Category: Values theory

Theory relating to the ethical and political principles which underpin thought and practice.

For ex. : Peter Kropotkin – Anarchist Morality

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Analytic theory Anarchism Books Capitalism Global Longue durée Statism - Representationism Values theory

Debt : The first 5000 years

Author(s)

David Graeber

Contents

“The real history of markets is nothing like what we’re taught to think it is.

The earlier markets that we are able to observe appear to be spillovers, more or less; side effects of the elaborate administrative systems of ancient Mesopotamia. They operated primarily on credit.

Cash markets arose through war: again, largely through tax and tribute policies that were originally designed to provision soldiers, but that later became useful in all sorts of other ways besides.

It was only the Middle Ages, with their return to credit systems, that saw the first manifestations of what might be called market populism: the idea that markets could exist beyond, against, and outside of states […]

What we have seen ever since is an end­less political jockeying back and forth between two sorts of populism­ -state and market populism-without anyone noticing that they were talking about the left and right flanks of exactly the same animal.

The main reason that we’re unable to notice, I think, is that the legacy of violence has twisted everything around us. War, conquest, and slavery not only played the central role in converting human econ­omies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected. […]

If this book has shown anything, it’s exactly how much violence it has taken, over the course of human history, to bring us to a situation where it’s even possible to imagine that that’s what life is really about.”

David Graeber

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19th century 20th century 21st century Analytic theory Anarchism Anti-racism Books Capitalism Direct democracy Global Indigenous rights Patriarchy Statism - Representationism Strategic theory Values theory White supremacy

Anarchy Works (2010)

Author(s)

Peter Gelderloos

Contents

“Anarchism is the boldest of revolutionary social movements to emerge from the struggle against capitalism—it aims for a world free from all forms of domination and exploitation. But at its heart is a simple and convincing proposition: people know how to live their own lives and organize themselves better than any expert could.

Others cynically claim that people do not know what is in their best interests, that they need a government to protect them, that the ascension of some political party could somehow secure the interests of all members of society.

Anarchists counter that decision-making should not be centralized in the hands of any government, but instead power should be decentralized: that is to say, each person should be the center of society, and all should be free to build the networks and associations they need to meet their needs in common with others.

Anarchy means different things to different people. However, here are some basic principles most anarchists agree on.

– Autonomy and Horizontality : All people deserve the freedom to define and organize themselves on their own terms. Decision-making structures should be horizontal rather than vertical, so no one dominates anyone else; they should foster power to act freely rather than power over others. Anarchism opposes all coercive hierarchies, including capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

– Mutual Aid : People should help one another voluntarily; bonds of solidarity and generosity form a stronger social glue than the fear inspired by laws, borders, prisons, and armies. Mutual aid is neither a form of charity nor of zero-sum exchange; both giver and receiver are equal and interchangeable. Since neither holds power over the other, they increase their collective power by creating opportunities to work together.

– Voluntary Association : People should be free to cooperate with whomever they want, however they see fit; likewise, they should be free to refuse any relationship or arrangement they do not judge to be in their interest. Everyone should be able to move freely, both physically and socially. Anarchists oppose borders of all kinds and involuntary categorization by citizenship, gender, or race.

– Direct Action : It is more empowering and effective to accomplish goals directly than to rely on authorities or representatives. Free people do not request the changes they want to see in the world; they make those changes.

– Revolution : Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society.

– Self-liberation : ‘The liberation of the workers is the duty of the workers themselves,’ as the old slogan goes. This applies to other groups as well: people must be at the forefront of their own liberation. Freedom cannot be given; it must be taken.”

Peter Gelderloos

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Analytic theory Anarchism Anti-racism Books Capitalism Direct democracy Europe Global Indigenous rights Longue durée Middle East Patriarchy Statism - Representationism Strategic theory Values theory White supremacy

Worshiping Power – An Anarchist view of Early State Formation (2017)

Author(s)

Peter Gelderloos

Contents

“The question of how and why states were formed is the keystone of Western civilization’s creation mythology. Most readers will share my experience of having been brought up in a society where history begins with the appearance ofthe State.

Anything outside its domain is a Dark Age, terra incognita, a savage and barbarian land. We are taught that communities created the hierarchical structures of territorial governance that would eventually solidify as states out of a need to organize more efficiently, to respond to natural disasters or population growth, to administer large-scale infrastructure, to defend against hostile outsiders, to protect individual rights through a social contract, or to regulate economic production and surplus value.

