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Social revolution may have different connotations depending on the speaker. In social libertarian and anarchist parlance, a “social revolution” is a bottom-up (as opposed to a vanguard party-led or purely political) revolution aiming to reorganize all of society. More generally, the term “social revolution” may be used to refer to a massive change in society, for instance the French Revolution, the American Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture reformations of religious belief, personal identity, freedom of speech, music and decentralized media.

“Social revolution means the reorganization of the industrial, economic life of the country and consequently also of the entire structure of society.”
- Alexander Berkman

A revolutionary is a person who either actively participates in, or advocates revolution. Also, a revolutionary is someone who supports abrupt, rapid, and drastic change, while a reformist is someone who supports more gradual and incremental change. A conservative is someone who opposes all such changes. A reactionary is someone who wants things to go back to the way they were.

Expropriation is politically motivated and forceful confiscation and redistribution of private property generally aimed at furthering the cause of social justice.  Expropriation takes place outside the law and can refer to the socially-motivated confiscations of any property.

“You say you want a revolution, Well, you know
We all want to change the world.” - the Beatles

Anarchist communism is a political theory that advocates the abolition of the state, private property, and capitalism in favor of common ownership of the means of production, direct democracy and a horizontal network of voluntary associations and workers’ councils with production and consumption based on the guiding principle:“from each according to ability, to each according to need”.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work,” we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wage system.”

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

- Preamble to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) Constitution (1908)

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We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For, you must not forget, we also know how to build. It is we the workers who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and in America, and everywhere. We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth, there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world, here, in our hearts. That world is growing this minute.

- Buenaventura Durruti (1936)

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We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts. In this is perhaps the outstanding paradox: we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. Beneath the reassuring tones of the politicians, beneath the common opinion that America will “muddle through”, beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now. For most Americans, all crusades are suspect, threatening. The fact that each individual sees apathy in his fellows perpetuates the common reluctance to organize for change. The dominant institutions are complex enough to blunt the minds of their potential critics, and entrenched enough to swiftly dissipate or entirely repel the energies of protest and reform, thus limiting human expectancies. Then, too, we are a materially improved society, and by our own improvements we seem to have weakened the case for further change.

Some would have us believe that Americans feel contentment amidst prosperity — but might it not better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties about their role in the new world? And if these anxieties produce a developed indifference to human affairs, do they not as well produce a yearning to believe there is an alternative to the present, that something can be done to change circumstances in the school, the workplaces, the bureaucracies, the government? It is to this latter yearning, at once the spark and engine of change, that we direct our present appeal. The search for truly democratic alternatives to the present, and a commitment to social experimentation with them, is a worthy and fulfilling human enterprise, one which moves us and, we hope, others today. On such a basis do we offer this document of our convictions and analysis: as an effort in understanding and changing the conditions of humanity in the late twentieth century, an effort rooted in the ancient, still unfulfilled conception of man attaining determining influence over his circumstances of life.

Unlike youth in other countries we are used to moral leadership being exercised and moral dimensions being clarified by our elders. But today, for us, not even the liberal and socialist preachments of the past seem adequate to the forms of the present. Consider the old slogans; Capitalism Cannot Reform Itself, United Front Against Fascism, General Strike, All Out on May Day. Or, more recently, No Cooperation with Commies and Fellow Travellers, Ideologies Are Exhausted, Bipartisanship, No Utopias. These are incomplete, and there are few new prophets. It has been said that our liberal and socialist predecessors were plagued by vision without program, while our own generation is plagued by program without vision.

All around us there is astute grasp of method, technique — the committee, the ad hoc group, the lobbyist, that hard and soft sell, the make, the projected image — but, if pressed critically, such expertise is incompetent to explain its implicit ideals. It is highly fashionable to identify oneself by old categories, or by naming a respected political figure, or by explaining “how we would vote” on various issues.

