there’s absolutely nothing you can do within the system. How would a social justice activist work within the North Korean system, for instance?

Stalinist Russia? Apartheid South Africa?

I’m not sure things are that different in socalled ‘democratic’ societies.

As for whether or not anarchists are unrealistic, well, historically lots of sweeping social change has come about through revolutionary ruptures whose proponents probably seemed wildly unrealistic before the fact. We also have to remember that it’s equally unrealistic to assume that the way social relations are currently structured can endure for longer than another couple of decades, at most, without causing complete social and ecological collapse. We live in wholly unrealistic, immoderate times and we

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

need to respond to them radically, even if the specific niches of relative privilege some of us occupy within them don’t allow us to notice the full scope of what’s unfolding all around us. Finally, I think some more moderate liberals also have this assumption that things are they are basically work fine except for a couple of glitches that can be ironed out...like, capitalism would be fine if we could just stop the bankers from being quite so greedy. For anarchists, on the other hand, things as they currently stand are fundamentally at odds with the interests of most people (and other animals, and the planet) and what we see as glitches or crises in the system are in fact a part of its functioning. That’s why we want to dismantle it: it cannot be fixed any more than slavery could be ‘fixed’.

Liberal: I don’t know...sometimes I think this is all so negative and oppositional.

Like the old saying goes, what you resist persists. Surely we’d be better off just living our lives in different ways, away from capitalism and the government?

Anarchist: What, like let’s all buy a piece of land in the Karoo and build an eco-village and pay each other in talents and bitcoins (small-scale alternative currencies)? Sure, it’s all fine and well to prefigure different ways of living together (even when they do limit themselves to perpetuating the capitalist myth of homo oeconomicus, all self-satisficing and optimisation problems and bartering and direct reciprocity) which is why anarchists are actually very keen on stuff like the really Really Free Market (a gift economy market), Food Not Bombs (a worldwide, grassroots project that shares ‘excess’ or ‘waste’ food in the spirit of solidarity, not charity), anarchist free schools and so on, but I don’t think this is even nearly sufficient... In fact, it’s often just a form of middle class escapism that allows us to think we’re making change while allowing us to continue living the good life. Also, this kind of stuff only works until it gets

“we need to defend and enhance these cracks and they need to form part of a doing-otherwise; we also need to promote their confluence as part of an explicitly anti-capitalist cry of ‘enough is enough!’” big enough to pose a real threat: the bitcoin project is tiny and it’s already being shut down by governments in various places. Eco-villages in the Karoo sound lovely, and I’m all for cob houses and permaculture and undermining and figuring out how we can live if and when this insane civilization is dismantled or comes crashing down, but what happens if they find natural gas under your ecovillage? Do you think they’ll just let you carry on living the idyllic hippie dream?

No. We’re going to have to

resist and we’re going to have to commit to actively dismantling these oppressive systems even if we would also do well to focus on building the new world in the shell of the old at the same time. The autonomous Marxist John Holloway sums this dual practice up well when he talks about building the new world as finding and multiplying the cracks in capitalism: as he continually reminds us, we need to defend and enhance these cracks and they need to form part of a doing-otherwise; we also need to promote their confluence as part of an explicitly anti-capitalist cry of ‘enough is enough!’

Liberal: I’m still uncomfortable with all this resistance stuff. As a Buddhist and a pacifist I’ve come to realise that change starts within and that we can only ever work on ourselves.

Anarchist: Firstly, what you’re suggesting is more of an exoticised Buddhism-lite than actual Buddhism. Check out the history of Buddhist through the centuries and you’ll find that not only did Buddhists resist, they sometimes even fought on the side of the oppressors, something they did not feel was incompatible with their spiritual views. In Mahayana Buddhism, for instance, they say that the true follower not the one who observes the five precepts but the one who uses the sword, bow, arrow and battle ax to protect the monks who uphold the precepts and who are pure. In other words, and ignoring the dubious hierarchy this suggests, someone still has to resist. Sometimes I think these appropriated, orientalist Eastern spiritual practices are actually kind of narcissistic.

They feel like a kind of disavowed consumerism by people who express anti-materialist views but live in large houses, drive fancy cars, eat expensive raw food diets, pay charlatans for expensive courses on achieving ‘enlightenment’ and decorate their living environment with all sorts of overpriced paraphernalia. Oh, and then go on anti-GMO protests on Saturdays to shout their chants of ‘we are all one; change the paradigm.’ Now that I think about it, one could even argue that the average Western Buddhist is an exemplary liberal capitalist citizen: they’ve disavowed their role in oppressive social relations while continuing to consume appropriately and perpetuating the myth of self-obsessed individualism.

This is a far cry from even some of the most liberal non-Western Buddhists: did you know that the Dalai Lama calls himself both a Marxist and a communist? Incidentally, one shouldn’t ignore the uncomfortable fact that Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism and so forth have been used throughout their history to maintain class, caste and gender hierarchies and to encourage acceptance of unjust social relations; even some of the most revered Buddhist texts contain supportive references to these kinds of hierarchies, along with endorsements of war and rightful killing (of icchantikas [supposedly based and self-deluded beings], for example). I don’t mean to lash out at all spiritual / continued on page 10

Page 9

Liberals, can we RIOT yet?

there’s merit in what people like Chomsky do then it’s to point out that this is not the exception but the rule: that the various components of the state are, at least in part, the protection and enforcement branch of capitalism. Whoever you vote for – and let’s not even get into how disempowering it is to choose a random bunch of people to decide on the lives of you and your community behind closed doors on your behalf – this collusion will continue to take place. All that changes is the window dressing. You’d have to be desperately naïve to think that there’s a massive difference in this regard between, say, the DA and the ANC, both of whom, whatever their rhetoric, are explicitly neoliberal and irremediably corrupt. As for fixing capitalism, well, it seems to me that the situation we find ourselves in is what any capitalist economic system – any formal economy even – tends to lead to: the massive centralisation of wealth and power and the ownership of all the land and means of production people need to be able to live their lives. Even an idealistic free market economy would quickly lead to the formation of private security companies required to manage the inevitable class antagonisms that would arise and this would in turn result in the evolution of a state (a ruthless neofeudal one most likely!)

