In this section, the reflective essays I write on radical historical movements will be posted on a bi-weekly basis, with a cumulative three papers in total at the end of spring quarter.
Week 3: The Paris Commune
Readings:
Ross, K. (2016). Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. La Fabrique: London.
communards during the Paris Commune 1871 (credit: marxists.org)
The events of the Commune changed the course of interests for one of the world’s most famous anarchists. Peter Kropotkin was a geological surveyor who always has an appetite for political inquiry. It was the Commune that gave him the inspiration to dive into social ecology and write pieces such as “The Conquest of Bread”. The commune even had effects on the theories of Karl Marx, a well known Statist. Marx had an initial criticism on the unpreparedness of the Commune upon its formation; his position grew to support and admiration, calling its very working existence an accomplishment to behold. He saw the breakdown of what he called commodity fetism within its boarders, and further emphasized the topic in later writings. In the ways that Marx edited his pieces post Paris Commune, there is evidence that its influence made him less of a state centralized. A preface he added to the “Communist Manifesto” in 1872 reads as “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose” (Ross,78). This sentiment is a far cry from the speeches Lenin would make in front of the winter palace more than forty years later. Marx advocated for some amount of state centralization no doubt, but of what his theories led him to toward the end of his life, be a more democratic socialist model that rings the sounds of Salvador Allende, the central planning and authoritarianism of the Mao’s and Lenin’s, or something else entirely, will probably forever be a mystery. Perhaps one of the most ominous quotes from Marx, in response to Zasulch’s notion that post-capitalist societies could likely move directly into indigenous communal forms, Marx replies perhaps, but “everything depends on the historical context on which it is located”.
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Week 6: Radical Labor Movements leading up to the Haymarket Affair
Readings:
Green, J (2006) Death in the Haymarket, anchor books
Media form the 8 hour movement of gilded age Chicago. (credit: chicagology)
As the industrial revolution cranked into gear in the 1870’s, Chicago’s net value of goods grew twenty times the rates of wages. This gap, as Richard Wolf explained, created increases in surplus for the capitalists, while the workers were brought to starvation wages, not being able to afford the commodities they helped produce. The gilded age in Chicago also brought a number of boom and bust cycles that wreaked havoc on working people. Just as in 2007, reckless bank loaning led to depressions during this time. The loans were for the capitalists benefit, but when they could not pay them back and depression hit, they cut wages and laid of workers, leaving many homeless and starving in the streets of Chicago. The infamous private detective Allan Pinkerton ordered his guards to shoot anyone attempting to steal food during this time. Another depression in the mid 1880’s was caused by competition between the capitalists to consolidate wealth. This is Albert Parson’s analysis: “The main cause of the current crisis was overproduction caused by the race for profit. In this competition among capitalists who wanted to corner the market, wage earners were the first to suffer because, during business panics, wage cuts and layoffs would always be made in order to preserve profits” (Green 113).
We largely discussed essays within part 2 of “Red Emma Speaks which carry themes of education, religion, atheism, morals, gender normatives, sex and love.
I brought up the modern school and how we could potentially see a revitalization of radical education in this day and age, beyond zines and affinity group discussions. Punkin brought up an education establishment in Seattle that started as a squat before the city gave them the space. Though not explicitly anarchist, they teach a very alternative curriculum.
I read a part of Dostoyevsky’s story he wrote on his prison cell wall about the devil taking a priest to homes and workplaces of working people, and explaining to him how he speaks of hell in other places when hell in on earth. Emma has a quote quote reading it is the Earth, not heaven thats man must rescue in order to be saved. Theses words carry an added weight no aways with climate change threatening our species very survival.
We then talked about Goldman’s take on family life in a religious, capitalist society. Religion tells people, man was made in god’s image, so parents get passed along that same line of thinking to raising kids, how they view their children being made in their image. This creates the morals and rigidity that suffocate an adolescent into uniformity. She speaks of a child’s natural tendency to rebel against a parent’s view. I brought up how this could be viewed as an innate biological mechanism to safeguard a species against multigenerational uniformity.
We discussed a part in the documentary where Goldman and Reitman ware criminally prosecuted for advocating birth control. He talked about the flaws within sex education in the U.S from both religious and secular modes and our own personal experiences taking sex ed classes in grade school. Safe sex is brought up marginally, or not at all in some cases. There is also no mention of pleasure in any curriculum.
Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches by Emma Goldman
Chomsky on Libertarian Socialism, video
“Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman,” documentary
A Dangerous Woman in a Dangerous World
Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (Credit: FoundSF)
Noam Chomsky calls state socialism an inherent contradiction. The way the bolsheviks seized power in revolutionary Russia is against a libertarian socialist (anarchist) platform of free assembly, free speech, and anti-authoritarianism. He has stated that if leninists are placed in the so called far left, then he wants no association with the term. The scene Emma Goldman arrived to in 1920 Russia was nothing she could have possibly imagined. She had spoken and lectured in support for the Bolsheviks while in America before her deportation. This was not the socialist revolution she dreamed of, that she had hoped for. It was a horrifying scene.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin
Peter Kropotkin (Credit: news.infoshop.org)
Kropotkin’s theories would have major repercussions on how our society would measure personal success and progress. He said that mutual aid leads to mutual confidence, which is what he calls the first condition for courage, as well as individual initiative, what he calls the first condition for intellectual progress. Two skill sets that seem to be caught up in individualism, and the hero’s journey archetype in our culture, it’s being re-introduced with their respective roots in a narrative centered on the collective. This brings me back to the Paris Commune. A large number of that population died for an idea, and died defending each-other. I believe they felt what I would call a primal instinct of collective compassion. What courage and intellectualism truly feel like in a context of true direct societal meaning.
“The Mass Strike: The political party and trade unions was written just after the 1905 revolution in Russia. Within this writing Luxemburg’s take on social change seems to repeatedly show an evolutionary mindset, something that is pretty consistent in marxist theory. This means that she believes in what I would call incremental revolutions. I would distinguish this from a reformist platform by the end goal of being overthrow of the bourgeoisie and general expected tactics that are not typically associated with reformist movements. Her main historical argument against more libertarian forms of social revolution is embedded in her experiences seeing the crushing blowback of the state after insurrectionary tactics.
Murray Bookchin (credit: Robert Graham’s anarchism weblog- wordpress.com)
Murray Bookchin is one of the most renowned american anarchists in the latter half of the 20th century. His ideas self-admittingly can border on the utopian, but in his words, at least they are tangible. Bookchin argues that the technological tide of automation can be a tool liberation for the worker, rather than as a weapon of unemployment under capitalism. He advocates for free association in communities, the merger of the ecological and the postmodern technological. Abdullah Ocalan is a political prisoner and lead organizer in Rajava’s free association movement. He was the leader of the PKK (a marxist-leninist group), and found the writings of Bookchin while in prison. He took great influence from the american anarchist and development models of self-organization that he calls democratic confederalism. In which there are tiers of geo-specific councils from commune to region, and social commissions, that interface with resources such as defense and energy.
Greer, T.S (1996) A lifelong Anarchist!, Ignacio hills press
P.B.S. (2016) The MIne Wars, American Experience series
Green, J (2006) Death in the Haymarket, anchor books
Lucy Parsons (credit: alchetron)
“What matters it whether you give the feed and clothes to the slave direct, or whether you just give him enough in wages to purchase the same?” – John Adams, 1787
This week we look at the history and lectures of Lucy Parsons, a former slave and radical activist from reconstruction in Texas, to the great upheaval in Chicago, to the beginnings of the IWW the following century. She spoke with such a tenacious bite and cut-throat vigor that could only come from a person who became a scholar of their own severely oppressed background. We take a look at the West Virginia coal wars (1912-1921), the largest insurrection on U.S. soil since the civil war. Playing big roles are union activist and agitators Mother Jones and Frank Keeney, and the efforts of the United Mine Workers of America to organize workers to confront complete corporate tyranny.
Dupont, M. (2003) Nihilist Communism, The Anarchist Library
De Cleyre, V. (?) The Economic Tendency of Freethought, The Anarchist Library
De Cleyre, V. (?) Direct Action, The Anarchist Library
(credit: libcom.org)
Dupont states that social movements do not lead to revolution, only a series of economic events that pressure individual groups to become more proactive in a selfish manner can do that, and only that. Nothing else has any lasting power. It is in at that time that groups coalesce with each other; or in other words unity is not a precondition for, but is created through struggle. Along those lines they think critically of politicizing the working class into a social category that is another thing the capital makes them out to be. They are the ones operating the mechanisms that drive capital, and in that they are crucial to challenging the current system, but there is no working class culture, or inherent shared political ideals, and there never will be. They insist on these groups keeping their demands as economic as possible, politicizing leading them farther not closer to their goals. Keeping demands on economic terms “they can stay on course for naked conflict with the bourgeoisie” (Dupont)
Debord, G. (1994) The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York
Dupont, M. (2003) Nihilist Communism, The Anarchist Library
(credit: vimeo)
“The commodity emerged in its full-fledged form as a force aspiring to the complete colonization of social life” (Debord 29)
“It emerges from a social unconscious that was dependent on it without knowing it. Whatever is conscious wears out. Whatever is unconscious remains unalterable”(Debord 34) To me this speaks in similarities to Dupont’s sentiments about inciting revolution, inciting change. Taken the notion of the spectacle full on, you would reach the conclusion that we all have deep psychological distortions that make imagining anything out those parameters, (especially as Dupont points out, imagining without survival incentives) impossible. On the other hand the inventions of the unconsciousness remain mystified and uncontrollable; they are ever turing like magma below earth’s crust, but to predicate any systematic agenda based on when lava spews would obviously be in vain.
