Incendiary Times Issue 3 (Feb 2014)

FEBRUARY 2014 • www.bolobolo.co.za/it • ISSUE #3 • PRICE: R10 - R20 according to means

INCENDIARY TIMES WHOEVER THEY VOTE FOR, WE ARE UNGOVERNABLE! 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.’

OUR DREAMS DON’T FIT ON YOUR BALLOTS! Dear anarchists, Elections have always confused me. Not because of the pre-election spectacle of mergers and unmergers and shady new parties and tonedeaf campaigns but, more fundamentally, because of the very idea that anyone could still honestly believe that we can vote our way to freedom by deciding which bunch of political specialists we’d like to elevate to the ruling class – if they weren’t there already – in order to represent our collective interests for the next five years.

Surely it’s perfectly obvious that, whoever gets into power and whatever rhetoric they used to get there, we’re essentially just reproducing an oppressive, hierarchical structure wherein various political and economic elites take turns looking after their own interests

with scant regard for anyone else? And surely it’s just as obvious that this applies equally to all prospective candidates, be they ‘democrats’, conservatives or faux-revolutionaries? Sadly, even though dwindling voter registration turnouts do suggest some cause for hope it appears that many people are so mired in the myths of electoral democracy, statism and the status quo that they’re utterly unable to conceive of any political possibilities outside of this framework.

Election after election, they obediently go and stand in lines (as one does), and enter their private little booth (as it has always been), and make their secret marks (as one should), never stopping to reflect on the possibility that this mark signifies little more than which shin they’d like to be kicked hardest in (as they always are).

“But this year it’s different,” they say, donning their red berets, “this year there’s a genuinely revolutionary option on the table. There’s no outside to this – we have to accept the hegemonization of the political space by our divine leader commander comrade, who is Subcommandante Marcos and Lenin and Biko and Morales and the Panthers all rolled into one, contradictions be damned!”

But it’s not different. Beneath the thin veneer of grandiose rhetoric lies the exact-same aspiration to obtain, maintain and expand ruling class power that determines the trajectory of every party demagogue. Ignoring this, we can continue to sublimate our desires, revolutionary or otherwise, into party politics – out of frustration, exhaustion, over-wrought analyses or

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sheer starry-eyed delusion – learning always just too late that, once again, we were misled, or, accepting the challenge, we can begin to think and do otherwise.

In this issue, our election special, we take up this task.

In these pages you’ll find: anti-election ‘manifestering’ from the notorious 2009 NOPE anti-voting campaign that demonstrates just how little has changed in the last five years; a scathing critique of the Madiba myth and the way his image will be used as political leverage over the next few months; an anti-voting call from a local anarchist group; a Hollowayinspired dismantling of the myths of electoral politics; some Fanonian ponderings on violence and the EFF; an interview with US anarchist Wayne Price that discusses alternatives to voting and

a modified CrimethInc exploration of electoral democracy. Beyond that, there are poems, some book reviews, art and a brilliantly détourned Tintin poster.

We put a lot of thought and labour into this issue and we hope you enjoy it; we also look forward to engaging with any responses, critical or otherwise, you’d like to share with us and, as usual, welcome all other contributions to future editions of Incendiary Times.

Until we see you again, imagine they called an election and nobody came...

Aragorn Eloff co-editor

Page 1

“The political superstition is still holding sway over the hearts and minds of the masses, but the true lovers of liberty will have no more to do with it. Instead, they believe with Stirner that man has as much liberty as he is willing to take..” - Emma Goldman

MANIFESTERING: Against party politics This anti-manifesto was one of many produced by the NOPE! Collective, a loose affinity group of anarchists, autonomists and others who came together in 2009 to explore alternatives to electoral democracy. Five years on, it has, sadly, lost none of its relevance.

T

he mandatory election manifesto. Every party has one. Every organisation. Every campaign.

Principles to be proclaimed from a ‘platform’, a vision to be attained in some future always on the horizon, a new promise to make us forget every other one that came before. The election manifesto: a public statement to close the possibility for any way of being political other than the putting ‘hope’ in a vote. Their ritual.

This is not a manifesto. Neither policy makers, nor vote takers, this is our manifestering…

We can no longer be satisfied with the empty cycles of election politics, the pious lies of party officials or their pretenses to speaking in the name of us all. ‘Together we can do more’ they say. More of the same… where ‘being-together’ will mean little more than deferring our dreams and desire in the name of the nation, party or magnum leader. We can no longer believe in the shallow visions of the future imagined by others for us all.

Regardless of the trimmings, their manifesto’s message is always the same. Trust in us, and we will deliver. We can no longer believe the promise and so can no longer take comfort

from it. And regardless of what they say, their manifesto bearing the promise of dreams one day fulfilled, cannot escape its framing by capitalism’s own manifesto. A manifesto that is felt everywhere by everyone. A manifesto that shapes our everyday. That tries to get under our skins, and make us live in ways alien to our desires. Their fulfillment always on the horizon, that is, always only ever a matter of ‘hope’.

Today the system struggles, nursing injuries from its battle with humanity, our individual and collective refusals against the mantras of commodity, fiscal discipline, restraint, indigent management... But it would rather scorch the earth than give in. The burns now stretch from the eyelid to the ankle of the globe. They cannot grow any bigger. But they can still deepen…

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As the system implodes, we are not here to convince you.

There are no easy answers.

In the brand management of movements, the pimping of activist pop-stars, and the solidarity of the NGO stipend, political opposition itself comes to resemble disaster management. Suture the wounds.

We too have searched for our ‘ideal movements’, ‘our heroes of hope’ with ‘their vision’ for remaking the world. But each time we have learned that there are no easy answers.

There is no alternative except what we make together. Walking we ask questions – finding our answers, finding our ways, discovering who we are becoming. Together manifestering…

We don’t care what you do with your vote, All that matters is what we will do together in the time that remains.

Our common action will be a shared disposition to joy, the joy of an insurgency, and the excitement of helping to ruin the order.

Our weapon against the wound is desire and we will know each other by it.

Alliances everywhere are possible. Mediation no longer viable.

From now on all friendship is politics. All braskap… a call to revolution.

Page 2

“The state organisation, having been the force to which the minorities resorted for establishing and organising their power over the masses, cannot be the force which will serve to destroy these privileges.” - Peter Kropotkin

TASTE TEST Poet, post-situationist and agent provocateur Siddiq Khan delivers a resounding FUCK YOU! to electoral politics, work and the myth of Tata Madiba.

M

andela is dead. Good

riddance. Unfortunately the democratic lie is as healthy as ever. In 1994 blacks in this country were satisfied with electing a black president; if they were not, they would not have allowed him and his cronies to order an end to mass struggle – or to turn it off and on, like a tap – when it suited them. Twenty years later, the taps are broken. We are not satisfied anymore. More elections are around the corner, and we will be ordered again to voice our dissatisfaction at the voting booth with the old motto: don’t change life, change leaders.

The majority see through the con: most don’t bother to vote.

The fact that so many people find such an apparently significant act not worth the trouble of standing in line for a few minutes (or hours) once every five years is indication enough of the level of disaffection felt by people towards the putrid corruption at the heart of this ridiculous charade. To us, ‘free and fair’ elections = ‘Free-from-relevance and fairly-useless’. We are disgusted not at ‘electoral fraud’ but at the fraud of elections. Despite the renewal of autonomous contestation at the point of production; most of this despair (and anger, as shown by ever-present protests) over the failure of politricks to change our condition of daily misery has thus-far been contained within the terrain of politics itself.

What is necessary, however, is to direct this discontent towards its source – the miseries experienced in everyday life.

Often the route to this kind of radical simplification turns out to be complicated: To approach everyday life; it is necessary to return for a moment to Tata Madiba. He is a hero. There is perhaps nothing more to say about him. Like every other hero, celebrity, and star in this upside-down society (including those of the ‘progressive’, ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ variety); Mandela has always been an enemy of ordinary proletarians. This year there will be national elections; the politicians will use his image as a red flag, waving it around like bull-fighters to trick the working class into running this way, running that way -- only to butcher us in the end (see: Cato Crest & Marikana). “The emancipation of the proletariat is the task of proletarians themselves”. An essential element of this task is learning to say: Fuck politics, political parties and politicians. Fuck the ANC, fuck all the fake-opposition parties, fuck the president, fuck parliament, fuck Desmond Tutu, and especially fuck Nelson Mandela. Unless we can tell them all to go to hell, they will do

everything in their power to take us into its deepest recesses. As a matter of fact we already are there; and it’s the job of Mandela and all those like him to keep us here. Many mortals have had visions of “that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners”. Dante Alighieri, the inventor of the Italian language, was one of them. But, as a poet once said, “Visions are problems. Vision is the solution that precedes the problem.”

“Like every other hero, celebrity, and star in this upsidedown society (including those of the ‘progressive’, ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ variety); Mandela has always been an enemy of ordinary proletarians.”

To put it another way: It was the earth that Dante trod When he trod Hell, it was the earth: Itself sufficient for the hearth That warms the hands of a cold God.

We don’t need visions or visionaries, heroes or heroism. They are all part of the problem. What we need is clarity. A clear view of the problem. Then we can begin to experiment with solutions for ourselves. Everything about this society trains us to keep our eyes turned to the sky: “you’ll get pie there when you die.” This way we are unable to look at the un-heroic existence right in front of our noses.

“The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” We see visions, we follow dreams, we fight for phantoms. We fear ‘sin’, we pursue careers, we struggle for ‘democracy’. And every day, life passes us by because – unnoticed, unthought of, and unspoken – everyday life passes us by.

“But to use a somewhat simplistic spatial image,” wrote Guy Debord in Perspectives for Conscious Changes in Everyday Life – which, to modern ears, sounds like a self-help manual, and in a sense it is, but a radical one - “we still have to place everyday life at the center of everything. Every project begins from it and every accomplishment returns to it to acquire its real significance. Everyday life is the measure of all things: of the (non)fulfilment

of human relations; of the use of lived time; of artistic experimentation; and of revolutionary politics.”

The English say “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

Which means: “if capitalism were good, the lives of those who live in it would be good.” Our lives are not good. They have not been good.

We know they will not be good as long as we have to work, so long as we have to make money, so long as we have to live in a world of jobs, couples, schools, prisons, armies, marriage, police, bank-accounts, gangster-governments, anarchism, democracy, socialism, NGOs, religion, family, The Mail and Guardian, shopping.

Of all these evils, work is the worst curse that ever struck mankind. When our ancestors lived off the land, when they hunted and farmed for themselves, they did just that: they lived. They laboured and they played, they struggled and they toiled – it was not always easy to make a living, but at least what they made, poor as it may have been in many respects, was life. The moment they started to work, labour stopped being used to make life. It is now used, as the bosses put it, to ‘make a killing’. When we enter our workplaces we leave our lives behind. We do the making, we do the killing; it is our lives that are killed. When it is done to make money, labour is murder. When it is done to make love, to make life – when a woman goes into labour – or to nurture life in child-rearing, housework, and re-creation; labour is not work. It makes no money. It means nothing, because it kills nothing. In the vile world of work & workers there is no meaning, no value, no use outside ‘the autonomous movement of nonlife’ whose slick gears are greased by blood and fuelled with corpses. To be a worker is to be a slave. Many poorer workers are ashamed of their poverty. It is not the relative poverty of some but the absolute slavery of all workers that is truly shameful.