Anyway, for anarchists, these are all deep structural problems: we’re not just concerned with the specific content that flows through them; we’re concerned with their form – with the structures themselves! If we’re truly serious about the liberal goals of freedom and equality we have to eradicate capitalism and the state along with all the other hierarchical and oppressive social relations that intersect with them. If this isn’t making any sense, think of it as a variation on that old saying, power corrupts. That’s not to say that we can’t hold power together, but that when one person or group has power over others in whatever sphere of our lives we’re considering, it changes them for the worse.

Liberals, can we RIOT yet?

"Freedom will be possible when people understand and desire it — for man can only rule where others subserviently obey. Where none obey, none has power to rule." - George Nicholson

/ continued from page 9

practices, by the way. I’m an atheist but I have several anarchist friends who define themselves as Buddhists, Taoists, pagans and so forth. There are even some Christian and Islamic anarchists.

Anyway, my point is that even Buddhists recognise that conflict might be necessary.

Contemporary no-conflict, no-resistance Buddhism is just disavowed capitalist subjectivity projected onto a caricatured and appropriated spiritual practice. It also often exudes paternalistic smugness, another perennial hallmark of liberalism, and it’s pretty suggestive that not many of these Western pseudo-Buddhists know about the more egalitarian and collectively liberatory teachings of Buddhism, like the bodhisattva, for instance.

Liberal: Whew...Okay...that was kind of a rant. Let’s move on from spiritual stuff...What about more radical stuff like the Freeman Movement? They seem to be on the rise and they’ve found all these loopholes in the law which mean you can opt out of paying taxes and obeying corrupt government regulations.

Anarchist: Well, you can try. In practice, the so-called ‘Freeman’ thing is based on a bizarre layperson misinterpretation of common law and no Freeman has ever succeeded in winning a legal case. There’s a reason first year law students make jokes about the Freeman movement and their obsession with misinterpreted Latin clauses and capital letters. Apart from the usual liberal misunderstanding of the law as being something that operates through reason instead of through force, I find the whole thing deeply suspicious, especially when you trace it back to its origins in conspiracy theories and new age quackery.

It’s just another way of selling middle class people false hope and quick-fix solutions that don’t require too much investment of time or energy from them, like signing petitions, clicking Like on Facebook, sharing Zeitgeist and Future By Design DVDs with friends or buying V for Vendetta Anonymous masks to wear at

protests (without realising, of course, that in the original V, the protagonist was an anarchist) or telling people how the banks are secretly speculating with our debt, as though that’s not something every firstyear economics student already knows.

It’s also a sad reproduction of the liberal consumerist magical thinking I’ve been criticising all along: that we can somehow create sufficient change through freely choosing to align ourselves ideologically with some or other passively held set of beliefs.

The reason I think it’s sad is because it says so much about the anomie and deep depoliticisation of otherwise well-meaning people. We’ve really had it rough in terms of political education in South Africa, especially those of us who grew up during Apartheid, and it’s left a lot of people completely confused about what’s going on in the world and how, historically, people have been able to change it. Obviously this creates a whole lot of anxiety and so, in the absence of any real understanding of why things appear to be going to hell in a handbag, we can’t blame people for seeking meaning and false solace in conspiracy theories and bizarrely internally contradictory utopias (like the one where we trade in bitcoins in a free market but also somehow have a ‘resource-based’ economy regulated by a benevolent bureaucratic class) that resemble nothing so much as the hyperindividualistic narcissism that is the default identity fostered by capitalism.

The Farmville model of utopia, I call it.

Perhaps the most tragic example of all this is the new age belief that all we have to do is visualize change.

It’s kind of telling that the people who buy into this tend to come from quite wealthy backgrounds where they probably did get whatever their hearts desired, if only because their daddy bought it for them...

What’s even sadder is that sometimes this kind of magical thinking ends in a kind of pathological millenarianism, waiting for auspicious dates or planetary alignments or the intervention of wise beings from other dimensions. Sure, not many of

Featured interview: Starhawk (Northern California) Anarchist, neo-pagan, ecofeminist, permaculture advocate and the author of numerous books, including the classic of Earth-based spirituality The Spiral Dance and the nuanced anarchic utopian novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, Starhawk has been a teacher and radical political activist since the late ‘60s and was deeply involved in the grassroots anti-globalisation movement of the late ‘90s as a developer and facilitator of collective, non-hierarchical practices.

Stefanie Noire and Aragorn Eloff visited her at her rural home in Northern California, a rustic, off-grid cob house nestled deep in the woods. She gave us a tour of the permaculture training and research projects she runs from this space before sitting down over a cup of tea for this interview, which we’ve edited slightly for publication but kept mostly verbatim to convey a sense of Starhawk’s simultaneously thoughtful yet light-hearted conversation style.

the people we’ve been discussing really buy into all this whacky stuff, but when you think about it this extreme example of misplaced hope reflects perfectly the deep psychological investment in the idea that change comes from elsewhere that’s symptomatic of living within a hierarchical, patriarchal, statist society.

Liberal: You know, I keep thinking like you’re trying to make me feel guilty for being middle class. It’s not my fault, I didn’t choose this life. What if I don’t want to take sides? I don’t have any responsibility to.

Anarchist: No, you don’t. Anarchists aren’t moralists; we wouldn’t ever tell you that you have to do something. However, what we can do is observe that, factually speaking, there is no such thing as a neutral position. Like it or not, you’re either on the side of the oppressor or the oppressed, even if you don’t feel as though you’re actively participating in either. As Howard Zinn used to say, you can’t be neutral on a moving train...you’re born into a world and had a default position chosen for you already. Also, lots of us who think of ourselves as middle class have a kind of false view of our position in society.

Sociologists might tell us that there are all these different social levels and that we’re quite high up in the chain, but I think the Marxist view makes more sense: unless we’re a part of the capitalist class we’re probably part of the broad working class (which includes everyone from whitecollar workers to the unemployed), even if we don’t want to admit it. Fuck, I’m a freelance job away from the street almost every month and even people who have decent white collar jobs are at the mercy of horrendous levels of accumulated debt and the idiosyncrasies of international finance. We are kind of in a unique position though: we can choose to serve the interests of hierarchical arrangements of power because they benefit us to some extent or we can choose to be in solidarity with those even more oppressed than we are because we recognise how similar our

Thanks for being so accommodating. Would you like to say a little about who you are and what your work is?

