[IPSM] Anarchism Against Colonialism in 9 parts

[JJ]

Anarchism Against Colonialism part 1 - the West Papuan resistance movement
Anarchism Against Colonialism part 2 - Zapatistas versus vanguardists
Anarchism Against Colonialism part 3 - Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution
Anarchism Against Colonialism part 4 - Anarchism and the Black Revolution
Anarchism Against Colonialism part 5 - Native American anarchism
Anarchism Against Colonialism part 6 - Kabylie insurrection
Anarchism Against Colonialism part 7 - "primitive" anarchism
Anarchism Against Colonialism part 8 - Que Vayan Se Todos!
Anarchism Against Colonialism - further examples

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Anarchism Against Colonialism part 1 - the West Papuan resistance movement

http://www.eco-action.org/opm/wpau/02/
 
Tribal War NOT National Liberation
' "Flag raisings" and "independence movements" have become burnings songs lately in West Papua. Then people might ask, "Do they want a nation state called West Papua?" The answer is of course "Nein!" We instead want to be left alone as we have been and as we are. It does not matter if we are regarded as primitives. The struggle to free West Papua is not to take away one government and then replace it with a new government. We do not want to administer ourselves the capitalists "profit-making". It is a struggle between modern society and tribal people. It is a struggle between an ecologically harmonious life and an environmentally exploitative one.'
>From OPM/TPN Communiqué 1/12/99
 
As eco-anarchists we in OPM SG (Brighton) do not support 'national liberation' struggles. This is not ideological nit-picking. Most of the population of this earth live in countries 'liberated' by the struggles of the anti-colonial wave. Millions of courageous workers and peasants sacrificed themselves for their 'nation's liberation'. Mostly all that was gained was the freedom to be oppressed and exploited by an emerging native managerial class. 'National liberation' builds nation states while obscuring pre-existing and emerging class antagonisms with the ideology of nationalism. Indonesia itself was forged in the heat of a guerrilla war of national liberation against the Dutch and Japanese.
 
Often radicals in western countries project onto a 3rd world movement an image that is largely a reflection of their own ideologies not the aspirations of the movement itself. For understandable reasons of survival and diplomacy many 3rd world organisations help this situation by either saying different things to different groups or remaining vague enough to be all things to all people. Is this the case with West Papua?
 
Papua's mountains and jungles have shaped one of the most diverse peoples on earth. The million or so West Papuans constitute less than 0.1% of the worlds population but account for up to 25% of all known languages. Some tribes live far from civilisation (literally meaning 'the culture of cities') carving out a subsistence lifestyle. Others live in or near the Indonesian created towns and roads and have seen their land destroyed by mining, logging and oil exploration. In some places missionaries have made Papuans reject their culture and traditional (un)dress while in others the godbotherers still get attacked if they try to spread the 'good news'.
 
It would be ridiculous to claim that all Papuans have the same ideas about their struggle. In fact some do not know that the struggle, the OPM or Indonesia even exist. Those Papuans who know 'Indonesia' has declared war on their race and their ecology could not for a moment envision Jakarta, the New York Stock Exchange or the matrix of global industrialism. Some of the baggage of 20th century 'revolutionary nationalism' has reached the OPM - flag raisings, pompous sounding military titles, in the past even a minute amount of Marxism. On the whole however the OPM has more in common with American Indian resistance in the wild west than Leninist guerrillas in Kurdistan.
 
There is always a danger that the struggle against Leviathan turns people of the resistance into monsters themselves. Is there a state waiting to be born within the OPM? It is possible but we think unlikely. There are many factors playing against the OPM ending up as 'national liberationists'. The scattered OPM guerrillas have a number of leaders but no central command. They love the land and dislike cities. They demand an end to logging and mining, not just a share of the profits. No other nation states of any meaningful size support the West Papuans - if they get aid at all it will be from either Pacific indigenous groups or anarchist/ecological networks. The diversity of their tribal cultures and the geography of their land both negate state creation. They defend the traditional and largely reject the modern. Their prime demand remains - 'Leave Us Alone!'
 
However it is not inconceivable that a native managerial elite could be constructed from Papuans in exile, some within the OPM and members of the Papuan Presidium Council. Anarchist orientated elements in the OPM have been guarding against this possibility both in word and deed. The OPM is at root a tribal war of stateless peoples, anarchist peoples, against the destruction of their land by the global industrial machine. As long as that remains so it is our responsibility as radicals in the heart of the empire that attacks them to aid them in whatever way we can.
 
- OPM SG (Brighton)



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Anarchism Against Colonialism part 2 - Zapatistas versus vanguardists

This is Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos's reply to national liberation group ETA, attacking the idea of revolutionary vanguards and demonstrating the anarchistic aspects of Zapatista philosophy.
 
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/2003/marcos/etaJAN.html
 
I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet
 
Zapatista National Liberation Army January 9 to 12, 2003
To the Basque political-military organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna Basque Country
>From the Zapatista National Liberation Army Mexico
 
Ladies and Gentlemen:
 
We received the letter that, dated January 1st, 2003, you sent us through news agencies, newspapers, web pages, etc. We knew of your letter's existence on January 6th, but not in the complete version until it came out in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. This is the version we are referring to. The news came in the way all news arrives here. I was in the latrine, thinking about what would happen if ETA took my word and fulfilled my desires just as I would be completing necessities that are known as philosophy. I could already see the newspapers headlines the next day: "The Sup Dies, A Victim of his Big Mouth", and later the gun shot (it's a journalistic term, not what you think): "He left the shit he made" (ok, well the journalists who keep good manners and preserve the good customs could say "He left the poop he made"). And all the dailies would publish a centerfold, signed by the clearest minds and most elegant of Mexico and Spain that would say, "We always said that this 
uncle was a shit".
 
In the end, I was in reflections of this type (that Salater and the CIA enthuse about so much) and returning to the commandancia (Command) when the commandantes Tacho, Mister, and Brus Li (and not Bruce Lee like they put in the news) came looking for me and told me:
-We heard in the news that the ETA has responded.
-Oh yeah? And what did they say?
-They scolded you.
-Great, this is already an international sport. And how is it "they scolded you"? It would be "they scolded us", isn't it "from my voice speaks the voice of the EZLN"?
-No, they scolded you. This is the deal: They directed the scolding to you and the greeting and congratulations to us, said Mister. He added, Maybe someone sent the complete letter. This took a really long time, seeing that we are supposed to be "postmodern" guerillas with all the advanced technology and that we "surf" cyberspace.
 
With the letter finally in hand, they read it and later passed it to me with a sarcastic "Uy!" Tacho asked, "Why would they say "we know that you haven't always guessed right"? Omar responded, smiling, "I think it is because we didn't guess right when we put the Sup as the spokesperson". The side-splitting laughter should have been heard all the way in Basque Country. Comandante David came close to me and consoled me: "Don't take it seriously, they're joking." Comandante Ester tried to say something but the laughter got in her way. For a change, Comandante Fidelia offered to prepare me a tea and told me: "There has to be a response, about all the children of the EZLN". "Also about this", Tacho said and marked for me some parts of your letter with a pen that once belonged to the General of the Division Absalo'n Castellanos (General of the Mexican Federal Army, famous for assassinating indigenous and persecuting, torturing, jailing, and killing dissident voices; he was taken 
prisoner by Zapatista forces in 1994, judged and condemned to the punishment of carrying with him for the rest of his life the pardon of those who were his victims). It goes like this:
 
First- I'll clarify that the children of the EZLN don't understand everything without words, as you incorrectly suppose in your letter. We treat the children like children. It is the powerful with their war that treats them like they are adults. We talk to them. We teach them that the word, together with love and dignity, is what makes us human beings. We don't teach them how to fight. Well, yes, but only how to fight with their words. They learn. They know that the reason we are in all this is so that they won't have to do the same. And they talk and they also listen. Contrary to what you say, we teach the children that words don't kill but that yes it is possible to kill words and, along with them, the act of being human.
 
We teach them that there are so many words like colors and that there are so many thoughts because within them is the world where words are born. That there are different thoughts and we should respect them. That there are those who pretend their way of thinking should be the only way and they persecute, jail, and kill (always hidden behind the reasons of the State, illegitimate laws, or "just causes") thoughts that are different then their own. And we teach them to speak the truth, that is to say, to speak with their hearts. Because the lie is another form of killing words. In the language of the bat men, those that in talking orient their paths, the Tzotziles, to speak with the truth they say "YALEL TA MELEI". We teach them to speak and also to listen. Because when people only talk and don't listen, they end up thinking that what they say is the only thing that is worth anything. In the language of the Tzotziles, those that in listening orient their paths, to listen with 
their hearts they say "YATEL TAJLOK 'EL COONTIC'". Speaking and listening to words is how we know who we are, where we come from, and where our steps are going. Also it's how we know about others, their steps, and their world. Speaking and listening to words is like listening to life.
 
Second.- I see that you have a sense of humor and that you have uncovered us: we the Zapatistas, who have never had the attention of the national or international press, we wanted to "use" the Basque conflict that, as is evident, gets great press. Furthermore, since the day that we publicly referred to the political struggle in Euskal Herria, the positive comments about the Zapatistas, in the streets and in the national and international press, have been growing. In respect to how you don't want to be part of any type of "pantomime" or "opera", I understand this. You prefer the tragedies. About how you refuse to be the "next fashionable T-shirt on the main street in Madrid", well this spoils our plans of putting a Zapatista souvenir stall on that street (this is how we were thinking about covering the costs of our trip). What's more, I doubt someone would dare to wear a shirt with the ETA cause (and not because you lack sympathizers- you have them, we don't forget this- 
rather because if they make Batasuma illegal because it does not condemn the armed struggle of ETA, imagine what they would do to someone with a T-shirt that said "Gora ETA"). Apart from that, we didn't think we would ask for autographs or fight with anyone to share the stage with you. That the meeting would be something serious would be guaranteed because we wouldn't be the ones organizing it (we only specialize in zarzuelas [Spanish comic opera] or absurd theater), rather we proposed that Basque social and political forces organize it and make it happen even when it wouldn't be possible to have a debate with Garzo'n, whether it would be for obstacles from the Mexican or Spanish governments or from him or ETA.
 
Third.- "The public manner, without prior consulting", in that we put forth our initiative of AN OPPORTUNITY TO THE WORD is how the Zapatistas do things. We don't previously agree "in the dark" so that we later feign to propose things that were already agreed upon beforehand. What's more, we don't have the means, or the interest, or the obligation to "consult" ETA before speaking. Because the Zapatistas have won the right to the word: to say what we want to, about what we want to, when we want to. And for this we do not have to consult with or ask permission from anyone. Not from Aznar, nor the king Juan Carlos, nor the judge Garzo'n, nor ETA.
 
Fourth.-About us "lacking respect for the Basque people"; this is something that Garzo'n has also accused us of (which, consequently, he should auto-declare illegal because ETA is coinciding with his positions) along with all the Spanish and Basque right wing. This is due to the fact that to suggest giving an opportunity to the word goes against the interests of those that, from apparently contrary positions, have made their alibis and business out of the death of the word. Because the Spanish government kills the word when it attacks the Basque language Euskera or the Navarrorum tongue, when it harasses or jails journalists that "dare" to talk about the Basque theme and include all points of view, and when it tortures prisoners so that they "confess" to whatever will be useful to Spanish "justice". And ETA kills the word when it assassinates those that attack with words and not weapons.
 
