rotenotes @rotenotes@qoto.org

What is an #anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the #responsibility of choice.

Ursula #LeGuin

#anarchism

#anarchism #anarchy is #solidarity

#anarchism

"Χάρη στην έμφυτα #ανταγωνιστική φύση της, η #αστική κοινωνία όχι μόνο στρέφει τους ανθρώπους τον ένα ενάντια στον άλλο, αλλά κι ολόκληρη την ανθρωπότητα ενάντια στον φυσικό κόσμο. Η αντίληψη ότι ο άνθρωπος πρέπει να κυριαρχήσει πάνω στο #περιβάλλον, προέρχεται άμεσα από την κυριαρχία του ανθρώπου πάνω στον άνθρωπο. Ο εκφυλισμός του περιβάλλοντος είναι άμεσα συνδεδεμένος με τον εκφυλισμό της υπάρχουσας κοινωνικής δομής. Οι ανάγκες κατασκευάζονται από τα ΜΜΕ για να δημιουργήσουν μια ζήτηση για ολότελα άχρηστα εμπορεύματα, που το καθένα έχει σχεδιαστεί προσεκτικά για να φθαρεί μετά από μια προκαθορισμένη χρονική περίοδο. Η λεηλασία του ανθρώπινου πνεύματος από την #αγορά μπορεί να παραλληλιστεί με τη λεηλασία του πλανήτη από το #κεφάλαιο. Η #ιδιοκτητική κοινωνία, η #κυριαρχία, η #ιεραρχία και το #κράτος, σ’ όλες τους τις μορφές είναι εντελώς ασυμβίβαστες με την επιβίωση της #βιόσφαιρας. Η #οικολογική δράση ή είναι επαναστατική δράση ή δεν είναι απολύτως τίποτα."

- Murray #Bookchin – Η #οικολογία και η επαναστατική σκέψη

"Another concept closely linked to #melancholy is that of #depression: in its most elementary form, the depressed subject has severed his links with the universe of intentions and meanings, his embeddedness and active participation in intersubjective activity; as #Heidegger would have put it, what ‘depression’ suspends is the attitude of active engagement, of #care [#sorge]. This link with Heidegger is further substantiated by the changed status of #temporality: according to Heidegger, in ‘care’, past, present and future are interwoven (the subject’s present consists in the way he projects his future out of his being-thrown, through his past, into his determinate situation), while in depression, #time is reduced to a uniform, #monotonous #duration."

- S. #Zizek - The Plague of Fantasies.

" Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde

Γεμάτος μόχθο, κι όμως ποιητικά, ο άνθρωπος κατοικεί τούτη τη γη"

- Friedrich #Hölderlin, Σ’ ευφρόσυνο Γλαυκό … Αρτος και Οινος, στο Ελεγείες, Υμνοι και άλλα ποιήματα, Αγρα 1996, μτφ. Στ.Νικολαϊδου, σελ. 188-189

"#Holloway does however, accept #Negri and #Hardt”s argument that #revolution can no longer be conceived of in terms of seizing #state #power. The Power that needs to be negated lies “in the fragmentation of social relations” rather than any “particular person of institution.” (167-75)"

[#Fetishism and Its Negations: On John Holloway and Theodor Adorno By David #Black](http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h4holloway.html)

Anti-globalisation has, thus, to mean complete #democratisation so as to make all social forces accountable to human #needs. In sum, the demand for a new #democratically constituted #regulation of #capital should be taken seriously. Though, it should be deepened and not restricted to legitimate the social engineering of discipline. It should first of all be taken on in the tradition of Enlightenment thought: Doubt everything! Second, it should be taken to its logical conclusion: the democratic organisation of socially necessary labour by the associated producers themselves, that is, the utopia of the society of the free and equal that #Marx summed up with one word: #communism.

[Werner #Bonefeld on Globalisation](http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h52003_Bonefeld.htm)

Further, the critique of #globalisation fails if it is merely a critique of speculative capital and that is, a critique for productive accumulation. It was the crisis of productive accumulation that sustained the divorce of monetary accumulation from productive accumulation (Bonefeld and Holloway, 1995). The critique of #speculation has to be a critique of the #capitalist form of social reproduction. Without such a critique of capital, the critique of speculation is reactionary. It summons the idea of #finance and #banks and #speculators as merchants of #greed. In the past, such views underpinned modern anti-semitism and its idea of a community of blood and soil (Bonefeld, 1997). The fact that #Nazism espoused ‘industry’ and rejected what it saw as vampire like finance, should be sufficient to highlight the rotten character of such a critique of globalisation.

[Werner #Bonefeld on Globalisation](http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h52003_Bonefeld.htm)

"All #emancipation is a return of the human world and human relationships to humans themselves. Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of bourgeois society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand, to a citizen of the state, a moral person. Not until the real individual man has taken the abstract citizen back into himself and, as an individual man, has become a species-being in his empirical life, in his individual work and individual relationships, not until man recognises and organises his ‘forces propres’ as social forces and thus no longer separates social forces from himself in the form of political forces, not until then will human emancipation be completed."

- Karl #Marx (1964) Zur #Judenfrage, in MEW 1, Dietz, Berlin, p. 370.

