The whole new world opens up. Communism is first posed, abstractly, in a seeming plenitude: the life lived inside Occupy. Then the real world arrives with its numberless police, and even attempts to squat are dislodged. The question is of such utmost importance: where to nurture communism? It almost poses itself in the sense of Deleuze, of considerations of geophilosophy. If, on the West Coast, where the mountains descend to the sand and cliffs of the blue Pacific, the radicals go “up country”, as it was once called, they will still find old hippies in the countryside who will help them, who lived through the past era of revolution, and will find a life free from the expense and madness of the decaying American cities. In fact the expropriated farm at Berkeley offers the perfect bridge in its location at the end of the city, both to the countryside and to the past history of People’s Park, of American utopian experiments in general. The Americans have their own history of retreating to the land, that runs like a hidden current through their history. If Americans look hard at their own history they will find Utopia trying to emerge on the farm. Even in our general anglophone culture, Occupy the Land was the slogan of the original Diggers of the 1640′s. Or if the comrades in the Northeast go upstate, as happened previously at Oneida and with such stunning success at Woodstock, or even further to the tiny towns of Vermont, the land where Shays lived the rest of his life after his failed rebellion, and where Bookchin and his followers went. Perhaps those from the South can find something in the mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, where John Brown planned to base his apocalyptic guerrilla war, and where the miners have struggled so fruitlessly, and for so long, against such odds. There is no great city to seize in America: just look at the wars with the British, they seized capital city after capital city, the Americans simply moved away. If there are only a few people in the countryside, there are only a few people in the cities worth talking to anyways: most of them are human wrecks of capitalism. If strategically and historically, space in America is almost flat, tending to zero, then go where no space exists: follow the heart, where it manifested in history, where kindness ends distance.
Eugene’s girlfriend said she believes he was drugged unknowingly. The only other explanation, she said, was supernatural, that someone put a Voodoo curse on him. The girlfriend, who unlike Eugene is not Haitian, said she has never believed in Voodoo, until now.
“I don’t know how else to explain this,” she told CBS4 News partner The Miami Herald.
The Federation’s distillation of everything down to “working class struggle” is problematic. The working class as it used to be has all but gone and anyway, like democracy, it was originally rooted in horror and lies for many. Democracy was invented on the backs of a Greek slave class and the Industrial Revolution first imposed the destruction of the individual and introduced ‘the dispossessed herd’ as it ushered in this age we hate. Focusing on the “working class” in this way is like shuffling between different forms of oppression, saying that we prefer that form of oppression over this one: people fought tooth and nail against becoming subsumed into a “working class” at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The assimilation of artisans and rural peoples into the industrial working class was bloody, so why some anarchists are attempting to reify it now, especially now that the machine has moved on and is now subsuming the traditional working class into the post-industrial consumer class, is not just questionable, it is bizarre. They are all simply stages in the grinding progress of the machine and we would do well to abandon all of these chimeras. This is not to deny that a class struggle has always and continues to be fought, but I prefer the term “social war” to “working class struggle” largely because it includes more individuals and their choices, including those who consider themselves traditionally working class. Class as a concept and as a social binder has become increasingly muddy over the years. People can be more crudely divided – if we must – into the rich and the poor, the included and the excluded, the critical and the uncritical regarding the State and civilisation. —Verona Q - a few notes on civil anarchism
(Source: 325.nostate.net)
