The ARPANET is an operational, resource sharing inter-computer network linking a wide variety of computers variety at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sponsored research centers and other DoD and non-DoD activities in CONUS, Hawaii, Norway, and England. The ARPANET originated as a purely experimental network in late 1969 under a research and development program sponsored by DARPA to advance the state-of-the-art in computer internetting. The network was designated to provide efficient communications between heterogeneous computers so that hardware, software, and data resources could be conveniently and economically shared by a wide community of users. As the network successfully attained its initial design goals, additional users were authorized access to the network. Today, the ARPANET provides support for a large number of DoD projects and other non-DoD government projects with an operational network of many nodes and host computers.
ARPANET Information Brochure, Defense Communications Agency, May 1980
The day was unusually fine till the afternoon, when some of the gossips who frequent the East Cliff churchyard, and from that commanding eminence watch the wide sweep of sea visible to the north and east, called attention to a sudden show of "mares' tails" high in the sky to the north-west.
Watching Dresden operate was usually one of two things: mildly amusing or positively terrifying. On a scene, his whole personal manner always made me think of autistic kids. He never met anyone’s eyes for more than a flickering second. He moved with the sort of exaggerated caution of someone who was several sizes larger than normal, keeping his hands and arms in close to his body. He spoke a little bit softly, as if apologizing for the resonant baritone of his voice.
—Jim Butcher, Aftermath (short story from Murphy's POV)
“Optimism is not only a false but also a pernicious doctrine, for it presents life as a desirable state and man's happiness as its aim and object. Starting from this, everyone then believes he has the most legitimate claim to happiness and enjoyment. If, as usually happens, these do not fall to his lot, he believes that he suffers an injustice, in fact that he misses the whole point of his existence.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer
Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
Fatigue. Worry. The names too numerous, incidents too vulgar to recount here — black flesh, life in blackness — speak of life relegated to the zone of vulnerability, life that cannot ascend, life that cannot be assumed to the zone of so-called and so-thought protected. The current theological and philosophical narratives that provide the epistemology of our existence don’t tell us how these unprotected lives might actually be lived.
The quotidian, ordinary, everyday nature of these violent incidents should produce within us a restiveness, a restlessness, a desire to exist otherwise. It’s the violence that is the daily experience of black flesh, of black sociality, against which those of us committed to justice must contend. Modes of surveillance will not be the panacea for the end of such interactions. Police wearing body cameras will not end such violence. Sensitivity training will not obliterate the structures of policing as antagonistic to our lives. The urgency of our times, times that began before the inaugural events of Columbus’s 1492 blue oceanic colonial expansionist mission, demands a thinking about what we might call “otherwise” possibilities, otherwise inhabitations, otherwise worlds. The otherwise in all its plentitude vibrates afar off and near, here but also, and, there.
Part 1: Social Alienation, Homogenization, and the Suppression of Cognitive Development
While cognitive development is often considered a realm of study for children, understanding the immense and rapid brain growth that occurs from infancy to adolescence to early adulthood, what is not widely known or accepted is that cognitive development is something that continues, or has potential to continue, into adulthood and even throughout the lifetime.
The cultural fetishization of youth, the simultaneous worship and stripping of personhood of young people, is rooted in domination and the allure of exerting of power and influence over a young mind that has not yet clearly defined it’s own sense of self, it’s own sense of value nor fully understands it’s place in the world. This vulnerability is an obvious site of exploitation, and while the passing of time and awareness may make this more obvious to the exploited youth in retrospect as they age and move more firmly into adulthood, we also live in a society that does not encourage the actualization of self quite intentionally. This vulnerability continues to be a site of exploitation, potentially throughout the lifetime.
Western colonial imperialist culture has largely sought to wipe inherent understandings of development and maturation from societies that hold and held such concepts as self-evident. Many cultures have rites of passage to mark developmental stages, and have conceptions of humanity throughout the lifespan that create space for the youngest babies to the oldest elders to have a place of belonging that is largely absent from the modern Western paradigm, absent from an iteration of capitalism that relies on isolation to strengthen it’s hold on our sense of self, place, and community. Community is now a hodge podge of social connections spanning our digital social media space to the people we meet at work, the bar, or the gym. Belonging and self now defined by numbers and algorithms, deepening the psychic sway that propaganda holds over us as we seek to prove our worthiness of existence.