All of us – worker or unemployed, home-maker or student, suburbanite or bergie – are forced each day to live in ways that are out of our control. Until now we have failed at every opportunity for freedom because we never attacked this curse of work in a simple, straightforward enough way. We have confused ourselves with a mishmash of jumbled ideas about the economy, social-justice, the government, social-services, elections, social-democracy, growth-rates, grass-roots participation, self-management – we’ve tried every way to change our lives except the one way that will work: to get rid of work. There is nothing

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unusual about such a goal. For the majority of human existence on this earth, not a single person worked.

For thousands of years women across Africa would call their neighbours to help them farm their fields, and nobody thought of turning it into a ‘decent job’ or demanding ‘a living wage’. They shared homemade beer, cider and wine; they sang and they danced in graceful, elaborate costumes; they smoked tobacco and dagga out of painstakingly carved, beautifully assembled pipes; they ate together with food freely provided by the host; the children played among themselves or snuck off, as they always do, to quench the passions of the heart in one another’s bodies.

Even with all the digging, weeding, harvesting and planting, it was actually an excuse for a party.

“What is necessary, however, is to direct this discontent towards its source – the miseries experienced in everyday life.”

The problem with the worker’s movement is that it’s not an anti-worker’s movement. The only solution to the unemployment crisis is full unemployment. The proof is in the pudding; the truth is in the tasting. Now that the old parties and unions have so thoroughly discredited themselves, and more people are coming together to change their own lives, many choices will be faced which will determine whether the fate of our generation escapes the miserable failures of our parents.

Many people will spring up with proposals for this or that imaginary system and requests for support of such and such a cause. From now one, whenever there is need to test if a course of action actually holds the possibility for moving us closer to liberation, the first thing to ask is ‘will this be a practical step towards the abolition of work?’ If not, not.

It’s never so simple, of course. Often the answer will be, ‘possibly’. Then the question is ‘how’ – and ‘how likely’? Another is, ‘what next’? Another is ‘what else?’ And so on.

Still, the first principle remains… primary.

If not, not.

Today it is work rather than field-parties that organises social time and space; the only parties of any significance these days are political ones. Every Party, even when it calls itself revolutionary, promises to put us back to work. Whenever we walk out on the job, sure enough all the unions will call for a return to work.

Page 3

“Frente a las urnas, la revolucion social (the alternative to the polling booth is the social revolution)!” - CNT statement on the 1933 elections in Spain

HAS POLITICS FAILED? Ali Tamlit explores the limits of what has been presented to us as ‘politics’ and, echoing John Holloway, asks us to look beyond this to the genuinely political.

T

he political context of South Africa is complex and challenging for anyone hoping to see social change. The persistent and extreme inequality here is a direct result of the racist polices of apartheid, the outcomes of which have been left unchallenged through neoliberal policies adopted in the “democratic” era. This situation was given attention by John Pilger in his film “Apartheid did not die” as early as 1998, but it can still be seen in daily life, as well as extreme events such as the Marikana massacre or the farmworkers strike in De Doorns.

With such a context it could be easy to see why people would give up on politics, especially following the hope that came with the transition to democracy 20 years ago.

What, though, is the situation in more established liberal democracies, such as the UK, the state that I have citizenship from?

Whilst clearly there haven’t been any massacres to speak of (at least not by the police), the situation isn’t looking great. David Cameron has recently shifted towards a policy of

“permanent austerity”, which shows that the recent and ongoing cuts to public services are ideological rather than a so-called solution to the economic crisis and government deficit.

The outcome of this is that there continues to be a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, which is a blatant example of structural violence. George Monbiot has also published a couple of articles which have painted an even bleaker picture of the political context in the UK. Firstly, there are the cases of “corporate courts”, whereby States have willfully signed away their sovereignty<?>, and allowed private courts to be set up to decide if corporations are due compensation for the results of State decisions in regards to international trade agreements. In a subsequent article, he cites this and number of other examples of corporate power, such as Lord Green’s (the former HSBC chairman) ministerial “buddy” system, as the reason for “the collapse of democratic choice” and “disillusionment”. This he claims is the reason politics fails, and will continue to do so until corporate power is challenged.

What is Politics anyway, and where do you find it?

George Monbiot, with many of those who would say they are on the “Left” of the political spectrum, tends to look to the State as a site of Politics. This can be seen in his articles, where he laments the fact that political resistance within Parliament is extremely limited beyond small parties like the Greens and a few Labour backbenchers.

Perhaps, before looking at why this is the wrong place to look, the idea of what Politics really is should be examined. For most people, Politics is exactly as Monbiot thinks too. It’s what takes place in parliaments, senates, congresses and the other places Politicians like to

Image by Gus Moystad

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hang out and spout a lot of hot air at one another. Politics then is what the Politicians do, apparently disagreeing quite fundamentally with one another, whilst actually agreeing on the underlying issues and therefore changing very little. An alternative definition of Politics is “the interplay of social, political and other power relations in the shaping of everyday policies and procedures” (Marchart 2007), which in other words means just about anything that impacts on social, economic and environmental life.

The trouble is, however, that these polices are by and large a form of Policing; an external force that shapes and controls our lives.

In a liberal democracy it is assumed that there is the rule of the people and therefore this shouldn’t matter as it is really just self-governance.

This follows the assumption that anyone can take part in the democratic process and there is equal opportunity to do so. What Monbiot’s articles show is that corporate interests have a significantly easier time of getting heard in formal Politics.

Formal Politics has also become less transparent recently as power shifts from the State to informal governance structures such as NGO’s and stakeholder meetings, where there is a broad consensus on the polices that are required and any radically

alternative visions for society are excluded. Thus, Politics has become an empty phrase, where polices are dictated from above and any debate is merely procedural rather than over any meaningful content. It comes closed circle back, very close to the idea that it is what Politicians do, though the actors may be less visible now.

Try the Political instead Another term that may be more useful, however, is the Political.

One useful definition of this is that Political which is radically different from Politics. As Erik Swyngedouw (2008) says, “the political arises when the given order of things is questioned; when those whose voice is only recognized as noise by the policy order claim their right to speak, acquire speech, and produce the spatiality that permits and sustains this right,” and is a concept based on a position of equality, instead of trying to work towards it.

Thus, the Political is about articulating dissent and rupture, it is claiming a voice for those who have no part in the current arrangement.

This takes disagreement as a basic standpoint. The Politics that takes place in parliaments, in high level / continued on page 5

Image by Anastasya Eliseeva

Page 4

"The State is simply the executive committee of the ruling classes." - Colin Ward

DON’T VOTE! ORGANISE! a callout by Soundz of the South, a local anarchist hip-hop collective

I

n the build-up to the 2014 elections, politicians – whether from the DA, ANC, EFF, or PAC – have been calling on us to vote. As part of this, they have promised to meet people’s needs, end poverty, and serve communities when they are elected. The promises of all these politicians are lies.

Politicians don’t give a damn about workers and the poor; all they care about is their own power. They will tell us anything to get nice jobs in parliament. When politicians get into the state – whether at a municipal or national level - all they do is pass laws and put in place policies that benefit themselves and their rich friends. They protect their own interests and those of their allies (in the form of the capitalists) when they hold state power. Far from serving us, they wage a war on us.

This is the goal even of the EFF. The EFF says should they get state power, they will use the state to nationalise the banks and mines. Nationalis-

HAS POLITICS FAILED? / continued from page 4

talks on climate change and so on, takes a form of consensus as the starting point. That there are certain limits to the discussion and we’re all agreed on this. If capitalism is in crisis, we can choose the Red party or the Blue one, taxes or cuts, but we can’t question capitalism, the crisis itself. Thus, any radical alternatives are excluded from Politics and can only be articulated in Political acts or spaces. This means taking a starting point of disagreement, or Dissensus, accepting that there could be many alternatives and that consensus is something to work towards, not a false starting point.

The Political then is not that which fits within Politics, but that which changes the whole framework, and is about making a real change. This, as Monbiot says, means that we need to challenge corporate power, but more fundamentally it means we need to challenge and change the logic of capitalism. For traditional Marxists as well, or other Revolutionary theorists, the way to overcome capitalism is through taking state power and then installing a dictatorship of the working class, for example. But is

ing companies, however, only means the state takes ownership of these companies; the state then appoints the managers, and they grow rich out of it. Under nationalisation, the working class still does not own anything: the state does. Workers still have bosses and are still exploited – the difference being that under nationalisation the bosses are well-paid state managers.

So the elite in the EFF, like Malema, want to use the state to enrich themselves through nationalisation. In fact, most of the leadership of the EFF were a part of the state, or linked to it through tenders, when they belonged to the ANC. They used their positions then to enrich themselves. Why would it be different as the EFF? In fact, the EFF is not even anti-capitalist. In their founding manifesto, their election platform, they say they will welcome private capitalists – both local and foreign – to invest in manufacturing in South Africa. To welcome capitalists is to allow them to exploit workers, and that, in South Africa,

the State really the right way to go?

In John Holloway’s book, Crack Capitalism, he argues that this is the method that has been tried and failed many times. There is good reason for this too; the State is fundamentally a form of organisation that emerges from a capitalist system. The idea of State-Nation developed in Europe at the same time as capitalism, which is logical as capitalism is a process of separation and the State is the separation of decision making from those in the community that it affects. The State is also fundamental to maintaining the economic system. For one thing, as capitalism cannot help but produce inequality, the State is necessary to ensure that enough wealth is redistributed (or at least appears to be) to maintain social order. The State is also vital in maintaining private property rights (the rights of a few at the cost of the many), either directly through laws and the police, or through hegemonic discourse such as is taught in schools.

So, with the State a fundamentally capitalist institution, it cannot truly be a site for democracy, as the logic of money and class is embedded deeply within it. That’s not to say that all States are alike, and there can be vast material differences for the “citizens” of different states. The point however is that the hollowing out of the State should hardly come as a surprise, given that it is a capitalist institution. Beyond this,

mostly means black workers.

In reality, a new party getting state power does not abolish the class system, the rule of a few, inequalities, or capitalism. Replacing government simply changes the make-up and some of the faces of the people that rule. Under states, which are always top-down, only a few can rule: the majority of people can never be involved in decision-making under a state system. That is why when former liberation fighters or activists have taken state power they have become rulers and gotten rich. They have become governors and ruled in their own interests. To keep this going they exploited and oppressed the vast majority of the people – using states and their institutions like parliament, the courts, and the police to do so. Marikana is an example that demonstrates this.

