Category: Direct democracy

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Our History is the Future (2019)

Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
Author(s)

Nick Estes

Contents

“Thanksgiving is the quintessential origin story a settler nation tells itself : ‘peace’ was achieved between Natives and settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts, where Mayflower pilgrims established a colony in 1620, over roast turkey and yams.

To consummate the wanton slaughter of some 700 Pequots, in 1637 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day be celebrated ‘in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won’.

Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide.

[…] But as colonialism changes throughout time, so too does resistance to it. By drawing upon earlier struggles and incorporating elements of them into their own experience, each generation continues to build dynamic and vital traditions of resistance. Such collective experiences build up over time and are grounded in specific Indigenous territories and nations.”

Nick Estes

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The Struggle against the State & Other Essays (1996)

Author(s)

Nestor Makhno

Alexandre Skirda (editor)

Contents

“The fact that the modern State is the organizational form of an authority founded upon arbitrariness and vio­lence in the social life of toilers is independent of whether it may be ‘bourgeois’ or ‘proletarian’.

It relies upon op­pressive centralism, arising out of the direct violence of a minority deployed against the majority. In order to enforce and impose the legality of its system, the State resorts not only to the gun and money, but also to potent weapons of psychological pressure. With the aide of such weapons, a tiny group of politicians enforces psychological repression of an entire society, and, in particular, of the toiling masses, conditioning them in such a way as to divert their atten­tion from the slavery instituted by the State.

[…] The final and utter liquidation of the State can only come to pass when the struggle of the toilers is oriented along the most libertarian lines possible, when the toilers will themselves determine the structures of their social ac­tion. These structures should assume the form of organs of social and economic self-direction, the form of free ‘anti­authoritarian’ soviets.

The revolutionary workers and their vanguard – the anarchists – must analyze the nature and structure of these soviets and specify their revolutionary functions in advance. It is upon that, chiefly, that the posi­tive evolution and development of anarchist ideas in the ranks of those who will accomplish the liquidation of the State on their own account in order to build a free society, will be dependent.”

Nestor Makhno

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Democratic Confederalism (2011)

Author(s)

Abdullah Öcalan

Contents

“In contrast to a centralist and bureaucratic understanding of administration and exercise of power, confederalism poses a type of political self-administration where all groups of the society and all cultural identities can express themselves in local meetings, general conventions and councils. This understanding of democracy opens the political space to all strata of the society and allows for the formation of different and diverse political groups. In this way it also advances the political integration of the society as a whole.

Politics becomes a part of everyday life.

Without politics the crisis of the state cannot be solved since the crisis is fuelled by a lack of representation of the political society. Terms like federalism or self administration as they can be found in liberal democracies need to be conceived anew.
Essentially, they should not be conceived as hierarchical levels of the administration of the nation-state but rather as central tools of social expression and participation. This, in turn, will advance the politicization of the society. We do not need big theories here, what we need is the will to lend expression to the social needs by strengthening the autonomy of the social actors structurally and by creating the conditions for the organization of the society as a whole.

The creation of an operational level where all kinds of social and political groups, religious communities, or intellectual tendencies can express themselves directly in all local decision-making processes can also be called participative democracy. The stronger the participation the more powerful is this kind of democracy.

While the nation-state is in contrast to democracy, and even denies it, democratic confederalism constitutes a continuous democratic process.”

Abdullah Öcalan

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Our Word is Our Weapon : Selected Writings by Subcomandante Marcos (2001)

Author(s)

Subcomandante Marcos

Juana Ponce de Leon (editor)

Contents

“The indigenous of Chiapas aren’t the only humiliated and offended people in this world. In all places and at all times, regardless of race, color, customs, culture, and religious belief, the human creature we are so proud to be has always known how to humiliate and offend those whom, with sad irony, he continues to call his fellows. We have invented things that don’t exist in nature : cruelty, torture, and disdain.

By a perverse use of race, we’ve come to divide humanity into irreducible categories : rich and poor, master and slave, powerful and weak, wise and ignorant. And incessantly in each of these divisions we’ve made subdivisions so as to vary and freely multiply reasons for disdain, humiliation, and offense.

In recent years Chiapas has been the place where the most disdained, most humiliated, and most offended people of Mexico were able to recover intact a dignity and an honor that had never been completely lost, a place where the heavy tombstone of an oppression that has gone on for centuries has been shattered to allow the passage of a procession of new and different living people ahead of an endless procession of murders. These men, women, and children of the present are only demanding respect for their rights, not just as human beings and as part of this humanity but also as the indigenous who want to continue being indigenous.

They’ve risen up most especially with a moral strength that only honor and dignity themselves are capable of bringing to birth and nursing in the spirit, even while the body suffers from hunger and the usual miseries.”

José Saramago (Prologue)

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Post-scarcity Anarchism (1971)

Author(s)

Murray Bookchin

Contents

“Today the greatest strength of capitalism lies in its ability to subvert revolutionary goals by the ideology of domination. What accounts for this strength is the fact that ‘bourgeois ideology’ is not merely bourgeois.

Capitalism is the heir of history, the legatee of all the repressive features of earlier hierarchical societies, and bourgeois ideology has been pieced together from the oldest elements of social domination and conditioning—elements so very old, so intractable, and so seemingly unquestionable, that we often mistake them for ‘human nature’.

There is no more telling commentary on the power of this cultural legacy than the extent to which the socialist project itself is permeated by hierarchy, sexism and renunciation. From these elements come all the social enzymes that catalyze the everyday relationships of the bourgeois world—and of the so-called ‘radical movement’.

Hierarchy, sexism and renunciation do not disappear with ‘democratic centralism’, a ‘revolutionary leadership’, a ‘workers’ state’, and a ‘planned economy’. On the contrary, hierarchy, sexism, and renunciation function all the more effectively if centralism appears to be ‘democratic’, if leaders appear to be ‘revolutionaries’, if the state appears to belong to the ‘workers’, and if commodity production appears to be ‘planned’.

Insofar as the socialist project fails to note the very existence of these elements, much less their vicious role, the ‘revolution’ itself becomes a facade for counterrevolution.”

Murray Bookchin

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Society against the State (1974)

Author(s)

Pierre Clastres

Contents

“Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value judgment that immediately throws doubt on the possibility of constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing something – the State – that is essential to them, as it is to any other society: our own, for instance. Consequently, those socie­ties are incomplete ; they are not quite true societies –
they are not civilized – their existence continues to suffer the painful experi­ence of a lack – the lack of a State – which, try as they may, they will never make up. Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the explorers’ chronicles and the work of research­ers alike: society is inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every society.

One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within himself, internalized like the believer’s faith, the certitude that society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very existence of primitive socie­ties if not as the rejects of universal history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has been transcended ? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism’s other face, the complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that every soci­ety is condemned to enter into that history and pass through the stages which lead from savagery to civilization.

[…] But the assertion of an obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies.”

Pierre Clastres

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