One personal experience that has driven this lesson home again and again was my own process of matrescence- my emergence into motherhood. The palpable loss of something I could not quite place- the sense of disorientation taking on such a monumental task as full responsibility for the life and thriving of a helpless human being- having had no models but only scraps of lore and popular sentiments about lack of sleep and loss of subjecthood and individuality to grant me any semblence of an idea of what to expect, how to emerge and move with the shifting focus of my energy, time, and self. We are creatures born and socialized via observation and modeling, and I did not grow up with models for how to care for a baby, how to breastfeed, nor how to manage the development of a child in a manner that respects their personhood. I did not have people around me to support the smooth functioning of a household with survival needs, no one to support me in getting proper sleep, reassure me that the baby was safe and okay and looked out for and that I was not alone in overseeing this task.
The more my child grew, and the more I grew in my role as mother, the more I saw and the more deeply I felt how a lack of interdepenent community affected my sense of self and place, and the ability for myself and my family to thrive.
In 2016 I read the book The Roots of Empathy which explains in detail a pedagogy developed to teach school children basic empathy (what I personally call compassion as I see empathy as distinct, that is for another article). One of the core tools they use is bringing a mother with a new baby into a classroom throughout the program- using the baby and it’s attachment to it’s parent as a way to illustrate crucial concepts like diversity of inherent personality, putting oneself in the shoes of another, etc. For instance, observing a baby one can learn about core personality features such as activity level, openness to novel experiences, reaction to stimuli and more. Every baby is different, and children can relate to themselves where they fall on any given trait, and look upon others in a light of acceptance of diversity- understanding that we are each imbued with traits that differ and are no better or worse than any other, and that we all have our place.
In a society that is built upon homogenization, in which certain traits and capacities are valued above others as useful and worthy, appreciating the natural diversity of our fellow humans is hardly an afterthought; it is actively fought against. All around us is messaging on how to be a productive person worthy of climbing the social and economic ladder, showing us that who we are is not enough and that our energy and focus should be spent thriving to be something different and that something different is defined in terms of who upholds existing hierarchies.
In my own explorations of alternative schooling options for my child, a friend shared their observation of their own unschooled children- that homeschooled and unschooled children tend not to develop as strict of hierarchies based on age or grade. They typically spend their time in age-diverse settings, watching parents tend to children of all ages, and understand that different ages come with varied developmental stages and adapt accordingly. Rather than a 6th grader looking down upon a 3rd grader, the 6th grader inherently understands through regular observation and interaction that they are at different stages of development and therefor have different dispositions, needs, and motivations. A sense of diversity and development as a part of the natural order of life is instilled in such an environment. The Roots of Empathy Program seeks to bring this understanding into classrooms by bringing the same babies back for students to observe the natural process of growth and development, and to base one’s understanding of others in context of who they are as well as where they are in their process of personal development.
This shifting framework in how I saw how diversity, inclusion, and mutual understanding in the realm of childhood has altered my understanding of the same in adulthood. My first introduction to the idea that cognitive development is something that continues beyond adulthood was through David Schnarch’s book Passionate Marriage. Schnarch frames adult cognitive development through the lens of differentiation which he further extrapolates on via his framework of the Crucible Four Points of Balance (solid flexible self, quiet mind and calm heart, grounded responding, and meaningful endurance). In his book Intimacy and Desire, he extrapolates on the scientific underpinning and an evolutionary model for human cognitive development, positing that the growth of the human prefrontal cortex gave us abiilties to make meaning of our experiences. He hypothesizes that relational dysfunctions that naturally arise in all intimate human relationships serve as a grounds of struggle for the purpose of cognitive growth. He makes an unusual and groundbreaking assertion that the most satisfying and meaningful intimacy happens as we age, because as we age we come to know ourselves better, have more of a self to reveal, and are challenged to show ourselves in vulnerable ways while maintaining solidity.