And so, if we vote we are only choosing new faces to join the class of oppressors and exploiters.

Instead of voting, we need to organise and build a mas-

the State is an organisation that has developed outside of society. It speaks on behalf of “the people” or “the masses” but cannot allow us to speak for ourselves. Only we can speak for ourselves, individually and collectively. The State is a fine place to look for conventional Politics, where polices can be thought up to control from the outside. But if one is looking for the Political, a real change, the State is not the only or best place to look.

If the State is not the place to look, for change, hope, and the Political, then where is? For radical pluralists, Politics is everywhere. In our every interaction our identities and positions change, and are in fact constructed, in relation to the Other. It is only through having another to contrast to that your position can make sense. This can be in relation to people, nature and even objects. Does that then mean that the Political is everywhere too?

Not necessarily. There is Politics in every interaction, there is a Politics of food, for example, when we are subjected to GMO’s in our staple products or free market policies mean the cheapest food is the one that comes from an industrial farmer and the small-scale peasant is unable to compete. However, food is also a potential site of the Political, in that we can say “No!” to these forces and choose another way, embracing local produce, a more ethical approach to meat or taking so-called “waste”

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sive campaign around not voting and strengthen the power of our movements. We can also use this to expose politicians for what they are – ruling class bloodsuckers in service of their own interests and that of their class.

In fact, we need to start building our movements into a massive power that can smash capitalism and the state; and throw out the capitalists and politicians from power. Voting does not bring us closer to this; what really brings us closer is organising and struggle in the streets, the mines, the farms, and the factory floors.

and run it through direct democracy without a state – using our movements and truly democratic tools like worker councils to allow everyone to have an equal say in how society is run. Voting brings us no closer to this either. In fact all it does is create more illusions about the state and politicians; and it keeps us slaves!

ONLY THE WORKING CLASS CAN FREE ITSELF – SO DON’T VOTE!

As part of this, we need to build towards the goal of taking the land, the mines, the banks, the farms – in fact everything - into our own hands, as the working class, seizing it directly – and not through hoping that politicians will give them to us (they won’t; they will keep it for themselves and their capitalist friends, and stab us in the back). We also need to build and fight so that one day we as the working class can take power in society

food out of a dumpster and liberating it. As with food, so the Political can be found in any other area of life.

Political Change: Screaming Stop! and Acting in Other Ways The recent years have seen numerous uprisings around the globe, from Cairo, to Istanbul, to Rio, to the Occupy movement and beyond.

These huge events can be seen as a mass Political event. A collective “No”, against local and global Politics. Demanding that their voices be heard and that other ways of doing and being be allowed and articulating them at the same time as saying stop. These mass events have been termed “Social Arrests” rather than “Social Movements”, as they are about challenging the overarching notions of progress, circulation and growth that are central to the capitalist way of thinking, and instead say it is time to stop, to reconsider and to listen to each other.

If the Political is about screaming “No!” it could be seen as aggressive, violent and reproducing the same hierarchies and oppressive structures that the current Politics has come to represent. Again, taking Holloway as inspiration, saying “No” can be as simple (and as complex) as refusing to do what capitalism requires us, and instead doing what we feel is needed or what we want. In these social arrests other

ways of doing have been experimented with, by occupying a public space, people have been forced to talk to each other, relate to one another, connect in more authentic and enjoyable ways than through the market and commodities. These aren’t easy things to do, when we’ve been brought up in a system that tells us we are alone and must work to buy the things we need, from food to connection and friendship.

These “No’s” and beyond, however don’t have to only take place in an occupation or a protest. As Politics is everywhere, so to can be the Political. The alternatives, the no’s and beyond, can be about disrupting people’s stories of separation, by acting out of kindness and love, they can be about challenging competition, by giving gifts freely, they can be choosing to live for pleasure instead of pain.

In looking for radical changes to how life is organised, Politics has and always will, ultimately, fail. Political changes, however, are possible everywhere. The big “No’s!” that arise out of social arrests will no doubt continue as a set of inter-related crises unfolds, where and when these occur, no one can say. In the mean time, we can all be Political in our daily lives, by simply saying “No” and choosing another, more beautiful and fun way to be instead.

Page 5

"A voter is far more likely to be hit by a car on the way to the polls than s/he is of affecting the outcome of an election, to say nothing of changing real life." - Bob Black

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’ve shared a longer piece than usual - a CrimethInc text on democracy and voting, edited for a South African context.

N

owadays, democracy rules the world. Commu-

nism is long dead, elections are taking place even in Afghanistan and Iraq, and world leaders are meeting to plan the “global community” we hear so much about. So why isn’t everybody happy, finally?

For that matter—why do so few of the eligible voters in South Africa, or in the United States, the world’s flagship democracy, even bother to vote?

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner.

One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: “We should put it to a vote!” The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.

“Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner,” they threaten. “Otherwise, vote or no vote, we’ ll eat you.”

The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: “Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!”

THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does any- one really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us – and those it does threat- en are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

The average self-professed law-abiding citizen does not consider himself threatened by majority rule because, consciously or not, he conceives of himself as having the power and moral authority of the majority: if not in fact, by virtue of his being politically and socially “moderate,” then in theory, because he believes everyone would be convinced by his arguments if only he had the opportunity to present them. Majority-rule democracy has always rested

on the conviction that if all the facts were known, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action – without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But even if “the” facts could be made equally clear to everyone, assuming such a thing were possible, people still would have their individual perspectives and motivations and needs. We need social and political structures that take this into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class.

Living under democratic rule teaches people to think in terms of quantity, to focus more on public opinion than on what their consciences tell them, to see themselves as powerless unless they are immersed in a mass. The root of majority-rule democracy is competition: competition to persuade everyone else to your position whether or not it is in their best interest, competition to constitute a majority to wield power before others outmanoeuvre you to do the same – and the losers (that is to say, the minorities) be damned. At the same time, majority rule forces those who wish for power to appeal to the lowest common denominator, precipitating a race to the bottom that rewards the most bland, superficial, and demagogic; under democracy, power itself comes to be associated with conformity rather than individuality. And the

more power is concentrated in the hands of the majority, the less any individual can do on her own, whether she is inside or outside that majority.

In purporting to give everyone an opportunity to participate, majority-rule democracy offers a perfect justification for repressing those who don’t abide by its dictates: if they don’t like the government, why don’t they go into politics themselves? And if they don’t win at the game of building up a majority to wield power, didn’t they get their chance? This is the same blamethe-victim reasoning used to justify capitalism: if the dishwasher isn’t happy with his salary, he should work harder so he too can own a restaurant chain. Sure, everyone gets a chance to compete, however unequal – but what about those of us who don’t want to compete, who never wanted power to be centralized in the hands of a government in the first place? What if we don’t care to rule or be ruled?

That’s what police are for – and courts and judges and prisons.

BY CONFINING POLITICAL PARTICIPATION TO THE ISOLATION OF THE VOTING BOOTH, THE DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM PREVENTS PEOPLE FROM LEARNING HOW TO WIELD POWER AND WORK OUT CONFLICTS COLLECTIVELY. CONSEQUENTLY, POLITICAL CONFLICTS CAN BE

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FRAMED AS DISAGREEMENTS BETWEEN PEOPLE WITHIN THE SAME ECONOMIC CLASSES, RATHER THAN BETWEEN THE CLASSES THEMSELVES. THE RULE OF LAW Even if you don’t believe their purpose is to grind out non-conformity wherever it appears, you have to acknowledge that legal institutions are no substitute for fairness, mutual respect, and good will. The rule of “just and equal law,” as fetishized by the stockholders and landlords whose interests it protects, offers no guarantees against injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which power and responsibility are ceded to expensive lawyers and pompous judges.

Rather than serving to protect our communities and work out conflicts, this arrangement ensures that our communities’ skills for conflict resolution and self-defence atrophy – and that those whose profession it supposedly is to discourage crime have a stake in it proliferating, since their careers depend upon it.

Ironically, we are told that we need these institutions to protect the rights of minorities – even though the implicit function of the courts is, at best, to impose the legislation of the majority on the minority. In actuality, a person is only able to use the courts to defend his rights when he can bring sufficient force to bear upon them in a currency they recognize; thanks to

capitalism, only a minority can do this, so in a roundabout way it turns out that, indeed, the courts exist to protect the rights of at least a certain minority.

Justice cannot be established through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws; such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in a society.

Common sense and compassion are always preferable to the enforcement of strict, impersonal regulations. Where the law is the private province of an elite invested in its own perpetuation, the sensible and compassionate are bound to end up as defendants; we need a social system that fosters and rewards those qualities rather than blind obedience and impassivity.

WHO LOSES? In contrast to forms of decision-making in which everyone’s needs matter, the disempowerment of losers and out-groups is central to democracy. It is well known that in ancient Athens, the “cradle of democracy,” scarcely an eighth of the population was permitted to vote, as women, foreigners, slaves, and others were excluded from citizenship. This is generally regarded as an early kink that time has ironed out, but one could also conclude that exclusion itself is the most essential and abiding characteristic of democracy: millions who live in South Africa and other countries today are not permitted to vote either, and the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen have not eroded significantly in 2 500 years. Every bourgeois property owner can come up with a thousand reasons why it isn’t practical to allow everyone who is affected to share in decision making, just as no boss or bureaucrat would dream of giving his employees an equal say in their workplace, but that doesn’t make it any less exclusive. What if democracy arose in Greece not as a step in Man’s Progress Towards Freedom, but as a way of keeping power out of certain hands?

Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless because it gives the greatest possible number of people incentive to defend that division.

That’s why the high-water mark of democracy – its current ascendancy around the globe – corresponds with unprecedented / continued on page 7

Page 6

There’s no government like no government!

ANARCHY101 / continued from page 6

inequalities in the distribution of resources and power. Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man the opportunity to be a dictator, to be able to force the “will of the majority” upon his fellows rather than work through disagreements like a mature adult, and you can build a common front of destructive self-interest against the co-operation and collectivity that make individual freedom possible. All the better if there are even more repressive dictatorships around to point to as “the” alternative, so you can glorify all this in the rhetoric of liberty.

CAPITALISM & DEMOCRACY Let’s suspend our misgivings about democracy long enough to consider whether, if it were an effective means for people to share power over their lives, it could be compatible with capitalism. In a democracy, informed citizens are supposed to vote according to their enlightened self-interest – but who controls the flow of information, if not wealthy executives? They can’t help but skew their coverage according to their class interests, and you can hardly blame them – the newspapers and networks that didn’t flinch at alienating corporate advertisers were run out of business long ago by competitors with fewer scruples.