Theoretic chaos has replaced the idealistic thinking of old — and, unable to reconstitute theoretic order, people have condemned idealism itself. Doubt has replaced hopefulness — and people act out a defeatism that is labeled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never recreated; the congressional stalemate makes men narrow their view of the possible; the specialization of human activity leaves little room for sweeping thought; the horrors of the twentieth century, symbolized in the gas-ovens and concentration camps and atom bombs, have blasted hopefulness. To be idealistic is to be considered apocalyptic, deluded. To have no serious aspirations, on the contrary, is to be “toughminded”.

In suggesting social goals and values, therefore, we are aware of entering a sphere of some disrepute. Perhaps matured by the past, we have no sure formulas, no closed theories — but that does not mean values are beyond discussion and tentative determination. A first task of any social movement is to convenience people that the search for orienting theories and the creation of human values is complex but worthwhile. We are aware that to avoid platitudes we must analyze the concrete conditions of social order. But to direct such an analysis we must use the guideposts of basic principles.

As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.

To turn these possibilities into realities will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty. They must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy. They must make fraternal and functional contact with allies in labor, civil rights, and other liberal forces outside the campus. They must import major public issues into the curriculum — research and teaching on problems of war and peace is an outstanding example. They must make debate and controversy, not dull pedantic cant, the common style for educational life. They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.

As students, for a democratic society, we are committed to stimulating this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program is campus and community across the country.
If we appear to seek the unattainable, it has been said, then let it be known that we do so to avoid the unimaginable.

From: The Port Huron Statement (1962) - By Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

By Darius Mirshahi

As young people, we already know we’re fucked. We’ve been robbed of a future by our elders who consumed it. The last few generations have taken every resource imaginable and extracted it at an ever-increasing rate. Blind to the world around them they planned our obsolescance like the products they designed for the dump. Now everything is unbalanced and we’re coming to a tipping point. We already see the consequences everywhere. Depression economics, ecological catastrophes, violent and oppressive social relations. Their poisons have logically spread beyond our rivers and land into our bodies and minds. It’s in the air we breathe, its broadcasted on the airwaves, it’s all pervasive, and always present. They dug us into a coffin and we must escape it. This will be no small task. It demands the radical re-organization of humanity and a total re-evaluation of our relationship with our ecological support systems.

What we know is this: There’s no future on this path and we’re speeding to the finish line. These are desparate times, the very survival of life on this planet, including our own, lies in the balance of the decisions we make now. Everything will flow from here.

The damage is done, the climate is not only changing, it has changed. We already live in an ecological catastrophe. But this only means that we must fight harder to save the small pockets of vibrant ecosystems that still exist. There are fools among us that still wish to pillage what little remains and it’s up to us to stop them. We cannot count on governments to do this work for us either. They have never worked for us, and have always paved the way for corporate exploitation of the earth’s resources. Politicians are bought and paid for by those who fund their campaigns. Clear-cutters, mining companies, and developers own the Canadian economy and by extension our politicians, who gladly rubber-stamp their ecocidal projects. The most important thing we can do now is directly confront the forces of industrial expansion by intervening as individuals and communities of resistance. We must create conflict with these forces every time they attempt to replace a forest with new suburban sprawl, every time they attempt to rob our mother and turn her into commodities, and every time they attempt to expand the roads and highways to facilitate larger distribution of their products.

But even this is not enough, we must dismantle the system of industrial capitalism not merely contain it. We need to reverse the process not just stall its expansion.

We need to develop sustainable alternatives to everything  we have come to take for granted in our culture. We need to realize our way of life is incompatible with life itself. We need to decontaminate our soil water and air, because even if we drastically decreased emissions we would still be breathing in toxins and living on a toxic planet. We need to dismantle the power grid, stop all mass production of energy and transition into more resilient community-controlled autonomous energy production. We need to abolish patent-laws that protect intellectual property and liberate the knowledge of sustainable alternatives. Corporations have been keeping us dependent on their inefficient and dirty technologies for decades through copyright laws.

We need to challenge the forces of social control that exist to keep us passively marching towards the nightmare they are steadily building for us on this planet. We need to reject their products, and make their entire industrial system collapse before there is a total ecological collapse and mass extinction. Species extinction is currently accelerating on this planet due to our culture of consumerism and the economic domination of this planet. The oceans have massive dead zones, most rivers have become undrinkable from dams and industrial runoff, and we live in concrete jungles, saturated in smog, where we slave away to meet our basic needs.

