Category Archives: Anarchism/Anti-State

Defending Jeff Deist From The Politically Correct Libertarians Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

Here’s the money quote from this article:

“There is something not normal about a person who can read a defense of the stateless society and decentralization, secession, and self-determination as means of achieving it and immediately think Nazi because of a reference to the obvious reality of blood and soil.”

By Dan Phillips

The Liberty Conservative

Certain quarters of the libertarian universe are in an absolute tizzy because Mises Institute President Jeff Deist invoked “blood and soil” in a recent speech. In the minds of some PC brain-addled libertarians, this is clearly an indication that the speaker was dog whistling to Nazis. This is both profoundly clueless and shameless PC grandstanding.

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The Land of No Men: Inside Kenya’s Women-Only Village Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Men and Women

Pan-Anarchism is for everyone, even abused African women.

Broadly

Where the foothills of Mount Kenya merge into the desert, the people of Samburu have maintained a strict patriarchy for over 500 years in northern Kenya. That is, until 25 years ago, when Rebecca Lolosoli founded Umoja village as a safe haven for the region’s women. Umoja, which means “unity” in Swahili, is quite literally a no man’s land, and the matriarchal refuge is now home to the Samburu women who no longer want to suffer abuses, like genital mutilation and forced marriages, at the hands of men. Throughout the years, it has also empowered other women in the districts surrounding Samburu to start their own men-excluding villages. Broadly visited Umoja and the villages it inspired to meet with the women who were fed up with living in a violent patriarchy.

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Marijuana company buys entire US town to create ‘cannabis-friendly municipality’ Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies

Pan-Anarchism for weed heads.

BBC

Cannabis jars

A company which makes cannabis products has bought an entire town in California and plans to turn it into a “destination” for marijuana.

American Green has agreed a deal to buy the town of Nipton for $5m (£3.8m).

The company will own 120 acres of land, which includes a school building, a hotel, mineral baths and a general store.

They also want to power the town with renewable energy.

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On Defining Anarchism and Egoism Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized • Tags:

Whenever I’m asked to define what an anarchist is I usually just say that if you get a 100 self-proclaimed anarchists in a room, and ask them a question, you might get 200 answers. It’s the same way people who are self-proclaimed Christians have argued over Christology for 2000 years. What I tend to like about anarchist theory is that it has so many parallel definitions in terms of what it’s essence is supposed to be, and some these may be only marginally related to each other. There’s also the way that different kinds of seemingly polar opposite forms of anarchism (an-coms and an-caps, an-prims and an-transhumanists) also complement each other in a kind of Hegelian manner.

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Why a nation is not like a house or a club – and why the difference matters for debates over immigration 2

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Immigration, Left and Right, Police State/Civil Liberties

Freedom-House-Cambridge-Maryland

From The Washington Post.

I’ve always thought that those were inept analogies for exactly the reasons outlined here. There are some well thought-out arguments coming from the restrictionist side, but those most certainly aren’t amongst them.

~MRDA~

By Ilya Somin August 6 at 4:18 PM

If you follow debates over immigration, it is hard to avoid arguments for restrictionism that analogize a nation to a house or a club. Such claims are ubiquitous in public debate, and are sometimes advanced by professional political philosophers as well. The intuition behind these analogies is simple: As a homeowner, I generally have the right to exclude whoever I want from my property. I don’t even have to have a good justification for the exclusion. I can choose to bar you from my home for virtually any reason I want, or even just no reason at all. Similarly, a nation has the right to bar foreigners from its land for almost any reason it wants, or perhaps even for no reason at all. All it is doing is exercising its property rights, much like the homeowner who bars strangers from entering her house. In the words of a leading academic defender of this theory, “My right to freedom of movement does not entitle me to enter your house without your permission… so why think that this right gives me a valid claim to enter a foreign country without that country’s permission?”

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Radical Municipalism: The Future We Deserve Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Strategy, Uncategorized • Tags:

By Debbie Bookchin

ROAR Magazine

Only a global confederation of rebel cities can lead us out of the death-spiral of neoliberalism towards a new rational society that delivers on the promise of humankind.

I am the daughter of two longtime municipalists. My mother, Beatrice Bookchin, ran for city council of Burlington, Vermont thirty years ago, in 1987, on an explicitly municipalist platform of building an ecological city, a moral economy and, above all, citizen assemblies that would contest the power of the nation state. My father is the social theorist and libertarian municipalist, Murray Bookchin.