Likewise, voting means choosing between options, according to which possibilities seem most desirable – but who sets the options, who establishes what is considered possible, who constructs desire itself but the wealthy patriarchs of the political establishment, and their nephews in advertising and public relations firms? In the United States for example, the two-party system has reduced politics to choosing the lesser of two identical evils, both of which answer to their funders before anyone else. Sure, the parties differ over exactly how much to repress personal freedoms or spend on bombs – but do we ever get to vote on who controls “public” spaces such as shopping malls, or whether workers are entitled to the full product of their labour, or any other question that could seriously change the way we live? In such a state of affairs, the essential function of the democratic process is to limit the appearance of what is possible to the narrow spectrum debated by candidates for office. This demoralizes dissidents and contributes to the general impression that they are impotent utopians – when nothing is more utopian than trusting representatives from the owning class to solve the problems caused by their own dominance, and nothing more impotent than accepting their political system as the only possible system.

Ultimately, the most transparent democratic political process will always be trumped by economic matters such as property ownership.

Even if we could convene everyone, capitalists and convicts alike, in one vast general assembly, what would prevent the same dynamics that rule the marketplace from spilling over into that space? So long as resources are unevenly distributed, the rich can always buy others’ votes: either literally, or by promising them a piece of the pie, or else by means of propaganda and intimidation. Intimidation may be oblique – “Those radicals want to take away your hardearned property” – or overtly violent.

Thus, even at best, democracy can only serve its purported purpose if it occurs among those who explicitly oppose capitalism and foreswear its prizes – and in those circles, there are alternatives that make a lot more sense than majority rule.

IT IS NOT YOUR VOTES BUT YOUR RANDS THAT ELECT THEM IT’S NO COINCIDENCE FREEDOM IS NOT ON THE BALLOT. Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vacuum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possession that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be given – the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting; being free doesn’t mean simply being able to choose between options, but actively participating in establishing the options in the first place.

WHOEVER YOU VOTE FOR, GOVERNMENT WINS “LOOK, A BALLOT BOX – DEMOCRACY!!”

If the freedom for which so many generations have fought and died is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth checking a box on a ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was before, then the heritage our emancipating predecessors have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the liberty they sought.

For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they create a sonic and emotional environment, transforming the world that in turn transforms them.

Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system – a harmony in human relationships and activity. To get there from here, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS A CONTRADICTION IN TERMS No one can represent your power and interests for you – you can only have power by wielding it, you can only learn what your interests are by getting involved. Politicians make careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political

power could be held by proxy; in fact, they are a priest class that answers only to itself, and their very existence is proof of our disenfranchisement.

Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we have ceded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and control of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labour has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.

But we don’t have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, television shows, and political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and social structures and power, we can establish a new society on the basis of freedom and cooperation.

A SPECTACLE TO DISTRACT Sometimes a candidate appears who says everything people have been saying to each other for a long time.

By persuasively critiquing the system within its own logic, he subtly persuades people that the system can be reformed – that it could work, if only the right people were in power.

Thus a lot of energy that would have gone into challenging the system itself is redirected into backing yet another candidate for office, who inevitably fails to deliver.

But where do these candidates – and more importantly, their ideas and momentum – come from?

How do they rise into the spotlight?

They only receive so much attention because they are drawing on popular sentiments; often, they are explicitly trying to divert energy from existing grass-roots movements. So should we put our energy into supporting them, or into building on the momentum that forced them to take radical stances in the first place?

More frequently, we are terrorized into focusing on the electoral spectacle by the prospect of being ruled by the worst possible candidates. “What if he gets into power?”

To think that things could get even worse!

But the problem is that the government has so much power in the first place – otherwise, it wouldn’t matter as much who held the reigns. So long as this is the case, there will always be tyrants. This is why it is all the more important that we put our energy into the lasting solution of opposing the power of the state.

IN THE MEANWHILE, ANARCHISTS ARE WORKING ON SOMETHING DIFFERENT. SOMETHING HUGE. Something a little too big for this article, so let’s start with some basics:

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Voting for people to represent your interests is the least efficient and effective means of applying political power. The alternative, broadly speaking, is acting directly to represent your interests yourself.

Don’t Just [Not] Vote, Get Active.

The idea is to dream up and practice the many ways we can take power out of the hands of the elite, be they elected or unelected, and redistribute it to everyone through a network of free communities and neighbourhoods. We do not do this to gain control over others, but to attain control together—over how we provide each other with shelter, education, art, and information, over how we resolve conflicts, over how we share resources and ideas, over how we determine our own lives.

This is known in some circles as “direct action.” Direct action is occasionally misunderstood to mean another kind of campaigning, lobbying for influence on elected officials by means of political activist tactics; but it properly refers to any action or strategy that cuts out the middle man and solves problems directly, without appealing to elected representatives, corporate interests, or other powers.

Concrete examples of direct action are everywhere. When people start their own organization to share food with hungry folks, instead of just voting for a candidate who promises to solve “the homeless problem” with tax dollars and bureaucracy, that’s direct action.

When a man makes and gives out fliers addressing an issue that concerns him, rather than counting on the newspapers to cover it or print his letters to the editor, that’s direct action. When a woman forms a book club with her friends instead of paying to take classes at a school, or does what it takes to shut down an unwanted corporate superstore in her neighbourhood rather than deferring to the authority of city planners, that’s direct action, too.

Direct action is a self-empowering, do-it-yourself approach. It’s handson and no-nonsense. Without it, hardly anything would get done.

Voting is glorified as “freedom” in action. It’s not freedom— freedom is getting to decide what the choices are in the first place, not picking between Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Direct action is the real thing. You make the plan, you create the options, the sky’s the limit.

Ultimately, there’s no reason the strategies of voting and direct action can’t both be applied together. One does not cancel the other out. The problem is that so many people think of voting as their primary way of exerting political and social power that a disproportionate amount of everyone’s time and energy is spent deliberating and debating about it while other opportunities to make change go to waste. For months preceding every election, everyone argues about the voting issue, what candidates to vote for or whether to vote at all, when voting itself takes less than an hour.

Vote or don’t, but get on with it!

Remember how many other ways you can make your voice heard.

This being an election year, we hear constantly about the options available to us as voters, and almost nothing about our other opportunities to play a decisive role in our society. What we need is a campaign to emphasize the possibilities more direct means of action and com- munity involvement have to offer. These need not be seen as in contradiction with voting. We can spend an hour voting once a year, and the other three hundred sixty four days and twenty three hours acting directly!

Those who are totally disenchanted with representative democracy, who dream of a world without presidents and politicians, can rest assured that if we all learn how to apply deliberately the power that each of us has, the question of which politician is elected to office will become a moot point. They only have that power because we delegate it to them! A campaign for direct action puts power back where it belongs, in the hands of the people from whom it originates.

As for us anarchists – we’d rather spend the time others spend voting doing anything we’re usually doing. We tend to think that voting is complicity in a system we don’t want anything to do with, since every vote legitimises their domination. Our dreams don’t fit on their ballots.

THERE’S NO GOVERNMENT LIKE NO GOVERNMENT.

Page 7

If you vote, you can’t complain.

Thoughts on Oppression and Freedom

by Michael Wentworth

NATIVE LIFE UNDER

EMPIRE This armed Nyala, covered in City of Cape Town branding, is parked strategically at a location Delft known for housing protests, in order to intimidate residents into passivity.

Xola dos Santos, anarchist, black consciousness advocate and rabble rouser extraordinaire, ponders the complex relationship between structural and revolutionary violence.

F

or the smooth operation of the relationships of coercion/ exploitation that sustain privilege for the bourgeoisie, a particular kind of violence is required. This is not the violence we experience through police brutality at protests, or incidents of violent crime. The violence I speak of is the threat or potential for violent outbreak, administrated by a political elite, in confrontation with revolutionary rebellion. This potential guides our interactions with one another, the government, our employers, et cetera.

In every situation, the threat of an unnatural outbreak of violence from the apparatus of the state is necessary to keep us in line, consistently regulating how we behave. This potential exists in opposition to the revolutionary violence that is required to dethrone the structures of economic and political domination that would mark the process of decolonisation.

We cannot see, but only fear this violence; nevertheless it is concrete.

And it is this fear that has suspended the anti-colonial revolution.

Fear, in this form and others, has become the basic component on which today’s politics revolves, particularity in US popular politics with their focus on “The War on Terror” and the various other wars they invent. More than creating the condition for forced labour under capitalism, this fear has literally created non-peoples. Whole native populations who are unable to reconcile with their humanity. Fanon noted the following: Violence in the colonies does not only have for its aim the keeping of these enslaved men at arm’s length; it seeks to dehumanize them. Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical fatigue will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job.

We have reached a climax point,

where creating without revolutionary violence, a society based on mutual aid and non-hierarchical relationships of solidarity and support, will take the greatest stretch of political imagination. Biko noted the inorganic nature, this feeling of inferiority, amongst blacks, but still offers a cynical solution - Revolutionary violence: This is particularly necessary in the case of the African people. Ground for a revolution is always fertile in the presence of absolute destitution.

At some stage one can foresee a situation where black people will feel they have nothing to live for and will shout unto their God “Thy will be done.” Indeed His will shall be done but it shall not appeal equally to all mortals for indeed we have different versions of His will. If the white God has been doing the talking all along, at some stage the black God will have to raise His voice and make Himself heard over and above noises from His counterpart. What happens at that stage depends largely on what happens in the intervening period.

How we relate to each other under state capitalism is not in the spirit of solidarity and mutual aid. It is a coercive forced relation.

Nevertheless, we are still waiting for the benevolent settlers to create this egalitarian society for us through the Western state-capitalist project. We are waiting for our current government to develop the perfect state, its diplomatic relationships and its economic and political trends that serve our interest. So far blacks, in particular, have waited in vain.

This is the violence that exists in the way that we relate to whites and one another. This is the relational violence that was required to reduce the native into an object, quite literally into an animal, for his role as a slave after the first black and white encounter during settler encroachment. This violence is structurally built into our economy and political life. We must not forget about slavery, dispossession, coloni-

sation and apartheid when we speak about coercive relationships of domination across race: It is very important for blacks to locate their identity within the project of slavery because that is when natives stopped being human, i.e. that is when the whites took the blacks, dispossessed them of all material things, and reduced them to animals. If you look at the images of plantation in America – the black folk and the animals are “put” in the same material situation.

If blacks are not human, if blacks are not people, then every project of subjugation and violence is available against them and it is justified that blacks only have ownership of 30% of the 122 million hectares of land in Azania. Fanon notes in The Wretched of the Earth: For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.

If we are to completely reverse the effects of settler encroachment on the colonised people, it won’t be through voting – as offered by the EFF and other political parties.

Contrary to what political parties say, blacks need to uproot themselves from the existential crutch that is “citizen” as political identity. We are not our most productive selves, eagerly thrown into work that sustains the very system that oppresses us. Locating our political identity in the very idea of a “native” would compel any black to revolution.

Natives resisted settler encroachment in the 1600’s and it is blacks, despite compromising 79 percent of the population, who account for 93 percent of poor people who live on less that R322 a month in 2012 in South Africa. We need to completely re-invent society as we know it.