"… the #everyday #struggle over the #production and #appropriation of #surplus_value in every individual #workplace and every local community is the basis of the #class_struggle on a global scale."

[Shift Magazine » Interview issue 5 » Interview with Werner #Bonefeld](https://web.archive.org/web/20110814174256/http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=260)

"#Humans have evolved #gregariously. We delight in each other’s company; we #care for one another. #Altruism is built into us. We have brilliantly deciphered some of the patterns of Nature. We have sufficient motivation to work together and the ability to figure out how to do it. If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?"

- Carl #Sagan, Cosmos, Futura, 1987, p. 358

"Generic #Communism designates a #free #associative #egalitarian #society where the activity of #polymorph #workers is not governed by regulations and technical or social articulations but is managed by the #collective power of #needs. In such a society, the #State is dissolved as a separate instance from public coercion. #Politics – much as it voices the interests of social groups and covets at the conquest of power – is de facto dissolved.

Thus, the purpose of #Communist politics aims at its own disappearance in the modality of the end of the form separated from the State in general, even if it concerns a State that declares itself #democratic."

- Alain #Badiou - Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of #Democracy (https://www.lacan.com/conceptsym.htm)

The second sequence of the #communist hypothesis runs from 1917 to 1976:
from the #Bolshevik #Revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution and
the militant upsurge throughout the world during the years 1966-75. It
was dominated by the question: how to win? How to hold out—unlike the
Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of the possessing classes; how
to organize the new power so as to protect it against the onslaught of
its enemies? It was no longer a question of formulating and testing the
communist hypothesis, but of realizing it: what the 19th century had
dreamt, the 20th would accomplish. The obsession with victory, centred
around questions of organization, found its principal expression in the
‘iron discipline’ of the communist party—the characteristic construction
of the second sequence of the hypothesis. The #party effectively solved
the question inherited from the first sequence: the revolution
prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popular war, in
Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and succeeded in
establishing a new order.

But the second sequence in turn created a further problem, which it
could not solve using the methods it had developed in response to the
problems of the first. The party had been an appropriate tool for the
overthrow of weakened reactionary regimes, but it proved ill-adapted for
the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense
that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the
transition to the non-state: its dialectical ‘withering away’. Instead,
the party-state developed into a new form of #authoritarianism. Some of
these regimes made real strides in education, public health, the
valorization of labour, and so on; and they provided an international
constraint on the arrogance of the imperialist powers. However, the
#statist principle in itself proved corrupt and, in the long run,
ineffective. #Police #coercion could not save the ‘#socialist’ state from
internal #bureaucratic inertia; and within fifty years it was clear that
it would never prevail in the ferocious competition imposed by its
capitalist adversaries. The last great convulsions of the second
sequence—the Cultural Revolution and May 68, in its broadest sense—can
be understood as attempts to deal with the inadequacy of the party.

[Alain #Badiou-Bibliography/The Communist Hypothesis/Lacan Dot Com](https://www.lacan.com/badcomm.html)

What is the #communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its
canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of #class—the
fundamental #subordination of #labour to a dominant class, the arrangement
that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be
overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different #collective
organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the #inequality of
#wealth and even the division of labour. The #private appropriation of
massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear.
The existence of a #coercive #state, separate from #civil #society, will no
longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a
#free #association of #producers will see it withering away.

‘#Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual
representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory
function, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist
principles #utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are
intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a
pure Idea of #equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed
since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes #state
#coercion in the name of #egalitarian #justice, rudiments or fragments of
the hypothesis start to appear. Popular #revolts—the #slaves led by
#Spartacus, the #peasants led by #Müntzer—might be identified as practical
examples of this ‘communist invariant’. With the French Revolution, the
communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.

[Alain #Badiou-Bibliography/The Communist Hypothesis/Lacan Dot Com](https://www.lacan.com/badcomm.html)

"#Anarchism, then, really stands for the #liberation of the human #mind from the dominion of #religion; the liberation of the human #body from the dominion of #property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of #government. Anarchism stands for a social #order based on the #free grouping of #individuals for the purpose of producing real social #wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the #necessities of life, according to #individual #desires, #tastes, and #inclinations."

- Emma #Goldman - Anarchism: what it really stands for (http://www.panarchy.org/goldman/anarchism.1910.html)

"Real #wealth consists in things of #utility and #beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence, - too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of #centralized #production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in #machine subserviency, our #slavery is more complete than was our #bondage to the #King. They do not want to know that #centralization is not only the death-knell of #liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.

#Anarchism cannot but repudiate such a method of production: its goal is the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the #individual. Oscar Wilde defines a perfect #personality as “one who develops under perfect conditions, who is not wounded, maimed, or in danger.” A perfect personality, then, is only possible in a state of #society where man is #free to choose the mode of #work, the conditions of work, and the #freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist, - the result of #inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force. That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of #voluntary #productive and #distributive #associations, gradually developing into free #communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires."

- Emma #Goldman - Anarchism: what it really stands for (http://www.panarchy.org/goldman/anarchism.1910.html)