For many years the left has struggled with the question of how to bring our ideas, of equality, economic justice and human rights, to fruition. And my father’s political trajectory is instructive for the argument that I want to make: that municipalism isn’t just one of many ways to bring about social change — it is really the only way that we will successfully transform society. As someone who had grown up as a young communist and been deeply educated in Marxist theory, my father became troubled by the economistic, reductionist modes of thinking that had historically permeated the Marxist left. He was searching for a more expansive notion of freedom — not just freedom from economic exploitation, but freedom that encompassed all manner of oppression: race, class, gender, ethnicity.

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Religious Agitation and the Limits of Principled Libertarianism 1

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Religion and Philosophy, Uncategorized

An interesting discussion of the church/state separation issue. I generally agree with the arguments made by this author.

By Millennial Transmissions

Libertarianism Without Adjectives

I’m not a very “principled” person. I am in the sense that my actions are guided by a number of principles defined loosely and amorphously, but I’m not dogmatic, I don’t subscribe to Kant’s categorical imperative, I’m not a utopian or an idealist. I’m a realist and a pragmatist before I’m even a libertarian.

I was recently considering a conversation between Penn Jillette and Glenn Beck on the subject of libertarianism. If you haven’t watched it, I urge you to, it’s very good viewing. Penn Jillette was one of the guiding lights that lead me out of my socialist slumber, and Glenn Beck himself makes some great contributions too. They don’t just discuss libertarianism; a friendly conversation about atheism also takes place. Glenn Beck raises an example:

“In Pennsylvania, a mostly Catholic Italian town had to relocate their nativity scene…it was outside of city hall…because of an outside atheist group, the ‘Freedom from Religion Foundation’, they came in and threatened legal action. Thomas Jefferson, in his writings, was proud that city hall was being used for meetings, church meetings on Sundays, four different ones. He thought that was not a problem…it’s not freedom from religion it’s freedom of…if I can put a menorah and everything else on the town square, why do atheists get so pissy about this…as long as it’s not the endorsement of one religion?” (lightly paraphrased)

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A Little Less Piousness, Please 5

A review of “The Unique and Its Property” by Max Stirner. Translated with a new introduction by Wolfi Landstreicher. Underworld Amusements.

By Keith Preston

An apparently controversial publisher has issued a new translation of a controversial book. The original work in question is Max Stirner’s egoist classic, originally published in Germany in 1844 under the title Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. This book was later translated into English by the American individualist-anarchist writer Steven T. Byington, and published in 1907 by Benjamin R. Tucker, the most prominent of the American individualist-anarchists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, under the title The Ego and His Own. All subsequent English editions of Stirner’s work have essentially been reprints of the 1907 translation.  However, Underworld Amusements has released a new translation by Wolfi Landstreicher under the title The Unique and Its Property.  Landstreicher has also provided an interesting introduction of his own to this new translation that touches on many of the most salient aspects of Stirner’s thought.

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Why Anarchism is Better Than Conventional Diplomacy Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized

By Carne Ross

The Guardian

Carne Ross pictured at Marinaleda, Spain, a cooperative municipality.

wrote Independent Diplomat shortly after resigning from the Foreign Office. I had worked on Iraq and WMD for more than four years at the UN security council, but resigned in 2004 after giving secret testimony to the Butler review on the Iraq war. It was a difficult time for me. My future was unclear; I had thought I would be a diplomat all my life.

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History repeats itself. We are coming back to the small, tribal states. Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized

By Helena Celestino

Political Critique

Celena Celestino: How do you explain the Brexit vote? What must Europe must to avoid losing more members states?

Zygmunt Bauman: Starting from the second sub-question: let’s hope that the mess that the Brexit adventure has cast and will be casting further on the (no longer…)United Kingdom may (just may) prove to be the best imaginable sobering concoction for those intoxicated enough to support the tribal “Euro-skeptics” in other member states of the EU.

But now to your first and fundamental question: for the millions of Britons left behind or fearing to be left at any moment without warning; for the victims of deregulated labour markets and financial forces, which have been let off the leash; of the reckless rising of inequality; of the fast shrinking of the ranks of the beneficiaries of the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher inheritance and equally fast multiplication of the mass of their losers; of the on-going descent of the once self-confident middle-classes into the condition of a frightened, disabled and unsure of itself “precariat” – the British referendum was the rare, well-nigh unique chance to unload their long accumulated, blistering/festering anger against the establishment as a whole: the system notorious for failing to deliver on its promises. In normal parliamentary elections, such a chance is severely constrained: rejecting one party, one part of the establishment, only to willy-nilly admit other to the same establishment who eager to manage it but who are  willing to do very little to change it. In the British referendum, however, all major parties of the establishment were on one side: the voters could manifest their indignation, disgust, resentment with and refusal to trust the whole establishment in one go: to the “order (or rather disorder) of things” as such.