All of these hypotheses are demonstrably false, yet we are continually indoctrinated to accept them, to keep us from grasping the predatory, parasitic, elitist, and completely unnecessary nature of the State.

[…] Thanks to social movements and anti-authoritarian struggles in the streets, and a growing recognition—starting with the near nuclear disasters of the Cold War and accelerating with climate change and mass extinction—that the State may well be the death of us all, room has finally been created for the scholarship that backs up what has been obvious for centuries: that the State is the enemy of freedom, human well-being, and the health of the planet.”

Peter Gelderloos

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How Non-violence Protects the State (2007)

Author(s)

Peter Gelderloos

Contents

“Because of the hegemony advocates of nonviolence exert, criticisms of nonviolence are excluded from the major periodicals, alternative media, and other forums accessed by anti-authoritarians. Nonviolence is maintained as an article of faith, and as a key to full inclusion within the movement.

Anti-authoritarians and anti-capitalists who suggest or practice militancy suddenly find themselves abandoned by the same pacifists they’ve just marched with at the latest protest. Once isolated, militants lose access to resources, and they lose protection from being scapegoated by the media or criminalized by the government. Within these dynamics caused by the knee-jerk isolation of those who do not conform to nonviolence, there is no possibility for a healthy or critical discourse to evaluate our chosen strategies.

[…] This book will show that nonviolence, in its current manifestations, is based on falsified histories of struggle. It has implicit and explicit connections to white people’s manipulations of the struggles of people of color. Its methods are wrapped in authoritarian dynamics, and its results are harnessed to meet government objectives over popular objectives. It masks and even encourages patriarchal assumptions and power dynamics. Its strategic options invariably lead to dead ends. And its practitioners delude themselves on a number of key points.

Given these conclusions, if our movements are to have any possibility of destroying oppressive systems such as capitalism and white supremacy and building a free and healthy world, we must spread these criticisms and end the stranglehold of nonviolence over discourse while developing more effective forms of struggle.”

Peter Gelderloos

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Who’s Afraid of the Black Blocs ? Anarchy in Action around the World (2014)

Author(s)

Francis Dupuis-Déri

Contents

“Amid clouds of tear gas, police officers in full riot gear face off with silhouetted figures bustling in the street. Masked and dressed in black, those figures are the “Black Bloc.” The black flag of anarchism waves above the commotion as bottles, rocks, and even the occasional Molotov cocktail fly overhead. The police fire volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets. Sometimes the bullets are real. The action unfolds against a backdrop of banks and multinational retail shops smeared with anarchist and anti-capitalist graffiti, their windows shattered. Since the epic “Battle of Seattle,” fought on November 30, 1999, during the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the media have enthusiastically captured such scenes.

According to a widespread myth, there is only one Black Bloc, which is thought to be a single permanent organization with numerous branches throughout the world. In fact, the term Black Bloc represents a shifting, ephemeral reality. Black Blocs are composed of ad hoc assemblages of individuals or affinity groups that last for the duration of a march or rally. The expression designates a specific type of collective action, a tactic that consists in forming a mobile bloc in which all individuals retain their anonymity thanks in part to their masks and head-to-toe black clothing. Black Blocs may occasionally use force to express their outlook in a demonstration, but more often than not they are content to march peacefully.

[…] Voices decrying the “theoretical confusion” and “theoretical poverty” of Black Blocs and their allies can be heard even on the far left. But this sort of criticism is specious, because it assesses the theoretical value of direct actions using criteria that are foreign to such gestures, comparing them, for instance, to treatises of social or political philosophy.

For many of its participants, the Black Bloc tactic enables them to express a world view and a radical rebuke of the political and economic system, yet they are certainly not so credulous as to believe that doing so can frame a general theory of liberal society and globalization. The Black Bloc is not a treatise in political philosophy, let alone a strategy; it is a tactic. A tactic is not about global power relations, or about how to take power, or even better, how to get rid of power and domination. A tactic is not about global revolution. Does this imply renouncing political thinking and action? No. A tactic such as the Black Bloc is a way of behaving in street protests. It may help empower the people protesting in the street, by giving them the opportunity to express a radical critique of the system, or by strengthening their ability to resist the police’s assaults on the people.”

Francis Dupuis-Déri

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Black on Both Sides : A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017)

Author(s)

C. Riley Snorton

Contents

“Although the perception that “race” and “gender” are fixed and knowable terms is the dominant logic of identity, in this book ‘trans’ is more about a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival, and ‘blackness’ signifies upon an enveloping environment and condition of possibility. Here, trans—in each of its permutations—finds expression and continuous circulation within blackness, and blackness is transected by embodied procedures that fall under the sign of gender.