Another way of life is possible and necessary. We can radically change this world for the better, all we need to do is start acting on our desires and putting our ideas into practice. We can start liberating our lives, communities, and bioregions from the tyranny of the market. We can challenge the authority of governments and reclaim local autonomy. We can defend the ecosystems that are still intact while re-wilding areas that have been devastated. We can tear up parking lots, detoxify soil, and create community gardens. We can occupy and take over the existing infrastructure and run it collectively while reconnecting it to our environment by collecting rainwater, building rooftop gardens, and ripping out lawns to allow diverse plant and animal life to flourish.

We can start in the here and now. We do not need to wait for action from the powers that be. We must take action and be the power for change ourselves. The fate of the world is in our hands. We can either create resilient communities capable of surviving the collapse and defending and regenerating our ecosystems, or we can continue down the suicidal path of industrial expansion and consumer culture. It’s time to get off the fence and stand up against those who have sold out the future.

By Alric Malgraith

Philosopher Thomas Hobbes described pre-civilized life, what he called “the natural condition of man” as “nasty, brutish and short” and thus Man needs an all powerful government to suppress his natural savagery. (Hobbes 1651) This description of hunter-gatherer cultures was widely accepted in Enlightenment thinking. Only Jean-Jacques Rousseau disagreed and argued in favour of an uncivilized life, philosophically. (Rousseau 1754) Rousseau’s thinking was dismissed as romantic and “noble savage” mythology. Perhaps Rousseau was romanticizing, but through modern ethnographic and archaeological studies it can be determined that hunter-gatherers have better lives than so-called civilized people. Hunter-gatherers have more leisure time, a more egalitarian distribution of wealth and a stronger sense of community than those living in industrialized societies.

Philosopher Derrick Jensen gives an appropriate definition of Civilization in a practical sense. Civilization is “a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts – that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities.” He proceeds to define a city as “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.” (Jensen 2006) These definitions will be considered when the term “civilization” is used throughout this essay and the term “uncivilized” or “primitive” should not be taken as a term of offense or denigration.

The Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reported in his book on Stone Age economics that hunter-gatherers on average spend three to five hours per day dedicated to food production. In this small amount of labour time per day, plus the occasional time spent building and maintaining tools and shelter they are able to provide all the things that subsistence requires. This is far less labour time than is required by industrialized people who often work eight hours per day or 35-40 hours per week. (Sahlins 1972) This leaves hunter-gatherers ample time for social, familial, artistic and other playful pursuits. One need only read the accounts of civilized people who have lived among uncivilized people to understand how leisurely their lifestyle was. Caribbean expert Carl Sauer gave the follow description of the lifestyle of the Arawak people, a pre-Columbian Caribbean culture; “The tropical idyll accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true. The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings, were dexterous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball games, dances and music.” (quoted in Jensen 2004) Similar descriptions of primitive cultures can be found from Africa to the Americas to the South Pacific.

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond has called agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” In his paper of the same name he claims that social and sexual inequality, despotism and most diseases have their origins in the advent of agriculture. He further reports that Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert spend only twelve to nineteen hours per week obtaining food. Hadza nomads from Tanzania spend fourteen hours or less every week foraging for food. Diamond quotes a Bushman who, when asked why he hadn’t adopted agriculture like some neighbouring tribes, responded, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” (Diamond 1987)

Central to their success from pre-historic times to the present is primitive cultures’ dedication to sharing. Hunter-gatherers have a much more egalitarian distribution of wealth than agricultural societies. This is important in that it ensures fairness and that everyone receives equal compensation for their contributions to the band or tribe. In uncivilized cultures “the importance of giving gifts and sharing is reinforced throughout life until it becomes deeply embedded within a person’s personality. Because the failure to share among many hunter-gatherers results in ill feeling because one party fails to obtain food or gifts, but also because the failure to share sends a strong symbolic message to those left out of the division.” (Kelly 1995) It was this concentration on solidarity, cooperation and sharing that led to the communitarian and close-knit tribes that developed out of small Paleolithic bands. This mutual respect in hunter-gatherer tribes explains their strong sense of community and lack of alienation.

