Tag: statism – representationism

The Struggle against the State & Other Essays (1996)

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Post date March 16, 2020
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Author(s)

Nestor Makhno

Alexandre Skirda (editor)

“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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Tags 1996, alexandre skirda, anarchism, books, kronstadt, makhnovtchina, nestor makhno, organization, russia, russian revolution, soviets, spain, spanish revolution, statism - representationism, ukraine, USSR

20th century Analytic theory Anarchism Books Capitalism Gerontocracy - Adultocracy Global Longue durée Patriarchy Social Ecology Statism - Representationism Values theory White supremacy

The Ecology of Freedom (1982)

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Post date March 16, 2020
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Author(s)

Murray Bookchin

“A hierarchical mentality fosters the renunciation of the pleasures of life. It justifies toil, guilt, and sacrifice by the ‘inferiors’, and pleasure and the indulgent gratification of virtually every caprice by their ‘superiors’.
[…] This mentality permeates our individual psyches in a cumulative form up to the present day – not merely as capitalism but as the vast history of hierarchical society from its inception. Unless we explore this history, which lives actively within us like earlier phases of our individual lives, we will never be free of its hold.
We may eliminate social injustice, but we will not achieve social freedom. We may eliminate classes and exploitation, but we will not be spared from the trammels of hierarchy and domination. We may exorcize the spirit of gain and accumulation from our psyches, but we will still be burdened by gnawing guilt, renunciation, and a subtle belief in the ‘vices’ of sensuousness.”
Murray Bookchin

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Tags 1982, books, ecology, gerontocracy - adultocracy, hierarchy, murray bookchin, patriarchy, social ecology, statism - representationism, technology

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

Democratic Confederalism (2011)

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Post date March 16, 2020
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Author(s)

Abdullah Öcalan

“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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Tags 2011, abdullah ocalan, books, democracy, democratic confederalism, direct democracy, feminism, kurdistan, kurds, make rojava green again, middle east, PKK, RiseUp4Rojava, rojava, state, state formation, statism - representationism, syria

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Society against the State (1974)

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Post date March 11, 2020
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Author(s)

Pierre Clastres

“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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