My name is Starhawk and I’m a writer, teacher and permaculture practitioner, which is a whole system of ecological design that teaches self-reliance and how we can build systems that can meet our human needs and regenerate the environment around us. I’m also a witch and long-time writer and thinker and teacher about the revival of the old goddessbased, Earth-based spiritualities from Europe and the Middle East, and a long-time political activist.

How did you first hear about anarchism?

I’m not sure how I first heard about it. It was so long ago. I would say probably back in the ‘60s. I remember reading Murray Bookchin and Kropotkin and some of the other anarchist thinkers. For me being an anarchist is probably more about a political culture than a political philosophy: the attraction is in the style of organising and the kind of relationships we can build, organising in ways that are decentralised, horizontal and directly democratic. The first time we really organised effectively in that way, for me, was in a blockade against Diablo Canyon in 1981 in Central

Printed by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective • we fight and play for a world beyond measure

actual class position is.

Liberal: All this stuff makes me feel really uncomfortable, like you’re forcing me to take sides. I don’t like aligning myself with any -isms.

Anarchist: What, so you wouldn’t call yourself a supporter of anti-racism? Or say you believe in environmentalism?

You wouldn’t agree that you’re opposed to sexism? We all buy into -isms, whether explicitly or not, and anarchists and liberals actually have quite a few of them in common. It’s just that we’ve chosen to sum up what we’re opposed to and what we’re for in a single term that encompasses the problems and solutions at their roots while remaining adaptable to many different situations. It’s funny how so many liberals are incredibly uncomfortable with what they perceive as rigid ideologies when they simultaneously implicitly align themselves most of the ideologies, including capitalism, statism, heteronormativity and whiteness that form part of all these current systems of hierarchy and domination. There’s a reason some people refer to liberalism, with its anti-ism-ism, as the default ideology of capitalism, you know.

Liberal: So what the fuck do you want me to do?

Anarchist: Whatever you think is best.

Anarchists certainly don’t have all the answers. Whatever you do though, at least make a commitment, and make it a real one, not a lazy, middle class, oneSaturday- morning-a-month kind of a commitment. The stakes are far too high for that to be defensible if you really do hold the liberal values you purport to. Be honest about what you’re willing to give up and also about the extent to which you benefit from society as it is currently structured and the conflicting feelings you thus experience around seeking to fundamentally change things. Challenge and exert yourself; see what you’re really capable of doing. Think about why you

California. Diablo Canyon was a nuclear power plant being built on an earthquake fault. The anti-nuclear movement of the ‘70s had shifted at that point into doing actual direct action and so we organised a blockade and people went along and tried to prevent them from putting the plant live by shutting down the front gate and then by infiltrating the high security zone so that they couldn’t turn the plant on.

That blockade was organised on a model that we had taken from a couple of earlier nuclear actions in New Hampshire and they were organised by the Clamshell Alliance with a lot of inspiration and help from a group called Movement for a New Society, which was a Quaker-based group from Philadelphia that did a lot of activist training. I think they were the ones who introduced this model to the Clamshell of organising around affinity groups and working by consensus, with an organisational structure that was bottom-up rather than top-down. The affinity group would send representatives to a spokes-council that would make all the decisions about the action. There was no central committee that made decisions or issued commands, it all came from below. So we adopted that model in the Alliance. I think the blockade at Diablo Canyon was

really find anarchist or radical ideas so unsettling. Bridge the gap by engaging with and learning from other people who experience hierarchy and domination differently from you: there’s a reason most liberals are white and middle class.

Ask yourself what risks you’re prepared to take. Speak to the people around you with honesty and integrity instead of trying to appease them or sound moderate. We do not live in moderate times. Get involved in grassroots projects.

Get your hands dirty. Do things you’re uncertain about – you’ll learn as you go along. Reflect on what pacifism really means in a structurally violent society and why confrontation might sometimes be necessary (and remember that some white folks in the civil rights movement in the US even ‘thought sit-ins’ at restaurant counters were too confrontational!)

Learn about the different ways in which people have interpreted and applied your spiritual path, if you have one. Read about how people have organised historically to overthrow oppressive social relations: society is not just made of individuals, it’s made of all sorts of social groupings and material forces and we’re in this together; we can’t just rely on noble liberal heroes to save us. Change comes from movements, not Gandhis or Mandelas. Map the complex and unique arrangement of privilege and deprivation that informs your own life, where it came from, how it differs from and overlaps with others and how social relations intersect with it. Think about how you can work with and through this mapping instead of being disempowered by feelings of guilt or resentment. Think deeply about the values you already hold and what their full implications are – what a world that reflected them would really look like. And remember what Goethe once said: ‘Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it’.

Liberal: Another beer?

Anarchist: Sure, why not.

very transformative, not just for me but for everyone who took part in it. Because, really, for a month we were living in this alternative society where every decision that was made, you were part of. There was nobody telling you what to do, you didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do something, there was no central authority figure. You became your own authority. And for me, coming back from that I realised that this was the kind of world I wanted to live in and that those were the kinds of structures I wanted to build into my life. It was a lived vision of a different way to organise and structure the world.

The other part of anarchism that has always appealed to me is that anarchists are more fun to hang around with! The anarchists are the bad kids with the bad attitudes – they always have a sense of humour.

The deeper appeal was the vision of a society where everyone is part of making decisions that affect them, where everyone is empowered and everyone is their own authority; that fit for me very well with my philosophy. / continued on page 11

Page 10

" Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government." - Pierre Joseph Proudhon

Starhawk interview / continued from page 10

Are you explicit about anarchism in your work as a writer?