Fifth.-In respect to the fact that ETA is willing to "do everything possible so that the EZLN is better informed about the Basque conflict with the French and Spanish states", we reject your disposition. We are not asking that anyone inform us. We are informed, and better than a lot of people suppose. If we don't express this information, which is also an opinion, it is because one of our principles is that the matters of each nation correspond to each people which is why we point out that would not speak at the forum "An opportunity to the word". But now that you are ready to inform, I think those that you should inform are the Basque people. We ask for an opportunity for the word. We should have directed this to various actors in the Basque conflict. We did it because we owe it, not because we are impassioned about writing to Garzo'n or ETA. In one form or another, from distinct points on the Mexican, Spanish, or Basque political spectrum (you included) they have taken this 
opportunity and they have talked (even though the majority of it has been to scold us). And so, even though it is grumbling and preaching, they are already giving an opportunity to the word. And this is the point.
 
Sixth.-The matter about representation. The judge Garzo'n claims to represent the Spanish and Basque people (and unites with the representation of the king, Pepillo, and Felipillo) and says that if I offend these said people then I offend all the Basque and Spanish people. ETA claims to represent the Basque people and if we offend them by proposing an opportunity to the word then we offend all the Basque people. I don't know if the Basque or Spanish people agree with being represented by one or the other. It is up to them to decide, not us. Contrary to judge Garzo'n and you, we do not claim to represent anyone, only ourselves. We don't represent the Mexican people (there are many political and social organizations in this country). We don't represent the Mexican left (there are other consistent leftist organizations). We do not represent Mexican armed struggle (where there are at least 14 other armed political-military organizations on the left). Nor do we represent all the 
Indian people of Mexico (there are, fortunately, many indigenous organizations in Mexico, some better organized than the EZLN). So we have never said that the stupidities that you have dedicated to us have offended "the Mexican people" or "the Indian people". They concern us and we don't hide ourselves behind those we supposedly represent who, in the majority of cases, don't even realize they are being "represented".
 
Seventh.- We know that the Zapatistas don't have a place in the (dis) agreement of the revolutionary and vanguard organizations of the world, or in the rearguard. This doesn't make us feel bad. To the contrary, it satisfies us. We don't grieve when we recognize that our ideas and proposals don't have an eternal horizon, and that there are ideas and proposals better suited than ours. So we have renounced the role of vanguards and to obligate anyone to accept our thinking over another argument wouldn't be the force of reason.
 
Our weapons are not used to impose ideas or ways of life, rather to defend a way of thinking and a way of seeing the world and relating to it, something that, even though it can learn a lot from other thoughts and ways of life, also has a lot to teach. We are not those who you have to demand respect from. It's already been seen how we are a failure of "revolutionary vanguards" and so our respect wouldn' t be useful for anything. Your people are those you have to win respect from. And "respect" is one thing; another very distinct thing is "fear". We know you are angry because we haven't taken you seriously, but it is not your fault. We don't take anyone seriously, not even ourselves. Because whoever takes themselves seriously has stopped with the thought that their truth should be the truth for everyone and forever. And, sooner or later, they dedicate their force not so that their truth will be born, grow, be fruitful and die (because no earthly truth is absolute and eternal) 
rather they use it to kill everything that doesn't agree with this truth.
 
We don't see why we would ask you what we should do or how we should do it. What are you going to teach us? To kill journalists who speak badly about the struggle? To justify the death of children for reason of the "cause"? We don't need or want your support or solidarity. We already have the support and solidarity of many people in Mexico and the world. Our struggle has a code of honor, inherited from our guerilla ancestors and it contains, among other things: respect of civilian lives (even though they may occupy government positions that oppress us); we don't use crime to get resources for ourselves (we don't rob, not even a snack store); we don't respond to words with fire (even though many hurt us or lie to us). One could think that to renounce these traditionally "revolutionary" methods is renouncing the advancement of our struggle. But, in the faint light of our history it seems that we have advanced more than those that resort to such arguments (more to demonstrate 
their radical nature and consequences than to effectively serve their cause). Our enemies (who are not just a few nor just in Mexico) want us to resort to these methods. Nothing would be better for them then the EZLN converting into a Mexican and indigenous version of ETA. In fact, ever since we have used the word to refer to the struggle of the Basque people they have accused us of this. Unfortunately for them, it is not like this. And it never will be. By the way, in the tongue of the night warriors "To fight with honor" they say "PASC 'OP TA SCOTOL LEQUILAL". Ok, "Salud" and we don't try to tell anyone what they should do, we only ask for an opportunity to the word. If you don't want to give it one, too bad.
 
>From the mountains of Southeast Mexico, in the name of the girls, boys, men, women, and elders of the EZLN.
 
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos Headquarters of the Zapatista National Liberation Army Mexico, January 2003
 
P.S. Before I forget (Tacho has reminded me) in respect to your final " !Viva Chiapas Libre!" (Long Live a Free Chiapas!): We don't ask for your respect, rather a familiarity with geography. Chiapas is a state in Southeastern Mexico. No organization or individual has posed themselves to liberate Chiapas (well, one time the Chiapan PRI, bothered because the Mexican federal army didn't dedicate itself to annihilating us), much less the Zapatistas. We don't want to make ourselves independent from Mexico. We want to be a part of it, but without leaving who we are: indigenous. So, figuring in that we struggle for Mexico, for the Indian peoples of Mexico, for all the men and women of Mexico no matter if they are Indian or not, the ending should say: Long live a Mexico with its' Indigenous!
 
P.S. "ACCIDENTAL".- Something should have happened, in the past, in the dates that I began and ended this letter.
 
Another P.S. It should already be evident, but I want to remark: I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet.
 
Autor(a): La Jornada / Translated by Laura Fecha: 
 
6:37pm Lunes 27 Enero 2003 






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Anarchism Against Colonialism part 3 - Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution

Postcolonial studies author Arif Dirlik has written a book (reviewed here:  http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/china-book-review.html) entitled "Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution", demonstrating the importance of anarchism in the revolutionary movements in China in the early twentieth century.  In this interview, he discusses the book.
 
The discussion below is excerpted from the following interview:
http://perspectives.anarchist-studies.org/2dimensio.htm
 
Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism:
An Interview with Arif Dirlik
 
>From 1905 to 1930, anarchists exerted a broad influence on Chinese culture and politics. They were at the center of the emerging social radicalism of that period and their activities left a significant mark on later decade’s revolutionary movements.
 
Arif Dirlik is among the few historians writing in English to treat the Chinese anarchist movement, which he has chronicled and analyzed in several works, most notably his Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. He has also written numerous explorations of contemporary problems in radical politics and theory.
 
I spoke with Dirlik on May 19, 1997. I asked him about Chinese anarchism, his experience as a radical social theorist in the university, and the future of his work. ~ Chuck Morse
 
Most histories of anarchism begin by establishing the principles of anarchism and then narrate the lives of those who embraced these principles. You chose a different approach in Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. You describe the Chinese anarchists as both subjects and objects – products and shapers – of the larger revolutionary process in China, and your book traces the dialectic between the anarchists and this process. Why did you choose this form of exposition? Is there something about the Chinese anarchists that makes this necessary or does it reflect larger methodological commitments?
 
It’s the latter. I believe in approaching concepts, theories, or political orientations historically. While some kind of notion of what one means by these concepts is necessary for analysis, establishing first principles tends to dehistoricize the approach to them. In other words, you establish first principles - as if they were true everywhere at all times - and then begin to analyze people in terms of those principles. This leads to ahistorical judgments, in my opinion, on "who is or isn’t a true anarchist" or "who is or isn’t a true Marxist?"
 
It leads inevitably to unproductive questions of orthodoxy -- unproductive both intellectually and politically. This also results in certain kinds of sectarianism, since it leads to a question of truthfulness rather than historical variation. So, this didn’t have anything to do with Chinese anarchism per se, but rather my approach to intellectual history and concepts.
 
Unlike Peter Zarrow in Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture, you de-emphasize the role of Daoism and Buddhism in the constitution of Chinese anarchism. Why is this?
 
There is a methodological problem here … There has been a long-standing tendency - I’m tempted to call it an Orientalist tendency even - to attribute everything new in China to Chinese tradition, which is another way of saying that there is never anything significantly new in China, anything that cannot be explained in terms of the past.
 
I have been a critic of this tradition in Chinese historiography. I believe that Chinese society was as subject to change as any other society, whether or not we are willing to recognize it. So, I was hesitant, therefore, to attribute the emergence of anarchism, Marxism, or anything for that matter, to some Chinese tradition or another.
 
The problem is that the Chinese tradition has been used to explain everything, from communism and Maoism to anarchism, and these days it’s fashionable to explain Chinese capitalism in terms of tradition. I don’t know how valid that is as an explanation, that notion of tradition, when it can explain so many different and contradictory things.
 
I came to study Chinese anarchism by tracing the origins of this notion of social revolution, and I believe that Chinese anarchism was a radical, new idea. There may be Taoist elements in it, there may be Buddhist elements in it, there may even – through Tolstoy – be Christian elements in it: nevertheless, my concern was with the new ideas that anarchism brought into the Chinese intellectual scene, chief among them this idea of a social revolution. So, I think this emphasis explains some of the differences.
 
Also, we need to make a distinction between the past as a determinant of the present and the past as a reservoir of ideas upon which people can draw to deal with the present. There is no question that some of the Chinese anarchists - Liu Shipei was the outstanding one among them, and then Shifu - drew on Taoism and Buddhism. However, this is not just the determination or constitution of Chinese anarchism by Daoism or Buddhism, but rather a two way, dialectical process. In other words, the Chinese past is being read in new ways with the help of anarchism and conversely there is a rereading of anarchism through Taoist and Buddhist ideas. What is important to me is the dialectic, and I stay away from the notion that the Chinese were somehow unconsciously under the sway of this or that tradition that then shaped their readings of anarchism.
 
You claim that the emergence of Chinese nationalism actually created many of the theoretical and political preconditions for the emergence of Chinese anarchism. This seems contradictory at first glance. How did this happen?
 
This reflects a particular appreciation of nationalism on my part. While we obviously are concerned with many of the negative manifestations of nationalism, it is a rather radical idea at its origins. It calls for both a new conception of state, a new conception of the relationship between state and society, and a new conception of the political subject as citizen. In that sense, it breaks radically with earlier forms of political consciousness that rested legitimacy in the emperor and rendered the subjects into passive political subjects, whereas nationalism called for active political subjects. Aside from the question of the citizen, nationalism’s notion of the relationship between state and society requires a new kind of accounting for society, both in the sense of who’s going to participate in politics, what are the qualifications for participation in politics, and what are the factors that militate against political participation. As I argue in my book, in some ways 
these changes lead directly to questions of social revolution.
 
In the case of China, there is another element. There’s at least some kind of historical coincidence between the emergence of a nationalist consciousness and a new kind of supra-national utopianism, if you like. It’s as if the building of a nation becomes the first task but somehow not the ultimate task; that once the nation has been built and society has been reordered, there would, in the future, be a way of transcending that nationalism.
 
