The passions spoke first; and men began to act in the right direction before they had reasoned out their action. The wanton cruelty with which political prisoners were treated, the horrors of preliminary detention, the barbarous punishment inflicted for trifling offences - all this proved unendurable even to the mild, patient Russians. The spirit of revenge was kindled, giving birth to the first attacks upon the Government, known by the name of terrorism. They began with an act of individual retaliation which, in the circumstances, had all the dignity of a solemn act of public justice. A girl, Vera Zassulitch, shot General Trepoff, who had ordered the flogging of a political prisoner. On March 31, 1878, she was acquitted by the jury, though she never denied her act. In 1878 terrorism was accepted as a system of warfare by the most influential and energetic section of Russian revolutionists grouped around the paper Zemlia i Volia ("Land and Liberty"). But at first this practical struggle with political despotism was carried on under the banner of political non-interference. "The question of constitution does not interest us," said the terrorists of this epoch in their pamphlet and in their paper, Zemlia i Volia; "the essential part of our activity is propaganda among the people. In striking the worst of the officials we intend merely to protect our companions from the worst treatment by the Government and its agents. The terrorists must be looked upon as a small detachment protecting the bulk of an army at some dangerous passage."– Sergius Stepniak
1: Decolonize the Operating system
"They were upright and correct without knowing that to be so was righteous. They loved one another without knowing that to do so was benevolence. They were sincere without knowing that to do so was loyalty. They kept their promises without knowing that to do so was to be in good faith. They helped one another without thought of giving or receiving gifts. Thus their actions left no trace and we have no records of their affairs" – Chuang Tzu
"Anarchism [as opposed to 'protests by anarchists' trying to lift off hierarchical structure and make more space for anarchism] is about invisible harmonies. It is ‘free association’ and it permeates our society in spite of hierarchical ethics and institutions. If you want to see it by ‘subtracting it out’ then you would ‘work to rule’ and remove all those natural, spontaneous, free associating moves that are the real heartbeat of social organization. Things would look very different if everyone did no more than execute, literally, instructions cascading down the 'chain of command'. In many cases the people above don't even know what the people below do or what challenges they are faced with...
If one takes a leaf from the book of ‘de-colonization’, anarchism is constituted by a ‘letting go’ of the notion of an ‘operating system’ which governs ‘how things work’, and not in devising a ‘new operating system’.
In a decolonizing system, what is needed is a return to a natural‘values system’; a values system that doesn’t believe in the need for ‘a new operating system’ or a new ‘political economy’, that orients to ‘how things works’ and to making them work in ‘correct manner’, as provided within the framework of the ‘sovereign states’ which may be hierarchically ranked on a better/worse performance scale;
...The decolonizer ‘values system’ does not start from a new American dream or a new French dream or a new EU dream which are theory-driven [common dream-driven aka common belief-driven] ‘operating systems’ governing ‘how things work’, ... the decolonizer values start from different assumptions; i.e. that we live in a relational space wherein we cannot isolate ‘how things work’ from the dynamics of the common habitat these things share inclusion in, whether we are talking at the level of individual people or individual sovereign states.
The decolonizer ‘values system’ orients to the beyond good-and-evil quest for cultivating, restoring and sustaining balance and harmony in the relational space we share inclusion in. It is a values system that transcends the moral values-based governance of common-belief driven ‘operating systems’ that describe the correct way for ‘how things work’ and the incorrect way for ‘how things work’, so as to ‘realize’ a common belief based ‘vision’ or ‘dream’. Evolution is not heading towards a particular ‘end-vision’; it is an unfolding [a continual transforming of relational space] whose forms/shapes arise from the quest for sustaining balance within an interdependent connectedness.
This is the way of nature; i.e nature is continual ‘organizING’ that does not allow ‘ego’ to get narcissist about an ‘organizING’, notionally creating an ‘organizATION’ driven from some ‘common belief’ or ‘common dream’, and establishing ‘dream-police’ to enforce dream-convergent behaviours on all of the participants with ‘the organizATION’.