In my work as a writer I think I do work with anarchist ideas; in my novel the Fifth Sacred Thing there’s a vision of a society that’s very much based on that kind of anarchist direct democracy...on a lot of the ideals that we hold and held. It was fun to write, to see what would a society be like if these ideals were actually played out in reality. Webs of Power: Notes From the Global Uprising I wrote at a time when I was very deeply involved in some of the organising around global justice issues...some of that book is reports that were originally out on the internet and some of it is shaping a kind of anarchist philosophy around certain specific issues and presenting that. Other times, like in the Fifth Sacred Thing, you know, there’s nobody waving a flag and saying: this is anarchism in action, because it’s fiction and it wasn’t appropriate. I’m writing a book now on group process and group dynamics for collaborative groups and I’m explicitly not making it purely for anarchists, although I think it has great, great relevance for anarchists because I feel like there’s a lot of groups that wouldn’t necessarily identify as anarchist but who are facing the same kinds of issues. When you remove the centralised authority, you have a different kind of an animal than when you have a hierarchical group, and there hasn’t been very much written about how to make those groups and circles really work. I wanted to be inclusive rather than exclusive, so I’m kind of explicitly making it for groups that might be anything from anarchist collectives to church groups, because I think we all face very similar issues around power and authority and communication, and just the sheer difficulty of getting along with other ornery, irritating human beings.

You work a lot with consensus.

How would you explain it?

Consensus decision making is a form of making decisions that is certainly favoured by anarchists, but it’s not limited to anarchism. It’s used everywhere from kids on the playground deciding what they’re gonna play to big corporations that work with the consensus model. In the US we have a judicial system that’s based on trial by jury, where you have 12 people taken at random from the general population who decide if somebody is innocent or guilty with again, a form of consensus. Consensus in its true form doesn’t necessarily mean everyone just has to agree. For me it’s a creative thinking process where instead of looking at the problem and saying we can either do this or we can do that, you say alright: you have these desires and needs, you have these desires and needs, how do we think creatively about finding the best possible solution that will meet them all and that will address people’s concerns.

So, you know, you want carrots for dinner and I want potatoes; we don’t have to choose between them, we can figure out a way to put them together and make a vegetable stew. And when it’s done right I think it’s tremendously exciting and empowering for everybody involved. When it’s not done right it’s painful and laborious and

tedious, but as people become more skilled at it...you know people always used to say voting is more quick and more efficient, but in truth consensus that is well facilitated, with people that understand the process, doesn’t necessarily take a lot longer than voting on an issue when people are actually willing to take time and care to hear all the different sides.

How do your anarchist views overlap with your spirituality?

For me my political views and my spiritual views are deeply connected. I guess I would say I came to Earth-based spirituality in some sense out of a political movement, out of feminism. So we started looking at the question of why were women oppressed?

How did that oppression work?

That led us to look at the question of religion and spirituality and belief, and the way that patriarchal religion reinforced the idea, as Mary Daly said, you know, when god is the father, when god is male then the male is god. As we started exploring different options, this was back in the late ‘60s early ‘70s, I encountered people who started talking about the ancient goddess religion of Western Europe and the Middle East, that was based on the idea that divinity...not so much that divinity has genitals you know, or skirts, but that the focus was on that power bringing life into the world, that this world itself is what’s sacred, it’s not sort of a little testing ground to go to the real sacred place like heaven, but this world is it, and that the processes that sustain life and produce life and bring forth life are themselves sacred and should be honoured.

Our sexuality is sacred, our nature is sacred, the life support systems of the planet are sacred. And again, sacred not in the sense that we bow down and we never question that, but sacred in the sense that the word literally means sacrifice; it comes from the same root. It’s what you make a sacrifice for, what you would take a stand for, what you don’t want to see compromised, what you value beyond your personal comfort or profit or convenience. And for me that fit so well with what I intuitively felt and believed that when I encountered it I kind of went yes, this is it, this is what I already know and understand. For me that goes very well with anarchism as a philosophy because I think at its core what it’s saying is that we’re each our own authority, just like in the goddess tradition we are each our own spiritual authority: we don’t have a pope or a queen of the witches or something that tells you what to believe, you have to make those decisions yourself, you’re responsible for your own spiritual growth and development.

You can find teachers, you can find guides, you can find mentors that you invest some of that authority in in order to grow and learn from, but ultimately the authority comes back to you.

I also feel like anarchism has its focus on this world, it’s about making this world better and working together, learning together, organising together in ways that embody the world that we want to see, and again that fits very well with a spiritual philosophy that says this world is where it’s at. We’re not in training for some other world. For me spirituality has always meant engagement with the political questions and power struggles of our times because, again, this world is where it’s at. You can’t just go off and meditate and

ignore injustice and ignore the destruction of nature. You have to be active, you have to be involved in doing something about it and that involvement itself is part of your spiritual path, is your discipline, is your learning. At the same time, if you’re an activist, it really helps to have some kind of a spiritual ground because what you get from that are the things that you can use to renew your own energy and restore your faith and get you through those times.

You know, political activism can be very discouraging and very hard sometimes and it really helps to have both, again, a sense of some larger connection that you’re serving and part of, and also a community of people who have ways of supporting one another, celebrating together, grieving together, mourning together, organising together.

Similarly, what’s the relation between your anarchist views and your feminist views?

My anarchism and feminism are deeply interrelated because for me feminism is really about challenging the way that relationships of power are constructed according to gender, but also more than that, challenging the way that we use any kind of difference as a way of justifying structures of power-over.

So to really be a strong feminist means you have to be willing to challenge all kinds of power, not just around gender but also around class and race and all of those other kinds of -isms that we find.

And I think it’s deeply integral to the anarchist movement, I think that anarchism suffers when it doesn’t look at those issues because it’s so easy to fall back into the old sort of patriarchal patterns and I’ve seen that happen in circles of consensus around actions. I’ve looked around and suddenly realised that you’ve got 20 people in the centre who are spokes for their affinity groups and 19 of them are guys...only one woman. And nobody is questioning a lot of the underlying assumptions that lead to that. Maybe nobody is consciously deciding let’s all pick boys to represent us, but if nobody is looking at the unconscious or less semi-conscious levels of entitlement that lead us into that then we fall back into them. I think a lot of the kind of adventurism and the focus on let’s do the smashy smashy, let’s fight the cops and stuff, without grounding sometimes in how is this really strategic, who is this really serving, how is this really helping, are actually just patriarchy. You know, they’re just the same old macho, strong guy with the fastest gun being the most powerful and therefore the most sexy and the most desirable. If we don’t look at that then again we tend to fall back into it, and that makes us less effective.

What are some of the problems we’re facing today?