It’s tricky ... I believe I described this as a counterpoint to nationalism. If you recall the parts in the book about Liu Shipei - and here the differences between anarchists become really important – there’s a feeling that nationalism opens up new questions that prepare the ground for anarchism, if you like, but also created new kinds of threats. For example, someone like Liu Shipei, could see correctly that for all the theoretical despotism of the Imperial State, nationalism promised far greater and far more intensive intrusion in society than had been the case under the imperial state. At this point, anarchism becomes a way of asserting the autonomy of the society against an intrusive nationalist society.
 
And, while I don’t want to generalize too much, this may be a fruitful way of thinking about other circumstances. This notion of nationalism - representing a new kind of politics, raising new questions, calling for new solutions, and playing some part in the emergence of socialism and anarchism - may be relevant to more than China.






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Anarchism Against Colonialism part 4 - Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Lorenzo Komboa Ervin is a radical black activist and former Black Panther.  He is also a committed anarchist, and has written numerous articles and at least one book criticising statist influences on black and anti-colonial activism.  His work demonstrates the importance and relevance of anarchism to black liberation.
 
His entire book, "Anarchism and the Black Revolution", is available online here, along with links to many of his articles:
http://lemming.mahost.org/abr/
 
What follows is an excerpt from his article, "Authoritarian Leftists: KILL THE COP IN YOUR HEAD!"
http://lemming.mahost.org/abr/authoritarianleftists.htm
 
II. The white left's concept of "the vanguard party"...
 
Such arrogance on the part of the white left is part and parcel to your vanguardist ideas and practice. Rather than seeking principled partnerships with non-white persons and groups, you instead seek converts to your party's particular brand of rigid political theology under the guise of "unity". It makes sense that most of you speak of "Black/white unity" and "sharp struggle against racism" in such vague terms, and with such uncertainty in your voices; or with an overexaggerated forcefulness that seems contrived. Another argument against vanguardist tendencies in individuals or amongst groups is the creation of sectarianism and organizational cultism between groups and within groups. Karl Marx himself fought tirelessly against sectarianism within the working class movement of 19th century Europe. He was also a staunch fighter against those who attempted to push his persona to an almost god-like status, declaring once in frustration "I assure you, sir, I am no Marxist". It 
could be argued from this viewpoint that the "vanguardist" white left in the US today is generally, by a definition rooted in the day to day practice of Marx himself, anti-Marx; and by proxy, anti-revolutionary.
 
Like your average small business, the various self-proclaimed "vanguards" compete against each other as well against the people themselves (both white and non-white); accusing each other of provacteurism, opportunism, and/or possessing "the incorrect line" when in fact most (if not all) are provacateurs, opportunists, and fundementally incorrect.
 
The nature of capitalist competition demands that such methods and tactics be utilized to the fullest in order to "win" in the business world; the white left has in fact adapted these methods and tactics to their own brand of organizing, actively re-inventing and re-enforcing the very social, political, and economic relations you claim to be against; succeeding in undermining the very basic foundations of your overall theory and all variants of that theory.
 
Or is this phenomenon part and parcel to your theory? In volume four of the collected works of V.I. Lenin, Lenin himself states up front that "socialism is state-capitalism". Are you all just blindly following a a dated, foreign "blueprint" that is vastly out of context to begin with; with no real understanding of its workings?
 
At the same time, it could be observed that you folks are merely products of your enviroment; reflective of the alienated and hostile communities and families from which many of you emerge. American society has taught you the tenets of "survival of the fittest" and "rugged individualism", and you swallowed those doctrines like your mother's milk.
 
Because the white left refuses to combat and reject reactionary tendencies in their (your) own heads and amongst themselves (yourselves), and because they (you) refuse to see how white culture is rooted firmly in capitalism and imperialism; refusing to reject it beyond superficial culture appropriations (i.e. Native american "dream catchers" hanging from the rear-view mirrors of your vehicles, wearing Addidas or Nikes with fat laces and over-sized Levis jeans or Dickies slacks worn "LA sag" style, crude attempts to "fit-in" by exaggerated, insulting over-use of the latest slang term(s) from "da hood", etc), you in fact re-invent racist and authoritarian social relations as the final product of your so-called "revolutionary theory"; what I call Left-wing white supremacy.
 
This tragic delemma is compounded by, and finds some of its initial roots in, your generally ahistorical and wishful "analysis" of Black/white relations in the US; and rigid, dogmatic definitions of "scientific socialism" or "revolutionary communism", based in a eurocentric context. Thus, we are expected to embrace these "socialist" values of the settler/conquorer culture, rather than the "traditional amerikkkan values" of your reactionary opponents; as if we do not possess our own "socialist" values, rooted in our own daily and cultural realities! Wasn't the Black Panther Party "socialist"? What about the Underground Railroad; our ancestors (and yes, even some of yours) were practicing "mutual aid" back when most European revolutionary theorists were still talking about it like it was a lofty, far away ideal!
 
One extreme example of this previously mentioned wishful thinking in place of a true analysis on the historical and current political dynamics particular to this country is an article by Joseph Green entitled "Anarchism and the Market Place, which appeared in the newsletter "Communist Voice" (Vol #1, Issue #4, September 15, 1995).
 
In it he asserts that anarchism is nothing more than small- scale operations run by individuals that will inevitably lead to the re-introduction of economic exploitation. He also claims that "it fails because its failure to understand the relation of freedom to mass activity mirrors the capitalist ideolgy of each person for their self." He then offers up a vague "plan of action"; that the workers must rely on "class organization and all-round mass struggle". In addition, he argues for the centralization of all means of production.
 
Clearly, Green's political ideology is in fact a theology. First, anarchism was practiced in mass scale most recently in Spain from 1936-39. By most accounts (including Marxist-Leninist), the Spanish working class organizations such as the CNT (National Confederation of Labor) and the FAI (Federation of Anarchists of Iberia) seized true direct workers power and in fact kept people alive during a massive civil war.
 
Their main failure was on a military, and partially on an ideological level: (1.) They didn't carry out a protracted fight against the fascist Falange with the attitude of driving them off the face of the planet. (2.) They underestimated the treachery of their Marxist-Leninist "allies" (and even some of their anarchist "allies"), who later sided with the liberal government to destroy the anarchist collectives. Some CNT members even joined the government in the name of a "united front against fascism". And (3.), they hadn't spent enough time really developing their networks outside the country in the event they needed weapons, supplies, or a place to seek refuge quickly.
 
Besides leaving out those important facts, Green also omits that today the majority of prisoner support groups in the US are anarchist run or influenced. He also leaves out that anarchists are generally the most supportive and involved in grassroots issues such as homelessness, police brutality, Klan/Nazi activity, Native sovereignty issues, [physical] defense of womens health clinics, sexual assault prevention, animal rights, enviromentalism, and free speech issues.
 
Green later attacks "supporters of capitalist realism on one hand and anarchist dreamers on the other". What he fails to understand is that the movement will be influenced mostly by those who do practical work around day to day struggles, not by those who spout empty rhetoric with no basis in reality because they themselves (like Green) are fundementally incapable of practicing what they preach. Any theory which cannot, at the very least, be demonstrated in miniature scale (with the current reality of the economically, socially, and militarily imposed limitations of capitalist/white supremacist society taken in to consideration) in daily life is not even worth serious discussion because it is rigid dogma of the worst kind.
 
Even if he could "show and prove", his proposed system is doomed to repeat the cannibalistic practices of Josef Stalin or Pol Pot. While state planning can accelerate economic growth no one from Lenin, to Mao, to Green himself has truly dealt with the power relationship between the working class and the middle-class "revolutionaries" who seize state power "on the behalf" of the latter. How can one use the organizing methods of the European bourgeoisie, "[hierarchial] party building" and "seizing state power" and not expect this method of organizing people to not take on the reactionary characteristics of what it supposedly seeks to eliminate? Then there's the question of asserting ones authoritarian will upon others (the usual recruitment tactics of the white left attemping to attract Black members).
 
At one point in the article Green claims that anarchistic social relations take on the oppressive characteristics of the capitalist ideology their rooted in. Really? What about the capitalist characteristics of know-it-all ahistorical white "radicals" who can just as effectively assert capitalistic, oppressive social relations when utilizing a top-down party structure (especially when it's utilized against minority populations)? What about the re-assertion of patriarchy (or actual physical and mental abuse) in interpersonal relationships; especially when an organizational structure allows for, and in fact rewards, oppressive social relationships?
 
What is the qualitative difference between a party bureaucrat who uses his position to steal from the people (in addition to living a neo-bourgeois lifestyle; privilege derived from one's official position and justified by other party members who do the same. And, potentially, derived from the color of his skin in the amerikkkan context) and a collective member who steals from the local community? One major difference is that the bureaucrat can only be removed by the party, the people (once again) have no real voice in the matter (unless the people themselves take up arms and dislodge the bureaucrat and his party); the collective member can recieve a swift punishment rooted in the true working class traditions, culture, and values of the working class themselves, rather than that which is interpreted for them by so- called "professional revolutionaries" with no real ties to that particular community. This is a very important, yet very basic, concept for the white left to 
consider when working with non- white workers (who, by the way, are the true "vanguard" in the US; Black workers in particular. Check the your history, especially the last thirty years of it.); i.e.- direct community control.
 
This demand has become more central over the last thirty years as we have seen the creation of a Black elite of liberal and conservative (negrosie) puppets for the white power structure to speak through to the people, the few who were allowed to succeed because they took up the ideology of the oppressor. But, they too have become increasingly powerless as the shift to the right in the various branches of the state and federal government has quickly, and easily, "checked" what little political power they had. Also, we do not have direct control over neighborhood institutions as capitalists, let alone as workers; at least white workers have a means of production they could potentially seize. Small "mom and pop" restaurants and stores or federally funded health clinics and social services in the 'hood hardly count as "Black capitalist" enterprises, nor are any of these things particularly "liberating" in and of themselves.
 
But white radicals, the white left of the US in particular, have a hard time dealing with the reality that Black people have always managed to survive, despite the worst or best intentions of the majority population. We will continue to survive without you and can make our revolution without you (or against you) if necessary; don't tell us about "protracted struggle", the daily lives of non-white workers are testimony to the true meaning of protracted struggle, both in the US and globally. Your inability or unwillingness to accept the fact that our struggle is parallel to yours, but at the same time very specific, and will be finished successfully when we as a people, as working-class Blacks on the North American continent, decide that we have achieved full freedom (as defined by our history, our culture, our needs, our desires, our personal experiences, and our political idea(s)) is by far the primary reason why the white left is so weak in this country.
 
In addition, this sinking garbage scow of american leftism is dragging other liberating political vessels down with it, particularly the smaller, anti-authoritarian factions within the white settler nation itself and the few [non-dogmatic and non- ritualistic] individuals within todays Marxist-Leninist parties who sincerly wish to get away from the old, tired historical revisionism of their particular "revolutionary" party.
 
This seemingly "fixed position", along with many other fixed positions in their "thought", help to reveal the white left's profound isolation and alienation from the Black community as a whole and its activists. Yet, many of them would continue to wholeheartedly, and retardedly, assert that they're part of the community simply because they live in a Black neighborhood or their party headquarters is located there.
 