As an individual who is socially coded as and was socialized as a woman, the process of becoming a mother, aging, and having a changing body in many ways has forced me to confront the ways that a lack of an interdependent intergenerational community impacts our sense of self, and robs us of the knowledge that we would otherwise have access to about aging bodies and developing minds and selves throughout the stages of life. We feel guilty for gaining weight and developing wrinkles, for not purchasing or using diligently enough the many products and labors we are offered to stave off these inevitabilities. We do not have the role models of mothers who’s children have moved on to adulthood leaving us to grapple with a shifting role in our families and society all alone.
Instead parents hold on to their children for dear life for a sense of purpose, demeaning and degrading, engaging in emotional abuse and domination tactics (including neglect) to suppress the autonomous functioning of their children to instill a sense of dependence or obligation to them, or to emotionally distance themselves to pre-empt their inevitable growing independence.
The proliferation of familial dysfunction, the suppression of children’s autonomy, the prevalence of domestic abuse, all circle back to one missing piece: the suppression of differentiation and adult cognitive growth, and this suppression is the underpinning of a society of imbalanced distributions of power.
Sabotage is like wine! —Slogan among Polish women in Ravensbrück
Of all the methods of resistance employed by inmates of concentration camps throughout World War II, my favourite to read about are the relentless acts of sabotage that plagued Hitler’s war efforts. While much of the work assigned to inmates early in the war was intended solely as punishment (e.g. moving bags of sand back and forth), after the spring of 1942, the camps became a prime source of slave labour for nearby factories that supplied Germany’s army.[74] Descriptions of the work that occurred within these factories paints a picture of an international circus of neglect, ineptitude, laziness, and outright stupidity — masks for what were in fact outrageously brave acts of sabotage against the Nazi war machine. Using a wide array of creative approaches, some more blunt than others, the inmates were able to botch their jobs, demonstrating to the Germans that slavery is simply not a reliable source of quality labor. Many of these acts were spontaneous, while others were part of organized campaigns; all were geared towards the pure negation of Nazism. Although sabotage certainly caused headaches for the Nazis and may have even hastened the end of the war, for Häftlinge whose lives were dominated by a second-to-second battle for survival, these acts brought only a heightened level of danger and little personal hope of survival. It is not the outcome of the act, but the moment of action itself that speaks loudest here. For many, the opportunity to step outside of the role of victim for even a fleeting moment, the chance to hit back in whatever way possible, outweighed the risks of such actions. After providing a broad overview of some of the sabotage that took place, this book will take ITS first detailed look at anarcho-nihilism. The nihilist concepts of negation and jouissance resonate deeply with these acts of sabotage, offering a framework through which we might think about acts of resistance not as a means of liberation, but as acts of liberation in themselves. Like any act of resistance, sabotage within the camps and factories was an incredibly risky venture. The SS pursued a number of strategies to prevent and dissuade anything that would get in the way of seamless production and orderly labour lines. The crudest strategy was of course blunt violence: anyone who even raised suspicions of sabotage was met with swift and brutal repercussions. In some situations, saboteurs “pretended to be slow on the uptake” and were spared their lives, though even well-feigned stupidity usually resulted in being beaten almost to death or being hung outside of the factory.[75] On the other end of the spectrum, the Nazis experimented with “premiums,” petty benefits offered to inmates who showed high productivity.[76] To aid in these anti-saboteur efforts, the Political Department developed intense networks of informants throughout the factories to expose and dissuade saboteurs, turning the factories into “a jungle of stool pigeons and agent provocateurs” that led to countless executions.[77] When these tactics failed to produce the desired results, Hitler himself implemented a desperate measure that replicated the tactics of “shared responsibility” against his own valuable workforce: wherever production lines lagged to a suspicious degree, and wherever defective products were found in suspicious quantities, every tenth prisoner in that factory would be shot.[78] Despite these bloody efforts, there were “reports from practically all camps about acts of sabotage by inmates forced to work on the production of weapons, and it is certain that many acts went unrecorded.”[79] Fliers spread throughout occupied Europe with the phrase “Work Slow” tagged across an image of a turtle, while slogans were developed within camps to further spread this mentality, such as Buchenwald’s, “Whoever works more slowly will reach peace more quickly,” or Sachsenhausen’s less catchy, “Work slowly, produce substandard articles, waste materials, cause machines to break down.”[80] In short, sabotage became an ingrained part of the work ethic of concentration camps.