I feel like right now we’re in a time where we’re facing some enormous challenges. This is like the point in the movie, right, where the heroine is tied to the railway tracks and the train is thundering down and you don’t know if someone is going to untie her in time and rescue her or not.

This is like the climax, the crunch time. Ecologically, we’re faced with the necessity of addressing climate change, which means really rethinking just a few little things, like our energy systems, our technology, our economy, our

*

bolo’bolo’s easy green living tips!

1a) Smash capitalism, the state and all other forms of

hierarchy and domination opposed to the continuance of life. This is the single most vital task we need to accomplish. If we cannot transition to a sane society based on the principles of mutual aid, solidarity, liberty in equality, voluntary social relations and gift economics, we’re screwed.

For much of human history most of us lived without these oppressive systems. Some of us still do. Let’s take our lives back from them.

1b) Prefigure these principles in your everyday life – in how you relate to other humans, other animals and the natural world.

2) Eat, to the best of your abilities, with LOVE (Local, Organic, Vegan, Ethical) firmly in mind. There is no ethical way – nor is there any ecologically friendly way – to produce animal-based food for the number of people now alive on the planet. We don’t need animal food: it’s one of the single largest causes of anthropogenic climate change and it’s not even healthy for us. Cut it out.

3) Say no to greenwashing. 98% of all products that claim to be ‘green’ or ‘sustainable’ or ‘eco-friendly’ are lying (see the 2009 Terrachoice report, ‘The Seven Sins of Greenwashing’).

Green capitalism is an oxymoron: you can’t consume your way to sustainability.

4) Say no to techno-fixes, or at least say no to techno-fixes as the only useful solution. You can’t fix the ecological crisis by mining for more metals and rare earths and besides, the elitist technotopians confident touting solutions on all those TED talks sound very much like the people that helped get us into this mess in the first place.

Cutting down massively on consumption levels is a far more effective approach.

5) Relocalize: learn how to live in dynamic harmony with your bio-region, how to create new forms of local community, how to grow plant-based foods using veganic permaculture and bio-intensive farming and how to radically repurpose urban space.

6) Walk more, run more or get a bicycle. Try cycle as often as possible without getting squashed by crazy car drivers, taxis, buses, etc.

Explore the place you live. Get to know it better.

7) Inform yourself. Watch films, read books, go to workshops, speak to people. If you don’t have time for this, ask yourself where your time is going and who it really benefits.

8) If you’re of reasonably sound mind and body, take an entheogen in nature and reconnect yourself. If that’s not your thing, go spend some time in nature anyway.

9) Really get to grips with both the stakes and the odds so that you don’t give up when the going gets hard. It is going to get hard: the stakes are very high and the odds are not in our favour.

10) Once you have made peace with the stakes and the odds, make a commitment: to yourself, your family, your friends and your community; to women; to people of colour; to poor and indigenous and marginalised peoples nearby and in far off places who bear the brunt of our ecocide; to birds and bees and fish and pandas and sloths and elephants and rhinos and snails and chickens and frogs and trees and moss and jellyfish and chimpanzees and wild grass. Make the commitment a real one, one that goes beyond clicking Like.

11) Start now.

/ continued on page 14

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Page 11

“We believe that the Anarchists are real enemies of Marxism. Accordingly, we also hold that a real struggle must be waged against real enemies.” - Joseph Stalin

Anarchy101 Obviating the state by stating the obvious

In this regular column we answer all your gnawing questions about anarchism, anarchy and anarchists, either directly or by sharing classic anarchist texts. If you'd like to ask us something, simply drop a mail to us@bolobolo.co.za with the subject line anarchy101 and we'll get back to you.

This issue, we share two powerful texts on property.

Ricardo Flores Magón | Reaping

Wolfi Landstreicher | Property: The Enclosing Fences of Capital

At the edge of the road, I find a man with weeping eyes and tossed black hair, staring at the thistle at his feet. “Why are you crying?” I ask, and he answers, “I cry because I did everything I could for my comrades. I sowed my parcel of land with hard work, as any man who respects himself must do; but those for whom I did so much good made me suffer, and in regard to my land, lacking water, that was snatched by the rich, only to produce those dry thistles you can see at my feet.”

Among the many great lies that maintains the rule of capital is the idea that property is freedom. The rising bourgeoisie made this claim as they partitioned the earth with fences of all sorts — physical fences, legal fences, moral fences, social fences, military fences... whatever they found necessary to enclose the murdered wealth of the earth and to exclude the multitudes who were undesirable except as labor power.

Bad harvest, I say, the one that the good ones harvest, as I continue my march.

A little farther I come across an old man falling and getting up, hunchbacked, with a vague look of sadness. “Why are you so sad,” I asked, and he responds, “I am sad because I have been working since I was seven years old. I was a dedicated person until the morning my boss said ‘You are too old, Juan; there is no work for you to perform,’ and he slammed the door on my face.”

What a harvest of years and more years of honest labor! He told me and I keep on walking.

Then a very young man missing a leg comes to my counter, hat in hand, asking “a bit of charity for the love of God” “Why are you moaning?” I ask, and he answers, “Maduo promised we were going to be free and happy, with the condition to help him get the presidency of the Republic. All my brothers and my own father died in the war; I lost my leg and my health, leaving our families in poverty.”

This is the reaping for we the ones who work to raise tyrants and support the capitalist system, I say to myself, and keep on walking.

A few steps further, I encounter a group of tired men with sad steadfast looks, their arms dropped, dismay in their faces, and anguish, and anger. “What makes you so angry?” I question. “We came out of the factory,” they say, “and after working ten hours, we only make enough for a miserable bean dinner.”

These are not the ones who reap, I say, but their bosses do, so I continue with my travel.

It is nighttime already. Crickets sing their love songs in the crevices of the ground. My ear, attentive, perceives sounds of fiesta somewhere. I direct myself toward the place from where those gay sounds come, and I see myself in front of a sumptuous palace. “Who lives here?” I ask a lackey. “He is the lord-owner of these lands you see around here and owner also of the water which irrigates these lands.”

I understand I am in front of the residence of the thief who made the fields become dry with thistle, and showing a fist to the beautiful structure of the palace, I think, “Your next harvest, scoundrel bourgeois — you will have to reap it with your own hands; you know your slaves are waking up...”