The white left's isolation and alienation was revealed even more profoundly in the criticisms of the Million Man March on Washington. In the end, the majority of the white leftist critics wound up tailing the most backward elements of the Republican Party; some going as far as to echo the very same words of Senate majority leader Bob Dole, who commented on the day after the march that " You can't seperate the message from the messenger." Others parroted the words of House majority leader Newt Gingrich, who had the nerve to ask "where did our leadership go wrong?"
 
Since when were we expected to follow the "leadership" of white amerikkka; the right, left, or center without some type of brutal cohersion? Where is the advantage for us in "following" any of them anywhere? What have any of them done for us lately? Where is the "better" leadership example of any of the hierarchical political tendencies (of any class or ideology) in the US and who do they benefit exclusively and explicitly? None of you were particularly interested in us before we rebelled violently in 1992, why the sudden interest? What do you want from us this time?
 
Few, if any, of the major pro-revolution left-wing newspapers in the US gave an accurate account of the march. Many of them claimed that only the Black petit-bourgeosie were in attendence. All of them claimed that women were "forbidden" to be there, despite the widely reported fact that our sisters were there in large numbers.
 
"MIM Notes" (and the Maoist Internationalist Movement itself) to their credit recognize that white workers are NOT the "vanguard" class: yet because they themselves are so profoundly alienated from the Black community on this side of the prison walls they had to rely on information from mainstream press accounts courtesy of the Washington Post. And rightfully alienated they are; who in their right mind actually believes that a small, "secret" cult of white campus radicals can (or should) "lead" the masses of non-white people to their/our freedom? Whatever those people are smoking, I don't want any! I do have to say, however, that MIM is indeed the least dogma addicted of the entire white left millieu that I've encountered; but dogma addicted nonetheless.
 
I helped organize in the Seattle area for the Million Man March. The strong, Black women I met had every intention of going. None of the men even considered stopping them, let alone suggesting that they not go. Sure, the NOI passed on Minister Farrakhan's message that it was a "men only" march, but it was barely discussed and generally ignored.
 
The Million Man March local organizing committees (l.o.c.'s) gave the various Black left factions a forum to present ideas and concepts to entire sections of our population who were not familiar with "Marxism", "anarchism", "Kwame Nkrumah", "George Jackson", "The Ten-Point Program", "class struggle", etc.
 
It also afforded us the opportunity to begin engaging the some of the members of the local NOI chapter in class-based ideological struggle along with participating community people. Of course, it was impossible for the white left to know any of this; more proof of their profound isolation and alienation. At the time, despite our own minor ideological differences, we agreed on one point: it was none of your business or the business of the rest of the white population. When we organize amongst our own, we consider it a "family matter". When we have conflicts, that is also a "family matter". Again, it is none of your business unless we tell you differently. How would you like it if we butted in on a heated family argument you were having with a loved one and started telling you what to think and what to do?
 
This brings me to two issues that have bothered me since January, 1996. Both comments were made to me by a member of Radical Women at the International Socialist Organization's conference at the University of Washington. The first statement was: "I don't recognize Black people as a 'nation' like I do Native people."
 
My first thought was "who the fuck are you to pass judgement upon a general self-definition that is rooted in our collective suffering throughout the history of this country?"
 
She might as well join up with the right-wing Holocaust revisionists; for this is precisely what she is practicing, the denial of the Black holocaust from 1555 to the present (along a parallel denial, by proxy, of the genocide against other non- white nations within the US). Our nationalism emerged as a defense against [your] white racism. The difference between revolutionary Black nationalists (like Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party) and cultural nationalists (like Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam) is that we see our nationalism as a specific tool to defend ourselves from groups and individuals like this ignorant person, not as an exclusive or single means for liberation.
 
We recognize that we will have to attack bourgeois elements amongst our people just as vigorously as we fight against white supremacists ("left", "center", or "right"). The difference is that our bourgeosie (what I refer to as the "negrosie") is only powerful within the community; they have no power against the white power structure without us, nor do they have power generally without the blessing of the white power structure itself. Our task, then, is to unite them with us against a common enemy while at the same time explicitly undermining (and eventually eliminating) their inherantly reactionary influence.
 
The second stupidity to pass her lips concerned our support of Black-owned businesses. I pointed out to her that if she had in fact studied her Marxism-Leninism, she would see that their existence goes hand-in-glove with Marx's theory that revolution could only ensue once capitalism was fully developed. She came back with the criticism, "Well, you'll be waiting a long time for that to happen".
 
Once again, had she actually studied Marxism-Leninism she would know that Lenin and the Bolsheviks also had to deal with this same question. Russia's economy was predominantly agricultural, and its bourgeois class was small. They decided to go with the mood and sentiments of the peasantry and industrial workers at that particular moment in history;..seize the means of production and distribution anyway!
 
Who says we wouldn't do the same? The participants of the LA rebellion (and others), despite their lack of training in "radical 'left-wing' political theory" (besides being predominantly Black, Latino, or poor white trash in Amerikkka), got it half right; they seized the means of distribution, distributed the products of their [collective] labor, and then burned the facilities to the ground. Yes, there were many problems with the events of 1992, but they did show our potential for future progress.
 
Black autonomists ultimatly reject vanguardism because as the white left [as well as elements of the Black revolutionary movement] has demonstrated, it errodes and eventually destroys the fragile ties that hold together the necessary principled partnerships between groups and individuals that are needed to accomplish the numerous tasks associated with fighting back successfully and building a strong, diverse, and viable revolutionary movement.
 
The majority of the white left is largely disliked, disrespected, and not trusted by our people because they fail miserably on this point. How can you claim to be a "socialist" when you are in fact anti-social? How do you all distinguish yourselves from the majority of your people in concrete, practical, and principled terms?





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Anarchism Against Colonialism part 5 - Native American anarchism

Rod Coronado is a Yaqui (Native American) environmental and animal rights activist who is currently a prisoner of war of the US state as a result of alleged involvement in sabotage of capitalist enterprises involved in ecocide and animal torture.  His anarchism is rooted in his indigenous heritage, the two connected through a passion for the earth and the creatures that inhabit it.  Even from prison, he publishes a zine, "Strong Hearts", available from:
Rod Coronado Support Committee
3245 E. Patricia
Tucson, AZ
USA 85716
 
An article by Rod Coronado on repression in America is available here:
http://www.nocompromise.org/features/9rods.html
 
What follows is an interview with Rod Coronado.
http://www.satyamag.com/apr97/interview.html
 
The Satya Interview: Freedom from the Cages: Rod Coronado Part 1
 
Rod Coronado is currently in the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona serving a four and a half year sentence, having been convicted of aiding and abetting arson at a Michigan State University research facility, in which 32 years of data intended to benefit the fur industry was destroyed. He is the first Native American Animal Liberation Front member in U.S. history to be sent to Federal Prison. In a two-part interview, Satya asked him for his views on extremism and the future of direct action.
 
Q: What is extremism, and how do you personally define it?
 
A: Extremism comes in varying degrees. Most people associate extremism with religion or politics, but the extremism that most concerns me is environmental, social and spiritual, which I differentiate from religion. Extremism to me is not what we as socially conscious individuals do to fight a greater evil. It's what multinational corporations, governments and consumers do to the earth and animals that pushes the extremes of the earth's carrying capacity at the expense of other life forms and future generations.
 
Extremism to me is continuing to manufacture and produce products that we know are destroying our ozone and contaminating our water. Extremism to me is the tyrannical degree of police and military repression that citizens sanction and that results in the imprisonment, torture and death of any who stand in the way of progress. Extremism is also the distance we have allowed ourselves to become from the laws and power of nature which taught us how to live in harmony with other life for millennia. This is an extremism that allows us to label those trying to reverse the destruction of earth and animals as "extremists" while calling the activities of the destroyers legitimate, and those responsible law-abiding citizens. I consider myself anti-extremist in every sense of the word because extremism tips the scales of all life on earth precariously close to disaster.
 
Q: How far should one be willing to press for a cause or belief system?
 
A: It depends on the cause and belief. Capitalism and communism are causes and beliefs, as are most institutionalized religions which, I believe, have been pressed so far, to the point that those opposing them and striving to maintain spiritual or cultural autonomy are persecuted. If you believe in something or rally behind a cause, the best you can do is to embody your principles and beliefs in your own life. People recognize sincerity and true faith. Nothing is gained by forcing someone to believe in something. If your cause or belief is true and does not negatively impact the balance of nature, then it is good for the earth, and most likely good for you and all other life.
 
When the balance of life on earth is negatively impacted by the actions of others, whose cause and belief come at the expense of ecological integrity and the human spirit, and which cause the unnecessary suffering and exploitation of other life striving to live in harmony with us, then we are justified in taking action that would restore balance and preserve life and freedom. We are justified as long as that action is only to the degree of righting wrongs and obtaining true justice, rather than turning into a cause or belief which obstructs the path to peace and harmony with all Creation. Freedom does not mean you have the right to exploit or abuse others. Using physical force to prevent an atrocity has always been commendable throughout history, when fighting a greater evil. If we can direct that force specifically against the tools and machines of life's destruction, with the goal of also liberating the oppressed without causing harm or loss of life, then there can be no 
truer path for those fighting tyrannical oppression.
 
Q: Should we blame others for not being radical enough?
 
A: Once again, all we can do is make an example out of our lives. Rather than pointing fingers at others, we should be asking ourselves if we're radical enough. Being radical is not about using more and more force. I don't like the world "radical," as the only radicals are those we're trying to stop from destroying the planet. So, the question is whether we are conservative enough. It's not just about what we eat, but what we consume. Paper made from forests, plastics which create dioxins, electricity generated by damming rivers, burning coal and nuclear reactors, agricultural products like cotton and vegetables which use pesticides and insecticides being introduced into the environment. It's a question of living as simply as possible with minimal impact on the earth and animals. It's about asking ourselves whether we're paying the rent -- not to landlords, but to the earth. As citizens of a country that consumes most of the earth's resources and creates most of its 
pollution, we should be fighting from within the belly of the beast to stop the destruction the U.S. is responsible for here and abroad. We do that by not blaming others, but by blaming ourselves for supporting evil industries and politicians with our money and our votes; by educating ourselves and others about every impact of our actions. From realizing that buying coffee is helping to steal lands from indigenous peoples living in poverty because they must grow cash crops rather than food, to realizing that driving a car is supporting the destruction of habitat in the quest for oil and sponsoring wars in other countries, we must measure our own impact on the earth rather than just on animals, and then pay the rent by rescuing animals, smashing windows, and striking the evil empire where it hurts the most: in the pocketbook.
 
Q: When is violence acceptable?
 
A: That depends on the definition of violence. I define violence as physical force directed at a sentient being or natural creation. I do not believe that violence can be committed against something inanimate whose sole purpose is the destruction of innocent life and natural creation. The violence that is legally committed against animals in labs, fur and factory farms, and in the wild is totally unjustified and unacceptable, as is the violence committed when the remaining wild places are destroyed. The violence committed against women, people of color, indigenous peoples, and anyone who opposes the loss of human rights and freedoms to governments and corporations, is especially despicable. It prevents those with a close relationship with the earth from displaying the path of harmony.
 
