Notes on the student demo and the illusion of mass movement

croydonclasswar presents a cut n paste review of the student demo with help from Peter Gelderloos's book 'the failure of non-violence'

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One of the ways to prevent a respectful diversity of methods in the broader terrain of struggle, is the creation of an assembly or an organization that attempts to represent and make decisions for an entire movement. It is often necessary to create assemblies or organizations as spaces of encounter, debate, coordination or planning.

But ....

......there is NO assembly that EVERYONE can participate in, and NO organizational style that is amenable or inclusive of EVERYBODY. 

The proponents of such structures always need to keep in mind that they are not the entire movement, only a part of it. Even more crass is the habit of some activists to try to serve as spokespersons for the entire movement.

Speakers for others who are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves is disrespectful. It replaces a plurality of voices, perspectives, and experiences of struggle with ...

.....ONLY ONE.

The quest to impose supposedly legitimate decisions on an entire movement not only marginalizes diverse forms of struggle, it also opens the door for the movement to be taken over by the leadership of a specific organization

In the case of the SWP or the newly-formed-old-trot-groups like Left Unity and Counterfire, these are the ones who wait for the appearance of a mass movement they can lead. It is an explicit part of these groups' strategies to co-opt and take over proletariat movements.

These crypto-authoritarian groups pay lip service  to the popular rejection of political parties and hierarchical leadership

BUT....

are secretly also looking for power, ALL these groups coincide in their support for central structures, central co-ordinating bodies.


                          

every direction wrong

If there is NO central structure that can make decisions for the entire movement, there is NOTHING for them to control and lead.

Taking the recent Scottish independence referendum as an example, the likes of James Meadway are always adept at producing impressive graphs to show that a mass movement suddenly now agrees with everything he's always been saying ...and so on. 

He even claimed that the recent Scottish surge for independence was 'inspired' by his efforts in the 'stop the war' movement. 

Dubious on every level.

Counterfire were all over the 'MASS' Scottish 'Yes' vote...funny how that supposedly mass movement was incapable of stopping young  'yes' voters being attacked in Glasgow city centre by racist football thugs. Where was the mass movement of Counterfire that evening? 
tucked up in bed? 
Or, wacking out some post-vote graphs of cold comfort followed with the usual 'we can build on this' bullshit.

its always coming tomorrow with this lot !


A struggle is much more than protest. And as there is NO assembly that can include everyone in a protest, this is even more true for an entire movement. There is no way to make decisions that can be applied to everyone in a struggle, or even to be aware of all the people who participate in a given struggle.

       This is the back of Caroline Lucas's head leaving the rally last Wednesday in Parliament Square. Her involvement in the event lasted 6 mins. 

She got the biggest x-factor-style cheer of course.



its all over.

lots of rhetoric.....

'get voting'

'get a union'

'join the mass movement'

one unionist even called for everyone to 'stop the city'

croydonclasswar is not holding its breath

we are left with the usual bitter taste in the mouth listening to 50-60 year-old careerist politicians (some from elite schools) speaking on behalf of 16 year old students. 

and those same careerist politicians using the term 'mass movement' when in reality that 'mass movement' is probably only going to return ONE green to parliament...if they're lucky.

fingers crossed of course...rather a Green than any of the others


BUT...


 it doesn't really matter, of course.













   

hello hello hello

On the eve of the next student demo 

plus the Poor Doors after-party

croydonclasswar ominously stumbles upon the latest issue of 'HELLO' magazine  
  

DONT ASK !



But .....


....this is worryingly prescient......tucked in amongst the gutter-glitz bullshit

is this accidental ?

Clever arty product placing?

or a knowing subversive homage to Juvenal ?

the observation in AD100 that the Roman people's anxious longings are mollified and neutered by just two things....

bread and circuses

or as we see in the vapid and suffocating consumerist society of the 21st century.....

chocolate and asteroids


of course

croydonclasswar

......presents an extract from 'the failure of non-violence' by Peter Gelderloos. 
The chapter 'seizing the space for new relations' takes a look at our understanding of history, evolution and the Earth, hinting that with anarchism the Green is implicit in the red and black. 

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In all the reputed victories of non-violence, its proponents never claim a fundamental change in social relations, a change at the economic level, or a clear and generalized step away from the despoliation of capitalism or the domination of government. Those of us who favor a diversity of tactics can lay claim to such a social transformation. There has not been any final victory. As long as capitalism and the State continue to exist, none of us are free. But in a number of important battles we have strengthened our struggle for freedom, temporarily liberated a space from state control, and put communal or horizontal social relations into practice. These beliefs constitute important lessons that we need to carry with us as part of our collective memory.

Because so many revolutions have been perverted in the past, we need to speak clearly. 