We have been debating tirelessly on different ways to abolish caste and other social evils which permeate the society that we have today. Raising voices against oppression, forming political parties and contesting in elections and also trying to force the government to form and implement policies which will give the Bahujans their fundamental rights. We have come a long way through decades of struggle in gaining rights, but the present political scenario of the country is not looking hopeful to the Bahujan aspirations for breaking away the shackles of caste.
With the diluting of labour laws and enabling state sanctioned exploitation of Bahujan labour, implementation of NEP which further marginalize the Bahujan children and extinguish their hopes of upward social and economic mobility, a proposed EIA which will rob the Bahujans and Adivasis of their land and livelihood, implementation of CAA and NRC to deprive the status of citizenship, privatization of key public utilities and destroying the already weakened public healthcare system, the government is openly showing its motives as a corporate stooge which dances to the whims of Adani, Ambani and other Brahmin Bania masters.
Armed with a grass roots organization like RSS and corporate funded media outlets, they have complete dominance in creating narratives they want the public to believe and they also have a well-oiled IT cell to spread fake news against any dissenters who dare to raise voice against them. Even though there are voices in the society which are raising against these government policies, there is a lack of grass root organization and common vision is sometimes lacking. This doesn’t mean that all the opposing forces against the fascist regime, which is murdering our democracy, should be centralized under one political entity. Instead it is time to think about exactly the opposite, the expansion of the idea of democracy from merely being a political tool used while casting vote once every 5 years to inculcating an idea of democracy in all aspects of life — political, social and economical and decentralization of all aspects of society.
Anarchism is a political philosophy which rejects all coercive and oppressive forms of hierarchy, be it caste, class, color, creed, clan, gender, age, orientation or country. It says that every system of power hierarchy should be scrutinized and made to justify its existence, and any system which fails to justify itself and is trampling the freedom of the individual will have to be abolished. The idea of questioning oppressive power structures is inherent to the idea of anarchism. It prohibits a system where even a party or a few leaders decide on how the society will function. Instead it focuses on decentralizing power to local bodies and communities so that decisions are made at the lowest level possible, thus eliminating the concentration of power into a few hands. It also shares the view that people who are most impacted by policies and decisions are the ones who are most capable of making them.
Historically, humans have developed to live in societies which didn’t have the kind of huge inequalities as it exists today. There is an intrinsic instinct to cooperate and help each other which is visible when a disaster strikes or the self-organization that appears out of nowhere in organic movements against oppression. Solidarity and mutual aid are the foundations of an anarchist society. The “right to well-being” of all human beings, meaning “the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours” (Kropotkin, 1892). Two of the examples of societies which function close to anarchist principles today are Zapatistas of Mexico (Nacional, 2002) and Rojava in Syria (Democracy, 2018). Extreme corruption, colonization and environmental exploitation forced the indigenous people of Mexico to form an autonomous region where people directly form communities and decide the policies. Similarly, the people of Rojava, battered by the civil war, have formed an autonomous region with direct democratic ambitions based on an anarchist and libertarian socialist ideology promoting decentralization, gender equality, environmental sustainability and pluralistic tolerance for religious, cultural and political diversity based on democratic confederalism. One of the principles of direct democracy is that there are no elected representatives for a fixed term, any member who is elected will just be a spokesperson of the community and can be withdrawn immediately if he goes against the decision taken by discussion and deliberations. The means of production will be owned by workers and run by worker councils. Conflict resolution mechanism and alternative systems of judiciary exists within the community run by the members. There won’t be police or other systems which grant power to one person or group to take away the life and liberty of an individual, rather power will be distributed equally or rotationally which is controlled by the community. During the current times of BLM protests all over the world, it is clear that the police institution is just a tool employed by the ruling and propertied class to control the lower class and there is mass class for defunding the police and transferring the resources to community welfare projects.
We need to look at how these communities organize themselves in the face of an oppressive regime and come up with innovative ways to decentralize and create institutions which we are brainwashed to assume will work only if they are centralized. Decentralized community gardens provide food for the community which is maintained by them. Systems of education, community defense, criminal justice systems, industry and healthcare can be decentralized and we need to focus our efforts in building such grassroot level communities which function along the principles solidarity and mutual aid. We already have systems of mutual aid in our communities, all we need to do is to transfer these tendencies to all the systems we live by.