Self-defense is not violence. Should anyone defend themselves from violence with violence, then I believe it is acceptable. But as a movement whose fundamental belief is respect and reverence for all life, there is no place for violence as a means to preserve life, especially when we have yet to exhaust the avenues of non-violent, illegal direct action against the tools and institutions of life's destruction.
 
Q: What do you think is the future for direct action movements like Earth First! (EF!), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA)?
 
A: For Earth First! I see a wider body of support as more and more people become disenchanted with mainstream environmentalism. I also see Earth First! gaining more respectability, which I don't necessarily think is a good thing. When any movement gains respectability it tends to want to retain it by focusing on the more legitimate and legal avenues for obtaining its goals and objectives. I've always loved EF! because of its primitive edge and its no compromising support of illegal direct action, "monkeywrenching." But now EF! sometimes seems to become swallowed up by the corporations they oppose by placing too much faith in media-orchestrated actions rather than in actions that cost corporation profits. Still, I have total faith and allegiance to EF! and have incredible hope for the young warriors they attract who must face their own trials and tribulations before deciding whether to place their faith in the powers of earth, or the powers of the media, courts and Congress. 
For the Animal Liberation Front, I see an escalation in its attacks on institutions of earth and animal abuse, and a greater emphasis on economic sabotage as police repression and physical security prevent the more popular tactics like live animal liberations. I see the ALF being treated in the future as the domestic terrorist organization the Justice Department has labeled it, meaning wider persecution of anyone who publicly supports ALF. Basically, I see the ALF leading other direct action underground movements to defend earth and animals into the 21st Century. I believe that in order to survive, the ALF must learn the lessons of their British counterparts, hopefully without the costs of imprisoned warriors. If the ALF can only grow through continued imprisonment of its members, then it is everyone else's obligation to ensure that strong prisoner support exists for them. Either way, illegal, direct action will continue to grow as more and more people realize that 
governments and corporations whose very existence is based on animal abuse will never afford legal protection to animals. If we truly believe in animal liberation, then we better be ready to break society's laws and do some time for it if necessary.
 
For PETA, I see the mainstreaming of animal liberation. Where other large organizations compromise their more "radical" beliefs to gain acceptance, I have yet to see PETA compromise in this fashion. They have pushed animal rights into every home, and have brought the idea of respect and reverence for animals past the stage of ridicule and into the borders of acceptance. They also have never shied away from recognizing or supporting their troops -- the ALF -- which I think is vital. Above-ground organizations like PETA and EF! have an obligation to support illegal, direct action because so many of the things both groups believe in can only be won by breaking the law. Very rarely if ever have struggles for justice and liberation been won without breaking establishment laws.
 
Q: Do you think there is a "too far" that can be reached in defending animals and the environment?
 
A: It depends on how far humans are willing to go to destroy earth and animals. Right now, I have complete faith that we can stem the tide of animal abuse and ecological destruction with non-violent illegal, direct action should all other tactics fail (which they are). But when we are talking about the preservation of our life-support system, the earth, and prevention of the extinction of literally thousands of species which play an integral role in a healthy environment, then allowing that to happen is what has gone too far. To stop it whatever we are forced to now may seem extreme, but will be appreciated by future generations who will be able to live and survive thanks to this generation's actions on behalf of earth and animals.
 
The question is whether we've already gone too far by allowing governments and corporations to play Russian roulette with the fate of this planet and our future without taking greater personal responsibility to stop it at all costs. We, as citizens of earth, and as the guardians of the planet for future, generations can never go too far in preserving earth and the many Nations of Life upon it. Such is our obligation.
 
You can write to Rod Coronado at 03895-000, FCI Unit SW, 8901 S. Wilmot Rd., Tucson, AZ 85706.






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Anarchism Against Colonialism part 6 - Kabylie insurrection

The insurrection in Algeria in Spring 2001 occurred almost entirely through autonomous direct action on a broadly anarchist model.
 
http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/ht/algeria.html
 
INSURRECTION IN ALGERIA
 
It’s not at all surprising that news of the insurrection that has been going on in Algeria since April 2001 has not been reported in US media. I learned about it through an Italian anarchist website: www.guerrasociale.org.
The uprising was provoked when police murdered a high school boy. On April 18, 2001, riots began in Beni-Douala, an area of Tizi Ouzou in the region of Kabylia about 70 miles east of Algiers. Riots and demonstrations quickly spread to other villages in the region. Rioters attacked police stations and troop detachments with stones, molotov cocktails and burning tires, and set fire to police vehicles, government offices and courts. Government attempts to quell the uprising failed. From the beginning, the rebels showed an unwillingness to negotiate and refused all representation. By the end of April, targets of collective rage broadened to include tax offices, all sorts of government offices and the offices of political parties. Rebels blockaded the main roads and looted government buildings and other property of the rulers. By the end of a week the entire region of Kabylia was in open insurrection. The state sent in its guard dogs to repress the revolt, leading to open 
conflicts with deaths and injuries on both sides.
By the end of the first week of May, the insurgent movement began to organize itself in village and neighborhood assemblies (the aarch) that coordinate their activities through a system of apparently mandated and revocable delegates who would be bound to a very interesting “code of honor” a few months later. The only political movement that might have had a chance of recuperating the revolt, the Front of Socialist Forces (FFS) very quickly showed its true colors by offering to aid the president of Algeria, Bouteflika, in organizing a “democratic transition”.
Since then the coordination of aarch has been organizing demonstrations, general strikes, actions against the police and the elections.
By mid-June, the rebellion had spread beyond the borders of Kabylia, and in Kabylia state control had been nearly completely routed. Offices of the national police were thoroughly devastated, and the police themselves were shunned. Because no one in the region would sell them food and other needs, the government was forced to ship in supplies to them by helicopter and heavily armed convoys.
At the end of June, the coordination of the aarch refused to meet with a government representative, clearly expressing the attitude of the insurgents. In mid-July the coordination of Tizi Ouzou adopted the “code of honor” which required delegates to pledge themselves “not to carry forward any activities or affairs that aim to create direct or indirect links to power and its collaborators”, “not to use the movement for partisan ends nor to drag it into electoral competitions or any other possibility for the conquest of power”, “not to accept any political appointments in the institutions of power” among other things. This pledge was put to the test almost immediately when unionists and partisans of the left tried to infiltrate the movement for their own ends. The failure of this opportunistic attempt to hijack the movement was made evident during a general strike on July 26, when demonstrators chanted: “Out with the traitors! Out with the unions!”
Huge demonstrations continued. In mid-August, the insurgents banned all officials from the Soummam valley. This was not just due to a government celebration that was to occur there, but also because government officials had begun to contact certain unidentified delegates of the coordination who supported the idea of negotiation. Rather than weakening the struggle this government ploy led the insurgents to ban all government officials from Kabylia. The minister of the Mujaheedin had to cancel a trip to Tiai Ouzou, and the minister of the interior was greeted with a rain of stones when he came to install a new prefect.
At the beginning of October, the government banned a demonstration that was intended to present a list of demands called the Platform of El-Kseur to president Bouteflika. A massive array of counter-insurgency detachments was used to block the demonstrators. These demands mainly deal with relief of the immediate effects of government repression against the uprising (end of judicial action against insurgents, release of prisoners, etc.), but also include the demand for the immediate departure of all police brigades from the region. The ban of this demonstration provoked further conflicts between insurgents and the forces of order. On October 11, the inter-wilayas coordination (of the aarch and other self-organized assemblies and committees) decided that they would no longer submit the demands of their Platform to any state representative, that the demands were absolutely non-negotiable and that anyone who chose to accept dialogue with the government would be banished from the 
movement. Disobedience is total: taxes and utility bills are not paid, calls to military service are ignored, the upcoming elections are refused.
On December 6, some self-styled “delegates” claiming to represent the aarch planned to meet with the head of government. In protest a general strike was called in Kabylia. Sit-ins blockading police barracks turned into violent conflicts throughout the region, some of which lasted for three days. Offices of the gas company, of taxes and of the National Organization of the Mujaheedin were burned in Amizour. In El Kseur, there were looting raids On a court and a judge’s house.
The struggle continued throughout December and January with protests and road blockades. It intensified when a delegation from the aarch was arrested in front of the UN office in Algiers on February 7, 2002. On February 12, a general strike was called throughout Kabylia to protest the reappearance of police on the streets. The entire region was shut down. People assembled in front of the police barracks and there were conflicts.
At the end of February, president Bouteflika announced that there would be elections on May 30. The movement responded by confiscating and burning ballot boxes and administrative documents. At the beginning of March it called for a boycott of the elections throughout Algeria.
Bouteflika tried to appease the rebels by offering compromises which were refused and by moving police forces out of two major cities, But he followed this with mass arrests of delegates of the aarch. On March 25, security forces attacked a theater in Tizi Ouzou that was being used as the office of the citizen coordination and 21 delegates were arrested. After police searches many other delegates went into hiding. Soon conflicts broke out. The government issued 400 arrest warrants against delegates, leading to further demonstrations. Conflicts continued throughout April.
Despite government repression, the anti-electoral campaign of the aarch went forward in May with calls to action, marches and the destruction of ballot boxes. Students demanding the release of prisoners greeted president Bouteflika with a rain of stones when he went to the university of Algiers on May 20. The next day the students occupied the university demanding the release of their comrades.
On May 30, election day, the entire region of Kabylia had less than a 2% voter turn-out. People showed their preference for direct action by barricading the streets, occupying the offices of the prefectures and the municipalities, and strewing the public ways with the remains of burned ballot boxes. A general strike paralyzed the region. There were conflicts with the police and election offices were attacked and destroyed. In the whole of Algeria, voter turnout was less than 50%, showing that the refusal of elections had spread beyond the borders of Kabylia.
All through June, rebellion and social conflict continued through out Algeria. On June 19, the government again tried to derail the movement, authorizing movement prisoners to meet to discuss a proposal of a government emissary arranged through the mediation of two supposed delegates. The movement disowned these delegates, and the prisoners refused this government ruse to pressure the movement into negotiation over the Platform of El Kseur in exchange for the provisional release of those arrested. Instead the prisoners issued a communiqué conforming their confidence in the coordination and their unwillingness to negotiate the demands of their Platform or their release and that of all the other prisoners.
By August, violent conflicts and an ultimatum issued by the movement forced Bouteflika to pardon all the arrested delegates of the aarch. Upon release, the delegates declared that the struggle would continue.
In October another election was called. The movement met it with a general strike and demonstrations. There were conflict with the police everywhere. Once again, about half of the eligible Algerians boycotted the elections. In Kabylia, in spite of the participation of the FFS in the elections, 90% of those eligible refused to participate in the elections.
This insurrection is of great interest to anarchists. There are no leaders, no parties, no charismatic spokespeople and no hierarchical or representative organizations of any sort behind it. It has been self-organized by those in struggle in a horizontal method and with specific guidelines to prevent the possibility of recuperation by parties, unions, politicians or other unscrupulous individuals, and these guidelines have been actively reinforced by those in struggle. The movement is equally against all of the contenders for power: the military, the government, Islamic fundamentalist, the left, the unions. It has successfully kept police “quarantined” to their barracks for long periods of time. It has carried out two election boycotts. It has forced the government to release arrested comrades. And it has carried out the daily tasks of an ongoing insurrectionary struggle. All through autonomous direct action.
Here is a statement of solidarity issued by some Italian comrades:
 