Freedom does not mean winning a new ruler or a new ruling class. Freedom does not mean winning a new system of government or organization, no matter how ideal.  Freedom is not a final, perfected state that everyone must be convinced to accept. Freedom is a process that never ends. Freedom is the ability to shape our own lives, in concert with our peers and our surroundings. In a free world, all social organization arises from the ground up from the efforts of those who formulate it, and no organization is permanent because every successive generation must be able to change and renew its surroundings.

Many anarchists speak of revolution as a rupture with the present order. A revolution that imposes a new order erases all that it has gained. Revolution must be a step towards a society that is in permanent revolt, that accepts no masters and that constantly recreates itself, not as a homogenous body but as a collectively held together by bonds of mutual aid, voluntary association, and harmonious conflict.

Some have argued that changing the world  must occur as a gradual evolution or incremental victory. I think this view is deeply flawed. Complex systems move from one stable state to another in sudden shifts. harmony in nature is not an unchanging state of peacefulness but a field of change and conflict that holds itself together in dynamic tension. 

The ideals of mutuality and self-organization or self-sustenance from the old vision of harmony remain valid, but the ideals of changelessness and peacefulness do not.

 Conflict , it turns out. is a good thing, and destruction, as Bakunin pointed out about 150 years ago, is a creative force.

Not even evolution is a gradual evolution but a process marked by periods of placidity that change in sudden shifts. 

When the complex system in question is a society in which an immense amount of power is concentrated in very few hands, and the governing structures try to suppress or harness every force that threatens their imposed equilibrium, it's a pretty safe bet that any real change will occur in a sudden, dramatic, and violent shift, whereas anything that appears to be a part of an incremental victory, a step in the right direction, is simply a reform that has already been harnessed by the ruling system without upsetting its equilibrium.

Of course, the forces that will cause the ruptures will have been hundreds of years in the making. The visibly identifiable moment of rupture may come and go in just a few years, but we will only develop the strength to overcome the current power structures and the wisdom to create a better world through a lifetime of struggle. 

And after destroying those power structures it will take generations to decontaminate the planet (thanks to capitalism. some places will never be decontaminated), to unlearn authoritarian, racist, and patriarchal behaviours, to heal from millennia of accumulated trauma, and to learn to take care of ourselves from within a rich web of relationships, both with other human beings and with the Earth itself.

Peter Gelderloos - Extracts

The spread of capitalism around the world has been accomplished by a symphony of fundamentally military operations.

The smooth functioning of capitalism requires the effective police occupation of a territory.

                                                poor doors demo, london

What it all comes down to is that in order to be exploited and ruled, we must be deprived of everything.

The process of deprivation has taken hundreds of years, but it is realised in an ever more intensive way.

By force of arms and leaving a trail of bodies, the State has enclosed communal lands, privatised the forests and the water, professionalised traditional skills - like healing, midwifery, or teaching - within exclusive institutions, and punished unlicensed practitioners, asserted its control over public spaces and limited the ways we can use them, criminalised autonomous networks of exchange, and imposed regulations that favor big industry, making self-sufficiency, food sovereignty, or artisanal handicrafts all but impossible.

                                              mapuche residence to state terror

The citizen of a prosperous democracy must be surrounded by spectacles of having without really being able to directly affect their surroundings or having any control over anything.

                                                         a fucking idiot

The only activities permitted are buying and selling. The cityscape in its entirety is dedicated to consumption. Cities are increasingly being designed without spaces of encounter or public space, and even what is public is owned by the State.

                                                  such is the force of imagination?

Trying to change just the surface of this carefully arranged ensemble is punished as vandalism. Acquiring a legal right to any bit of space can only come about through purchase - everything is reduced to its status as property - and even then, those who can afford it must put it to an economically productive use, following the accumulative logic of capitalism and private property, because governments levy taxes on ownership. Often, that taxation is specifically calculated to put 'unproductive' property back into market circulation.

To take the case of Greece, many working class people owned their own homes, after a lifetime of working, and they passed these homes down to their children. The government deliberately imposed an annual housing tax that many homeowners would not be able to afford. Without the blackmail of forcing people to pay a third or a half of their salaries for the right to live in their own homes, capitalism cannot function.   Economists and bankers do not like the idea of people owning their own homes, and not having to pay rent and home loans. The new tax, recommended by economists and bankers, caused many Greeks to lose their homes, forcing them to take out mortgages or start paying rent. In the parlance of those of those on top, this was ''boosting the economy''.

This is what the government does when people are not being productive enough. And we should also say it plainly, when people are not being productive at all, government declares ownership void, invades, and gives the land and resources away to those who will use it according to a capitalist logic.
The founders of the United States justified robbing indiginous lands with the argument that native peoples had not put those lands to productive use, therefore they did not constitute property. A similar tactic was used when the Pinochet dictatorship, advised by economists trained in the US, gave away public lands to forestry companies in the 1970's. In the seminal philosophy of John Locke, property comes into being when one mixes their (servants') labor with it to make it productive. Such is the nature of property under capitalism.

