The Anarchives Volume 2 Issue 2.1 The Anarchives Published By The Anarchives The Anarchy Organization The Anarchives tao@lglobal.com Send your e-mail address to get on the list Spread The Word Pass This On... --/\-- Canadian / / \ \ Student ---|--/----\--|--- Strike \/ \/ /\______/\ Strike For Student Rights University for the individual can be a time of conflict and confrontation. Often for the first time, the truth, or at least the closest thing, is presented to the post-secondary student. The truth of a global exploitative system that wreaks its havoc on all forms of humanity. Through various disciplines and courses, the complexity and expansiveness of this system is presented to students. For perhaps the first time in their lives they are confronted with perhaps a less than perfect picture of our so-called liberal democracy. Here the student is faced with three main options. The first and seemingly most common choice is to attempt to altogether ignore the horrible truth being presented. This is often accomplished through large consumption of beer, booze, and many other recreational drugs, along of course with the generous aid of television. The second option, is to simply accept the truth as it is. Accept that it is just a process of human development, and communism has failed so what are you supposed to do. From this standpoint it becomes easier to compete for a spot among the elite, or their supporting class. Gotta get those good grades to get a good job. The third choice, really the only viable one, is to accept the truth, while at the same time rejecting its implications. A rejection of what is being taught, and the beginning or continuation of the struggle for alternatives. The desire to stand up in class and say, "This is shit! We gotta do something about this!" This third choice leads to the struggle for Student Rights... Every person has the right to a decent, free education. The pricing of education is an integral part of the commoditization of human labour and subsequently humanity itself. We are always learning from birth to death. Or at least we should be, free education can help ensure this. Every person has the right to learn what they want, how they want it, and when they want it. This would include not just choosing courses, but the curriculum and evaluations of the course. Education should be a process of empowerment rather than submission to authority. Professors should be guiding students towards the exploration and development of their studies. Equipping them with the tools needed to find the truth/answers to their problems. Students leading the class, the professors provide the fuel. Instead of enforcing their views and conclusions upon the class, professors should help create an environment that encourages original and critical thinking. Education should be a never ending process. We must escape from the formal institution of education. It is our job to build an environment that supports a continual learning process. Real life as education. Strike. Study. strike. study, will someone out there stop studying and start striking, break down doors and throw some MP's furniture out the window. This chance for protest doesn't not just consider student tuition but rather the entire social service industry. Unions might be self interested beaurocracies but the reality of a capitalist system automatically calls for either sacrifice or welfare. With the present liberal budget, people previously dependant on government assistance will make up a new lower labour class willing to work for under minimum wage with less financial security. It is what Chomsky calls the third world within the first world. The liberal budget is following a fascist approach left behind by Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, and Mulrooney, among others. If you render your rights to an oligarchy and find yourself trapped in a cold institution, one way of warming it is to burn it down. A lot of schools across Canada have declined the opportunity to strike on Jan. 25 1995. What the fuck's up with this?! A strike is an excellent activity for class consciousness. Students need to realize the power they have in numbers, not to mention desire for change. I'm striking every time I skip a class. I've been complaining about schools and the education system since kindergarten. I wanna see lots o' changes in education. Rising tuition is not one of them. Prices are going up, and active student participation is going down. We gotta get our shit together. With the absence of a powerful "grassroots" student organization, the onus for resistance and revolution lays on the individual. It becomes the responsibility for student activists to 'cause shit wherever and whenever they can. The most effective often comes within the classroom. Professors authority should be challenged at all points, as well as the authority of those being studied. Until a large collective of autonomous groups can rise up and demand what is rightfully theirs, individuals must take the weight of fighting back. Large student groups that wish to compete with the government by forming large hierarchical organizations, are doomed to pragmatic self-interested actions rather than radical change of the education system. Change must come from the bottom up, not dictated from the top down. We've all gotta do our share to take our freedom... Jesse Hirsh Don't Call Students When the Revolution Comes by Jay Terpstra jterpstra@trentu.ca There is a story about public education mirroring the