Anarcho-primitivist philosopher and re-interpreter of the Frankfurt School’s “critical theory”, John Zerzan defines alienation as being “estranged from our own experiences, dislodged from a natural mode of being.” (Zerzan 2002) Nothing such as this is experienced among primitive cultures. Zerzan argues that this is because hunter-gatherers do not have their personal relationships mediated by technology. He believes that the full range of communication and understanding developed among hunter-gatherers through directly experiencing each others’ opinions, personalities and ideas is why tribal peoples rarely have feelings of isolation, hopelessness or exclusion. (Zerzan 2002) It is through an excess of cultural images and technological mediation that we dehumanize each other, neglect each others’ emotional needs and suffer a general breakdown in societies. In adopting civilization we lose the generally friendly communal bonds based on mutual aid that hunter-gatherers have, at least within their own tribe.

Detractors of these viewpoints will claim that these ideas are a type of positivist or reverse racism and are no more than noble savage mythology. This is a fallacy. The historical revision of how we view hunter-gatherers in not groundless ideology, but a worldview backed up by almost 40 years of new ethnographic and archaeological data which throws into question old progressivist ideas. Others will point to violence among some tribal peoples as well as the ritualized violence of the Aztecs and headhunting groups as evidence against pre-civilized peacefulness and equality. This is also easily refutable considering that the Aztecs were clearly civilized. None of the headhunting groups were true hunter-gatherers either. The ritualized domestic violence among the Yanomano of South America, as reported (and exaggerated) by Napoleon Chagnon (1968) can be explained by the authoritarian power relations and sexual divisions that developed due to their use of “slash and burn” horticulture. Domestication and control breeds domestication and control.

The vast amount of archaeological data that has been collected and vast amount of ethnographic research conducted on hunter-gatherer cultures seems more and more to support the “romantic” idea that primitive people live with a close bond to nature and each other, that they are not destitute and backward. In fact we should instead be reconsidering the merits of civilization and questioning the civilized way of life. Perhaps the question is not “Why did humans take so long to invent agriculture?”, but “Why did humans invent agriculture at all?”

It is common in our mass-media to read and to hear commentators talk about the number of social problems that face us today, such as global warming, destruction of Earth’s environment, unemployment, crime, violence, poverty, hunger, and the population explosion. Yet, how often do we hear of workable plans for alleviating many of these social problems? It is relatively simple for people to criticize society, however it’s much more difficult to identify and implement plans to resolve the problems.

The Venus Project is a veritable blue-print for the genesis of a new world civilization, one that is based on human concern and environmental reclamation.

The plans for The Venus Project offer society a broader spectrum of choices based on the scientific possibilities directed toward a new era of peace and sustainability for all. Through the implementation of a resource-based economy, and a multitude of innovative and environmentally friendly technologies directly applied to the social system, The Venus Project proposals will dramatically reduce crime, poverty, hunger, homelessness, and many other pressing problems that are common throughout the world today.

One of the cornerstones of the organization’s findings is the fact that many of the dysfunctional behaviors of today’s society stem directly from the dehumanizing environment of a monetary system. In addition, automation has resulted in the technological replacement of human labor by machines and eventually most people will not have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services turned out.

The Venus Project proposes a social system in which automation and technology would be intelligently integrated into an overall social design where the primary function would be to maximize the quality of life rather than profits. This project also introduces a set of workable and practical values.

This is in perfect accord with the spiritual aspects and ideals found in most religions throughout the world. What sets The Venus Project apart, however, is that it proposes to translate these ideals into a working reality.

