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.