[…] Black on Both Sides is a meditation on an eclectic collection of materials, including mid-nineteenth and twentieth-century medical illustrations, pickup notices, fugitive-slave narratives, Afromodernist literature, twentieth-century journalistic accounts of black people ‘exposed’ as living in/as different genders, true-crime books, documentary film, and poetry. As with any archive or historiographical project, its organization is political.

[…] What is necessary, then, are theoretical and historical trajectories that further imaginative capacities to construct more livable black and trans worlds.”

C. Riley Snorton

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20th century 21st century Analytic theory Books Capitalism Colonialism Direct democracy Feminism Futures theory Intersectionality Longue durée Middle East Patriarchy Social Ecology Socialism Statism - Representationism Strategic theory Values theory

The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan (2017)

Kurdistan, Woman’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism
Author(s)

Abdullah Öcalan

Contents

“Öcalan coined several slogans, such as ‘A country can’t be free unless the women are free’, and later he restated this more strongly as ‘To me women’s freedom is more precious than the freedom of the homeland’, thereby redefining national liberation as first and foremost women’s freedom. In his prison writings, women’s freedom is taken up constantly as an essential part of his discussions of history, contemporary society and political activism. The practice he observed in real socialist countries and his own theoretical efforts and practice since the1970s led Öcalan to the conclusion that the enslavement of women was the origin of all other forms of enslavement. This, he concludes, is not due to woman being biologically different to man, but because she was the founder and leader of the Neolithic matriarchal system.

[…] Öcalan has examined the issue of women’s freedom, the phenomena of power and state and how interrelated they all are. This has led him over and over again to return to an analysis of history. In doing so he stumbled over nation, state and nation-state and how detrimental these are for any movement; turning even the most revolutionary individuals into mere practitioners of capitalism. For Abdullah Öcalan it is not sufficient to produce critique and self-critique. He feels compelled to lay out what might constitute an alternative to the way of life that is being imposed on society. Therefore, he makes an effort to systematise the lives and struggles of all those oppressed and exploited throughout history, aswell as to propose an alternative model and way of life outside of capitalist modernity and thus classical civilisation.

[…] Öcalan’s voice is tremendously important as one of peace and reason, but it is all too often silenced by his solitary confinement on Imrali Island. His freedom is in the interest of all peoples in the Middle East – not only of the Kurds. As you will see, the writings in this book do not address only the Kurds. There is no ethno-centrist or even nationalist perspective here. Everybody can be inspired by them or benefit from them. The Rojava Revolution may be the initial spark to a wave of transformations in the Middle East and perhaps beyond. And with the support of you, the reader, this wave will also carry Abdullah Öcalan himself out of his prison cell and to freedom.”

International Initiative ‘Freedom for Abdullah Öcalan’ – Peace in Kurdistan

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To Exist is to Resist – Black Feminism in Europe (2019)

Author(s)

Akwugo Emejulu

Francesca Sobande

Contents

“How might we theorise and practise Black feminism and Afrofeminism in Europe today? This is a provocative question for Black women, as our politics are too often erased from or misrecognised in the European imagination.

We define Black feminism as a praxis that identifies women racialised as Black as knowing agents for social change. Black feminism is both a theory and a politics of affirmation and liberation. Black feminism names and valorises the knowledge production and lived experiences of different Black women derived from our class, gender identity, legal status and sexuality, for example.

This insistence on Black women as human, as agents and as knowers is critical to any kind of Black feminist thought. It radically dissents from and subverts the hegemonic con-structions of Black women as either irrelevant and invisible objects or alien Others who disrupt the taken for granted racialised and gendered social and economic order. Crucially, Black feminism is also a politics of liberation. Our struggle for our humanity is revolutionary political action that imagines another world is possible beyond the plunder, exploitation and expropriation that are the bedrock of liberal democracies.

It is important to stress that Black feminism does not merely operate against violence and exclusion but creates and fosters a different way of seeing and being in this world. Black feminism is always a creative and dynamic production of thinking and living otherwise.”