And I keep my march, thinking, thinking, dreaming, dreaming.

I think on the heroic resolution of those disinherited, who have the courage to put in their hands the recovery of their lands that, according to the law, belong to the rich, and, according to justice and reason, belong to all. I dream about the happiness of the humble homes after the expropriation; men and women feeling really human; children playing, laughing, happy, with their stomachs full with plenty of healthy food.

The rebels will give us the best of the harvests: Bread, Land, Freedom for all.

Originally published in Regeneración issue 69, December 23, 1911

Like so many lies of power, this one manages to deceive through sleight-of-hand. The multitudes “unchained” from their land were free to choose between starving or selling the time of their lives to whatever master would buy them. “Free laborers” their masters called them, since unlike chattel slaves, the masters had no need to take responsibility for their lives. It was merely their labor power that the masters bought. Their lives were their own, they were told, though in fact these had been stolen away when the capitalist masters enclosed the land and drove these “free laborers” off to search for survival. This process of expropriation, which allowed capitalism to develop, continues at its margins today, but another sleight-of-hand maintains the bourgeois illusion at the center.

Property, we are told, is a thing and we purchase it with money. Thus, according to the lie, freedom resides in the things that we can buy and increases with their accumulation. In pursuit of this freedom that is never quite attained, people chain themselves to activities not of their choosing, giving up every vestige of real choice, in order to earn the money that is supposed to buy them freedom. And as their lives are consumed in the service of projects that have never been their own, they spend their wages on toys and entertainment, on therapy and drugs, these anesthetics that guarantee they won’t see through the lie.

Property, in fact, is not the thing that is owned. It is the fences — the fences that keep us in, the fences that keep us out, all the enclosures through which our lives are stolen from us. Thus, property is, above all, a restriction, a limit of such magnitude that it guarantees that no individual will be able to realize herself completely for as long as it exists.

To fully understand this, we must look at property as a social relationship between things and people mediated by the state and the market. The institution of property could not exist without the state that concentrates power into institutions of domination. Without the laws, the arms, the cops and the courts, property would have no real basis, no force to support it.

In fact, it could be said that the state is itself the instituting of property. What is the state if not a network of institutions through which control over a particular territory and its resources is asserted and maintained by force of arms? All property is ultimately state property since it exists only by permission and under the protection of the state. Dependent on the levels of real power, this permission and protection can be revoked at any time for any reason, and the property will revert back to the state. This is not to say the state is more powerful than capital, but rather that the two are so thoroughly entwined as to constitute a single social order of domination and exploitation. And property is the institution through which this order asserts its power in our daily lives, compelling us to work and pay in order to reproduce it.

So property is actually the razor wire, the “No Trespassing” sign, the price tag, the cop and the security camera. The message that these all carry is the same: one cannot use or enjoy anything without permission, and permission must be granted by the state and paid for in money somewhere along the line.

It comes as no surprise then that the world of property, ruled by the market and the state, is an impoverished world where lack, not satisfaction, permeates existence. The pursuit of individual realization, blocked at every turn by yet another fence, is replaced by the homogenizing, atomizing competition to accumulate more things, because in this world the “individual” is measured only in terms of the things that he owns. And the inhuman community of the price tag strives to bury singularity beneath identities found in shop windows.

Attacking the things owned by the rulers of this world — smashing bank windows, burning police cars, blowing up the employment office or breaking machinery — certainly has its worth. If nothing else, one may get a bit of pleasure, and some actions of this sort may even hinder specific projects of the ruling order. But ultimately we must attack the institution of property, every physical, legal, moral or social fence. This attack begins from the desire we each have to take back our life and determine it on our own terms. Every moment and every space we steal back from this society of production and consumption provides us with a weapon for expanding this struggle. But, as one comrade wrote: “...this struggle is widespread or it is nothing. Only when looting becomes a large-scale practice, when the gift arms itself against exchange value, when relationships are no longer mediated by commodities and individuals give their own value to things, only then does the destruction of the market and of money — that’s all one with the demolition of the state and every hierarchy — become a real possibility”, and with it the destruction of property. The individual revolt against the world of property must expand into a social revolution that will break down every fence and open every possibility for individual realization.

Originally published in The Network of Domination, 2005

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Page 13

"We are too young to wait." - Graffiti found on the streets of Paris in May ‘68

Starhawk interview / continued from page 11

food production systems...the whole way we organise our world. We’re really challenged by the need to shift from using fossil fuels to different kinds of energy, and it’s a challenge which we seem to be on some levels failing miserably at and on other levels taking up and doing very energetically and creatively. And it’s not at all clear yet what is going to happen from now. Along with that goes the big questions around social injustice and economic injustice, which, you know, have always been present but are really I think in our face now. Here in the US, you know, we have seen this process over the last few decades of our country becoming more and more like a third world country – the disparity and wealth, the siphoning of the money and wealth away from the middle class and the poor and the working class to very few extremely wealthy individuals and groups and corporations has just run amok, to the point where our social system and our financial system and a lot of basic systems that we depend on are crashing down around us.

That’s another huge crisis and it’s one that I think we can’t just say, well, you all go and let that system fall and we’ll live in our happy little anarchist collective, because when that system falls it tends to fall the hardest on the people who have the fewest resources. To me these are two questions that are deeply intertwined; you can’t address one really without addressing the other. And of course with climate change it’s not just climate change: as permaculturalists we say that climate change is a symptom of ecological dysfunction on a deep level. All of our systems are creating this dysfunction: toxins, development, destruction of wilderness, destruction of wetlands... All of those things go together.

How do you define anarchism for people?

I think there are many different anarchisms, but I would say that at its core, anarchism is the striving for people to organise themselves with the absence of coercion, in ways that empower each individual and empower communities, and you know, that gives rise to a lot of different approaches, and a lot of different tweaks to that political philosophy, but its essence is a world free from force and from violence, where people organise themselves and one another by taking responsibility for their own actions and their own needs and by understanding that we’re all interconnected and that for me to take responsibility for myself means I have to take responsibility for making my contribution to the whole and for taking care of others.

What would an anarchist world look like?