assembly line patterns of modern industrialization, creating a surplus of information-glutton automatons. A university is run by pre-determined laws and curricula. The danger is the end of anything fresh. Neil Postman called the act of modern day education to be an exercise in ventriliquilization and Malcolm X called it miseducation. Meanwhile, minds continue to rot and robotize and the castles still stand. Sitting in the principles office, the spit of the principles declarations started to burn my cries of defence. I would either crack under the weight of his towering suited frame and broad desk shoulders or I would be so shocked by his skits of faked disappointed toughness and so unimpressed by his desperate attempts to coerce admission of my crimes carefully categorized and moralized to fit guilt and shame that I would start to laugh. The awful realization that I was being sucked into a game of rank and rule pissed me off to the point where I'd be sent off to a higher course of punishment. In university the forces of beaurocracy are more subtle. Students, like children have little effect on education past paying the ticket price at the door. Just like members of an industrial factory students have to put their hands in the lines of standardized knowledge without pulling any of the wrong screws. That infinite amounts of text are routinely recited is not in itself a problem until a blindness to any alternatives (often the realistic ones) occurs. Narrow education emerges with the over examination of the specifics of a past theory such as in politics; the structure of style as in english, the rationalization of everything such as in sciences. It's often impossible to keep an original opinion against previously set guidelines and significant data. For the professors to be able to grade people they must have predetermined parameters. At the outset of a course the professor already knows the purpose and point of the course and just like a minister their job is to sell the point, whatever the truth is that they profess. Professors are only roles of a wide structure that has failed to influence much more than shit packing. Noam Chomsky points out, "Those whom we call intellectuals have tended to see the state as the avenue to power, prestige, and influence". University is a place of mass imitation of the status quo. This is bound to happen in a place that masks live experience behind sacred text. Memorization and mathematical categorization is valued over individual creations and open-ended questions. It's easy to kill dissension when most students are too busy figuring out guidelines, grades and graduation. Paul Goodman suggested that high school and post secondary education be replaced with on-site direct education. He goes on to say that university "should be reserved for adults who already know something about which to philosophise. Otherwise, as Plato pointed out, such 'education' is just mere verbalizing". Instead of sections of people in standardized departments, students should have the unconditional right to pursue an entirely independent curriculum. Taking interest and ambition into assumption this could be the most efficient means to a meaningful education. Goodman points out that instead of supporting costly institutions, the government could fund individual students directly . Yet many would nevertheless sink to the fear that students wouldn't acquire the essential theories and prerequisites necessary for academically accepted interpretation. The schools consider students to be the same rather than interconnected, a group of successful and less successful people rather than as individuals with unique abilities and interests. The legendary founder of free schools, Francisco Ferrer believed the true educator to be someone who "does not impose his own ideas and will on the child, but appeals to its own energies" . Almost a hundred years after Ferrer was shot by the government for being too radical, his common sense vision of education is still not a reality. After years of imposition, students learn to insert their energies into ready-made roles. Emma Goldman's critique of university education and liberal capitalism is still a potent cry for the freedom and deinstitutionalization of education: The ideal of the average pedagogist is not a complete, well-rounded, original being; rather does he seek that the result of his art or pedagogy shall be autonomous of flesh and blood, to best fit into the treadmill of society and the emptiness and dullness of our lives. Every home, school, college and university stands for dry, cold utilitarianism, overflooding the brain of the pupil with a tremendous amount of ideas, handed down from generations past. 