“Insurgent Algerians,
“The struggle that you have been carrying forward against all society’s rulers since April 2001 is an example for us and for all the exploited. Your uninterrupted rebellion has shown that the terrorism of the state and the integralist groups, allied for a decade in the slaughter of the poor to the benefit of the rich, has not lessened your ferocity. You have understood that faced with the infectious disease of military dictatorship and the plague of Islamic fundamentalism, the only choice is open revolt. In the union of two capitalisms, the liberal one that privatizes and fires people in mass and the socialist-bureaucratic one that tortures and kills, you have responded with the unity of a generalized struggle.
“We imagine what it means for a state and its police to find themselves facing a mass of rebels whose posters warn: ‘You cannot kill us, we are already dead’ as occurred in June 2001.But we can barely imagine what it means for a region with a few million inhabitants, like Kabylia, where the police are barricaded in their barracks, ‘quarantined’ by the insurgent population; in which elections are deserted in mass, the ballot boxes ond the offices of political parties set on fire; in which the city halls are deserted and boarded up.
“The politicians who sit in the parliament with zero votes obtained have revealed the lie of representative democracy and the arrogance of a power that is increasingly mafia-like to all. You have managed to shatter the plans of anyone who tried to give your struggle a regionalist or particularist image.
“The universal content of your demands – such as that of the immediate and non-negotiable withdrawal of the police – can no longer be hidden.
“The autonomy of your movement, organized horizontally in the aarch (village assemblies), can only unite all the leaders of Algerian society and their accomplices in other countries against you. A revolt without leaders and without parties won’t even find favor among the professionals of international solidarity who are deprived, in this case, of charismatic figures or sub-commandantes to idealize. Up to now, you have only been able to count on yourselves. And the repression presses hard, with hundreds of deaths, thousands of injuries, people disabled for life, so many missing, the torture and arrest of many delegates of the aarch and many demonstrators. With prisoners on hunger strike and many insurgents forced to go underground.
“Now the radicality of what you have already done finds other accomplices in the world, in order to break the information embargo and the murderous violence of the state. The bullets that strike are also given by the Italian government and Italian industries, Eni in the lead. The weapons that are used against your demonstrations are often of Italian manufacture.
 
“COMRADES, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. MAY YOUR REVOLT EXPLODE EVERYWHERE.
 
“Some friends of the Aarch”





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Anarchists Against Colonialism part 7 - "primitive" anarchism

Anthropologists such as Howard Barclay, Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres have demonstrated a strong anarchist current in so-called "primitive" societies (indigenous peoples close to nature).  Barclay's book "The Anthropology of Anarchism" demonstrates the pervasiveness of anarchism throughout hunter-gatherer societies, while Clastres' "Society Versus the State" suggests that "primitive" societies contain an inherent hostility towards the emergence of state-forms, which they proactively attempt to ward off.
 
The Russian anthropologist Peter Kropotkin became one of the founders of classical anarchism, in large part because of his observations of non-state forms of mutual aid in various societies.  The chapter of "Mutual Aid" dealing with peoples close to nature is available here:
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/mutaidch3.html
 
Anarcho-primitivist authors have gone further in attacking the colonising logic of industrial society and celebrating peoples close to nature as an inspiration in attacking capitalism.  Many primitivist works are available at www.primitivism.com.
 
What follows is an exemplary piece by leading primitivist author Bob Black, attacking the logic of work in capitalist society and contrasting it with the organisation of productive activity as a ludic activity in hunter-gatherer societies.
 
http://www.primitivism.com/primitive-affluence.htm
 
Primitive Affluence
A Postscript to Sahlins
 
Bob Black
 
(This piece originally appeared in Friendly Fire, copyright 1992 Bob Black, published by Autonomedia)
 
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins is an essay of wide-ranging erudition whose persuasive power largely derives from two extended examples:   the Australian Aborigines and the !Kung Bushmen.  The Australian instance, omitted here, is developed from a variety of 19th and 20th century written sources.   The data on the Bushmen--or San, as they call themselves--were the result of fieldwork in the early 1960's by Richard Borshay Lee, an anthropologist.  Lee has subsequently published a full monograph on work in a !Kung San band in which he augments, recalculates and further explains the statistics relied on by Sahlins.  As finally marshalled the evidence supports the affluence thesis more strongly than ever--and includes a couple of surprises.
 
"Why should we plant," asks Lee's informant/Xashe, "when there are so many mongongos in the world?"  Why indeed?  Originally, Lee studied the San equivalent of what is conventionally accounted work in industrial society--hunting and gathering in their case, wage labor in ours.  This was the comparison Sahlins cited.   In terms of our standard eight-hour workday, a San adult works between 2.2 and 2.4 hours a day--well below the provisional four hour figure Sahlins references.  Not that the San work a seven- or even a five-day week at these ludicrously low levels of labor, for they spend "less than half their days in subsistence and enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies."   For many Lee might better have said any.  More often than not a !Kung San is visiting friends and kin at other camps or receiving them in his own.
 
Upon returning to the field, Lee broadened his definition of work to encompass all "those activities that contribute to the direct appropriation of food, water or materials from the environment"--adding to subsistence activity tool-making and fixing and housework (mainly food preparation).  These activities didn't increase the San workload as much as their equivalents in our sort of society increase ours--relatively we fall even further behind.  Per diem the manufacture and maintenance of tools takes 64 minutes for men, 45 minutes for women.  "Housework" for the San means mostly cracking nuts, plus cooking--most adults of both sexes and older children crack their own mongongo nuts, the only activity where women do more work than men:   2.2 hours a day for men, 3.2 hours for women.  Nor are these figures fudged by unreported child labor.  Until about age fifteen San children do virtually no work, and if they are female they continue to do little work until marriage, which may 
be some years later.  Our adolescents fare worse at McDonald's, not to forget that women and children comprised the workforce for the brutal beginnings of industrialization in Britain and America.
 
It is often asserted that in most societies women work more than men and this is probably, in general, true.  In a perhaps not unrelated development, women in all known societies wield less political power than men, in fact usually none whatsoever.   A thoughtfully strategic feminism should therefore eventuate in anarchism, not in fantasies of matriarchal table-turning; and in the abolition of work, not in caterwauling for equal pay for equal work.  The only mathematically certain way to equalize, gender-wise, government and work is to get rid of both of them.  in San society, however, men work more than women.  Men do one-third more subsistence work than women, although they provide only 40% of caloric intake.
 
When the full tally of work as Lee expansively defines it is taken, the average workweek is 44.5 hours for men, 40.1 hours for women.
 
Lee's original figures relied on by Sahlins were startling enough, but the later data enhance their value by allowing comparisons of housework as well as subsistence work.   Our world of work has a dirty secret:  wage-work rests on the indispensable prop of unpaid "shadow work." (Illich 1981)  The arduous toil of housewives--cleaning, cooking, shopping, childcare--is so much uncompensated drudgery literally unaccounted for in statistics on work.  With us as much as with the San such work is usually women's work, to a much greater extent among us.  How many husbands perform even two hours of housework a day?  How many wives, like their San counterparts, less than three?  Nor does San society exhibit any sight so sorry as the majority of married women working for wages or salaries in addition to the housework they always did--and at levels of pay which still reflect sexual inequality.
 
Lee's later figures strengthen the affluence thesis in other ways--for instance, caloric intake, previously underestimated, is upped to a more than adequate level.   The surplus is stored as body fat against occasional shortages, fed to the dogs or consumed to sustain people's efforts at all-night trance-healing dances occurring one to four times a month.  And despite the staggering variety of plant and animal sources in their diet, the San do not eat many items which other peoples find edible.  Their work yields them so many consumer goods that the San as a society can and do exercise consumer choice.  To assign such societies to the category "subsistence economy" is not only foolish phraseology--what economy is not a subsistence economy?--as Pierre Clastres argues, it passes an adverse value judgment in the guise of a statement of fact.  The implication is that these societies have failed to be other than what they are, as if it were unthinkable anybody might prefer a 
leisurely life bereft of bosses, priests, princes and paupers.  The San have a choice.  In the 1960's and 1970's, amidst a worsening  political situation in Botswana and neighboring Namibia, many San gave up foraging for employment by Bantu cattle ranchers or South African farmers.  All along they were able but not willing to work for wages.
 
As Ivan Ilich observes, "Economists understand about work about as much as alchemists about gold."  In positing as twin fatalities infinite wants and finite (scarce) resources they erect a dismal science on axioms every sensible person rejects out of hand.  By their lifeways the hunter-gatherers give the lie to the Hobbesian hoax.  Resources are bountiful and the San consume them with gusto, but since they are rational hedonists, not ascetic madmen, the San find satisfaction in satiety:  they have worked enough if there is plenty for everybody.  So scandalous are the foragers for the economists and their addicts that they call forth paroxysms of pulpit-thumping prejudice, notably by libertarian economist Murray Rothbard and, in a hostile review of my book espousing the abolition of work, David Ramsey Steele.   Liberty (as it styles itself) suppressed 90% of my rejoinder to Steele.   Let me retaliate by quoting him only in quoting myself:
 
Steele, with unintended humor, explains why hunter-gatherers loaf most of the time: "If you have one animal carcass to keep you going for the next week or two, it's a waste of effort to get another one, and what else is there to do but swap stories?"  The poor devils are too rich to work.   Cruelly denied the opportunity to accumulate capital, what else is there for the benighted savages to do but create, converse, dance, sing, feast and fuck? (Liberty May 1989)
 
Behind Steele's braying ethnocentrism is a fear of wildness and wilderness, a yearning fear for the call from the Forest, a fear of freedom itself.
 
Foragers like the San and the Australians are not the only prosperous primitives with ample leisure.  Gardeners who practice shifting ("slash and burn") cultivation work a lot less than we moderns.  In the Philippines the horticultural Hanunoo annually devote 500 to 1000 hours to the subsistence activity that sustains one adult.  At the higher figure, that works out to less than 2 hours and 45 minutes a day.  Gardening, augmented by hunting and gathering was the mode of production among most of the Indians in eastern North America when the Europeans arrived.  The clash of cultures has been regarded from many perspectives, but not as insistently as it should be as a collision between worlds of work.
 
Far from living hand-to-mouth, the Indians produced a surplus--had they not, the settlers would have starved at Jamestown and Plymout.  Far from exhausting themselves scrounging for survival, the impression the Indians left on early English observers like Captain John Smith was that their life was a paradise of all but workless plenty.  He thought the settlers might enjoy a three-day workweek featuring the "pretty sport" of fishing.  In 1643, the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay received the submission of two Rhode Island sachems.  "Giving them to understand upon what terms they must be received under us," as Governor John Winthrop put it, the Indians were told "Not to do any unnecessary workd on the Lord's day within the gates of proper towns."  Not to worry, replied the sachems:  "It is a small thing for us to rest on that day, for we have not much to do any day, and therefore we will forbear on that day."
 
According to one of the Roanoke colonists, to feed one Virginia Indian enough corn for a year required annually 24 hours of work.  (Morgan 1975) (Of course the Indians ate more than corn; New England Indians enjoyed an abundant, varied "diet for superb health," more nutritious and less monotonous than what became standard fare in, say, the back country of the South; or in later industrial tenements.
 