My picture of an anarchist world is really very much like what I created in my novel The Fifth Sacred Thing, at least in the North part of that, where they have a society that’s very diverse, very multi-cultural, where different traditions are respected, where different races and genders and sexual orientations and all of that is seen as resilience and strength rather than a source of problems. It’s a world that has attained harmony with the natural

world so that people can meet their needs in ways that actually regenerate the systems around them rather than destroying them, it’s a very locally based world where people meet most of their life needs locally rather than all of the globe, it’s a world where people are encouraged to create art and beauty and pleasure and where those things are highly valued, they’re not seen as some kind of little extra that you should give up either for the sake of the revolution or for the sake of making more profit or for whatever; they’re seen as the reason we’re alive as humans: to enjoy our life, to share that enjoyment with one another, to create beautiful things... and it’s fun, a fun world, right?

In the Fifth Sacred Thing you undertake an incredibly nuanced exploration of violence and selfdefence. What are your thoughts around the role of violence and non-violence in creating meaningful social change?

Anarchism has again, many different philosophies in approach to the question of violence and what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate violence. I come out of the non-violent way. For me, again, and let me go back to those actions that we were organising around nuclear power and nuclear weapons and militarism, we were organising explicitly nonviolent direct action. Not because I think violence is never justified but because we all felt first that it was the most effective way to organise in our time and place around those issues and secondly because we felt it most embodied, again, the kind of world that we wanted to create. It was the way that the means sort of prefigured or embodied the ends. So I think people sometimes think of anarchism as synonymous with smashing windows, right? [laughs] And there certainly are anarchists who smash windows, right, and people have different philosophies and different rationales for that, but there also are anarchist philosophies that say it’s not about what you smash it’s about what you want to create, what you want to build.

In terms of this building, I love to see people trying out their anarchist theories in real life in different ways however that is, you know. People who are squatting, I say, more power to you! I’m too old and I need my comforts too much to do that myself but I think it’s great that young people do those things and take those risks and explore those different options: collective living, free love, ecologically sustainable lifestyles...

to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina to do relief work and we went down with a group called Common Ground that had organised...there was a guy down there named Malik Rahim, who was an old Black Panther, who put down a call for people to come down to help people stay in one of the neighbourhoods that hadn’t flooded, that was relatively intact, and they organised a clinic and they organised distribution, and they had stuff up and running and going before the Red Cross got there, before the military, the whole government aid, and all the big organisations were disastrous, and this little Common Ground, you know, that was organised basically on grassroots activist direct action principles was very effective, and a lot of people who went down to work with Common Ground were people I knew from globalisation movements and, so, it was a great example of seeing anarchist ideals in action and seeing them work effectively, but it was also a real wakeup call for me to see the limit of what we could do.

What we could do was just a tiny drop in the bucket of what actually needed to be done, and it made me I guess also maybe more interested in saying how do we scale these things up so that we can really address the level of disasters that we’re facing and I don’t know, there’s something about after being down there dealing with this real overwhelming, complete collapse of everything that made it harder to just go off and do another mobilisation or organise something new.

I think in the last few years that kind of culture

What do you think about the contemporary anarchist movement?

What do I think about the contemporary anarchist movement?

I would say for me, I’ve been involved in one form of activism or another since the ‘60s and when you’re in it that long your involvement kind of comes and goes and ebbs and flows into different channels and directions.

I went through a very intensive period for about seven years after the big blockade against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, and that threw me into a level of activism and involvement and training and going to actions all over the world where I felt deeply immersed in the movement and the anarchist movement. That started to shift for me in about 2005, really with hurricane Katrina.

A lot of us went down

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of challenging corporate globalisation at big meetings has shifted; I think in Europe people are still doing that around the climate camps, but here in the US it seems like the anarchist movement is kind of in a little bit of, I’d say, a resting phase. You know it’s smaller, it’s probably more hardcore people and less inclusive, and a lot of people have gotten more into doing local organising, community organising.

For me right now my energy is going into running this community programme in Bayview, Hunters Point, working with very poor people and trying to bring some of these skills and understandings into that community. And they’re not anarchist and anarchist principles don’t speak a lot to their way of looking at the world, which tends to actually be much more authoritarian; I mean I think those principles do ultimately speak to them, but not in the way of saying hi, we’re anarchists, why don’t you do what we do, but more in being willing to be there, be of service, ask what are the resources this community needs to empower itself and what are the ways I can be of service to that.

How optimistic are you these days?

I tend to be optimistic by nature, so, I am optimistic even if reality seems to be pretty grim, right? I think optimism is a better place to organise from than despair or pessimism or sheer outright rage and frustration, although I certainly visit all of those places too, but I see a lot of positive things happening, mostly at small scale and local scale levels of organising. I see a lot of young people that really have a deep

desire to change the world for the better and make a contribution to it, and, so...and ultimately I see the systems that we have on the verge of falling apart, so I am optimistic that we can shift and change them.

I do think that it won’t necessarily be an easy, smooth, graceful shift, that it will involve some kind of level of conflict and loss and pain and suffering, you know, and I would rather avoid that. I’m old enough now that I don’t seek a romantic revolution, you know. If we could do it smoothly without anyone getting hurt and without too much disruption I’d be happy, but I don’t think that’s terribly likely at this point.

What can each of us do?

What I think each one of us can do is to really ask ourselves the question: what do I most care about? What’s sacred to me in the sense that it’s something that I want to most see happen, that’s more important to me than my own comfort and my own personal benefit, and then how do I put my life force energies at the service of that thing that I most deeply care about. When we do that then we mobilise tremendous energies in ourselves, and the moment we say how do I connect with other people around me, how do we organise around it, how do I find the other people who care so deeply about this then we develop a force that’s really unstoppable, because we align ourselves with the great creative compassionate powers of the universe and when we do that, I think we do have great hope for changing the world.

Get involved in FOOD NOT BOMBS Observatory, or start your own chapter!

We meet at the park opposite the community center once a month to share food, music and ideas with people from all walk s of life.

If you’d like to get in touch, come find us in the park or email us at: foodnotbombs @ bolobolo.co.za

Page 14

" - Well, go ahead...say something.