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Anarchism and Democracy: Response to Shawn Wilbur and Gabriel Amadej Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right

By Wayne Price

Center for a Stateless Society

Shawn Wilbur argues that “anarchy” and “democracy” are completely distinct principles—philosophically. Philosophically, there is “no middle ground.” However, in actual living, there is “the likelihood that we might continue to have recourse to practices that we think of as ‘democratic.’ It is difficult to imagine a society in which we are not at times forced to…engage in practices like voting.” How often will these times happen?  Perhaps a lot during the “transition” from statism to anarchy.

Shawn seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. He fiercely rejects even the most decentralized, direct, participatory, democracy in the name of anarchism (philosophically). This is combined with a willingness to support actual democratic procedures in solving collective problems (practically).

Let us leave aside philosophical definitions, as well as considerations of what Proudhon and Bakunin really meant (although Bakunin’s anarchist association called itself the Alliance of Socialist Democracy). Does Shawn really disagree with me and other democratic anarchists, in praxis (integrating theory and practice)? He and I are both for as much freedom as possible, both individual and collective—rejecting the state and any other institution of oppression. We both want collective decisions to be as free and uncoerced as is possible. We both accept that there have to be some conflicts in which everyone is not satisfied with the outcome, conflicts which must be managed through democratic procedures of some sort (even if he compares this to cannibalism!). If we can agree on this much, then I am willing to accept that we have differences in philosophy.

Gabriel Amadej also bases her argument on principles developed by Proudhon.  Unlike Shawn Wilbur, her solution to collective decisionmaking is not through democratic procedures but through “the market.” But our societies are so intertwined and interconnected, economically and otherwise, that even decentralization will not end the need for working and living together collectively—and making collective decisions in our workplaces and communities—democracy.

Ex-Diplomat Carne Ross: The Case for Anarchism Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State

I am increasingly of the opinion that if anarchist, libertarian, and anti-state movement are to grow, expand and achieve influence in the future, it will be due to opinion leaders such as this, i.e. former members of the state who have “seen the light,” just as some of the most effective leaders in the atheist movement are former religious professionals, and some of the most effective people in the opposition to the “war on drugs” are former law enforcement. A prototype might be the way in which Ron Paul spurred the growth of the libertarian movement in the US.

By Andrew Anthony

The Guardian

If you were to play a game of word association with the term “anarchism” what would be the likely responses? Perhaps the anarchy sign, with the capital A over a circle. Black flags. The turn-of-the-century bombers immortalised by Joseph Conrad in The Secret Agent. Or maybe Johnny Rotten singing Anarchy in the UK.

What it would be unlikely to evoke is the image of an English diplomat, a veteran of the Foreign Office and the United Nations, a man schooled in the subtle arts of negotiation and persuasion. But that is the profile of Carne Ross, a former Middle East expert in the UK’s delegation to the UN, who is said to be the inspiration for a character in John le Carré’s novel A Delicate Truth. For Ross, as a new film shows, is now of one of world’s most active proselytisers for the virtues of an anarchist revolution.

With anarchism hardly top of the political agenda, that may sound like a limited claim to fame, akin to being the world’s tallest pygmy. In fact, anarchist ideas are taking root everywhere from Grenfell Tower to Rojava, the Kurd-run area of northern Syria.

Anarchism as a political outlook is rooted in the notion of direct democracy, a polity in which power moves from the bottom upwards. Many of those protesting at the Grenfell Tower fire argue that it was a symptom of a politics that goes in the other direction, from the uncaring top down to the unheard bottom. Ross not only wants to reverse what he sees as a failed kind of democracy, but believes the crisis of “neoliberalism” has created the conditions in which people are beginning to voice their disapproval of the status quo.

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Black and White, Unite and Fight! 3

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Police State/Civil Liberties, Race and Ethnicity, Uncategorized
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The extent to which most people react to a particular situation or event is quite remarkable and to suggest that such behaviour impairs their overall judgement in terms of lacking the fundamental ability to make an accurate and realistic analysis of the realities behind the political, social and economic issues that shape our day-to-day existence is an understatement. Human spontaneity can often be a good thing, but making knee-jerk assumptions without ensuring that one’s brain is actually keeping pace with one’s keyboard inevitably leads to the widespread dissemination of a congealed and distorted mass of useless misinformation that merely compounds existing problems and allows the Establishment to continue to divide us for its own ends.