To test its designs and proposals The Venus Project is working towards putting its ideals into practice by the construction of an experimental research city. Blueprints for most of the initial technologies and buildings have begun. Fund-raising efforts are currently under way to help support the construction of this first experimental city. This new experimental research city would be devoted to working towards the aims and goals of The Venus Project, which are:

1. Realizing the declaration of the world’s resources as being the common heritage of all people.

2. Transcending the artificial boundaries that currently and arbitrarily separate people.

3. Replacing money-based nationalistic economies with a resource-based world economy.

4. Assisting in stabilizing the world’s population through education and voluntary birth control.

5. Reclaiming and restoring the natural environment to the best of our ability.

6. Redesigning cities, transportation systems, agricultural industries, and industrial plants so that they are energy efficient, clean, and able to conveniently serve the needs of all people.

7. Gradually outgrowing corporate entities and governments, (local, national, or supra- national) as means of social management.

8. Sharing and applying new technologies for the benefit of all nations.

9. Developing and using clean renewable energy sources.

10. Manufacturing the highest quality products for the benefit of the world’s people.

11. Requiring environmental impact studies prior to construction of any mega projects.

12. Encouraging the widest range of creativity and incentive toward constructive endeavour.

13. Outgrowing nationalism, bigotry, and prejudice through education.

14. Eliminating elitism, technical or otherwise.

15. Arriving at methodologies by careful research rather than random opinions.

16. Enhancing communication in schools so that our language is relevant to the physical conditions of the world.

17. Providing not only the necessities of life, but also offering challenges that stimulate the mind while emphasizing individuality rather than uniformity.

18. Finally, preparing people intellectually and emotionally for the changes and challenges that lie ahead.

[http://www.thevenusproject.com]

By Chris Spannos

Where did parecon come from? What is its history?

Participatory economics, or parecon, came mainly from the cumulative struggles of diverse populations trying to win liberation from capitalism. Parecon owes, in particular, to the anarchist and the libertarian socialist heritage, to the most recent experiences of the New Left of the Sixties, but also to every historical uprising and project aimed at eliminating class rule from the beginning to the present. It has learned from successes and from failures.

I once heard about a strike, billed as the first, by Egyptian peasants against a Pharaoh who moved from requiring six days labor on the pyramid a week, to requiring seven days, and from providing food to providing nothing. I think parecon harks back all the way to that uprising. I think it owes to every essay, speech, and book, and to every activist project and movement that has tried to shed light on the meaning or practice of classlessness.

Parecon meaning classlessness most broadly was born when revolutionaries of various camps began imagining and seeking a classless economy. Kropotkin, Rocker, Bakunin, Pannekoek. That’s what parecon is, a classless economy. It is not capitalism but it is also not an economy ruled by roughly a fifth of the population that monopolizes empowering conditions. In parecon a few participants don’t dominate the remaining participants.

Parecon itself, the model, came into being more recently, however, with a particular conception of defining institutions, when Robin Hahnel and I thought through our reactions to various schools of anti capitalist activism, and set out our views in a book titled Looking Forward, about sixteen years ago. Since then parecon has been repeatedly refined, partly in its conception, but mostly in how to communicate about it.

What are the central institutional features of parecon which, if they were absent, then an economy wouldn’t be a parecon anymore? And beyond the features essential to being a parecon, what range of variety and choice is there in any specific participatory economy?

The central features of the model called parecon are workers and consumers self managed councils, balanced job complexes, remuneration for duration, intensity, and onerousness of socially valued labor, and participatory planning.

I think these institutional features are to the parecon model what private ownership, corporate divisions of labor, remuneration for property, power, and output, and market allocation are to capitalism. You can’t have a classless economy without these defining features.

But just as capitalism comes in many shapes, often dramatically different from one instance to the next, and just as this diversity of capitalisms is not due solely to countries having different populations, resources, levels of technology, or differences in other parts of social life, but also owes to countless variations in the implementation of key economic features and in the implementation of endless second, third, and fourth order economic features as well - the same will hold for actual participatory economies.

Thus, different instances of participatory economy will differ in the details of how labor is measured, how jobs are balanced, how councils meet and make decisions, how participatory planning is carried out, and, beyond that, in all manner of less central attributes within and between workplaces and communities.

It is a debilitating mistake to get caught up in seeking an inflexible, unvarying blueprint. Parecon is not inflexible or unvarying. It no more specifies the details of all future parecons than any broad description of capitalism’s defining features tell us everything about the U.S., Sweden, Chile, and South Africa. The model shows central defining features, no more, no less.