"

The 2013 Cape Town Anarchist Bookfair 7 December, Observatory Dear anarchists and anarcho-friendly folks, It’s almost time for our third Cape Town bookfair and we’re looking for people to get involved. If you’d like to host a stall, present a talk or workshop, exhibit some art, sell some vegan food or contribute in any way to the bookfair, drop us a mail at us@anarchistbookfair.co.za.

Alternatively, keep checking Facebook and www.anarchistbookfair.co.za for the full event details.

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Page 15

"The passion for destruction is also a creative passion." - Mikhail Bakunin

COMING UP SOON AT BOLO'BOLO

...and then music filled the air

(76 Lower Main Rd, Observatory)

NOVEMBER

Wed 6: Free screening: Capitalism is the Crisis | An explicitly anarchist exploration of capitalism and its fundamental problems that cannot be addressed through reform Wed 13: Free screening: Breaking out the Box | The lives of black lesbians in South Africa Wed 20: Free screening: We feed the world | A troubling look at how food is produced in the modern world, from factory farms to toxic chemicals to wasteful packaging and inefficient modes of production and distribution

Wed 27: Free screening: The Big Sellout | The impacts of privatization and global trade, as seen through the eyes of poor and working class people in the developing world Date to be confirmed: Recycling workshop | learn to make useful stuff from ‘waste’

DECEMBER

Wed 4: Free screening: The Burning Times | A classic documentary on the oppression of women as witches, featuring well-known anarchist and witch, Starhawk Sat 7: The Cape Town Anarchist Bookfair afterparty! | We’ll be closed all day in order to join in the bookfair fun,

This month in anarchist history: 1917 & 1936 - our mistakes 1: In 1917, Russia was a hotbed of anarchism. In the buildup

to the October Revolution of that year some anarchists, Lenin’s revolutionary rhetoric of ‘all power to the soviets!’ rigning in their ears and kindling false hopes of an imminent leaderless society of free equals, elected to support the Bolsheviks. Impatient romantics that they were, those in and around Petrograd leapt straight into the fray in mid-July, working with sailors and workers to reclaim people’s power and establish a free soviet in the port city. Lenin, in typical authoritarian fashion, ordered his ‘comrades’ to exercise discipline and patience. Material conditions were not yet right.

While some anarchists balked at this fraught coalition, not least among them that fierce opponent of all Earthly and heavenly authority Mikhail Bakunin, a strange submission took hold of the rest and they remained supportive of Lenin right up until the coup in October. This starry-eyed alignment with authoritarian Marxism did not, however, serve them well and things ended very much as Bakunin had always argued they would: after initially entertaining the anarchists and their ‘infantile left communism,’ Lenin grew tired of the theatrics and revealed the true nature of Bolshevik rule by placing the free soviets under central control and, let us never forget this, ordering the Cheka (secret police) to raid all the anarchist social centers and disband the organised anarchist movement. The fearless anarchists fought back bravely, but the iron fist came down with brutal force on that night of April 12, 1918: around 40 women and men were killed in pitched street battles and over 500 more were imprisoned. Some small flame of resistance remained, but for the most part the revolutionary fire of Russian anarchism had been extinguished. In the near future, instead, lay Stalin and the gulags.

but we’ll be opening up in the evening for post-bookfair music and conversation. Join us!

While our words and actions might still sound dissonant to some, full of rhetoric and confusion and bearing the scars of many thousands of years of hierarchy and oppression, borders and wars and the whole grey spectacle of modern life, perhaps if we listen closely we can just about make out the subtle harmonies and delicate melodic counterpoints, the shifting tempos and complex rhythms and even, if we concentrate just a little harder, the very first and faintest suggestion of a vast crescendo.

It is hard to pinpoint the exact beginning of this endlessly rising canon, but we know one thing for sure:

Wed 25: Apparently there’s some sort of religious holiday on this day. We’ll probably be closed, ‘cos even anarchists need a break!

Wed 11: Free talk and screening: Psychedelic Medicine | What does contemporary science make of substances like DMT, LSD, psilocybin and ketamine?

Come join in our talk / open discussion on the therapeutic potentials of these much maligned substances; we’ll also screen some short films on the subject Wed 18: Free screening: Live Nude Girls Unite! | A provocative look at the world’s first and only unionised radical peep show!

we are finding our voices.

2: Federica Montseny entered the Spanish Popular Front

government as Minister of Health in November of 1936, at the end of that glorious year in Spain where anarchism had reached its high water mark and large swathes of the country were running on anarchist principles, the songs of the free workers and the black and red flags of the CNT-FAI filling the streets. The threat of fascism looming large, Montseny’s participation in the great unification against Franco - seen more favourably by the CNT inner clique than by the less compromising anarchists in the liberated communities of Catalonia and Aragon - was harshly criticised by some of her comrades, among them Emma Goldman.

Montseny defended herself thus: “The anarchists have come into the Government in order to prevent the Revolution from deviating from its course and in order to pursue it beyond the war, and also in order to oppose all possibility of dictatorial endeavours, wherever they should come from.”

Camillo Berneri, the great Italian anarchist who had come to Spain to fight alongside his fellow revolutionaries, wrote a scathing letter to Montseny in April of the next year. In it he observes: “I believe that you must pose yourself the problem of knowing if you are better defending the Revolution, if you are making a greater contribution to the struggle against Fascism by participating in the government, or if you would not be infinitely more useful carrying the flame of your magnificent skill with words among the combatants and to the rear.”

Three weeks after writing his letter, and shortly before his 40th birthday, Berneri was dragged from his home by Spanish Communist Party members and executed.

FROM HISTORY TO LIFE When, from the vantage point of different continents and different times, we read about these sad moments in anarchist history, there are two things we should always bear in mind: First, that reality is infinitely more complex than abstract principles and codes of conduct.

None of us, I’m sure, no matter how unwavering our anarchist convictions, would envy the complicated position the Russian anarchists of 1917 found themselves in, nor, unless we’re the worst kinds of armchair sophists, would we trivialise the dififcult decision taken by Federica Montseny in 1936, even if in hindsight it might strike us that, in both instances, history has failed to vindicate the choices of our comrades.

Second, having learned from some of our more grievous mistakes, let us try never to make them again.

Federica Montseny speaks at the commeration of Durruti

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