The anarchism in decolonization is by way of values that suspend this reifying of balance-and-harmony-sustaining ‘organizINGs’ into ‘common-belief driven local organizATIONs’ [the latter being ‘genomes’ that have cast aside their ‘epigenomes’. Without the 'epigenome' the 'genome' becomes an internally directed 'mechanistic organizATION'. With the 'epigenome', which ensures continuing resonance between the dynamics of the relational spatial-plenum and the dynamics of the diverse multiplicity of inhabitants of that plenum, interdependent connectedness is acknowledged."
2: Southern Hospitality (Apache style) is no friggin' joke!
"Since the hardening of White supremacist cultural norms in the 18th century, it has always required a level of violent rupture for White, Black, and Native rebels to actually find themselves side by side in true affinity.
This is true of the aforementioned stockade wars in Tennessee, of the long history of maroon rebellion along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, of early slave rebellions alongside Irish indentured servants, of those conflicts like the Lowry Wars, of early labor battles, and of later prison riots, just to name a few. Obviously this is not to say that the reverse is true, that violence of any kind automatically creates the conditions to break down racial hierarchies. Yet for actors of various racial privileges and disadvantages to find themselves in true affinity requires a rebellion whose content is somehow fundamental to the nature of our society, and such rebellion will always be violent. The progressive view tends to abhor this reality in favor of a perspective that freedom is something which comes over time, rather than an experience we immediately create for ourselves as we rebel together against those who would oppress and exploit us. When historians reflexively fall back on this progressive way of understanding history, they often have to ignore much of what is right in front of them. How else could entire armies of Left academics and politicians sincerely portray the Republican Party in the South as a well-intentioned but tragic attempt at racial equality, or the mass theft of plantation property as aimed at securing "rights" for Indians rather than what it clearly (albeit temporarily) resulted in – immediately communist relationships of black and brown people? For a historian to use the political discourse of one who is at peace with State and Capital to explain away the motives of those who were at war with these systems, represents to us an extreme kind of intellectual dishonesty and theoretical laziness.
Anarchists can also be guilty of this. All too often our own struggles make the same mistake, using the discourse and frameworks provided to us by our enemies with little examination. Civil and workers' "rights," "amnesty" for immigrants, economic and social "justice," an end to police "brutality" – the words we use about the problems we face say something about our position towards the society that gives us these problems in the first place. Rights discourse, this concept of "justice," the idea that police could be anything but brutal – framing solutions in this way only make conceptual sense if we plan to stay inside this world we currently inhabit. They both reflect and reinforce a constrained imagination towards what is possible. Anarchist history should be about discovering or recovering those moments when something entirely different emerged on the scene, to help us expand our imagination and ability to describe such moments in their own terms rather than in those of our enemies. Such history should work to grow our sense of joy and wonder at the possibilities implied in rebellion, and our appreciation and sense of heritage for those who came before us."
3: "The universal hypocrisy of modern society", or was it just a mirage?
"In one of Edgar Allen Poe's tales he recounts how a little group of wrecked seafarers on a water logged vessel, at the last extremity of starvation, are suddenly made delirious with joy at seeing a sail approaching them. As she came near them she seemed to be managed strangely and unseamanly as though she were scarcely steered at all, but come near she did, and their joy was too great for them to think much of this anomaly. At last they saw the seamen on board of her, and noted one in the bows especially who seemed to be looking at them with great curiosity, nodding also as though encouraging them to have patience, and smiling at them constantly, showing as he did so a set of very white teeth, and apparently so anxious for their safety that he did not notice that the red cap that he had on his head was falling into the water.
All of a sudden, as the vessel neared them, and while their hearts were leaping with joy at their now certain deliverance, an inconceivable and horrible stench was wafted to them across the waters, and presently to their horror and misery they saw that this was a ship of the dead, the bowing man was a tottering corpse, his red cap a piece of his flesh torn from him by a sea fowl; his amicable smile was caused by his jaws, denuded of the flesh, showing his white teeth set in a perpetual grin. So passed the ship of the dead into the landless ocean, leaving the poor wretches to their despair.