Voting, especially in light of this, as an option created by the Western liberal democratic project, is an ineffective way of exerting political power, as I’m sure other writers in this newspaper will take the task of expressing to you.

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Oppression: (Noun)

1. The act of subjugating

2. The state of being kept down by unjust use of force or authority 3. Arbitrary and cruel exercise of power 4. The experience of repeated, widespread, systemic injustice

Freedom: (Noun)

1. The power to act, speak, or think without

externally imposed restraints 2. The capacity to exercise choice 3. The right to enjoy all the privileges of citizenship

“Oppression is the experience of repeated, widespread, systemic injustice. It need not be extreme and involve the legal system (as in slavery, apartheid, or the lack of right to vote) nor violent (as in tyrannical societies). Jean Harvey has used the term “civilized oppression” to characterize the everyday processes of oppression in normal life.

Civilized oppression “ is embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules. It refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions which are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms.” Morton Deutsch – 2005.

Ancient hunter-gatherer societies were for the most part egalitarian until about 12000 years ago. Families and clans became overpopulated tribes that could no longer be sustained from the land that had until then supported the previously cooperative communities. This necessitated the expansion of territory and the development of agriculture and animal husbandry.

With the accumulation of surplus food, new occupations such as traders, merchants, administrators, artisans, soldiers, and rulers emerged. Social hierarchies developed as some became more successful than others which in turn led to the reliance of the less successful communities on the more prosperous ones.

Inevitably this led to conflicts that ultimately resulted in the development of warfare.

These four little ailments that will be the death of mankind.

The new old four horsemen.

Over-population, land, agriculture and the mother fucker of them all: warfare!

Often the size of the gun hides the intent.

Base and uncouth: something I once referred to as ghetto logic when working with kids in prison. It’s the same shit on a global scale with full-blown sociopaths at the helm.

“You have what I want. If I take it I will have it and you will be okay with that or you’ll be dead! Either way, fuck you!”

In this world of the petrified, the most ruthless men are kings.

And even rational thinkers doubt the evidence, choosing to accept the cesspit called reality because “That’s just how it is.”

And… “Things are the way they are.”

And… “What can you do?”

That’s why I can be a proud human being, while not being proud of being human.

I was born in the nationalist South Africa of 1969 and I live in another nationalist South Africa in 2013. In what kind of South Africa will I die?

I am proudly Azanian but right now I am not proud of being South African. I am a proud African and yet I think Africa’s pride is being willingly bartered by everyone of us for a handful of plastic beads and baubles in the form of a religious-capitalist paradigm that serves to make us oppress ourselves and each other even as we are being oppressed.

And as for freedom, it does not exist while oppression is king.

Page 8

Representative democracy is a contradiction in terms.

Featured interview: Dr Wayne Price (New York)

working people have: the power of our numbers and, ultimately, the power of our position in society to shut it down as workers, to close down production and transportation and start it up again on a different basis.

Working in the marketplace or in the political arena, the electoral arena rather, is a sucker’s game.

Pacifist, revolutionary Marxist and, in recent years, revolutionary anarchist, Wayne Price has had a long and nuanced political trajectory. He has been involved in numerous North American anarchist movements, including the controversial Love and Rage and the late NEFAC (Northeastern Federation of Anarchist Communists) and is the author of several books, most recently The Value of Radical Theory: An Anarchist Introduction to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Wayne is passionate about sharing Marxist economics with anarchists and reminds us that we’d be well-served not to throw out the baby with the bathwater in this regard. Stefanie Noire and Aragorn Eloff visited Wayne at his New York home one chilly February evening and, after a generously provided vegan meal, sat down to discuss electoral politics, resistance movements, anarchist history and hope for the future. This interview has been slightly edited for publication.

Hey Wayne. Could you introduce yourself?

My name is Wayne Price. I have been a radical, libertarian socialist of some sort or another since high school. I’ve gone from being an anarchist pacifist, to being a Trotskyist of an unorthodox sort, to being a revolutionary anarchist as I am now. I have worked as a teacher and as a school psychologist - a white collar worker. I am now retired. I’ve been in various organizations over the years.

As an anarchist, what do you think are the problems we’re facing today?

The major problem we’re facing is a drastic crisis in the capitalist world-system. A return to the kind of crisis that existed between 1914 and 1946: general downhill development, the threat of collapse into another great depression, the danger of the rise of fascism, the danger of increased wars – including the danger of nuclear war – the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the ecological catastrophe, including global warming. And the biggest problem I think we’re facing is the lack of sufficient response to that on behalf of the masses of people, ordinary working people. The middle class itself has no idea how to handle this; I think it’s remarkably incapable of showing itself capable of dealing with it. But the real problem for me, as an anarchist, a revolutionary, is lack of response, which is why I was so excited to see the recent [2011] rebellions that took place in North Africa, or very recently the struggle of workers in Wisconsin against the attacks on unions. But we’re still nowhere near the kind of responses that are necessary.

The specific problem that I deal with is the need to create an organisation of revolutionary anarchists to develop their theory

and develop their practice, to coordinate themselves and to help inspire and work with other people. To build a libertarian socialist anarchist revolution in North America.

The organisation-building approach you describe seems antithetical to the way in which most people assume change comes about, i.e., through voting and petitions and so on. Why don’t anarchists vote?

Anarchists aren’t against voting in organisations, the question is whether we’re against voting in the bourgeois elections. We feel that the bourgeois elections are still, it’s part of the capitalist system, it’s their ground. You can’t run in elections without a lot of money, you can’t get elected without a lot of money, and even if you did, even if you had a party that was totally based on, say, unions or something, you can’t run the government without dealing with capitalist interests.

The fact is that every step forward in this country, every major step forward, has been through non-electoral mass struggle. It was through nonelectoral mass struggle and major sit-in strikes in the ‘30s that the unions organised themselves and the workers got the right to form unions. It was through massive civil disobedience in the south in the ‘60s that the black movement won major civil rights gains. And it was the so-called riots in the north that won even further gains for black liberation, even though blacks are still forced to the bottom of society.

The struggle against the war in Vietnam was fought not through the electoral system – after all the war was fought by the democratic party – but through massive demonstrations, sit-ins and campus strikes and so on, and young people in the army rebelling. So this is the power

How do you define anarchism?

Anarchism to me is the most extreme form, the most radical form of democracy; it’s a belief that you can replace large, centralised institutions with institutions that are grounded or at least based in communities of direct face to face democracy, face to face communities where people make decisions themselves, directly, with their own direct participation. It can’t be delegation or representation, it’s got to be based on direct control. It means the replacement of the state and the bureaucratic military machine that’s socially alienated above the rest of society, the replacement of that by federations and associations of popular councils and workers assemblies. Councils, assemblies, committees: the replacement of the corporate capitalist economy by a network of worker-run industries and cooperatives and self-governed communes, with democratic planning from the bottomup. Anarchism also means replacement of the police and the military as a special layer of armed force by the armed people.

By workers’ popular militia that’s under democratic control and for as long as that sort of thing is necessary.

You talk about replacing the State. How do you define the State?

When I say the state, which is the basic framework of the government, the government being the face of the state, I’m thinking of an essentially bureaucratic, military institution above the rest of society: layers of specialised military, police, professional politicians, jurists, bureaucrats of all sorts who control, really, the mass of people. They may elect once every two years, four years, six years, but they always elect somebody who is serving the rich in one way or another. Then we go home and we do our regular work under the orders of the local boss. So the state itself, as an institution, is above us. Whatever impression it gives of democracy it’s really a separate institution beyond us and we want to get rid of it. It didn’t exist for most of the history of the human race – it had a beginning and it can have an end. It can be replaced by other forms of coordination and selfrule in society.

This sounds like a particularly socialist description of what society could be like. Didn’t the 20th century prove once and for all that socialism can’t work?

Well it’s like they used to say about Christianity, that you can’t say it didn’t work because you’ve never tried. There have always been two trends in socialism, at least, and one trend is a socialism from the bottom-up, socialism the struggle of the mass of ordinary people to take over and run society themselves,

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with the other being some kind of collectivization that really serves a small minority from the top down. The kind of socialism that existed in the 20th century was really either generally under the ideology of Marxism or, if not, was either a kind of social democracy as in Western Europe – a mix of labour and socialist parties that really just intended to manage the existing state, the existing capitalist institutions – or it intended to overthrow these institutions and replace them with a new state and a new centralized economy, which is the kind of thing they had in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China and so forth.

These movements used the word socialism to justify themselves, to cover their crimes and to prevent an opposition from developing, but in fact, they were not socialist at all, it was all just a form of capitalism.

The basic relationship between the workers and the means of production, the workers and the bosses, remained the same – it was essentially a state-capitalist kind of system. So what the 20th century has demonstrated to me beyond all manner of guessing is that it’s capitalism that does not work, not socialism.

You spent a fair amount of time within the revolutionary Marxist tradition and have written extensively on the relationship between Marxism and anarchism. Would you like to say a bit about this?

Well the question of the relationship between Marxism and anarchism is something I’ve been interested in for a long time and both my books discuss that as a core issue. To a great extent anarchism and Marxism overlap: they both come out of the socialist and working class movements of the 1840s, ‘50s and ‘60s and both believe in a working class revolution that is originally a mass revolution that would replace capitalism and eventually lead to a society without the state, without classes, without any form of oppression.

Those were at least the original goals.

But over time, each developed in a different direction, which would take too much time for me to explain right now. In short though, Marxism is based on the writings of one towering genius and I think there’s both positive and negative aspects of Marxism: there’s a progressive, democratic, libertarian side, and there’s the authoritarian sides. Over time, it’s mainly the authoritarian sides that have dominated, at least within movements. These have developed first into the pro-imperialist social democracy of the West, where there are no longer any parties that could strictly be called socialist or labour or whatever; they no longer even pretend to be for a new kind of society. Second, on the other side, the attempt to revive Marxism by Lenin, Trotsky and others resulted in the mass murder of the Stalinist totalitarian regimes, which were state-capitalist regimes. That’s also a disaster. So, in practice, Marxism has shown itself not to work very well. It doesn’t mean there aren’t useful aspects of the

theory, the analysis and so forth.

Anarchism, for its part, started weaker in certain areas of theory and practice, but nevertheless had more of a clearly libertarian aspect; there were authoritarian sides to anarchism too, which I discuss further in my books, but its essence is a belief in the self-management of society. For me this is crucial and so, even though I like certain aspects of Marxism, I identify essentially as an anarchist.

Could you talk a little more about this anarchist principle of liberty?

