The CIRA Needs Help

The CIRA (International Centre for Research into Anarchism) in Lausanne (Switzerland) began its work of collecting and archiving the material published by the international anarchist movement in 1957. The CIRA gives militants and researchers the opportunity to consult archives made up of tens of thousands of volumes and is one of the most important places as far as the historical memory of anarchism is concerned. Today, the CIRA is in need of the efforts and solidarity of everyone if it is to get over a difficult financial situation and continue in its work. Within a short space of time, the CIRA must raise F100,000 or else it will be forced to close. For more on how to help the CIRA, see http://www.cira.ch

Info from A-Infos http://www.ainfos.ca/org/faq-en.html

Another Anarchist View of Venezuela's RCTV Situation

The Venezuelan anarchist movement is divided between those who give critical support to the Bolivarian Revolution, seeking to radicalize it, and those who are completely against it, seeing the movement as either purely capitalist or Stalinistic. The former is represented by FAL (El frente de acciones libertarias ) and the latter by El Libertario. (1) Be that as it may, I will let El Libertario speak for itself:

The Collective of “El Libertario”, Venezuelan anarchist newspaper, makes public its reasoned out position in the debate generated by the case of RCTV, in where the current government imposes a solution where we pass from the meanness that the capitalistic private oligopoly of TV to the dreadful that could be the monopoly of a bureaucratic and authoritarian state.

Since two decades ago, by means of our publications, ten Venezuelan anarchists have denounced and being against the vices and slants of the private media corporations as RCTV. This company had guaranteed its economic success combining evil oligopolistic practices, opportunist bonds with the current state power and the emission of “garbage-content” with the excuse of “giving the people what they want”. However, the problems that indeed this company represented are taken now as an
excuse for the imposition of a solution that means a repetition and multiplication of the same vices. In the 2007´s Venezuela, the meanness of a part of the private oligopoly is supposed to be corrected by the dreadful of a state monopoly, increasing the unprecedented insane advantages for the government and justifying the production of “garbage-content” with the condition of being “rojo-rojito” (red-small red) *1. In concrete terms: we do not have Miguel Ängel Rodríguez anymore but we will have the acclaimed Mario Silva, the presenter of the journalistic paradigm of the V Republic...

Continued See http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/ElLib.html

1. There are international ramifications. El Libertario is sympathetic to the Spanish CNT-IWA and FAL to the Spanish CGT. This split is over doctrinal purity vs. practical involvement in popular struggle. For the FAL see http://accioneslibertarias.blogia.com/

Venezuela's RCTV – Again!

Rad Geek http://radgeek.com/ disagrees with my refusal to get on the liberal media bandwagon and attack the Chavistas for closing down a pro-US mouthpiece. He also does not believe that class struggle is reflected in this event. He states;

Don't kid yourself. This isn't a matter of "the ruling class" attacking the anti-ruling-class government. The government is a ruling class: that is what governments do. This is a competition between two would-be ruling classes over which one is going to be dominant. I don't know about you, but I am an anarchist, and I don't give a good god damn about which gang of thugs wins, or about whether "revolutionary" or "counter-revolutionary" jackboots end up on the people's necks.

I think this a rather simplistic view of things. Yes, ultimately all states are the same – based upon coercion, hierarchy, power etc, but anarchists have always differentiated between reformist and reactionary states, and while never (well, rarely) giving support to a left-wing govt., have always preferred these to retrogressive ones. It is a matter of human lives. You would have to be insane not to see a difference between say, the Unidad Popular and Pinochet's dictatorship, or Labour circa 1978 and the Thatcher Regime which followed it.

The state is not a ruling class, although with capitalist or feudal governments some members of the ruling classes are directly involved in governing. But generally they do not, leaving this to their subordinates. Only in a state capitalist regime like the USSR can we speak of the state and ruling class being identical. With democratic left wing or progressive governments what we have is an attempt to mediate or stand between the classes, much in the manner that trade union officials do. Left-wing governments however, do not appear out of thin air, but are a result of class struggle. Left wing parties, whether out of opportunism or a sincere desire to reform society and better the working population, ultimately depend upon what happens in the streets. Chavez did not create the movement which put him in power, but rather was created by it. He would like to control it, but that is what social democrats seek to do, nothing unusual or unique there. The task of anarchists and revolutionary socialists is to radicalize this movement, not undermine it, or show sympathy for pro-imperialists and reactionaries. The goal is to make the movement escape from Hugo's hands and sweep away the corporate state in its entirety.