"Whatever else early America was," according to recent scholarship, "it was a world of work." (Innes 1988)  Indian America was anything but, as that Roanoke colonist was not the only one to notice.  No wonder that he and the others apparently went native, abandoning the earliest English settlement, leaving only a message carved on a tree that they were gone "To Croatan."  These first defectors from civilized toil to barbarous ease were not to be the last.   Throughout the colonial period, hundreds of Euro-American agriculturalists joined the Indians or, captured in war, refused to return when peace came.  Women and children were inordinately likely to take to the Indian life-style, readily casting off their restrictive roles in white society, but adult males also sought acceptance among the heathen.  Without a doubt work was a major motivation for the choices they made.   At Jamestown, John Smith enforced a regimen of labor discipline so harsh as to approach concentration 
camp conditions.  In 1613, some of the English were "apointed to be hanged  Some burned Some to be broken upon wheles, others to be staked and some to be shott to death."  Their crime?  An historian recounts that all "had run away to live with the Indians and had been recaptured." (Morgan 1975)
 
The anthropology of  work does not suggest any reduction in the quantity or increase in the quality of work in societies of greater complexity.  The trend or tendency is rather the other way.  The hunt for Virginia Indian men, as for their San counterparts, was more like "sport" than work, but their wives seemed to have worked more than San women if less than their white contemporaries.  On the other hand, the gardeners work perhaps even less than the San but some of the work, like weeding and clearing new fields, is more arduous.  The watershed, however, is the onset of civilization with its government, cities, and class divisions.  Peasants work more because they are compelled to:  because they have rents, taxes, and tithes to pay.   Later the laboring class pays all that plus profits too which are taken by employers whose interests lie in prolonging and intensifying work.  There is, in the words of the Firesign Theatre, "harder work for everyone, and more of it too."   
Consider how many weeks of subsistence work an Englishman had to do over the centuries:  in 1495, 10;  in 1564, 20; in 1684, 48; and in 1726, 52.  (Eyer & Sterling, Review of Radical Political Economics Spring 1977)  With progress, work worsens.
 
So it was with the American worker.  In the eighteenth century, there was a general trend for labor, slave and free alike, formerly seasonal, to become continual.   Technical progress, as usual, made matters worse.  Seamen, for instance, were something of an avant garde of wage-labor.  During the eighteenth century, the size of ships and their capacity for cargo greatly increased and the work became heavier and also harder to do.  Seamen responded by collective action including strikes--they coined the word, they would strike the sails--mutinies, and the ultimate, piracy, the seizure of the workplace.  Pirates simplified the management hierarchy, elected their captains, replaced wages with cooperative ownership and risk-sharing, and vastly reduced the hours of work since a pirate ship had a crew five times larger than the merchantmen they preyed upon.  Aversion to work was a main motivation.  For one pirate, "the love of Drink and a Lazy Life" were "Stronger Motives with him 
than Gold."  An admiral who impressed some suspected pirates into service on his man-of-war thought to rehabilitate them, "to learn them...working" which "they turned Rogues to avoid."  The governor of the Bahamas said, "for work they mortally hate it," and another resident of those islands concurred:   "Working does not agree with them."  (Rediker, Innes 1988)
 
It goes without saying that the next turn of the wheel, industrialization, made for more and more monotonous work than workers as a class ever endured before.  There were no volunteers in the industrial army.  The earliest American factory operatives were not even, in most cases, formally free:  they were women and children sent to work by their lawful superiors, their husbands and fathers.  The factories of the North, like the plantations of the South, rested, so to speak, on servile labor.  For a time, much later, the hours of work did decline as organized labor and assorted reformers made shorter hours a part of their agenda.  The eight-hour day which we officially enjoy is the cause for which the Haymarket anarchists of 1886 paid with their lives.  But the new deal in legislating a forty hour week scotched proposals by then-Senator Hugo Black (later a Supreme Court Justice) for a thirty hour week and the unions dropped shorter hours from their shopping lists.  In recent 
years, workers have dropped unionization from their shopping list.  Everything that goes around, comes around.
 
Not only have the hours of work not diminished, for all the technological progress of the last half century, the years of our lives devoted to work have actually gone up.    The reason is that many more people are living to retirement age, which means that the system is getting more years of work out of us:  the average American male works eight more years than his counterpart in 1900.  In the eighteenth century a worker ended his days, if he lived so long, in the poor-house; in the twentieth, if he lives so long, in the nursing home, lonely and tortured by medical technology.   Progress.
 
I have saved the worst for last:  women's work.  Today's working women (most women now work, outside the home, as employees) are worse off working than they have ever been.  They still do most of the household work they have done since industrialism, and additionally they do wage-work.  Their entry in force into the workforce (they were working all along, but unpaid labor, insane to say, isn't counted as work) in the last twenty years has greatly increased their total toil and, as a result, the total toil altogether (since nobody thinks men are working less).  Even if sex discrimination were entirely eradicated, which is far from imminent, equalized women workers would still shoulder an unequal load of what Ilich calls "shadow work," "the consumer's unpaid toil that adds to a commodity an incremental value that is necessary to make this commodity useful to the consuming unit itself."  Civil rights laws do not--can not--penetrate the household.  The history of work, if it has 
any evolving logic, is a history of the increasing imposition of exhausting toil on women.   Any feminism which is not implacably anti-work is fraudulent.
 
The world of civilization, the world of history is above all, objectively and subjectively, a world of work.  The jury is in on the verdict workers pass on what work means to them, subjectively: it hurts and they hate it.  Objectively it just gets worse in terms of the ways it might imaginably get better.  Since the late nineteenth century, most work has been "de-skilled," standardized, moronized, fragmented, isolated, policed, and made secure against piratical expropriation.  To take and hold even one workplace the workers will have to expropriate them all.
 
Even hard work could be easier, and easier to take, than the bossed work most of us do.  In Liberia the Kpelle, for instance, grow rice, which is work--strenuous work--by any definition.  But these "neolithic farmers" conduct their workd in a way that the organizers of our work can't or won't even consider.  Lii-nee', "joy," axiomatically accompanies any work the Kpelle do or they won't do any.   Work is conducted in groups to the accompaniment of musicians whose rhythms pace the strokes of their hoes and machetes.  Intermittently a woman throws down her hoe and dances to entertain her companions and relax muscles made sore by repetitious movements.  At the end of the day the workers drink palm wine and sing and dance together.  If this is not Sahlin's original affluent society, it is still an improvement on our allegedly affluent one, workwise.  The anthropologist adds that the government has compelled the Kpelle to switch from dry rice-farming to wet (irrigated) rice 
farming since it is more productive.  They demur, but not out of any inherent conservatism:  they accepted the advice of the same experts to raise cocoa as a cash crop.  The point is that "paddy-rice cultivation will be just plain work without the vital leavening of gossip, singing and dance--the traces of play which have been all but leached out of most modernized work.
 
As the 80's ended and the 90's commenced, working hours in America, where millions are without work, went up.  The new two-income family has a lower standard of living than the one-income family of the 1950's.  Housework has hardly been diminished by 20th century technology.  Time studies suggest 56 hours of housework a week in 1912; 60 in 1918; 61 for families in 1925.  In 1931, college educated housewives in big cities worked 48 hours a week, but by 1965 the average for all housewives was 54 hours, with college educated women putting in 19 more minutes a day than those with grade school educations.  By 1977, wives without outside employment worked 50 hours a week, those with jobs, 35 hours excluding wage-work which at 75 hours "adds up to a working week that even sweat shops cannot match." (Cowan 1983)
 
Primitive productive life was neither nasty nor brutish, nor is it even necessarily short.  Significant proportions of San men and women live past age sixty; the population structure is closer to that of the United States than to a typical Third World country.   With us, heart disease is the leading cause of death, and stress, a major risk factor, is closely related to job satisfaction.  Our sources of stress hardly exist among hunter-gatherers.  (Cancer, the second greatest killer, is of course a consequence of industrialization.)
 
"Working conditions" for hunters can be hazardous, yet civilized work does not even here exhibit a clear superiority, especially when it is recalled that many of the 2 1/2 million American motoring fatalities to date involve one or more participants in wage-work (police, cabbies, teamsters etc) or shadow work like commuting and shopping.
 
Sahlins had already remarked upon the superior "quality of working life" enjoyed by primitive producers, to borrow a catchphrase from the pseudo-humanist experts in job redesign and job enrichment.  In addition to shorter hours, "flextime" and the more reliable "safety net" afforded by general food sharing, forager's work is more satisfying than most modern work.  We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a lot, night and day.  We are sedentary in our buildings in our polluted cities; they move about breathing the fresh air of the open country.  We have bosses; they have companions.  Our work typically implicates one, or at most a few hyper-specialized skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brainwork in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the great utopians called for.  Our "commute" is dead time, and unpaid to boot; they cannot even leave the campsite without "reading" the landscape in a potentially productive way.  Our children are subject to compulsory 
school attendance laws; their unsupervised offspring play at adult activities until almost imperceptibly they take their place doing them.   They are the makers and masters of their simple yet effective toolkits; we work for our machines, and this will soon be no metaphor, according to an expert from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration:  "In general, robots will work for men, but there may be exceptions in which some robots are higher in the hierarchy than some humans."  The last word in equal employment opportunity.







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Anarchism Against Colonialism part 8 - Que Vayan Se Todos!

The mass insurrection in Argentina in December 2001 succeeded in bringing down three governments in close succession.  The piqueteros - unemployed mass picketers - blockaded the streets and tore down road signs, turning the country into something akin to a massive Reclaim the Streets demo.  Workers occupied their factories and kicked out the bosses, banks and government buildings were torn down, and politicians were forced into hiding.  Popular assemblies sprung up across the country.  The slogan "que vayan se todos" - get rid of them all (referring to politicians) - suggested an anarchistic impulse behind the rebellion.  Basically, this was untheorised anarchism in operation on a mass scale.
 
An article on workers' control in Argentina can be found here:
http://www.ainfos.ca/02/nov/ainfos00259.html
 
What follows is an analysis of the situation from an anarchist group, exploring the kinds of social action pursued by workers and unemployed people in Argentina.
http://www.ainfos.ca/03/may/ainfos00540.html
 
On the 16th March 2002 Armed police and hired
goons (including members of the football hooligans
Barra Bravas) forced their way into the Brukman
textile factory in Buenos Aires, which had been under
occupation since the owner fled four months
previously. They were shortly afterwards driven out
by the combined forces of the occupying workers,
piqueteros, members of unemployed groups and local
residents. This direct action was one of the first that
brought together in practical co-operation the various
forms of working class self-organisation that have
developed since the December 2001 uprising - a
wonderful example of social solidarity put into
practice - and one which helped to speed the growth
of working class co-operation and autonomy.
 
One of the most important things about the incredible
growth of self-organisation is that the initiatives
developed - in the overwhelming majority of cases -
outside of any party or institutional influence - they
are a direct expression of the needs of the
participants and the wider community - as against the
needs of a particular political tendency (we're looking
at you trots!). Also, they arose on a classic
spontaneous model - they were formed to meet the
demands of the current situation, they are not simply
the mechanical application of forms of organisation
that were determined elsewhere in a different
struggle; though it should be pointed out that to a
certain extent, spontaneity is really just the coming to
light of previously submerged networks designed to
meet collective social needs. Spontaneity is what the
bosses sneeringly call working class self-activity
when they finally manage to see what is going on
under their noses.
 
