We Too Have a Dream...
A dream of a society based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation without the coercion of a ruling elite. We dream of a world without wars, poverty and oppression, where all are valued and free to live our lives rather than the hollow lifestyle sold to us by corporate masters. We hope for a world of play and happiness beyond the dull monoculture of this one. Reality today is full of unfulfilled people travelling in streets full of banks, shops, traffic and neon lights. Streets full of cops and adverts of things you don’t even need. We live rushing to work, punching the clock when we should be punching our boss. This is capitalist reality-selling lifestyles that are a very poor imitation of having a real life. There is a real world outside of this capitalist crap, as its been said under the pavement a beach.

We most oppose the state and all forms of coercion. We oppose national borders. Ideas of ethnic or cultural superiority recreate the world we hope to escape. Private property and money create social division and injustice.

Society Sucks
Governments have nothing to give us except what they have first taken away. No one can give us freedom. Groups that promise freedom and peace lie and give us war and injustice, perpetrating the injustice of hierarchy in the name of liberty. The colonialism so deeply ingrained in our minds has created the monotone McCulture of the western world that is being sold to the globe in the flashing images on TV and on the silverscreen of Hollywood. The disenchantment of industrial production with its time clocks, specialization, and production for profit for its own sake is a further division of labor that create classism and hierarchy. Social class did not fall from the moon. It was created using the division of labor. In hunter and gatherer societies men hunted and women gathered. As time went by the hunters turn to warriors and then to Kings. This was the embryo of the modern patriarchal world.

Social classes produce a psychology of domination, and when people lose control of their destinies they in turn try to control someone or thing else. This alienation is the creator of class war, sexism racism homophobia and ecological destruction. Whenever someone else is in control humanity and everything else on the planet is endangered.

Because of fetishism of commodities, we fill our lives with stuff. We must work to fill the void left by the consumer world. We fail to notice how stuck we are in the vicious circle of production, having to work to pay for things we don’t really need as well as working to make more junk. Its an insane paper chase and completely unnecessary, except to keep consumer capitalism grinding on. Perhaps only 5% of the work done today feeds, heats and lights our lives, the rest is pretty much unnecessary.

A move away from work would obviously benefit the more down trodden people in society. Remember the old saying a woman’s work is never done? Well its true that women do about 80% of work in the world for very little reward. Humanity is out of step with the planet around us. We must reconnect with the earth and become, once again, part of the ecosystem rather than outside looking in. The richness and diversity of all forms of life have value and humanity is part of this web of life and not its center.

People are not happy with this world, even the police, one of the states guard dogs, fought in Madrid because they were unhappy with their jobs having to enforce a drinking ban. In Britain Commander Brian Paddick, who is in charge of policing in Lambeth, south London, recently said, "the concept of anarchism has always appealed to me". In an insane consumer world where you have to work long hours so you can fill your life with plastic, Prozac and flickering light to fill the void created by the disenchantment that modern capitalism has become. Small is Beautiful The boredom of society today can’t be reformed it must be replaced. We seek to replace the dominant culture of death with the ecology of everyday life, where we reconnect with ourselves and the planet around us. A concrete world breed’s apathy but even the cities were built on fertile soil and fresh water we just need to break through the surface.

If we are to reconnect ourselves to the world around us we need to work together. Mutual aid and cooperation in affinity groups in a community is the anti-dote to the alienation of mass society. This will, if we are success overcome the cultural baggage that has created racism. If a cat and a crow can work together surely people can. Something I saw recently pointed out that racists aren’t born but created by the culture we grow up in. All too often people who wish to see the end of oppression just mirror the structure of the oppressor and replace it. Identity pimp sell us ideas of a class, gender or ethnic group being the true suppliers of freedom when there are really repackaging the old world with news tape with the freedom of a few only in the name of the people. We desire community beyond the isolation of our modern existence trapped as we our into our mundane lives making us easier to trap into the capitalism existence of wage slavery with only commodity fetishism, your are what you own in this world after all, to pacify your anomie. There is a continuing appeal of nationalism in ever so called radical centers. For as long as there is social division and separation their can never be equality, in fact powerful elite relay out social division to stay in control of use, the need to divide to stay in power over us and use fear to continue the status quo. We can’t use the master’s tools, like nationalism or alienation, to destroy the masters house. You only have to look at Israel to see that even those who have lived through a holocaust repeat the pattern of other states. Cultural, political and ethnic isolation perpetuates this racists system. If we are to have a free, just world we need a human community of empowered individuals who can work together. Our liberation can’t be imposed, you can liberate me and I can liberate you but our liberation comes when we can work together. An old native America prophecy talks of people of all creeds, colors and religions joining to save the planet and in turn liberating us too.

Land and Liberty

Malcolm X once pointed out that all revolutionary struggles are centered on the question of land. The agriculture/food industry is the second most profitable industry in the capitalist world after the pharmaceutical industry, so if we can learn to take care of ourselves through free skools, to be able to feed ourselves and have health care for those around us, then we are taking direct action. We are undermining the systems hold over the world and us.