Thugs? Dissidents? Critics? Words have meaning. No one would doubt that Saddam or Pinochet were thugs, with their mass murders, tortures and the millions they skimmed off and hid in numbered bank accounts. Chavez and the leftist politicians around him have done none of these things. Their only real crime is trying to control an unfolding revolutionary situation. Hopefully they will be pushed aside or swallowed by this movement. Members of the oligarchy and the sheep who support them are not dissidents, or critics, but people who fear social change or the loss of some of their privileges. In my opinion, the Chavistas are far too soft on these scum, but that is understandable given their fundamentally social democratic viewpoint, which seeks to straddle the classes, rather than eliminate capitalism entirely.

This same type of rhetoric was used against the Sandinistas, I might add, and they did not turn into thugs or Stalinists as the Reaganites hoped. So too, the APPO in Oaxaca has been slandered as “thugs and vandals”.

And when push comes to shove I would rather have a Chavez than an Allende in power. Allende refused to arm the people, in the face of the impending CIA-backed coup. Chavez, I am certain, would not.

The world does not work according to wishes, ideology or theories. It is messy. It would be nice if all the left-wing parties in Venezuela disappeared and were replaced by millions-strong anarcho-syndicalist unions and an anarchist federation with tens of thousands of members. But that does not seem to be in the offing. Class struggle is being reflected through the Chavista Movement (for now) – though not the origin of such. If the Chavistas are overthrown in the foreseeable future, it will not be by anarchists, but the reactionary forces who will then murder thousands of people in an orgy of revenge. I suggest you read what Venezuelan class struggle anarchists have to say about the Bolivarian Revolution, explaining their critical support for it. See

http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/anarchist-analysis-of-venezuela.html

On the other hand, I do care a lot about how far a government can get away with using the force of arms to silence its critics. Which seems to be what's happening here. That's a big deal, even if the critics are real creeps. After all, they always come after the soft targets first.

Soft targets? Corporate TV and a CIA-backed opposition are soft targets? If the Chavistas were really against freedom of expression and wanted to pick on a soft target, they would shut down El Libertario, the anarchist paper which is highly critical of them, or harass the Trotskyists for that matter. See

http://porkupineblog.blogspot.com/2007/04/anarchists-and-ultra-left-mine-canaries.html

Venezuela's RCTV - Much Ado About Nada

Much has been made of late by corporate media – and liberals who ought to know better – about the Venezuelan government's refusal to re-new the license of a TV station. Everyone is bellowing about "censorship" and "authoritarianism." This station was instrumental in propagandizing for a coup d'etat against the Chavez government. One can imagine how a TV station that helped organize a coup against the American Government would be treated. The owner would do an eternity in Gitmo as a "terrist" and not have the wrist slap of license non-renewal. Hilarious hypocrisy, eh?

What is overlooked by liberal critics of this action is how the corporate media is used as an arm of the state, or where the state is controlled by folks the ruling class dislikes, as an agent of counter-revolution. This first came to people's attention in a big way in Chile just prior to the Golpe. The main newspaper, El Mercurio, and a major TV channel, Universidad Catholica, were both instrumental in fomenting support for a coup and spreading hate propaganda against the Unidad Popular government. Once again, in Nicaragua during the US-sponsored Contra terrorist attacks, the right-wing Nicaraguan media sought to undermine the Sandinistas and aid the US.

Liberal critics are upset with Chavez because they lack a class perspective, not realizing, or hiding from the reality, that an irreconcilable contradiction exists between the minority who control most of society's wealth and the vast majority who work for this minority.

The state need not be controlled by revolutionaries for the corporate media to go into attack mode. Any government that seeks to improve the lot of working people, no matter how moderate that party might be, comes in for similar treatment. Here in British Columbia, the social democratic NDP government of Dave Barrett (1972-1975) was pilloried by the newspapers for minor cost over-runs and a climate of hostility generated, resulting in the NDP losing power after only one term. When the right took power, billions were squandered on corporate welfare, but the media ignored this.

The corporate ruling class are consummate class warriors and their media are weapons in that war. While they demand a "loyal opposition", from the people, they do not expect the same of themselves. Any lie, any slander, any crime, is permissible in maintaining their power. Their only loyalty is to their stolen wealth and perverse will to power. Government, people, nation, and tradition ultimately mean nothing. We cannot expect any mercy from them, and should show them no mercy in return, not out of vengeance, but a sense of self-preservation. Note that this is not a call for violence, but expresses the need of the working people for united, concerted, forceful measures against the ruling minority, to advance our liberty and defend ourselves against attack.