'Facts and data,' as they are called, constitute a lot of information, well enough perhaps to maintain every form of authority and to create much awe for the importance of possession, but only a great handicap to a true understanding of the human soul and its place in the world. The castles made of sand still standing. ANARCHISM by: Lior Stecklov ai797@freenet.victoria.bc.ca "In the battle for freedom, as Ibsen has so well pointed out, it is the struggle for, not so much the attainment of, liberty, that develops all that is strongest, sturdiest and finest in human character." These words of Emma Goldmann may best sum up what anarchism means to me. Although I often think that I would like to present a comprehensive theory of anarchism, I do not believe that there is one. How can there be a theory to explain the yearning of the soul for freedom, human dignity, the shame of repression ? the spark of spirit that seeks new and daring worlds ? There are some basic ideas underlying anarchism but they do not constitute a dogma, scientific or otherwise. The first idea is that people are inherently good, that human nature does not need to be coerced for society to function. Human beings live in society from the moment they are born to the moment they die. To conceive of a person without society is an absurdity: thought, language, belief, sexuality and love are what we give and take with others and are what define the deepest aspects of life. Yet we are born into a society which is hostile to free thought, which uses language as a means of control, which trivializes beliefs and replaces them with dogma, which denigrates sexuality to the level of a function and raises love to the level of an ideal. Whenever we question these perversions, rationalizations are riveted into place and the cold steel hull of the ship of social "order" is cast off into the ocean of historical illusions. But in a world where the multiplicity of human interactions makes for unlimited spontaneity, the certainty of social order creates a paradox which both poets and economists must know. A society based on illusions fostered by social order cannot cope with reality, and the needs of the people will assert themselves through revolution while the needs of Nature will assert themselves as we continue to destroy the environment. Underlying the fear of human nature is the great mass of repression and fear of change which characterizes modern society. The fear of human nature is what keeps the systems in place, it is the excuse given by most people who know injustice but are afraid of change, it is the justification given for every savage repression by the ruling elites. Yet whatever systems are proposed are bound to fail because they are resistant to change, the essence of humanity and nature. The very idea that there is an ultimate system that will run human affairs is a product of the type of thinking arising from hierarchical society, where individuals are alienated from community, from real contact with each other and are simply considered as abstract "agents" to be manipulated. Hierarchical society is a society where every person or group has power of coercion over another: relationships are conceived through power structures. Sound strange or weird ? Open the T.V. or newspaper, look around your workplace or classroom with new eyes, look at your family. It is so close to us that we can't see it or believe it. Our thinking has been appropriated by it. It is not just the words: it is what you don't read in your newspaper, it is the tone of the announcer as the news is read; it is the rightness of your boss or prof, it is the emptiness found at home. "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice...Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." Mikael Bakunin The same hierarchical relations apply to political systems which are a product of hierarchical thinking, of the belief that something can be "over" people. This is as much the failure of Marxism as of liberal capitalism or fascism. The Marxist system, which is supposed to be theoretically imposed by history and practically by the proletariat has failed as revolution. Anarchism split off from the Marxist dominated revolutionary movement in 1872 because anarchists such as Mikael Bakunin believed that Marxist ideology would lead to a totalitarian state. This is exactly what has happened in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and so on. And while Marxism has many important contributions to revolutionary ideology, its subsumption into a type of religion and its esoteric philosophical concepts have done much to hurt the cause of true revolution. " A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias." Oscar Wilde Of course, this does not mean that anarchism stands for riot and mayhem and that Anarchists do not believe in thought. Certainly, a dialectic of revolution is called for, but this dialectic must be true to its origins: any dialectic that presumes to know the answers it will find, that knows its ultimate end must be called into question. As with philosophy, as with real life. Any social movement which sets up an end point and imposes it cannot be a truly revolutionary movement. Revolution is never ending, it starts from one point, moves to another, and again to another. Change is the rule, not the exception. Anarchism's "end point" is the point where society can accept change without destroying human life or the environment. If this is the Utopia, let it be. Anarchists are often charged with being utopian dreamers yet it is Anarchism which destroys the illusion that power can solve human problems. Power, and by this we mean the power to coerce, never solves more problems than it creates ! Power is antihuman: a being who relates through power will always dehumanize the other. What Anarchists demand is a solution to social problems without using power, and this is a lot harder than anything else because it demands a human response, a spontaneous response, a direct, personal, real, unmediated response ! Anarchism demands that you think for yourself, never retreating into dogma, useless and endless causality (henceforth called mind-fucking), abstruse mysticism, bourgeois decadence and pettiness. Freedom from compulsion allows the development of all that is beautiful in human