With 40% unemployment (100 000 jobs lost a month),
inflation around 11% (and also rising) and the state
imposing utility bill increases of 50% on heating gas,
35% on electricity and other essential services, it's
unsurprising that the first forms of self-organisation
were concerned with meeting the immediate needs of
the community. To bypass the supermarkets which
were making the most of the crisis by increasing
prices, a whole network of communal community
gardens producing directly for the community
developed. People worked together to clear
wasteland or other suitable areas for growing food,
which is given to those who have no other means of
support, or exchanged for goods from the occupied
factories (see below).
 
Meeting Social Needs
 
Similarly, the piqueteros (see previous issue for
background on these) dealt with the problem of social
housing by simply forming a brick making factory
from whatever material they could find and proceeded
to collectively build houses for those in need, whilst
being fed from the community gardens and the
factories. In return the piqueteros also turn out to
defend them both from state attacks. The piqueteros,
who were previously looked down upon and called 'le
negrada' (the blacks), are now seen as heroes and
great examples by the people they help, who in turn
help them - active solidarity is the key.
 
A similar approach has been taken to health issues. A
number of private hospitals were abandoned by their
owners during the uprising; these have now been
occupied and are operating as profit-free ventures.
The same is true of the system of alternative
education, which has mushroomed and operates
entirely outside of the state system. Cultural spaces
have also been opened, where people come to talk
about how they can collectively help each other: plays
and songs about working class life and solidarity are
performed. Crèches, bakeries and canteens are also
set up in these spaces. On top of all this, local
communities turn out en masse to physically oppose
evictions and attempts to cut off essential local
services. All of this activity is carried on outside of the
state and it's local representatives.
 
A less successful venture was the 'truque' or barter
network that at its height of popularity had over 8000
clubs and 3 million members. The problems stemmed
from the network's use of an alternative currency that
soon became the de facto currency in many places -
soon 90% of the 'certificates' were forgeries and
credit inflation was at 40%. On top of these problems
the network was being used to finance small-scale
local capitalism, and large-scale producers were
taking their goods out of the system and selling them
off at inflated prices outside of the network. (These
were not local problems - they are inherent in systems
of this type, but we do not have the space to deal with
that here).
 
A significant change in people's behaviour is their
view of 'the family', which has expanded to include
not just immediate blood relatives, but all members of
the local community. People have grown to see
through joint struggles that their problems can only
be addressed through collective action. Their answers
are in working with others, hence the almost
desperate desire to forge new links with others in
struggle as demonstrated by the unprecedented
growth of territorial, local, national, occupational and
interest based co-ordinations, which magnificently
demonstrate the desire for human community -
communism.
 
In The Workplace
 
The movement of factory and workplace occupations
has grown rapidly during the past year, from a
handful of isolated and under siege examples at the
start of the year, to a full-scale social movement with
hundreds of occupations, complete with regional and
national conferences, 'National Plans of Action', and
attempts at recuperation by state and leftists forces.
 
The first occupations took place during the December
2001 argentinazo, notably the Brukman and Zanon
factories, which have both played an immensely
important role in practical and symbolic terms. These
two have become the public face of the occupation
movement, providing space for others to work out
their own plans of occupation and as a place where
the implications of the occupations can be worked out
by those they effect - not just the workers.
 
Today there are hundreds of occupied workplaces
(and not just factories but also schools, hospitals and
other 'white-collar' sites) covering every region of the
country. A closer look at how these places work, the
different forms the occupations have taken and the
states attitude to them reveals that there are in fact
two types of occupation; one that results from
communities organising to directly meet their own
needs, and one under the control of official 'working
class representatives' or of representatives of the
local state and capitalist institutions who seek to
recuperate this activity and direct it into support for
'stability' and the state as benefactor.
 
The Zanon ceramic factory in the province of
Neuquen is probably the largest occupied workplace
still actually producing. Pay remains at the same
levels as prior to the occupation (with inflation being
taken into account) and the ceramic tiles produced
are sold at 60% of their former price through a series
of street vendors employed from the piqueteros or at
the 'popular' supermarkets set up in Rosario and
other towns specifically to sell the goods from the
occupied workplaces. When new workers are needed
piqueteros and other unemployed groups are taken
on, and at the same rates as the other workers.
Decisions are taken by the mass workers assembly
(with delegates from other groups present) and
production is organised collectively. A technical
college for members of the local community has also
been established.
 
One of the first things the Zanon assembly sought to
do was to establish links with others in struggle,
especially the piqueteros and other factory
occupations, and to that end they hosted a national
meeting of occupied factories in April (more on the
various co-ordinations and conferences below) which
declared that it would start a plan "of public works,
controlled by workers, to construct schools needed by
teachers and students, public hospitals, and housing."
 
State Interventions
 
The Ghelco ice cream factory in Buenos Aires
highlights a different approach to the direct
occupation at Zanon, one that the state is increasingly
viewing as both a way out of its stability problems and
as a potential bulwark for co-opting the working class
back into its political and structural programs (a la
Peron and the unions). The factory was occupied by
an order of a bankruptcy judge, who decreed that it
should be rented back to the workers. After a set
period the factory was then legally expropriated by
the local state and handed over to the workers, thus
building up ties between the state and the occupation
from the outset, and potentially providing support for
capital in any future crisis ("after all you're all bosses
now"). The Ghleco workers now earn the same pay as
before but working hours have jumped to twelve
hours a day to cover administrative expenses.
 
The state has offered quiet support for MNER
(National Movement of Recovered Factorise) which
lobbies for legal expropriation of occupied
workplaces, for wiping out debts and for establishing
a clear legal framework for further expropriations. The
Brukman factory has been forced by circumstances to
largely follow this path, asking the Buenos Aires
government to expropriate the factory and re-hire it
back to them, and to give them a preferential option to
buy the plant after two years, when it will be put up
for sale. Provincial and city legislatures are currently
drafting a number of bills to create a government
agency to assist in the formation of co-operatives and
to facilitate expropriations, as presently expropriation
is only legally possible if it is in "the public benefit".
This temporary manoeuvre is designed to speedily
introduce stability, all the better to allow the real
capitalists to step back into their old shoes when
conditions allow. On top of this many factories are not
actually occupied in the classical sense since they are
still paying the previous owners rent or have written
off months of unpaid work and owed back-wages.
 
Communication and Networks
 
This is not say that the people involved are not aware
of these dangers: they are, and a series of
conferences and co-ordinations amongst various
groups have taken place to discuss these issues. The
Brukman, Zanon and Grissinopli factories all held
national meetings attended by hundreds of delegates
from all of the groups in struggle. "National Plans of
Action", Solidarity commissions, factory committees,
National Workers Assemblies, "Plans of Struggle"
were amongst the initiatives thrashed out at these
meetings in order to turn the states plans to their own
use. The co-operation between the groups over the
year has built up very strong bonds of solidarity, a
solidarity that was highlighted during the important
National March by Piqueteros last December, made
possible through the wider networks established in
the struggle.
 
This March lasted five days, blocking highways and
organising soup kitchens whilst passing through
towns and cities that have played a central role in the
uprising and in building up resistance (Rosario and
Cordoba being particularly noteworthy). The slogan
for the march was "Throw the bums out!" and ended
up at the Plaza de Mayo (scene of bitter fighting and
many deaths last year) on the first anniversary of
(President) De La Rua's resignation.
 
Solidarity actions under the banner of "Que Se Vayan
Todos" (They All Must Go) took place at the same
time in every corner of the globe Australia, Austria,
Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia,
Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands,
Norway, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden,
Switzerland, UK, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, and
Yugoslavia. The network now extends far beyond the
borders of Argentina, putting into practical effect the
demand for No Borders!
 
Prospects
 
The current state of affairs is a series of
self-organised initiatives that operate to a greater or
lesser degree successfully, and largely outside of the
state's institutional structures - but there is a growing
awareness and willingness on the state's part to make
use of these initiatives to put itself back on its feet - to
get capital accumulation started again and to
introduce a measure of social stability. There are
clear efforts being made to split the movements
through recognising certain useful sectors as official
and taking them under the (local) state's wing.
 
This should not be a cause for undue pessimism
however - as we pointed out in an earlier Organise!
the dynamic of people organising their own lives and
communities logically leads them to organise against
the state. The genie is out of the bottle, and the
Argentine working class is in no hurry to chase it back
in. When collective needs are taken as the starting
point for collective activity, without any fuss being
made of this - then we can truly say that struggle has
changed people (just like we said it would!).




*****************************

Anarchism Against Colonialism - further examples

Several other examples also come to mind of anarchist struggles linked directly to anti-colonialism.

 

The Manipur uprising in the summer of 2004 was very similar to anti-capitalist protests in the way it was organised and developed.  The organisers were not a single group, but rather, an umbrella of single-issue campaigns and localised activist groups which organised localised actions spread out across the region.  The result was a wave of mass disruption which destroyed "normal" capitalist functioning and state power for a temporary period.  Also notable is the separation of this mass movement from the vanguardist armed opposition groups active in Manipur.  My article on the uprising, discussing these and other aspects, is available here:

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/iaps/Manipur%20illustrated.pdf

 

The Bougainville Island revolt against ecocidal industrial operations was similar to the ongoing OPM revolt on Papua, and involved a long campaign of armed resistance to the Papua New Guinean army, which was receiving support and funding from Australia.  The revolt was successful, leading to the closure of the main project targeted and a situation of autonomy.  Today, despite recuperation attempts via a statist autonomy initiative, some areas of Bougainville are still under the control of independent tribal militias. 

An article on the insurgency is available here:

http://www.spunk.org/library/pubs/freedom/focus/sp000668.txt

 

Zvakwana, a group linked to autonomism and anarchism, are a major force in the resistance to Mugabe.  They organise a Ya Basta!/Reclaim the Streets style mass resistance movement focused on street action, graffiti, culture jamming, and mass protest.

http://www.zvakwana.org/

 

There are also anarchist groups in many postcolonial societies including South Africa, most Latin American countries, and many parts of Southeast Asia.  People's Global Action, an anarchistic network started by the Zapatistas, has members on all continents, including CONAIE (indigenous people's group which has brought down a number of governments in Ecuador) and Karnataka State Farmers' Union (Indian farmers' group who use direct action to destroy GM crops and oppose corporate power).

 

Some more links:

Uganda Anarchism

http://uganda.blogspirit.com/

Zabalaza anarchist collective, South Africa

www.zabalaza.net/

Equality Trade Union Migrants Branch, South Korea

http://migrant.nodong.net/ver2/index_e.html

Lalit (workers' movement), Mauritius

http://www.lalitmauritius.com/

Ogiek support campaign

http://www.ogiek.org/

Indymedia South Africa

http://southafrica.indymedia.org/

Indymedia Ambazonia

http://ambazonia.indymedia.org/

Indymedia Phillipines sites

http://qc.indymedia.org/

http://manila.indymedia.org/


Native Solidarity News at
www.ckut.ca/nsn/

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