To us Socialists this Ship of the Dead is an image of the civilisation of our epoch, as the cast away mariners are of the hopes of the humanity entangled in it. The cheerfully bowing man, whose signs of encouragement and good feeling turn out to be the results of death and corruption, well betokens to us the much be praised philanthropy of the rich and refined classes of our Society, which is born of the misery necessary to their very existence. How do people note eagerly, like Arthur Gordon Pym and his luckless fellows, the beautiful hope of the softening of life by the cultivation of good feeling, kindness, and gratitude between rich and poor, with its external manifestations; its missionary enterprises at home and abroad hospitals, churches, refuges, and the like; its hard working clergy dwelling amidst the wretched homes of those whose souls they are saving; its elegant and enthusiastic ladies sometimes visiting them; its dignified, cultivated gentlemen from the universities spreading the influences of a refined home in every dull half starved parish in England; the thoughtful series of lectures on that virtue of thrift which the poor can scarcely fail to practise even unpreached to; its increasing sense of the value of moral purity among those whose surroundings forbid them to understand even the meaning of physical purity; its scent of indecency in Literature and Art, which would prevent the publication of any book written out of England or before the middle of the 19th century, and would reduce painting and sculpture to the production of petticoated dolls without bodies. All this, which seems so refined and humane, is but the effect of the distant view of the fleshless grinning skull of civilisation seeming to offer an escape to the helpless castaways, but destined on its nearer approach to suffocate them with the stench of its corruption, and then to vanish aimlessly into the void, leaving them weltering on the ocean of life which its false hope has rendered more dreadful than before.
...Yet even now it is necessary that a certain code of morality should be supposed to exist and to have some relation to the religion which, being the creation of another age, has now become a sham. With this sham moreover its accompanying morality is also steeped, although it has a use as serving for a cover of a morality really the birth of the present condition of things, and this is clung to with a determination or even ferocity natural enough, since its aim is the perpetuation of individual property in wealth, in workman, in wife, in child.
The so called morality of the present age is simply commercial necessity, masquerading in the forms of the Christian ethics: for instance, commercial honour is merely the code necessitated the by needs of men in commercial relations which without it could not subsist, and which has found nothing in common with the Christian "do unto others as thou wouldst," etc., maxim, in the name of which it is on occasion invoked. The only connection that current commercial ethics has with the Christian is, as we said above, a purely formal one. The mystical individualist ethics of Christianity, which had for its supreme end another world and spiritual salvation therein, has been transformed into an individualist ethic having for its supreme end (tacitly, if not avowedly), the material salvation of the individual in the commercial battle of this world. This is illustrated by a predominance amongst the commercial classes of a debased Calvinistic theology, termed Evangelicalism, which is the only form of religion these classes can understand, the poetico-mystical element in the earlier Christianity being eliminated therefrom, and the "natural laws" of profit and loss, and the devil take the hindmost, which dominate this carnal world, being as nearly as possible reproduced into the spiritual world of its conception."
4: Black Bloc
"It is also what is left in the hands of our discontent, at the stage of society we have reached, despite ourselves: the impossibility of marching together while shouting out phrases so that they can be heard, the incapacity to engage in indirect and representative actions, the urgent need to unload one-thousandth of the cruelty the State, money, and advertisements inject in all our veins every day.
The category black bloc doesn’t designate anything or anyone, or more precisely, maybe it designates anyone as such. A distinctive feature of one who finds themselves in what we call a black bloc is to demand nothing for themselves or for others, to cut across public space without being subjected to it for once, to disappear in a mass that has at last come together in places that are not office or factory exits and public transportation at rush hour. Rampant hypocrisy makes us associate the black bloc with a specific and organized entity—like Sony, Vivendi, or Total Fina—and this same hypocrisy considers as “crimes” the minor damage that the desire for willful indistinctness leaves behind when it takes the form of a spontaneous demonstration.
In this night where all demonstrators look alike there is no point in posing Manichean questions. Especially since we know that the distinction between guilty and innocent no longer matters, all that counts is the one between winners and losers. Punishment always lands on the latter, not because they deserve it but because somebody has to be repressed. Trying to figure out if someone has infiltrated a black bloc is like trying to know the extent to which rain infiltrates a river, a lake, or seawater.
...Putting insurrections into words has simply turned into a not very attractive task. For one revolts first and foremost because words are insufficient."
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