The Invisible Library

We Are All Anarchists Now
by Siva Vaidhyanathan

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg is offering a nice deal to anti�Republican protesters who pledge not to break things during the Republican National Convention this week. Polite protesters will receive discounts at such Manhattan hotspots as the Pokemon Center and Applebees Restaurants if they display cute buttons declaring them “peaceful political activists”.

Such perks might not be as exclusive as the mayor hopes. During his announcement earlier this month, Bloomberg admitted that “unfortunately, we can’t stop an anarchist from getting a button.”

The mayor seems caught in the same unfortunate binary as many commentators on recent political uprisings. They assume that anarchists are violent by definition. They carry a cartoon image of anarchism, reinforced by more than a century of propaganda and misrepresentation of this complex political philosophy. And they fail to recognise that anarchism is now a part of millions of people�s attitudes and orientations, even if we rarely call it what it is.

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Well, it’s time Americans got to know the anarchists in their midst. They might be surprised at their influence and diversity. I’m not an anarchist. I’m just a good mainstream American liberal. But I have been studying anarchism for some time. So please allow me to describe it.

Anarchism is radical democracy. It eschews authority and dominance. It demands a commitment to fight coercion in all its forms. Yet anarchists (with some exceptions) generally oppose violence, vandalism, and political disengagement. Anarchist organisations (not an oxymoron) govern through conversation and consensus.

The American experience with anarchism has been tainted by images of violence and coloured by anti�Semitism and nativism: the 1877 Haymarket Square riots in Chicago; the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo at the hands of a deranged American of Polish descent; and the Red Scare and Palmer Raids that followed the first world war.

The European experience is richer and more nuanced. It involves the failed revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, the Russian Revolution before the Bolsheviks triumphed, and the influential sindicatos movement in Spain before the rise of fascism. Anarchism, as a result of such failures at the hands of enemies both left and right, has been considered a mere footnote to modern political history.

But anarchism in recent years showed itself as a powerful force in the 1994 Zapatista uprisings in Mexico and the massive protests that shut down the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle. In both cases, it was state officials who overreacted with brutality and violence, yet the anarchists who got blamed. Still, many movements took inspiration from the Zapatistas and let Seattle raise their expectations.

Although it’s been with us in some form since the cynics of Greek antiquity, anarchy matters now more than ever. As anarchism has faded as a well�defined political movement, its tactics have grown in relevance. Anarchism is now practical. It is a bag of tools.

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Read the Whole Thing at Democracy Now.

(Note: this post was written by my good friend, Jason).

Oh, sure, you used to call yourselves Americans. You used to stand for liberty and pursuit of happiness and for the people and by the blah blah bah. (We all knew that was a little much, didn’t we?) Well, at last we can breathe an exhausted sigh of relief. We can finally be honest. There is no saving grace, no human compassion or any of the whiny spectral optimism that tainted the language and the legacies of our “founding fathers”. There is no Mother Planet, no Gaia, and there is no Noble Savage. There is only things. Things for the taking. Might makes Right, and Peace is only attained through Omnipresent Threat of the Destruction of Everything. No Mercy For The Weak. These things are as Right and as Solid as the dirt beneath our feet. As Real as jaws crunching flesh.

It is time to give up the baby-mewling. Time to lay your books and scythes on the ground and pick up your swords and your assault rifles. Time to stop teaching your children nursery rhymes of universal humanity and teach them strategic placement of land mines.

Evolution has ended, Ladies and Gentleman, and we have been deluding ourselves in believing in some Dream Country, some Idealized World. Evolution has ended and we have been it’s ultimate beneficiaries. We now control it. Broke it like a horse and ran nanotechnology through it’s skeleton and now we guide it. And because we now control the future and the present we will soon control the past. And we will bend it and shape it, melt it and dilute it and forge it into a perfect genealogy of Power, leading up to the inevitable, unstoppable juggernaut that is US.

Rejoice, brothers and sisters, and lay your lives down at the feet of our Masters. Because we are only worthy of sacrifice to our Gods, and our Gods are Men. Men that are better than us. Men that have the necessary tools to lead– and only one tool is necessary to win, at any rate. Poor, doomed Mr. Kurtz knew it. It is only Will.

These Men of Will, our mighty hydra of flesh that we will now call El Shaddai, after our prototype, shall lead us through a crucible of blood that will end in our beautiful martyrdom, not for some dream of a fool’s Heaven, or a fanciful Afterlife, but for US. For Victory over History. For Our Kind. Put down your faces, my people, we are the New Pawns. We are the New Spartans. Our face is an obdurate mask of Will. We are a phalanx, marching toward Dominion over All. And our Masters will feed on our sweat and on the livers of the conquered and we will be watch, happily, basking in Their presence as They eat the World.

And We the legs that move Them.

Welcome to New Sparta, Ladies and Gentlemen. Prepare to give your lives.

–Jason.

My wife, besides being beautiful, smart and a talented photographer is now also a blogger! See her work at the Photograhic Library.