You say balanced job complexes are also central to classlessness, and that classlessness can’t do without them. How do you arrive at that claim?

We want classlessness and by definition of what classes are, that means that we can’t have our economic institutions giving some producers more power which they use to accumulate excessive wealth, better conditions, and so on.

We know that if we let people own means of production and determine its use they will dominate outcomes and accumulate extreme wealth. Parecon, seeking classlessness, excludes that. That much is straightforward.

But it also turns out that if some people do only rote and tedious, obedient labor, while other people do only work that involves empowering conditions, the former traditional workers, will be dominated by the latter group who I call the coordinator class. The logic of seeking balanced job complexes stems from this observation.

With balanced job complexes, we honor expertise, of course, but each worker does a mix of tasks - not solely rote or solely empowering - so that everyone is comparably and sufficiently prepared by their economic position to participate in self managing councils. We have to have balanced job complexes, in which we all have a mix of tasks of comparable empowerment impact, to avoid a division of labor that separates a coordinator class above from a working class below.

What difference can parecon make now? Is this vision just for the future, or can it matter in the present, and if so, how?

I am baffled when people say vision has no implications. To me it is like saying to someone looking for their terminal at the airport, hey, where you want to go has no relevance, just tell me how you are feeling about where you are, that is enough to decide your terminal. You see the problem. You can’t have good activist strategy, good organizational structure, good policies in the movement, or good policies regarding the broader society, unless you know what you are trying to attain. Without vision, you can make your strategy fit your current means and assets. You can make it oppose what you dislike. But you can’t orient it to arrive at a preferred destination. How many times must people suffer the disasters of directionless activism before we elevate having a destination to priority importance?

[www.zcommunications.org/parecon-today-by-michael-albert]

Look upon the “Popular Action Movement” (PAM) as being the New State. Unlike the current State this new state would be us, the people ourselves, organised. There should be no State that stands above the people and governs them: for the state must in fact be the people. There should be no departments and ministries. There will have to be people doing specific jobs at specific times, but this does not mean that there will need to be an administration; in fact, we must eliminate administration and management. In other words, we are not describing a protest movement here. Nor are we describing a political party. Thus the programme becomes: How do we provide goods and services for ourselves? How do we want to control the ownership of private and capital property? Do we want to outlaw interpersonal exploitation? We have to get used to thinking as a free people rather than as petitioners who beg the state for crumbs here-and-there. We are interested neither in begging the state to look after us nor in voting for which people will look after us. It is necessary that we get used to being free and having to figure out how to run society for ourselves. We will figure these things out in the process of doing them.

For some time now, in fact for longer than many care to admit, but especially for the last ten years and intensifying over the past four or five years, there has been a marked concentration?of wealth in the hands of very few people. Entities referred to as Corporations are drawing the wealth of society into themselves. This concentration of wealth has been accompanied?by very little actual wealth creation with the result that most people have been getting poorer while a few people have been getting much richer.

Where is this wealth coming from and where is it pooling? In general wealth is flowing away from wage and salary earners and towards people who are deemed to own capital. The situation is more nuanced than this of course. Corporate financial entities are gaining control over most of the wealth and the people who control these financial corporations are directing the use of this wealth. In other words there is a group or class of people who work for wages and salaries and a group or class of people who control and direct the wealth that is created. (There are also people who partake of both aspects and also those who fall beneath the entire process.) The two sets or classes of people mentioned first thus have an antagonistic relationship with each other and have different interests. The people controlling the wealth understand these things. Most of the people being stripped of their wealth don’t. Most of those being stripped of their wealth don’t want to understand these things. In fact, many working people don’t even want to be considered working people, and in spite of every sign of a shrinking personal and social wage, deny that this drift of wealth away from themselves is happening. Many people who acknowledge that it is happening claim that this drift of wealth into the hands of transnational bankster cartels is a good thing. Or others claim that nothing can be done about it: we can work to overcome the worst of the consequences but the process itself is?untouchable and unstoppable (the NDP line).