If the Chavistas are to be faulted, it is not for shutting down an enemy propaganda machine, but taking so long to do so. Refusal to renew a license is also a somewhat wimpy and bureaucratic way of dealing with the enemy, far better to let the people occupy the station, throw the US-mouthpieces out in the street and run the show themselves. Working people have an instinctual way of dealing with corporate media, if allowed to. During the Quebec General Strike of 1972, workers seized newspapers, radio and TV stations. Those they could not occupy and run were simply shut down. Recently in the Oaxaca Commune, radio and TV stations were occupied and self-managed. This is the way to deal with the reactionaries.

There is no role what so ever for a corporate media in a free society. Only living, breathing, individual people have rights and freedoms, phony state-granted, paper constructs like corporations do not. The media should reflect the views of 95% of the population, not the interests of the wealthy and powerful 5% of exploiters and oppressors. The only way we can have genuine freedom of expression and freedom of the press, is for the people to own and control the mass media. This cannot happen via state ownership, one merely substitutes one giant corporation for several big corporations. The only free and democratic way is to turn the various mass media into a mass of stake-holder coops - democratic institutions run by directors elected from the various groups that make up the populace – by profession, social origins, political viewpoint, ethnicity and gender.

See also this excellent Narco News analysis of the RCTV controversy

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2007/5/27/162742/757

Believers and Non-Believers.

"Neither God nor Master!" is an old anarchist slogan first stated by Bakunin, and a mighty fine one. But how does this jibe with the many anarchists, like Leo Tolstoy and Dorothy Day who were believers? Then again, how about the anarcho-pagans and their Goddess? How can such two widely divergent viewpoints be reconciled? Or can they be reconciled?

I say they can be reconciled to a degree. First off, what does one exactly mean by "God" ? For Bakunin, God was a vengeful authoritarian monster, a purely imaginary and human creation modeled upon earthy despots – a tyrant of infinite dimensions – one that had to be overthrown to liberate humanity. As long as people were beholden to such a horrible fantasy, they were in mental and spiritual chains and thus incapable of liberating themselves from their human masters.

This cruel monster is the God of religious "fundamentalists" everywhere, and to this extent Bakunin was absolutely right. But talk to the anarcho-believers, and this is definitely not how they see God. For them the Divine is benevolent, agree with Bakunin that the Monster is a human creation and reject it. Tangentially, many proto-anarchist Gnostics saw the Old Testament God - the one who creates, murders, curses and destroys seemingly in fits of psychopathic or infantile folly, not as God, but as Satan.

Fine, we now have an evil God and a kind one, and the anarcho-believers follow the latter. Such a God is not a "master" anymore than the eco-system is a "master". It just is and one goes with it, or one does not. If you don't go with it, you are "punished" by your own foolish behavior and not by some Super Cop In The Sky, in the same way we are being "punished" by Global Warming for the stupidity of polluting the atmosphere.

Neither Evil, nor Master, but surely the God concept is still irrational and a purely human invention? Maybe our believer comrades have a screw loose somewhere in wanting to believe in this fiction?

To answer this query we have to turn to the German American libertarian socialist philosopher Joseph Dietzgen, (1) who discovered the underlying materialist aspect of the God concept. A dialectical philosopher, he sought the rational kernel within all thought and belief. For Dietzgen, the basis of all rational thought was the interconnectedness and unity of all existence, also known by philosophers as the Absolute, the Universe or the Totality. It is this unity of existence that is the materialist basis of the God concept, or as he put it, ...the all-perfect Being, with the conception of God, with the Substance of Spinoza, with the "thing in itself" of Kant, and with the Absolute of Hegel, has its good reason in the fact that the sober conception of the Universe as the All-One with nothing above or outside or alongside of it, is the first postulate of a skilled and consistent mode of thinking... (2)

When you think about it, the Totality of Existence or the Universe does have the classic attributions of God – it is infinite, it is greater than anything else, and since everything is interconnected and every action ultimately effects every aspect, one can even stretch the notion to include a degree of omniscience. The basic idea is not wrong, it is what people do with it. The reification and anthropomorphication of the Totality creates the God that atheists deny...the infinite, eternal, is not personal, but objective. (3) [my emphasis]

The Totality is not too far removed from the Tao, or for that matter, (even though they have become reified) Dharma, Karma and Rita of Hinduism and Buddhism. And is not The Great Spirit of the First Nations more of a Creative Force-Totality than the personal God of the Abrahamic religions?

Now, I agree that the folks who desire a personal God, let alone those who crave a Celestial Monster to bully them, will not find the Totality satisfying, and this problem I cannot even begin to resolve. But what it ought to do, is make non-believers more sympathetic to believer comrades and to realize that both of us share a certain spiritual-philosophical common ground.