To me the principle that resonates most with me, and I don’t mean it’s absolute and everybody’s got to have the same reaction, but certainly to me the question is freedom. Or liberty, autonomy, whatever, I’m making fine distinctions here. Perhaps that has to do with my personal psychology, my personal neurosis, but I’ve always hated oppression, I’ve hated bullying, I’ve hated domination. I’ve always disliked having a boss, although I’ve occasionally had some nice people as bosses. The idea of people having the right to decide for themselves has always been kind of fundamental for me, and that affects me at an emotional level. Sometimes this has caused conflicts, even with anarchists! One of my arguments I have with other anarchists is, well, what if people choose something we anarchists don’t agree with, like what if an oppressed nation chooses to have their own government or state. What if workers choose to have conservative unions, what if gay people want to get married by the bourgeois state or want to be allowed to join the US imperialist military? And some people will say we’re not for that so we’re against that so we’re not going to support that in any way. And my feeling is, well, people learn through their own mistakes; they have a right to choose their goals. Now, I’m perfectly free, we’re free to say, no, you shouldn’t form a state, you should form a different form of society. No, you shouldn’t aim to get legally married, you should end the state. No one should join the imperialist military, and so on and so forth. We shouldn’t shut up just because it’s what people want. But at the same time we should defend their right to have what they want and hope that they will learn through their own experience. To me the question of freedom is really a fundamental value; it’s one of the primary factors that made me become an anarchist and is, I believe, central to a different kind of society.

Speaking as an anarchist, didn’t the 20th century prove that these kinds of principles, that anarchism in general, can never work?

Well, did the Spanish revolution fail? I think the reason the Spanish revolution failed, essentially, was because the anarchists abandoned their program and capitulated to the bourgeois state. They joined ogether with the liberals and e social democrats and with the / continued on page 15

Page 9

Anarchy: a vote for us really is a vote for you!

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Page 10

It’s not your votes but your Rands that elect them.

When I create the world, by Shan’t Tell When I create the world, I shall not create a world born in fear, I shall not create borders that keep the Israeli and Palestinian lovers apart, I shall not create a world that bows down to the almighty American god.

Footprints were the first remnants to disappear When I create the world, Softened by the rains and smoothed over by the wind Or was it noise?

I shall cover the lands with trees and grass and flowers, Leaving behind a silence so overwhelming trees and grass and flowers that grow wild and wither and die and grow once more, Nothing moved or made a sound for days trees that are not cordoned off and made into a neat garden with a master, a wife and a child.

Next were the roads Dirt first, then tarmac When I create the world, Tender grass roots shot ribbons of tiny canyons in every direction I shall not, like the Man-God, create it with words and breath, Buildings began to crumble and be devoured by moss and insects though there shall be words and breath, they shall be sparse, Breaking bricks down to their basic elements Flags decayed and withered over time they shall be sparse and tiny and they shall not live to rule, but live to bring death.

National and international borders decaying with them Although those didn’t really exist in the first place When I create the world, Fences and walls followed suite I shall create words that bring death, Cars, trains, busses, planes I shall create words that bring death to unnecessary violence and any form of oppression, Rusted and combined with earth I shall create words that cut and pierce the minds and open the eyes of that stupid race on earth.

Styrofoam and nuclear waste took a little longer But, over time, they too decayed into nothing All writings were lost to the moths When I create the world, Devouring thousands of years of knowledge and learning I shall not promise eternal life for obedience, Mines filled themselves again I shall, instead, promise life until death for those who look and see, As did the forests, jungles, rivers and oceans for those who speak carefully and disobey any man or god-made law.

Green replaced grey Entire cities became thriving jungles When I create the world, And scorched deserts I shall give equal power, The soil slowly replenished itself Living populations filled and balanced themselves again I shall give equal power to each human, to each being of that stupid race, And the earth breathed a sigh of relief to each human, regardless of the face they wear or the skin wrapped around their bones.

At the cleansing of its face From the clutches of disease

When I create the world, there will be no nations, there will be no nations with governments and police and a military force, instead, there will be animals and water and land and people who awake each day to the world.

Untitled, by Anah Moorad I see your hunger for votes. Grasping for power like a junky fighting for a fix.

Snorting each ballot and pocketing the tax, you disillusion the masses. Leading the blind astray with quick fix hits. The instant gratification keeps us wanting, passing on the addictive hunger, desire to believe. Just one more term…

Just one more term… Just one

Flames lighting flames We pass our blaze Like angels in the dark We have our secret smiles And the inner chambers Ancient. Pristine. The temple.

We lead and we are lead By the common thread We belong of the same source Life is that mixture A burning moment That is never replaced Time is a concept of function Where actions need A scale of direction Then when we understand We embalm our belief With a completely new dimension When logic demands Illogical conclusions We surrender logic Time is the oil of life And love the vessel With us the flickering flame Burning portraits of Those whom led us here

When I create the world, there will be no corporations, there will be no corporations or money or working five days to earn a living, instead there will be neighbours, one grateful for receiving, one proud for giving.

When I create the world, there will be animals and water and land and people, there will be neighbours, one grateful for receiving from the bounty of another, the other proud to give away the bounty without need for recognition, reward or payment.

When I create the world, I shall not create it.

For though I am a woman and know the fear of being powerless, I am white and know the privilege of the colour of my skin.

When I create the world, I shall lay down my crown, I shall lay down my crown and paint on my heart a big, red dot, I shall paint on my hart a big red dot and make myself the first target.

t

e

When I create the world, I shall make myself the first target, and if I am made to be the first target I shall receive it with the pain of all the world, I shall receive it with all that pain, but I shall hope that I am not made to be the first target.

r

When I create the world, I shall make myself the first target, but I shall hope that I am not made to be the first target, for if I am, I shall be the first target of many to come.

When I create the world, I shall lay down my crown, I shall lay down my crown and I shall make myself the first target, but I shall hope that I am not the first, stretching out my hand to take another.

m

,

When I create the world, I shall not create the world, I shall stretch out my hand and hope that it is taken by another; one hand stretched out to receive another, I shall wait to feel the skin of a palm against mine.

When I create the world, I shall stretch out my hand, one hand stretched out to receive another, I shall wait to feel the skin of a palm against mine, one hand stretched out to receive, I shall stretch out the other to give to another in grace.

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Colossal, by Douglas Simoes

When I create the world, I shall lay down my crown, I shall lay down my crown and make myself the first target, but I shall hope that I am not made to be the first target.

more

We are but damaged Portraits of those Whom have led us here

Colossal colonies sprawled across the land Neon markers... of the constant growth Empty concrete cages divided by lonely black roads In a system designed with no hope of knowing self if we are to dance to the pulled strings made from plastic funded by the victors of wealth defined by their abundance In my life... as i live i have always felt i am at a point of transition where i am part of this world around us but i am always entering a new world

Untitled, by Pete Reynolds

When I create the world, I, too, shall start with the sea.

I shall create fish to swim, fish who feel the pleasure of water without need to own it.

I shall create birds to fly, birds to teach the stupid race I create, how to fly.

Potraits, by Douglas Simoes

Page 11

It’s no coincidence freedom is not on the ballot...

ARE WE NOT FREE MEN? Aragorn Eloff wades into the strange world of half-facts, pseudo-law and magical thinking that is the Freeman Movement, discovering some interesting parallels with other forms of false hope along the way.

Y

ou may not yet be aware of it, but just recently all the world’s governments – which, it turns out, were just a cover for the corporate global elite – were shut down. We the people are now the rightful and

equal owners of all the titles and rights of these corporations and all their assets are now duly secured and held in trust, somewhere or other, for all of us. Even more amazingly, this paradigm shift did not require a revolution, an economic collapse or even any widespread grassroots dissent. No. All that was needed, apparently, was a strongly worded legal letter.

If this is all starting to sound like the plot of a Douglas Adams novel then you’re probably not yet familiar with the One People’s Public Trust (OPPT) or the affiliated Freeman on the Land Movement (FMOTL), the ‘global freedom movement’ that’s ‘rocking the world’ according to one of their founders, a local Internet ad-space salesperson turned ‘marketing guru’ turned Freeman who is also an avid supporter of renowned crank Michael Tellinger’s lawsuit against the South African banking system (Tellinger’s Ubuntu Party bears striking similarities to FMOTL and OPPT).

The Freemen (there are ostensibly no Freewomen) are an amusing albeit slightly tragicomic bunch: declaring the state illegitimate, pointing out the ills of capitalism and advocating instead a social order characterised by gift economics and direct democracy (so far so good), they then go on to argue that the best way to achieve this magical new world – or at least the best way to avoid paying taxes or licensing your car – is through a layperson bricolage of misinterpreted lines from old law dictionaries (they especially love contract and maritime law), a smattering of Latin, the Magna Carta and random search results from securities and exchange websites, along with a couple of ill-understood legal cases as precedent. They also sometimes write letters to the queen. Armed with this arsenal of half-truths and distortions, groups like the OPPT have filed grandiose cases (well, sometimes they’ve just uploaded reams of pseudo-legal word salad to their personal websites – the kinds of websites that share prominent links to Alex Jones, AIDS denialism and channelings from Zeta Reticuli – claiming themselves to be free, sovereign citizens) declaring that, technically anyway, we’ve now all been liberated from our shackles.

Let’s go over this once more, just to make sure the batshit insanity is clear: FMOTL/OPPT have unveiled a grand conspiracy whereby we’re all subjugated, partly via the legal apparatus, by an oppressive and all-powerful political and economic elite. More importantly, they’ve figured out how to escape from this bind: we free ourselves by appealing to the legitimacy of the very legal structure that serves to keep us enslaved! In other words, the bad people oppress us using the law, but if we can use that same law in very clever ways to demonstrate to them that they’re in fact bad people, then...well...therein lies the problem: the whole plan, even if the Freeman understanding of law, contemporary banking and so forth wasn’t so embarrassingly poor that law and economics undergrads crack jokes about it, makes about as much sense as handing Stalin a highlighted copy of salient passages in the Communist Manifesto in order to argue that he doesn’t have a right to send you to the gulags. Actually, it makes even less sense than that, so little in fact that it’s difficult to find a suitable analogy. In a way, it’s a kind of psychological cargo cult or, as the website Rationalwiki more bluntly puts it: “their theory of the world is utterly spurious, and their practical approach is made entirely of magic beans and crack.”

It goes without saying that these movements have never won a case, are associated with all sorts of dubious con artists and New Age charlatans and are regarded as little more than an annoying bunch of time-wasting cranks. For the most part, engaging with this errand nonsense is about as pointless as trying to master time travel using the Time Cube (http://www.timecube.com).