Although most people know and understand, very few will acknowledge that the concentration of wealth in the hands of the very rich is a political decision, agreed to and supported by all of the major parties in Canada, and in fact does not have to be happening. Let me repeat: the impoverishment of working people is actively (actively!) sought by all of the major parties (Liberals, Conservatives, NDP, Bloc) in Canada. The mass media support the impoverishment of working people. Most of the supporters of the impoverishment of working people don’t claim to be supporters of this policy. The supporters of the concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer and fewer people mainly pretend that it is not happening, or that it has to happen, or even that it is a good thing.

[...]

Let’s return our gaze to capital stripping the state. This process is quite far advanced in the United States of America. The National Debt continues to rise. The interest on the National Debt for the month of June 2006 was US$ 98,255,216,240.82. There will come a time when they can’t even afford the interest on the debt. It is our contention that the system in the U.S. of A. will be destroyed by the forces of Capitalism itself. Capitalism is beset by periodic crises of overproduction which lead to crises of unemployment. These crises are chronicled; we know when they happened, the events leading up to them, the severity and the duration etc. At the time that this document was originally written, everyone was predicting an oncoming serious recession or depression. We are currently in the midst of the predicted depression. Unfortunately, the current depression will not destroy the current system; it will take two more downturns in the economy, each one more severe than the previous, to destroy this system. In other words we are three downturns away from the end of the system. One will happen almost immediately and two more will occur with eight to twelve years between them. As State services terminate chaos will develop.

This is where PAM: The New State comes in. There has never been a situation where poor people have made a Revolution to overthrow rich people. That is a romantic fantasy. A Revolution occurs when the Rich and Powerful do not control the State: for example, the English Revolution 1642 – 1649, the French Revolution 1789 – 1793, the U.S. Revolution 1776 – 1783. The other time a Revolution can occur is when the State ceases to function owing to general collapse of State Institutions: for example Russia 1917 – 1919, China 1924 – 1949. (At present there are several Revolutions going on in remote areas of the world where there is no effective State presence). We are building the Popular Action Movement now, so that it can be an organised force when the Institutions of State Power dissolve sometime between 2020 and 2050.

From The Manual: A Brief What, Why, and How of the Popular Action Movement: Part 1 - Social Revolution (SR)
[sorev.wordpress.com]

By Wayne Price

Coming out of capitalism, Marx believed, it is not possible to immediately create “a more advanced phase of communist society”. A “dictatorship of the proletariat” will be needed during a transitional period – usually interpreted as a new state. Many anarchists have argued that it is possible to go immediately into a fully communist economy. The post-revolutionary society would begin with a technology of immense productivity, an end to capitalist waste, and an expanded productive force. Potentially modern technology is so productive that it could provide everyone with a high standard of living while requiring a small amount of the total social labour.

The reported view of Bakunin leads to a third position: that of an experimental economy. The capitalists will be expropriated and the economy will be some from of cooperative, collectivized, and democratically managed by those who work in it. But exactly how this will work out may not be the same at every time and place.

Different communities, regions, or nations might try out various models of anti-authoritarian socialism, adapted to their conditions. One such model is the free-communist economy. Everyone works, not for money but because they like to keep active and productive, or because they feel responsible, or because they do not want to be called “lazy bums”. People might take turns doing the dirtiest jobs. Consumption of plentiful goods is free; people take what they want from the shelves. Scarce goods have to be rationed.

Parecon is a proposed system of “decentralized socialist planning” or “participatory economics”. Local consumer councils would list their wants. So would factory councils, listing what materials they need for production. The factory councils would state what they could produce. This would be helped by the fact that the consumers and producers are ultimately the same people. Eventually a plan would be developed, without any central planning bureaucracy.

We could imagine a society which “pays” people for their work, while gradually increasing the free-communist sector of their economy. Even under capitalism, most roads, public schools, libraries, fire protection, and public water are “free” – that is, communally paid for and available to all. A socialist society might expand this “free” sector, providing basic food, clothing, and shelter for all regardless of work.