existence. "Breath, breath in the air, don't be afraid to care.." goes the Pink Floyd song. Without coercion, people can reach out to each other and solve problems through community. At the workplace, community will replace the power games and enmity between the labourers and the managers. The land will be given back to the People, and small, self-reliant communities will spring up which practice sustainable agriculture and resource use. Small communities will be able to harness renewable energy and the exploitation of fossil fuels will be minimized. Work will become play: instead of the torpid monotony and stress that most people find in work there will be diversity and personal growth. Urban lands that were once set aside for cars and for the rich will be turned into horticultural gardens where food is grown. Listen to your inner voice, Which you've sold under stress: Contractual agreement on emptiness The mouth not yours now the lips slightly taught, the jaw set: A wind stirs they begin to shake the breath too Anger, joy and even fear, form into sound, into thought and word, whispered in love, embraced as life, spoken by toil, screamed through struggle Freedom ! Freedom ! History teaches that there are two opposing forces that shape political destiny: revolution and reaction. Revolution, the force for change, the new, the creative; Reaction, the opposition of change, keeping things the same, keeping things "stable" in the doublespeak of the Bourgeoisie. Everything that is happening in the world today is a product of history and the dialectic of opposites formed by revolution and reaction. This dialectic forms the basis of revolutionary thought, both Marxist and anarchist. The word dialectic simply means reasoning through the synthesis of two opposites. Once we see the revolutionary dialectic, we can understand the necessity of revolution and nurture it rather than pervert it into totalitarianism. This situation is especially urgent in the tension between the "North" and "South" which is actually a tension between reaction and revolution. The wealthy powerful world are using every means to keep the majority of the world oppressed and poor. The rebellion in Chiapas is a good example of this trend and we must support the rebels in every way possible. Next issue I will expand on the dialectic of revolution and discuss the meaning of Statism, Capitalism and the international imbalance. GOOD BOOKS Shulman, Alix Kates. 1972. Red Emma Speaks. Random House: New York. Bookchin, Murray. Post-Scarcity Anarchism Morris, Brian. Bakunin: the philosophy of freedom Marshal, Peter. Demanding the Impossible : A History of Anarchism. Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread. FREEDOM IS FREE by J.V. Kiss-An The word freedom can't explain fully what it stands for. freedom is an inherent property and not a temporary state of being. Freedom can't be partial. Freedom is the essential component for a healthy and peaceful society Freedom provides the energy for the physical and mental body to properly function Freedom is not a commodity to fight over or trade. Freedom belongs to everybody: It is not a privilege Freedom leads one to wisdom. Wisdom is not an intellectual property to be copyrighted or patented. Freedom is not a compensation or reward for a trick performed. Because of its abstract nature, freedom has manifested itself in different forms. Anarchy is probably the purest form so far. Freedom stays a dead word under capitalist ideology. If you are activated by the spirit of freedom it only shows you are a normal human being This quality needs nurturing and will produce positive thinking in a world full of negativity. Remove the price tag put on freedom by the greedy who have sought to own the priceless It does not take a genius to figure out that we live in a sick society where food, water and air have price tags put on them. It's time we learned the art of giving, an easy way to achieve freedom. Anarchy by Darrell Lake Anarchy is aiming to destroy corporate capitalism. There are no other political motivations to follow, just individuals leading by example; to inspire people to practice anarchy themselves. Anarchy in the sense of defining one's own politics. Defining one's own lifestyle with a social consciousness. Fighting capitalism by escaping it and building alternatives. By following the examples of other individuals this anarchy will not be promoting chaos or trying to exterminate all rational thought. Instead it attempts further environmental awareness on several different levels by making the individual more intelligent and independent of the flaws of the society they live in. We're not looking at big and wasteful political awareness campaigns advertising in the same corporate backed mediums it wishes to destroy. Anarchy has to be kept on an individual, community level, promoting amateurism rather than professionalism. This is the only way to take power from the specialist corporate model. To be an amateur means there are no systematic campaigns. Anarchy comes from the methods and practices offered by all individuals. There is chaos in the wide array of differences that will emerge, but these differences are united in a common struggle. A struggle for freedom, with capitalism as a major obstacle. Anarchy is a human expression for freedom. It's time we all start expressing ourselves with a bit more volume. Ed Note: Darrell Lake is the author of the infamous biography of Mr. Fuck You Man. It is available through The Anarchy Organization.