After all, how do you even begin to respond someone who, when you point out the flaws in their reasoning, states: “you call it cognitive dissonance, I call it the freedom to experience the universe in any way I wish.” (believe it or not, someone really said this to me in a recent online debate with some OPPT advocates). Futile to argue with or not, interest in FMOTL/OPPT has grown in recent months in South Africa, largely amongst that cluster of politically naïve but well-meaning people who hang out at Afrika Burn, support initiatives like Occupy and anti-Monsanto campaigns and buy massages using talents (none of which, in principle, I have a problem with – I’m even registered on the local talent exchange). These

people, however misled they may be as to the functioning of common law, do actually agree with me on some fundamental issues, leaving me feeling strangely compelled to critically engage with them. After all, like the Freemen I too think that property law needs to be eradicated, that capitalism needs to be abolished and that the state has no legitimate right to govern me and, like them too, I’d prefer to live in a world of free equals, although I usually call this world ‘anarchy’ or ‘full communism,’ two terms I’m sure that, tellingly, most Freemen would balk at. Unlike them, however, I disagree – and both history and common sense vindicate me here – that the way to achieve this is by asking these inherently corrupt institutions to reflect on their own contradictions, as though there’s some magical power that’s able to foreclose on the governments of almost all the world’s countries through the very

legal apparatus regulated by these same governments – an omnipotent, all-seeing eye in the sky that will, once it acknowledges the veracity of the cases brought against the state, the legal apparatus, etc., cause them to spontaneously dissolve in the coruscating light of reason or morality.

It’s probably worth pausing at this point to think about the logic of all this once more: in order to believe that the FMOTL / OPPT approach holds any merit, one has to believe that the legal system is simultaneously a) a co-opted framework not set up in our interests and b) a neutral framework set up in our interests. In other words, that ‘law’ is at once both malevolent and benevolent, democratic and totalitarian, oppressive and just, set up in ‘their’ interests and set up in ‘our’ interests.

In sum it’s an attempt to beat the system at its own game, only the players don’t understand the rules properly and haven’t yet recognised that said system creates the game, writes the rules, regulates play, judges outcomes and awards the prizes.

The assumption underpinning this flawed reasoning – that there’s some big Other that we can appeal to that is simultaneously both within and outside of the situation we find

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ourselves in – is the most dangerous kind of magical thinking, not only because it flies in the face of reason but also because it allows people to imagine that they can change the world without really doing anything beyond saying some magic words.

No amount of rational discourse, however, can stop a growing number of hippies and die-hard libertarians from changing their names to Dave of the Family Smith, making extravagant claims when stopped at roadblocks without licenses and sharing endless tinfoil hat and V mask videos on Youtube (Youtube, we must always remember, is somehow immune from the mainstream media hegemony of the global elite).

Although a fair number of these folks might just be exceptionally gullible or suffering from a kind of sublimated existential buyer’s remorse, I suspect there’s something both more subtle and more profound at play. Indeed, it is well-known that magical thinking of this type often emerges in conditions of perceived powerlessness as a form of individual or collective psychological self-defense – it’s better to have a completely tenuous fantasy plan for fixing the binds we find ourselves in than resigning ourselves to them. In other words, perhaps the people who buy into the irrational arguments of the FMOTL/OPPT zealots are in fact making a rational decision to preserve their sense of existential well-being in the face of an unjust socio-economic order that they have no idea how to successfully analyse or overcome. The modern world is an incredibly complex place and dogma, no matter how insincerely believed or touted, is often a useful coping mechanism.

Underlying this, however, is an assumption which can itself be challenged: instead of accepting that this is just the way things are and then deciding how best to live with it (through whatever mix of resignation and coping strategies), we could also begin to ask whether or not things are in fact the way they are.

Not in a conspiratorial sense, but in the sense the philosopher Jacques Rancière suggests when he argues that what we experience in our daily participation in the social order is a partitioning of the sensible – a circumscribed domain of possibility that occludes anything outside of, beyond, or lacking from the current system. This partitioning, maintained and defended by an arrangement of ideological and material power Rancière calls the police, is precisely what we should draw attention to, pointing to what lies beyond through a radical enactment of dissensus: thought and action on behalf of our excluded groups or classes – what Rancière calls the part of no part – that breaks through the

partitions and the police barricades in order to begin politics proper.

If, as Rancière observes, politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable, then one can see how the clumsy pseudo-legalese of the FMOTL/ OPPT movements simply reinforces the partitioning; how they serve as a reification of the same legal system they’re trying to outsmart; how they form part of what we could call the riot gear of the police. If we seek a genuinely transformational politics, then, we cannot simply reproduce the modes of engagement immediately present to us within the partitioning of the sensible, transforming all of our social and political tensions into a set of grievances that are completely compatible with the internal logic of the State apparatus. Instead, through dissensus we need to overturn the very notion that current distributions of power are outside of the scope of action that forms part of our desire for social change. Instead of the closing down of possibility that is evident in the ill-conceived approaches of Freeman-style movements, it is only through a renewed vision and subsequent enactment of possibility, of pointing to what lies concealed our current partitioning, beyond these police lines, that we can create something genuinely new.

This article was written by Aragorn of the Family Eloff. Under the maritime code of 1914, Aragorn declares himself a SOVEREIGN CITIZEN not bound by the laws of the Corporation of South Africa. You may find the original printed notice of this declaration sellotaped to the underside of the lavatory seat in the last cubicle of Aragorn’s favourite bar. Another copy has been submitted to the queen of England, who has not yet responded. Lots of confusing terms and conditions apply and you will probably be served a lien for reading this.

Editor’s note: You may be wondering what all this has to do with this issue’s theme, electoral democracy. Well, here’s a fun exercise for you: instead of reading the above article as a critique of the Freeman Movement, why not substitute any mention of FMOTL/OPPT with the word ‘voter’, any mention of the legal system with the term ‘electoral arena’ and so forth...

All things considered, is a belief in the power of the ballot to change the system that provides us with ballot boxes really that different from the magical thinking we’ve been discussing?

Page 12

Image by Gus Moystad

Whoever you vote for, the system wins.

Wayne Price interview

/ continued from page 9

Stalinist communist party in a coalition to support the existing liberal capitalist state in the fight against fascism. In other words, I don’t think anarchism as a philosophy failed in the Spanish revolution. What failed in the Spanish revolution was the policies of certain anarchists, notably the unwillingness to see the need for a revolutionary perspective, the need to take power. Not take power in the sense of forming a new state, but to take class power, for the workers to take over through workers councils and committees and eradicate the existing state, both the liberal democratic state and the fascist state. Instead, they joined the popular front, they worked together with the Stalinists and the social democrats and the capitalist parties holding back the revolution. I outline all this in the one chapter of my first book, ‘The abolition of the state’.

In another way, it’s true that anarchism has failed. To put it more broadly, in the 150-odd years or so since the working class movement began, there’s been more rebellion by workers, more struggles against the existing system, than any oppressed group has ever had in the course of history, over thousands of years. Since it’s been possible in principle for an anarchist socialist society to exist – let’s say since near the end of the industrial revolution, where suddenly we have the amount of industry possible to produce plenty for the whole of society – there has been a continual history of struggle that has both succeeded and failed but has never gone all the way to creating a world revolution to bring about a new society.

But then again there really isn’t anything else that has succeeded any better.

Haven’t free markets succeeded better?

The free market is a fraud, and I doubt too many capitalists really believe in it; there isn’t a government subsidy or benefit they wouldn’t accept. In every country in the world capitalism itself has produced massive centralized corporations which have close partnerships with the massive centralized states that they have called into existence. Yes, there’s a market, yes, there’s competition, but it’s competition within the limits of a very oppressive society. We are free, the workers are free to sell themselves, sell their ability to labour for enough to keep on going at a certain level of existence, and the capitalists are free to exploit people to the fullest extent, to live beyond the levels of kings and pharaohs of old. So, I don’t think there’s much freedom: there’s a small minority that runs society, there’s a mass of people who take orders and produce goods for the small minority and to talk about this as freedom is to see it as a very limited kind of concept.

Do anarchists preach violence?

Anarchists have all kinds of opinions. You know, large

numbers of anarchists are pacifists. People calling themselves anarchists have been crazed advocates of indiscriminate violence. But the tradition that I come out of, or at least identify with, is a tradition that does not like violence. I myself hate violence.

I hate the thought of violence.

But, like almost the entirety of the human race, except for a few absolute pacifists, we believe that there are certain times when people have the right to defend themselves and when the use of violence becomes necessary.

Almost everybody agrees with that, and we think that, if the time comes, or when the time comes, when the majority of workers, for example, decide that they want a different kind of society, they want to reorganise into a different kind of more democratic, decentralized and cooperative form, I don’t believe that the ruling class, and the state that serves them, will allow them to peacefully change over to a new society. I believe that the ruling class will use all the violence at its control.

This is a very ruthless class that has overturned governments throughout the world, including governments that were formerly bourgeois democratic; I believe they will cancel elections, they will mobilise the military and police, they will organise fascist bands, and it will be necessary for working people to defend themselves. Now our defense will include violence, but not only violence - our major force, remember, is our ability to shut down the economy, the means of production, and to start it up again. To appeal to the rank and file of the military in particular, who are after all sons and daughters of the working class, same as me, and to appeal to all sorts of parts of the society, to let them know that almost everybody has got an interest in change and a better world.

So there should be as little violence as possible, but I think that to renounce violence or renounce the need for violence is absurd. Basically, this is a distraction – people raise it because rather than discuss the need for change in society they want to talk about violence as though we are living in a peaceful world right now, as though the US government right now isn’t waging war in several countries throughout the world and hasn’t done so repeatedly, over and over again; as though this is a peaceful society, which of course is the big lie.

Could you perhaps explain the anarchist focus on the working class a little more, and how it differs from many Marxist conceptions of class?

We revolutionary anarchists focus on the working class and by the working class we don’t just mean the employed workers at any one moment. For us the working class includes the unemployed, it includes those dependent on the employed – such as full time homemakers and housewives and their children – it includes retired workers; all these are part of the working class as a class. It’s a much broader category than just

those employed at the moment.

Now, it’s not that the workers are necessarily nicer than anyone else. There are plenty of mean workers, but that’s not the issue.

It’s also not that the workers are morally more oppressed than anyone else. I don’t wanna get into those kinds of discussions.

As workers, ‘Are deaf people more discriminated against than Jews?’ is an absurd discussion.

It’s that, on a strategic basis, this broad category of the working class has certain advantages.

Number one, it includes the big majority of the population: everyone who works by hand or brain, who is paid a salary, who doesn’t have subordinates under her or him. And secondly, the working class has strategic power and the ability to stop things. If you’ve been to any city when there’s been a big strike, you know what that means: the city just grinds to a halt. No other sector of society, however oppressed, has that much power.

In another sense, the working class overlaps with all the other oppressed sectors of society and so in principle I’m absolutely in favour of supporting every other struggle of freedom. I mean, if you’re a small group you have to make priorities, but, we’re against every form of oppression, and we should be against every form of oppression, and some of these have key roles: the suppression of women, the suppression of people of colour, all types of oppression. Also nationalities oppressed by imperialism.

It’s precisely where there’s an overlap between different types of oppression – let’s say between workers of colour, black workers, young workers, women workers – that you have a particular potential for enormous courage and struggle to lead in really changing all of society.

That’s what we class struggle anarchists look towards.

How do anarchists understand the current ecological crisis?