1. The Joseph Dietzgen Page http://www.geocities.com/vcmtalk/jodietzgen.html

2. Joseph Dietzgen, Some of the Philosophical Essays, p. 274

3. Joseph Dietzgen, Popular Outcome of Philosophy, p. 437

This has been published in the Carnival of Anarchy http://carnival-of-anarchy.blogspot.com/

The Myth Of Idealism

I have been very busy of late, hence no postings for the last few weeks, but now things are back to normal...

I have never been an idealist. A favorite tactic of the upholders of the status quo is to drag out the old story of the person who was once "young and idealistic" but has now "grown up" and is now "practical and pragmatic" – ie ,who has adopted the conformist and retrograde ideology of the speaker. Another aspect, is to speak of socialists of whatever age as "left-wing idealists". It all boils down to seeing leftists as some sort of soft-hearted (and soft-headed) dreamers working for causes because of some inner need, isolated from the lives they actually live.

True, some people who come from privilege may see them selves as idealists, working out of guilt or compassion for causes which are not theirs. But in the main, most of us are driven more by a sense of enlightened self-interest rather than fuzzy idealism. This is something the reactionary cannot understand, indeed, will not understand. For the apologist of corporate power, blinded by a narrow and irrational ideology, everything happens in isolation. It does not matter if the corporate state drives masses of people into poverty, the tragic results are excused by claiming personal failure on the part of the victims. It does not matter if we destroy the environment in a quest for corporate profits, the negative consequences, such as global warming, are merely coincidental.

The socialist, the anarchist, indeed thinking people of any ideology, do not see reality in dislocated, isolated lumps, but, as it is in reality – as interconnected systems. Thus, what seems as "idealism", such as trying to preserve a forest 3000 miles away, organize a farmers coop in Africa or supporting a workers struggle in Mexico, is in fact, a form of self-interest. That forest produces oxygen for all of us, and the more poverty and oppression exists, the more likely we are to be impoverished and abused ourselves. The more sucessful others are, the more successful we might be. The old IWW slogan "an injury to one, is an injury to all" encapsulates this truth so well.

The reactionaries atomistic and false world view isn't their only (deliberate) misunderstanding giving rise to the myth of idealism. There is also their over-emphasis upon competition. Seeing the world in a dog-eat-dog "struggle for survival" mode does not make for an easier life. In most instances, it is far easier to get tasks accomplished in a cooperatively rather than everyone struggling against each other, not to mention being bullied into acting in a co-ordinated manner, seemingly the only other alternative allowed with the corporate mentality. Hence, those of us who opt for cooperation, self-management and voluntary effort are the practical ones and the "survival of the fittest" types are the practitioners of idealism, albeit a most perverse variety. (*)

(*) This is not to say that cooperation, self-management and voluntarism are always easy in a society where most are indoctrinated from birth into a short-sighted and narcissistic false individualism.

Violence and Social Change

These are some thoughts that I posted at the Carnival of Anarchy

1. I am in total agreement that individual and small group acts of violence such as attentats, bombings and vandalism serve no purpose, either in advancing the cause of anarchism or social change. In fact, such actions only hold back social change, and anarchism, to this very moment, has to endure the caricature of the mad bomber, due to the actions of a tiny minority more than 100 years ago.

2. Ideally, social change would come about without violence, and our approach, whether one that encourages or discourages violence, does have an effect upon the amount of violence that occurs. But our responses are only one aspect of the situation. We do not control the playing field. History and culture are major determinants. A society with a long history of violence and little history of peaceful change will not be positive ground for a successful non-violent movement. How much support the ruling class has, how great the level of disintegration of the old order determines how peaceful change will be. Mass movements involving violence, but in a limited manner, such as mass insurrections, or dual power situations backed by armed groups, may be the inevitable form that social change takes in most situations. We have seen this recently in Mexico with the Zapatista Movement which began as an armed insurrection, and the Oaxaca Commune where a certain amount of defensive violence occurred. In both cases, they faced an opposition that would not hesitate to engage in massacre, yet the movements engaged in minimally violent response.

3. Hence, barring a situation like East Germany where even the ruling elite's supporters abandoned the state en-mass, it appears the most we can ask for is a minimization of violence during mass social change.

4. This does not mean that pacifists ought to be criticized for their total rejection of violence, or that they can not, and would not, play a significant role in a social revolution. Even a revolution entailing a great amount of violent conflict involves much action that is non-violent in nature. Think of the Cuban revolution where the Directorate engaged in urban guerilla warfare and the 26^th of July Movement fought in the mountains. General strikes – a non-violent method – were also used and were an important aspect in the overthrowing of the Batista dictatorship.