Despite the caricatures of black-bloc-style chaos, the bulk of anarchist tradition has sought for people to be better organized in their everyday lives—while they work, where they live, how they manage disagreements. This type of power emanates from below, and it is shared. Anarchists aspire to a kind of world in which the Donald Trumps among us can shout all they want but nobody has the need for flocking to them. Real, daily democracy does not leave much room for quite so much greatness.
Anarchism calls for a politics that doesn’t begin and end with politicians.
“Less than two miles from the inaugural ceremonies,” The Washington Post reported on the front page of its website on Friday evening, “anarchists marched through the city’s streets, smashing bus-stop glass, vandalizing businesses and lighting fires.” It goes unexplained how the paper was able to confirm that these protesters were adherents of anarchist political philosophy, since fascists, soccer fans and others have been known for such conduct at times. (To The Post’s credit, at least, if these are the same protesters who also punched white nationalist Richard Spencer in the face, that pretty well points in the anarchist direction.) But whatever you think of such mayhem, or regardless of whom you accuse of it, anarchism is a tradition of thought and practice that we would do well to reconsider in times such as this.
Anarchism shares common roots in the late Enlightenment with liberal republicanism, through figures like William Godwin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. They agreed with earlier liberals like Locke, for instance, that people have the capacity to reason and the dignity to self-govern; the difference was that they went further in seeking self-governance at every level and in every corner of life. An occasional ballot box is not enough. Anarchism is not content with any form of coercion, whether by countries or corporations or an electoral college. It is skeptical of all pretenders to authority, like God’s warnings about kings in the Hebrew Bible and Jesus’ indifference to the powers that pretended to rule Palestine in his time. This is the anarchism, for instance, that Dorothy Day inherited and lived by.
On a day that saw the ascent of a man who promises to personally deliver more weapons, walls and wealth for some, anarchism offers a stark alternative. It calls for a politics that doesn’t begin and end with politicians.
...
Despite the caricatures of black-bloc-style chaos, the bulk of anarchist tradition has sought for people to be better organized in their everyday lives—while they work, where they live, how they manage disagreements. This type of power emanates from below, and it is shared. Anarchists aspire to a kind of world in which the Donald Trumps among us can shout all they want but nobody has the need for flocking to them. Real, daily democracy does not leave much room for quite so much greatness.
The scenario could have played out differently. If it had, what might these right and left libertarianisms - equally amnesiac about their common origins - learn from one another?
The anarcho-curious left might rediscover that there is more to a functional resistance movement than youthful rebellion. Its members might, for instance, study working examples of the mutual aid they long for - education, material support, free day care - in churches and megachurches across the country, which form both the social life and the power base of the right. Independent of the state, these citadels put into practice something anarchists have been saying all along: no form of politics is worth our time until it helps struggling people get what they need, sustainably and and reliably. All the better if yhou can do so without patriarchy and fundamentalism.
Meanwhile, the libertarian right might find the wherewithal to detach from its overly rosy view of the Constitution, from its more or less subtle racism against nonwhites and immigrants, and from its 1-percenter sponsors. It might raise tougher questions about whether 'competition' is really the most liberating response to long-standing injustices along lines of gender, race, and circumstance. What would these young, energetic libertarians think if they encountered an egalitarian, democratic anarchism in the form of a robust political philosophy and practice? For too many people, Ayn Rand is as close to it as they are ever exposed to, and she's not very close at all.
No country has gotten rid of poverty through charity, philanthropy and welfare.
America Magazine’s Nathan Schneider and George Lakey, author of Viking Economics, discuss the differences between universal care and the welfare state, the role of religion in Nordic economics, and much, much more. Read it. It is great.
I have to apologize to the prophets. I just listened to an interview with Nathan Schneider, and it made me realize that I had a caricature in my mind, of an angry man breathing fire, ranting and raving. The caricature is connected to my own ambivalent feelings about Christianity and patriarchy but the story is nuanced. Prophecy was also an ancient form of institutional critique. It must have taken great courage to stand alone, refuse the comforts of daily life and domesticity, of belonging; and speak truth to power. The writer Marilyn Robinson in a recent interview was asked which Presidential candidate she favored and she said she was partial to the “prophetic fire” of Bernie Sanders.
In Toronto this week, we have Black Lives Matters protesters camped out in front of Police Headquarters, Jian Ghomeshi acquitted on all charges of sexual assault, and Rob Ford’s death followed by a hypocritical display of ‘mourning’ in the media. My sister in law stated it this way: that this week, we see in stark relief which lives matter in this city, and which lives don’t. How is it that the lives of some white men, no matter how depraved their actions, still carry with them a mantle of privilege. The Ghomeshi acquittal, even though it was expected, still opened a wound. Perhaps it was the feeling of seeing so blatantly what that privilege is made of, its weight and texture, a sickening velvet plush that hides rot.
A lot of us are feeling some prophetic fire in our hearts after watching all this unfold. The ways in which the machinery of power and justice, the courts, the police, supposed to serve and protect, keeping tightening the threads in that mantle of privilege rather than protecting the vulnerable.
I wonder about this fire. I don’t want to forget this feeling but I also don’t want to become a burnt piece of charcoal.
Although there's a 0 percent chance of the US Congress enacting universal basic income, techies have launched their own DIY basic income schemes through the distribution of online currencies like Bitcoin.
What makes a lot of people uncomfortable about a phenomenon like Uber, when you get right down to it, is how it is owned. As in other mega-Internet companies, a small number of owners poised to take over a global industry—in this case, the taxi industry with ownership currently spread out among local drivers and operators. In response to Uber’s rise, there has been a flurry of proposals for driver-owned alternatives.
