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The Anarchives Volume 2 Issue 2 Part One Free
The Anarchives To get free paper version send
The Anarchives Snail-mail addresses to
The Anarchives yakimov@ecf.utoronto.ca
Anarchy & Education
The Canadian Student Strike
This transmission contains: Strike For Student Rights
Don't Call Students...
Anarchism, Freedom is Free, & Anarchy
Forward, spam, post, print, or send this everywhere...
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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."
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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.
____________________________________________________________
Get with the program. Contact TAO today.
____________________________________________________________
--
/-/\-\ The Anarchy Organization |
/ / \ \ Free Minds For Free Lives ( | )
--|-/----\-\-- yakimov@ecf.utoronto.ca \|/
\/ \/ jterpstra@trentu.ca `_^_'