The only way to alter this world, insulated by invisible layers of protection, as though frozen in glass, is to break something. 

                                                        never forget riot dog, xxxx

And the only way to open space to create something wholly new and sustaining is to seize that space, to disrupt the control of the agents of law and order, and to smash through the asphalt.

                                              the beach beneath the street?

It is also worth noting how versatile capitalism is at co-opting initiatives that seek to provide an alternative. Capitalism makes sure that nothing is free, but there are always plenty of options for renting or buying. People can encourage whatever different kind of lifestyle they want, as long as that lifestyle pays the rent.  All of the means we are presented with for gathering together, for building a community, for creating, sharing, and communicating, must rely on the logic of accumulation , and at some point must pass through the activity of buying and selling.

When the participants of a struggle who engage in creative acts - the very acts that capitalism can co-opt and turn a profit off of - wholeheartedly embrace the destructive parts of the struggle, they create a force that cannot be easily recuperated. The negation of the current system, the commitment to destroy that which oppresses us, and a practice of attacking power allow all of those creative acts that might otherwise be mere lifestyle choices or even entrepreneurial initiatives to hold on to their revolutionary potential.  

                                                                   celebrity makeover

In sum, a combative practice, by which I mean the use of sabotage, a capacity for self-defence, an ability to confront the forces of law and order, and a determination to attack the existing power structures, allows people in struggle to seize space in which the seeds for a new world can begin to take root, and helps prevent those experiments in freedom from being co-opted by the dominant system.

The need to create new social relations also has an immediate aspect that cannot be resolved in a future utopia. We don't fight against the present system because we expect to one day be rewarded with a better world. The State is so powerful, it is very possible that we will never win, that capitalist civilisation will make the planet uninhabitable or that new technologies will make revolt or even simple transgression impossible. Or, less dramatically, that we continue to fail in our revolts and we have to put up with this miserable system forever.

Without creating any false hopes, i think it is important to fight to win, but much more immediate than the question of the future is the fact that many of us fight for our lives, that struggle is survival and that no life worthy of living can be had in complicity with a society that steals everything that is ours and gives us only the opportunity to participate in our own domination.

croydonclasswar presents....

extracts from 

THE FAILURE OF NONVIOLENCE

by Peter Gelderloos




US Federal Judge Ann Aiken is just one of many government authorities who believe that dissidents must be nonviolent. It's really a no-brainer about why they would want those they rule to remain peaceful, even though nonviolent conspiracy theorists continue to pretend that the FBI is engaged in a secret plot to make us all violent.

Aiken was the judge who sentenced radical ecologist Daniel MacGowan to seven years in prison for a series of Earth Liberation Front arsons that harmed no one but damaged property connected to businesses and institutions that were destroying the environment.

After September 11th, 2001, the FBI named radical ecologists and anarchist as the domestic counter-terrorism priority.

 One of the primary blows of repression that made up the Green Scare was 'Operation Backfire' which targeted 18 people for participation in such arsons. Their case was based entirely on the word of snitches - many of whom were people who no longer had the support of a community that accepted the validity of illegal direct action. Daniel was one of those who refused to snitch, but because he and his legal team were threatening to subpoena government records about illegal spying, prosecutors agreed not to seek the life imprisonment they were initially aiming for.

While sentencing Daniel MacGowan, Judge Aiken told him didactically: 

Don't use Ghandi just when it's convenient. I hope you'll go back to your website and tell who you were, what you did. (...) To the young people, send the message that violence doesn't work. If you want to make a difference, have the courage to say how the life you lived was the life of a coward....It is a tragedy to watch these extremely talented and bright young people come in and do damage to industries.

perfectly normal judge ann aiken (her son committed suicide in 2011)

Fortunately, most of the people targeted by this repression could see the hypocrisy of a judge calling a person a coward when they are about to be locked up in a cage for acting on their beliefs. Judges, after all, are the ultimate cowards, bureaucrats who force moral lectures down the throats of those whose freedom they hold captive, who make their living sending people to prison to endure forms of psychological and sometimes physical torture they cannot even imagine. ''talented and bright young people'' should be able to conclude that a judge who had never participated in social movements is talking out of her ass when she tries to instruct us about what methods work and what don't. 



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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/04/daniel-mcgowan-
arrested_n_3016885.html

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-what-s-missing-is-solidarity


http://supportmariusmason.org/

marie Mason and eric mcdavid

At the trial of eco-activist Marie Mason the Prosecution argued that  'a good cause does not justify the worst means. That's not how society works'


croydonclasswar says.... 

fuck that society