The Indian social mentality of following a leader or waiting for a savior needs to change. Any system which can consolidate power in the hands of the few can change into authoritarianism. Even if the leaders are benevolent and have the will to serve the people, there are systems of coercion which exist in our society, where economic, political and social power resides in the hands of the few, that they will bind the leaders from doing their duty to the Bahujans. The leaders and parties we look up to keep failing and disappointing us time and again. Now, action needs to be taken directly at grass root level by the Bahujans by creating communities and networks of solidarity and mutual aid and practicing decision making and direct participatory democracy. The culture of outsourcing decision making to politicians or other ruling class needs to stop. This has to start at all sectors of industry, agriculture and services too, and also within family.
We can’t turn to the state for protection anymore as it the state apparatus which is being systematically abused by the ruling castes to exploit Bahujan labour to create their wealth. Along with the efforts to educate Bahujans through social media and other means to sensitize them of their exploitation, effort needs to be focused at the bottom most level to inculcate the habit of participatory democracy at individual, family and community levels, respecting the liberty of the individual. The fight for annihilation of caste cannot be won, unless all unjust power structures in the society cease to exist and power is decentralized and distributed to the people directly, where individuals themselves can organize and make decisions about their life without being coerced or exploited to create wealth for others.
References
Democracy, N. (2018, July 6 ). The Communes of Rojava: A Model In Societal Self Direction. Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDnenjIdnnE
Kropotkin, P. (1892). The Conquest of Bread. Paris.
Nacional, E. Z. ( 2002). A Zapatista Response to “The EZLN Is NOT Anarchist”. Retrieved from The Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-a-zapatista-response-to-the-ezln-is-not-anarchist
…it is important that we note, following Lukács’s insights, that irrationalism tends to lead philosophers to abandon the prospect of a coherent understanding of the antagonisms and contradictions that make up bourgeois society. As such, philosophy falls into an apologetics for the bourgeois social order. This apologetics can take two forms: a direct apologetics in which the philosopher aims to champion the unjust social order directly, as we find in thinkers such as the libertarian writer Ayn Rand; or an indirect apologetics for capitalist exploitation, as we find in thinkers such as James Burnham or Nietzsche, in which the philosopher critiques the bourgeois social order and even aspects of capitalism, but keeps open an implicit justification of the social order. Indirect apologists often make for more effective proponents of reactionary agendas, as they incorporate an anti-capitalist critique but do not decisively champion a revolutionary position. In other words, indirect apologetics involves an obscuring or a mystification of the political and social situation.
“The communism of disaster communism, then, is a transgressive and transformative mobilization without which the unfolding catastrophe of global warming cannot and will not be stopped. It is simultaneously an undoing of the manifold structural injustices which perpetuate and draw strength from disaster, and an enactment of the widespread collective capacity to endure and flourish on a rapidly changing planet. It is hugely ambitious, requiring redistribution of resources at several scales; reparations for colonialism and slavery; expropriation of private property for Indigenous peoples; and the abolition of fossil fuels, among other monumental projects. We are, clearly, not there yet. But as Ernst Bloch noted, that “not-yet” is also in our present. In the collective responses to disaster, we find that many of the tools for constructing that new world already exist. When Solnit talks of that emotion “graver than happiness” which animates people in the wake of disaster, she catches “a glimpse of who else we ourselves may be and what else our society could become.” Amidst the ruins, within the terrible opening of the interruption, pitched against the conditions that produce and seek to capitalize upon that interruption, we are close to complete change, to the generalization of the knowledge that everything—and everyone—might yet be transformed. In other words, in the collective response to disaster, we glimpse a real movement which could yet abolish the present state of things.”
If you want to overcome your enemy you must match your effort against his power of resistance, which can be expressed as the product of two inseparable factors, viz. the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will. The extent of the means at his disposal is a matter—though not exclusively—of figures, and should be measurable. But the strength of his will is much less easy to determine and can only be gauged approximately by the strength of the motive animating it.
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