Akwugo Emejulu & Francesca Sobande

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Anarchism – A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 3 (2013)

The New Anarchism 1974–2012

Volume 1 : From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

Volume 2 : The Emergence of The New Anarchism (1939-1977)

Author(s)

Robert Graham

Contents

“Anarchy, a society without government, has existed since time immemorial. Anarchism, the doctrine that such a society is desirable, is a much more recent devel­opment.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings lived in societies without any for­mal political institutions or constituted authority. About 6,000 years ago, around the time of the so-called dawn of civilization, the first societies with formal structures of hierarchy, command, control and obedience began to develop. At first, these hierar­chical societies were relatively rare and isolated primarily to what is now Asia and the Middle East. Slowly they increased in size and influence, encroaching upon, some­times conquering and enslaving, the surrounding anarchic tribal societies in which most humans continued to live. Sometimes independently, sometimes in response to pressures from without, other tribal societies also developed hierarchical forms of social and political organization.

Still, before the era of European colonization, much of the world remained essentially anarchic, with people in various parts of the world continuing to live without formal institutions of government well into the 19th cen­tury. It was only in the 20th century that the globe was definitively divided up be­tween competing nation states which now claim sovereignty over virtually the entire planet.

The rise and triumph of hierarchical society was a far from peaceful one. War and civilization have always marched forward arm in arm, leaving behind a swath of destruction scarcely conceivable to their many victims, most of whom had little or no understanding of the forces arrayed against them and their so-called primitive ways of life. It was a contest as unequal as it was merciless.

[…]

Anarchists and their pre­cursors, such as Fourier, were among the first to criticize the combined effects of the organization of work, the division of labour and technological innovation under capi­talism. Anarchists recognized the importance of education as both a means of social control and as a potential means of liberation. They had important things to say about art and free expression, law and morality. They championed sexual freedom but also criticized the commodification of sex under capitalism. They were critical of all hierarchical relationships, whether between father and children, husband and wife, teacher and student, professionals and workers, or leaders and led, throughout society and even within their own organizations. They emphasized the importance of maintaining consistency between means and ends, and in acting in accordance with their ideals now, in the process of transforming society, not in the distant future. They opposed war and militarism in the face of widespread repression, and did not hesitate to criticize the orthodox Left for its authoritarianism and opportunism.

They developed an original conception of an all-encompassing social revolution, rejecting state terrorism and seeking to reduce violence to a minimum.”

Robert Graham

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Anarchism – A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 2 (2009)

The Emergence of The New Anarchism (1939-1977)

Volume 1 : From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

Volume 3 : The New Anarchism (1974–2012)

Author(s)

Robert Graham

Contents

“Anarchy, a society without government, has existed since time immemorial. Anarchism, the doctrine that such a society is desirable, is a much more recent devel­opment.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings lived in societies without any for­mal political institutions or constituted authority. About 6,000 years ago, around the time of the so-called dawn of civilization, the first societies with formal structures of hierarchy, command, control and obedience began to develop. At first, these hierar­chical societies were relatively rare and isolated primarily to what is now Asia and the Middle East. Slowly they increased in size and influence, encroaching upon, some­times conquering and enslaving, the surrounding anarchic tribal societies in which most humans continued to live. Sometimes independently, sometimes in response to pressures from without, other tribal societies also developed hierarchical forms of social and political organization.

Still, before the era of European colonization, much of the world remained essentially anarchic, with people in various parts of the world continuing to live without formal institutions of government well into the 19th cen­tury. It was only in the 20th century that the globe was definitively divided up be­tween competing nation states which now claim sovereignty over virtually the entire planet.

The rise and triumph of hierarchical society was a far from peaceful one. War and civilization have always marched forward arm in arm, leaving behind a swath of destruction scarcely conceivable to their many victims, most of whom had little or no understanding of the forces arrayed against them and their so-called primitive ways of life. It was a contest as unequal as it was merciless.

[…]

Anarchists and their pre­cursors, such as Fourier, were among the first to criticize the combined effects of the organization of work, the division of labour and technological innovation under capi­talism. Anarchists recognized the importance of education as both a means of social control and as a potential means of liberation. They had important things to say about art and free expression, law and morality. They championed sexual freedom but also criticized the commodification of sex under capitalism. They were critical of all hierarchical relationships, whether between father and children, husband and wife, teacher and student, professionals and workers, or leaders and led, throughout society and even within their own organizations. They emphasized the importance of maintaining consistency between means and ends, and in acting in accordance with their ideals now, in the process of transforming society, not in the distant future. They opposed war and militarism in the face of widespread repression, and did not hesitate to criticize the orthodox Left for its authoritarianism and opportunism.

They developed an original conception of an all-encompassing social revolution, rejecting state terrorism and seeking to reduce violence to a minimum.”

Robert Graham

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