Globalism needs resources from across the planet to survive. The mega machine exploits those who work the land; people who have nothing to gain from cooperating with capital and so take back the land. Groups in Central America and South America like the EZLN or MST re occupy land just the same all urban guerilla gardeners do in cities around the US.

These ideas are nothing new as even during the Middle Ages people like the Taborites, the free Spirit, the Diggers to Modern times like the Maknovists in the Ukraine, those who agreed with the Magon brothers and agricultural collectives in Spain have all fought for the land.

When people talk of over population–the famines and the destruction it creates-–they are missing the point. It’s industrialism that forces people to move away from the land and into cities in search of food and profit, creating an atmosphere of overcrowding and poverty. Often times when peoples go hungry it is not for lack of food but lack of justice. It’s more profitable to feed grain and soy grown in the third world to animals at industrial farms in the west than feed it to the poor. During the famine in Ethiopia in the 80’s for every bag of grain given to the refugees displaced during the civil war Ethiopia exported 4 bags to pay back its debt so it could continue fighting the war.

By 2028 there is going to be an estimated 8 billion people on the planet. We can’t simply sit back and let the agricultural industry push its lies of biotech and chemicals as the solution to the growing population. Land redistributes and the destruction of capitalism is the only hope. The poor don’t need to be growing monoculture cash crops like coffee or tea or drugs intensively to survive there need land and sustainable permaculture so as not to destroy the planet we depend on.

Revolution on the Periphery

It seems that as long as our struggle is not on our own terms but in the terrain of capital, there will be no creation of a better world. What is the point of occupying the factories when its production that should be stopped? Why should we wish to take over the system that imprisons us? So we can self manage our own imprisonment? Surely we are fighting a losing battle if we are fighting for industry. It’s a system so diabolical that poisons the food that we eat, water we drink and air we breath why would we want to take it over?

Just as we need mutual aid to overcome the alienation of humanity we also need to have ecology of everyday life. We need to reconnect with the world around us and fight the psychology of domination not just of people but also of the environment.

People in the third world are resisting the monopolizing of seed production and the patenting of biotech seeds. They are not buying the ideas of economic growth, predicated on the work of women and the third world. We must support their struggle by creating our own here.

Modern capitalist relationships have pushed many people to the periphery of society leaving nothing to gain from the world we live in today. Peoples have been reduced to mere specters of the world around them. They have been reduced to mere consumers. People with a little jolt could disrupt their way of thinking and turn them against the system.

Autonomy Now

We have no desire to merely turn the world upside down but to create a human community of equals with not ruling elite. Be it a tribe, worker, city or elected council we can’t delegate our lives into someone else’s hands. We want autonomy not democracy with affinity groups deciding their own destinies. We need to learn from each other with mutual respect to create a multi culture world at peace with itself and the earth.

We do believe in direct-action, action that will bring power into our hands and not that of authority. When people have to depend on the state for protection from others they help strengthen its hold on society. In a true community we don’t need a police force. The very presence of a law enforcement system in a community is an indication that something is not working. And the presence of the police is supposed to make it work? Such a force is essentially repressive, which means that certain people in such a dysfunctional community do not know how to fit in. A community is a place where there is consensus; not where there is a crooked looking onlooker with a gun, creating an atmosphere of unrest.

We must beware of groups that promise a better deal. During the beginning of the industrial revolution in Britain a group rose up against the centralization and shoddy work of industrialism. They then had to face more British troops in their towns then Napoleon had to face in Europe at the same time. Despite fierce repression the Luddites still posed quite a treat so the government legalized trade unions that wanted people to work in the factories just with better pay and hours. The same tactic has historically been used by those in power from the Catholic Church to governments giving women/people of color/working class the vote so they can pick their own repressors. Often times people are called into talks and ether offered a seat at the table like during the Spanish Revolution when CNT leaders joined the government or simply gunned down like in Russia (1917-21) or Mexico (1909?). Governments will never give us our freedom we must take it from them.

Learning to live free from exploitation by boycotting the institutions like banks, corporations and governments that are destroying our world. We can build a new life for each other and reclaim our destinies from those who want to control our lives. Humans are not intrinsically evil; rather the society we are raised in creates unnatural cutthroat attitudes and beliefs. If right from the outset certain people are denied all possibilities of humanity, how can they subsequently be expected to emerge as real people? When conflict comes, those who defend capital should be reduce to the level of bestial or mechanical adversities. We need to reveal and demystify and demonstrate its contradictions and rise doubt in their minds. We can’t make the mistake that we can somehow enforce our will over others or we too will become what we despise.

Racketeers preach the merits of chaos and collapse, but that will not bring about a better world for all its inhabitants. Empires have come and gone but the social relationship, the class structure and the domination of nature continues. Without a proactive approach there is no hope. We should learn from the past and carry those lessons onto a free and just society for all. People can learn to cooperate and humanity can learn to coexist with the world around it. Do not be fooled by those who talk about the total destruction rather than a world where the true beauty of mutually cooperative society exists.

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