An alternate model might be called “decentralized market socialism.” There would be a market, regulated by communal authorities, but big corporations or state enterprises would not be allowed. There is to be no exploitation; workers do not sell their labour power to bosses. Instead, the economy would consist of worker-run businesses (producer cooperatives), consumer cooperatives, small businesses, craft shops, community-owned enterprises and family farms.

I am neither advocating or opposing any of these models. I have preferences, for anything which moves towards anarchist-communism, but I do not know which is best. Under the right circumstances, any of them may work. Following a revolution, I hope that different regions would try particular models, becoming social experiments from which the world can learn. I am proposing that, instead of seeing revolutionary society as “transitional”, it should be seen as an “experimental society”. It would always be in transition.

From The Abolition of the State: Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives.

By Ward Churchill
You don’t have to have the preponderance of the population engaged in some sort of a final campaign to bring down the government. What you do need is the ability to cause an increasing number of people to withdraw consent from some key sectors that keep the system functioning. And if an appreciable number of those people are going into more active forms of resistance and are supportive, at least to the extent that they won’t give you up to the cops and that maybe they will make a contribution, be it monetarily, or by providing you sanctuary, I think that’s attainable over the long haul. You have to have a much greater weight in order to take the structure intact and then rearrange its organization, than you need to have it begin to unravel and collapse, and that’s actually the aspiration that I hold.

You also have to create counter-models that people can look at, that they can be attracted to: “Oh yeah, there is another way of doing this and maybe I’d be more comfortable in that context. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t lived in it, but it looks like something I might like to explore.” That leads to withdrawal, and creates doubt as to the inevitability of state structures and that’s what you’re trying to create.

Not that you’re going to supplant the structure of the state with co-ops, or little land occupations, collectives and so forth. In the 70s in particular, there was this whole notion that you could simply create a society that you want within the shell of the old one, and eventually the old one will wither away. Well that ain’t going to happen either. You’re going to reach a certain threshold and then the state will begin to actively repress you and try to crush you.

The Black Panthers’ breakfast for children program, their community clinics, alternative educational institutions, job placement programs, housing initiatives, and all the rest, when viewed as a package in and of themselves may seem like a very liberal agenda. But it was framed in terms of a very coherent program of self-determination, of self-sufficiency, that sought to remove those service delivery sectors of responsibility from the state, and to place them in the hands of the community.

You don’t see a lot of that happening these days. For most people in the anarchist community who organize in their little collectives and get together and eat their bean sprouts and shit, it’s only for themselves, at the present time. If you want to talk to factory workers, you need to connect with them where they are, not where you think they should be. You need to get over your prohibition on ashtrays. You keep asking me why nobody shows up, except you, when you organize an event - there’s the answer. I’ve answered the question about 15 times. You may have ideas, you may have counter models and they might be constructive, but if people - coming from the bowling alley or something - have to spend 15 minutes reading your fucking signs about what they can or can’t do in exchange for the privilege of entering your sacred premises, they’re going to go bowling instead. Get over your bicycles and go down and bend a wrench with a gear-head for a while. Do what he’s fucking doing.

Maybe he’ll learn how to talk to you and vice versa.

But that’s like shedding the black uniforms. It’s a real psychological barrier to some anarchists, because they’ve got the solution to the world’s problems somehow in code form in their minds. They posit an implicit demand that people are supposed to acknowledge the superiority of their vision as the price of admission. So get the fuck off the university campus and down into a union hall. Put ashtrays on the goddamn tables. Make some babysitting services available. And try to package it in a set of terms that can appeal to the people you’re trying to reach. Call it spin if you will, call it packaging, call it Madison Avenue - but how you pedal it, how you try to reach people, is really important. They’re probably not about to put safety pins in their eyelids and all the rest of that shit. I understand why you’re doing it, and I’m not objecting: it’s just that you’ve got to realize that there are some other people out there you need to reach if you’re going to be successful, who don’t feel that way. And you need to respect that. Because you’re ultimately demanding that they respect you. That’s a reciprocal proposition.

From Indigenism, Anarchism and the State: An Interview with Ward Churchill
(Upping the Anti # 1)  http://www.uppingtheanti.org/