I am, of course, talking about the inflammatory situation in America and the potential for racial conflict. Those people who enjoy this kind of thing – and there are plenty of them, on all sides – will be straining at the leash to add a little excitement to their otherwise dull and mediocre lives. Alternatively, those with a modicum of common sense will understand that the Black Lives Matter campaign began as a direct reaction to police violence against members of the Black community. That, in itself, is perfectly understandable. However, as a result of persistently trying to portray all Black people as victims and claiming that police repression is a result of ‘racism’, the group has done far more harm than good and much of their outrage – which, again, is perfectly understandable – is based on ressentiment and a lust for revenge.
Meanwhile, the Right’s predictable response to Black Lives Matter is to claim that most of the people who have been murdered by the police are themselves criminals and that they had it coming. Now, if it was ever officially decreed that instantaneous execution should be the penalty for criminality then most people in America, Black or White, would immediately be wiped from the face of the earth. Inevitably, therefore, by reacting to the racially-centred approach of Black Lives Matter in this ridicuous manner those on the Right inevitably justify the brutality of violent police officers and, thus, the institutional criminality of those who allow these murderers to patrol the streets in the first place.
It is debatable whether all Black lives matter, just as it is debatable whether all White lives matter, but it is a fact that the American state is killing people of all colours and creeds, both at home and abroad, and that the only solution is for people to stop fanning the flames of racial conflict by attacking each another and to unite against the global establishment. That means rejecting the crass victimology of the mainstream Black organisations and the ignorant racists of the reactionary right. Black and White: Unite and fight!”
                                                                                                                       -Troy Southgate

National-Anarchist Movement Conference 2017: A Summary Reply

Image result for national anarchist movement

By Keith Preston

Special thanks to Peter Topfer, Adam Ormes, Thom Forester, and Sean Jobst for their assistance in the writing of this summary.

On June 17 and 18, the first ever conference of the National-Anarchist Movement (N-AM) took place in Madrid. The process of arranging this conference was certainly not without its difficulties, and the organizers deserve much praise for their diligence in this regard. Originally, the conference was supposed to be hosted by the Madrid section of N-AM, who dropped out of the project shortly (and out of N-AM altogether) before the conference took place. This led to the irony of a conference being held in Spain where no actual Spanish people were among the attendees. Because National-Anarchists are widely despised by leftists who mistakenly regard N-A as a “fascist” tendency, security was a paramount concern.

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Attacking the Left from the Left Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Left and Right, Uncategorized

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“I believe that Herr Marx is a very serious if not very honest revolutionary, and that he really is in favour of the rebellion of the masses, and I wonder how he manages to overlook the fact that the establishment of a universal dictatorship, collective or individual, a dictatorship which would create the post of a kind of chief engineer of world revolution, ruling and controlling the insurrectionary activity of the masses in all countries, as a machine might be controlled – that the establishment of such a dictatorship would in itself suffice to kill revolution and warp and paralyze all popular movements.” – Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876)

Changing the World-for Real Reply

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized • Tags:

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“This is what we humans call Planet Earth. A big, blue-green mass of globular rotation with a surface of around 510 million km². Now, as you will observe, it is shown without borders or boundaries. Not because we National-Anarchists believe in the abolition of borders and boundaries, of course, the more the merrier, but due to the fact that we do not recognise the existing territories governed by the various nation-states or imperialist empires. We have turned our backs on their territorial designs and believe that fresh micronations must come into being; i.e. those formed by ordinary tribes, families and individuals. This is the beginning of a new world at the expense of the old. Not the planet itself, which we hope to replenish, but to the economic designs of the boardroom cartographers who are helping to destroy the great multiplicity that still endures. Look carefully and you will see the real world. Go ahead, take it. By all means respect the flora and fauna, but forget about ‘England’, ‘Germany’ and ‘Sweden’, countries which no longer reflect the ethnic or cultural aspirations of the peoples who settled and founded them originally. Discover your micronation, plant a flag in your own little piece of soil, surround yourself with those you love and live your life in the way that you choose. The world must become a rich and diverse canvas upon which to paint a billion organic landscapes and multiverses. In short, we must raise the periphery at the expense of the core.” -Troy Southgate

Adam Kokesh Asks Lauren Southern: “Why Aren’t You An Anarchist Yet?” 1

by • Anarchism/Anti-State • Tags: , ,

During her Anarchapulco speech in Acapulco, Mexico, Lauren Southern was asked by Adam Kokesh what parts of the state she deems necessary and why as well as why she’s not an anarchist yet.
Lauren explained that she sees pragmatism as a legitimate way to avoid globalist tyranny by outside forces. The deep state for example. As Lauren explains, she’s a libertarian nationalist and in her opinion, to tackle our current problems like the restriction of free will and free speech, nationalism is the best way to defeat this familiar enemy of the individual.