Well, the current ecological crisis is basically a crisis caused by capitalism. The inability of the capitalist system to be at peace with nature. In it’s drive to accumulate, as Marx said of capitalism: accumulate, accumulate, that’s Moses and the prophets of capitalism. And this drive to accumulate, it treats the world like a mine. It pays no attention to reality and to the necessity for balance. In its declining rate of profit, which has been a long-term trend with a tendency to stagnation, capitalism has, in effect, tried to compensate by looting the environment or, you could say, looting the future. It’s like a person running a factory who, instead of putting an assigned part of the profits to a fund so that when the machinery gets worn out he can replace it, counts that as profit, and uses part of that money to pay the workers higher wages, to buy them off. But in fact at some point, the machinery will wear out and the capitalist will not have money to replace the machinery, and that’s the way the world bourgeoisie is treating the natural environment. Instead of making efforts to clean the environment up, to clean the air, to plan to gradually replace their

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reliance on petroleum and other carbon-based sources of energy they’re just living like there’s no tomorrow. And in a very reckless fashion, because that’s what the drive of this system is.

It’s not like anarchism guarantees that people will always treat the environment well, because, you know, people always make mistakes, people are limited and so forth, but an anarchist society won’t have a drive to destroy the environment.

There will instead be a drive to be cooperative, to live in the world: an ecological, regional or decentralized society. And I think that this is not only possible, that anarchism is not just something that would be nice, but that it something necessary in order to prevent a worldwide ecological collapse of the worst sort.

In terms of drives, what would motivate people to do anything in an anarchist society?

What incentive, in an anarchist society, in a post-revolutionary society, would people have to do all the necessary activities, the work of the world? Let me start by saying that I don’t have all the answers, and that I would expect that different regions, or countries, or parts of the world, would try different things. I imagine one society might try to pay people for doing communal work by giving them tickets or something, and another part in another area might try to go directly to a totally free communism and rely upon the fact that people like to do things, like to keep busy, and don’t like to be called lazy bums by their neighbours. Which of these two versions would work the best, I don’t know, we would see. Or maybe something in-between; some people like Marx suggest that first there would be a society where you still gave people incentives by paying them for their amount of labour and then later on, as things got more productive they would just take whatever they needed off the shelves.

I can see different parts of the world trying that, although if we think of the potentiality of modern productivity, of modern machinery, you can actually imagine a society where the problem is not how do we get people to work but how do we find things for people to do. When you consider that it used to take 95 or so percent of the human species in order to produce food, and now it takes 2-3% of the population to produce enough food for the whole of society, we have the potential to do the same thing in terms of all basic goods.

The question is, do we want to do that, do we want to automate everything, do we want to decide that some things are best left to be productive handicraft and some things should be totally automated and some things should just be forgotten about?

I imagine an anarchist society would make all sorts decisions about that, but I don’t think that this is necessarily a major technical problem. We’ll try things!

You sound optimistic!

Well, the question of optimism of course always brings up

the famous quotation from the Marxist Gramsci: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Really, optimism is not the question at all: it’s not a matter of prediction, it’s a matter of commitment. I want to commit to this and I want other people to commit themselves to it. Anarchism is not only a better way for human beings to live and work together, it’s also necessary if the human species is to avoid massive destruction on a world scale. We need a better way of living, a better way of organising things and I believe that there’s a chance for that. I believe that history is not over. You can look out the window and see everything looking just the way it’s been, you know, year in and year out, but then every now and then something happens. Look at the Arab Spring, look at the recent struggles in the north of Africa.

Look at how in my lifetime, my recent lifetime, I have seen the collapse of the Soviet Union, of the whole communist dominated dictatorship and all the systems of Eastern Europe based on it. I have seen the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

I’ve seen the end of the fascist regime in Spain, in Portugal.

I’ve seen the Cuban revolution, I was much younger then and these changes haven’t solved the problem, the struggle continues on a different level, but these regimes looked like they were going to last forever and now they’re gone.

We can’t tell when the next upheaval will come and so sometimes I feel like a geologist who is telling people not to build new houses in California because at some point there’s going to be a great big earthquake. We know that tectonic plates are moving, that some day it will be the big one, and people say well, when will it happen, and the answer is I don’t know when it will happen.

It could happen tomorrow, it could happen in a century.

Except that when we’re dealing with human classes instead of geological strata we’re dealing with people who have free will, who have consciousness and change their minds and so forth, so it’s even harder to predict, I think there are signs of struggle, signs of the changes coming, but I do not know. I do not know at all. I am not even going to think about what’s most probable. But, it’s not a matter of optimism, it’s a matter of faith and hope and commitment.

So what should we do?

The main thing to do is to build revolutionary anarchist organisations. To recruit people, to build organisations, to clarify our thinking, to develop our theory, develop our practice, participate in the mass struggles of ordinary people, the mass of people, win over the most radicalised, the most advanced among, the greatest militants among the working people in society from all sectors of oppression, and build them into a revolutionary anarchist organisation in every country tied up on an international level.

That’s what I believe is the key thing to building our own successful worldwide revolution.

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"I and my truth; I and my faith ; and I for you, but without ever ceasing to be me, so that you can always be you. Because I don’ t exist without your existence, but my existence is also indispensable to yours." - Carmen Conde (Mujeres Libres)

WHAT’S BEEN UP WITH BOLO'BOLO?

Y

ou may have noticed that things have been a little quiet at bolo’bolo lately - we haven’t sent out a newsletter since December and rumour has it that we’re closing down in March.

We can now reveal that it’s not just January laziness that’s to blame for our silence: from the 1st of March we’re expanding, taking over the other half of our current premises, upgrading our food and drink offerings, getting more books in, publishing more of our own stuff, hosting more events and perhaps even selling some interesting vinyl. We’re also discussing listening evenings, an anarchist free school, an exhibition space and all sorts of other exciting things.

Some of our plans are ambitious, and our costs are going to be a lot higher, but we’re confident we can make it work...with your help! In the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity, we’re calling on everyone who is passionate about our little space and what it represents to step on board and get involved in whatever way they’re able to help us grow and sustain ourselves over the coming months. It could be as simple as encouraging friends to come visit or suggesting a cool event or you could help us raise much-needed funding or even donate a bit yourself. We’re also always looking for new collective members (we run as a non-profit collective where everyone has equal say).

Contribute to our next issue: anarchism and environmentalism.

Dear readers,

T

If you want to get involved, in any way whatsoever, get in touch at us@bolobolo.co.za, on Facebook, at www.bolobolo. co.za or, best of all, come visit us at 76 Lower Main Road.

We thank everyone who has supported our anarchist infoshop / vegan coffee house over the last year and look forward to sharing our space, ideas and projects with the ever-growing bolo’bolo community for many years still to come.

Together, as some dumbass politician once said, telling the truth despite themselves, we really can do so much more.

he next issue of Incendiary Times will, like the current one, have a theme. Although sustainable living and a passion for the natural world has always been a strong undertone of some anarchist currents (the early environmentalist and animal liberation views of 19th century geographer Élisée Reclus, for example), over the last few decades anarchists have taken up the question of our relation to the natural world in earnest, exploring the myriad ways we oppress and exploit not only each other but also non-human animals and entire ecosystems. In a sense, green anarchists take the old anarchist critique of hierarchy and domination to its logical conclusion, arguing that the way we treat the world and the way we treat each other closely mirror each other and that we cannot successfully eradicate oppressive social relations if we don’t also eradicate the old Enlightenment assumption that we stand above nature in some great hierarchy of being.

If you’re a long-time green anarchist, anarcho-primitivist or just passionate advocate of living more harmoniously with nature, we encourage you to contribute to our next issue. Opinion pieces, creative writing, poetry, art, debate and honest questions are all welcome and we’re happy to entertain critical perspectives on controversial themes like the green anarchist critique of civilization, veganarchy, the Earth Liberation Front or the romanticisation of so-called primitive and primal cultures.

Send your submissions through to incendiarytimes@bolobolo.co.za or get in touch with us on Facebook.

For the wild, the Incendiary Times collective

This month in anarchist history: The Greenwich Observatory bomb

O

n the afternoon of February 15th, 1894, in a story immortalised in Joseph Conrad’s book, The Secret Agent, 26 year old Martin Bourdin blew himself up with a homemade bomb on the path leading to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London. This was the time of the anarchist assassinations: the Russian Tsar Alexander II had been killed by an anarchist bomb several years earlier and, in the years to come, King Umberto I of Italy would be shot dead by anarchist Gaetano Bresci and, most famously, Emma-Goldman-inspired Leon Csolgosz would execute US president William McKinley during a public procession.

Bourdin, who had been a member of the anarchist tailor’s collective L’Aiguille (The Needle) back in his native France and was at the time of the explosion a member of London’s anarchist Club Autonomie, a hub for international anarchists, was immediately suspected by the police of wanting to murder innocent victims at the Observatory, but the case remains mysterious to this day; anarchists were enacting what they called propaganda by the deed against members of the ruling elite all over Europe, but none of them – and nothing within anarchist philosophy either – would have endorsed a random attack on members of the working class. Did the bomb go off accidentally? Did Bourdin intend to travel somewhere else in London with it? Was he intending to deliver it to a friend?

Dispose of it? Was he, as anarchists at the time speculated, set up by an agent provocateur? Whatever the case may have been, the fallout was severe: many foreign members of Club Autonomie were deported and the violent anarchists were, as they are until this day, demonised in the media.

While many of us may disagree with the oftentimes desperate bombing tactics of angry young anarchists like Martin Bourdin, and while none of us, I’m sure, condone the violent murder of innocent people, especially not in this country, with its sordid history of political bombings and assassinations, is it really that easy to dismiss propaganda by the deed as errand anti-social violence? When almost a hundred police stations were blown up or burned to the ground during the Arab Spring, was that not also a form of propaganda by the deed, albeit not anarchist?

When we support militant rural peasant uprisings against oppressive states or industrial encroachment, what tactics are we tacitly supporting? Suffragette bombings helped win women the vote (one step further than the vote, women, if you would be liberated), but today we

Martin Bourdin, unknown source

only speak about women’s lib petitions. When the blue people in Avatar blow up the bulldozers come to destroy their homeland, why do we all cheer for them?

have extreme consequences.

Perhaps we need to begin asking more difficult questions.

Some anarchists say that we can’t blow up a social relationship, that propaganda by the deed just leads to negative publicity and that the media will always demonise us. Other anarchists argue that we just need to make better bombs. Both positions are grievous simplifications and both

Written by Aragorn Eloff

COLOPHON Incendiary Times is typeset in

Garamond 10/12 with asides in

Akzidenz Grotesk; we've chosen

Memphis and its italic as our

primary display face, along with a few guest appearances by Mrs Eaves and her italic.

Our overwrought ramblings are printed on Envirotext using two colour risography.

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

GENERAL INFORMATION Incendiary Times is published by the bolo'bolo anarchist collective. You can find us at www.bolobolo.co.za. or on Facebook or Twitter. If you’d like to contribute to future issues or have anything else to say, email incendiarytimes@bolobolo.co.za

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