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Title: Destination Anarchy! Author: Tasos Sagris Date: April 7, 2016 Language: en Topics: democracy, anarchy, Greece Source: https://crimethinc.com/2016/04/07/feature-destination-anarchy-every-step-is-an-obstacle
I find myself in the courtyard of the School of Fine Arts in Athens,
Greece. It’s May 25, 2011, a hot summer day. A five-day anarchist and
anti-authoritarian festival starts in six hours and I am scrambling to
prepare all the small details I have in mind. I’m working alone.
I walk across the campus to bring an electrician from one stage to the
other. In Spain, people have been on the streets for ten days now, after
75 years of silence. They are sending us signals of revolt, bringing the
flame of liberation from the Arab countries to European land. We are
just setting up for our festival: sound systems for three stages and two
areas for public discussions and lectures; there is a theater stage, a
book fair area, and workshop areas. We are about 30 people from two
affinity groups constructing an area for 12,000 people. We are acting
like a Spartan army (totally paranoid ideas about the amazing abilities
of a small group of determined fighters). The mind is a spaceship.
People travel to other planets during the summer nights for thousands of
years now. We are on our way to anarchy! Sometimes it seems far away;
sometimes it is suddenly all around us.
This same afternoon, there is an assembly behind the Acropolis for
people hoping to bring the flame from Spain to Greece. For a year now, a
small weekly anarchist assembly has met in Syntagma Square in front of
the Parliament to talk about the crises. At the new assembly this
afternoon, people decide to go and camp in Syntagma following the calls
for action coming from Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt. They publish a call
for others to join them.
We can do an incredible amount of logistical work to prepare a space for
people, but if the spirit of revolt draws them somewhere else, the
important thing is to be there! We can spend our whole lives building a
theoretical argument or an ideological position or an infrastructure for
the movement—but when a revolt is taking place, we have to be ready to
abandon what keeps us apart and find a way to meet each other, to spread
beneficial ideas and revolutionary practices to those in rebellion.
What appeared that day was a tropical storm, an ocean arising in front
of our eyes, vast and wild. 100,000 people gathered suddenly around the
parliament, shouting the classic anarchist slogan against democracy, “We
Want to Burn, We Want to Burn the Parliament, this Bordello!” Nobody was
at the festival for the afternoon lectures; everybody was at Syntagma.
More than 8000 people arrived late at night for the concerts and the
techno-trance stage. The crowd was in a frenzy, sharing an unfamiliar
and wild enthusiasm.
We went to camp at Syntagma with Void Network. We announced this in the
weekly anarchist assembly “For the Self-Organization of the Society,”
which we had been participating in for three years already. Some of the
groups refused to come to Syntagma—they called it petit bourgeois, they
kept a distance from it, just watching. Other anarchist, autonomous, and
anti-authoritarian groups and individuals stayed at Syntagma all summer.
We stayed there too, spreading anarchist ideas and practices among
countless desperate people, participating in the organization of the
Athens General Assembly to guarantee that everyone would have an equal
opportunity to express himself or herself, to ensure that no political
party or ultra-left group could manipulate the decisions, to keep
leftists from taking over the movement.
Other groups came only for the three days of riots. The riots were vast…
In the middle of financial collapse, in the middle of inhuman austerity
measures, unemployment, and unbelievable state repression… this was one
of the best summers of my life.
When the Greek government signed a contract with the IMF and Central
European Bank in 2010, agreeing to austerity measures, it gave everyone
the chance to see how global economic interests control representative
democracy. People felt betrayed by politicians they had believed in for
40 years, politicians they had put in parliament to represent their
interests. Furious, they imagined burning down the Parliament; many of
them even tried to. Metal bars and 24/7 riot police protected the
Parliament for three years, representing the final obstacle between the
people and the economic interests that govern our lives.
The collapse of faith in representation was also a kind of emancipation.
The obedient victims of superior logic and common sense shook free of
the leadership of the politicians and the manipulation of the
journalists. The unions and parties lost their influence. A new
individual and collective intelligence and liberation arose in place of
the old identities. Wild strikes took place after decades of apathy and
obedience among what we call the general public, millions of people took
part in wild riots—shouting first against themselves for believing in
the politicians for so many years, and then against the politicians.
The people took a step. This is what happened during the summer of 2011
in Greece and many other countries.
I find myself in my mother’s house. It is June 2011. A 65-year-old
social democrat, she wonders why people didn’t succeed in storming the
parliament yet during the days they have been encircling it. She is
afraid to go out in the streets because of the tear gas, but she always
asks me, “Maybe I could come also to the camp during the daytime?” My
uncle and my aunt are also there, members of the Socialist Party (PASOK)
since it was established in 1973; now it governs the country. My aunt is
62. With her eyes shining, she describes how last night the limousine of
a famous minister of PASOK passed her outside the Parliament. She
punched the back of the limousine, then ran behind it with other people
to smash its windows and punch the minister. She feels liberation—she
feels free! She took a step…
But were the assemblies that happened in Syntagma liberating, in the
end? Or were they “directly democratic” in a way that led directly to
the parties of Syriza and Golden Dawn gaining huge numbers of new
adherents, for different but fundamentally similar reasons?
People expressed themselves through the assemblies all around the
country. Common people who had never taken part in any kind of public
event spoke openly about their deepest fears and their most precious
desires, in front of thousands upon thousands of people, with megaphones
to guarantee that everyone could hear their voices clearly. It was like
some kind of group therapy, a catharsis from the delusions of the past,
a jump into public space, an expedition into the vast possibilities of
social power. It was a wonderful summer when everyone was staying out in
the streets talking with everyone about everything.
And then democracy was re-established.
Most of the anarchists were absent, anyway, committing their biggest
political mistake so far this century. In any case, we—the anarchists of
our times—do not yet have anarchist answers for most of the problems our
societies face. We know very well how to deconstruct the ideas of our
enemies, but our worst enemy is our own inability to bring our ideals
from the clouds of anarchism down to the rough and dirty ground of
anarchy.
Under these circumstances, with no other concrete options, people felt
obliged—or forced—to choose between the party of social control offering
them a totalitarian leader for a father figure, or the social-democratic
party promising them free schools, hospitals, and some amount of
protection from the wild neoliberal sharks that govern this world.
And so, after speaking in the assemblies, after participating in
“direct” democracy, people got in line once again to vote, to reaffirm
the democracy of the state. Every step you take towards freedom becomes
an obstacle to going further. Democracy itself is an obstacle.
The democracy of our times, the highest achievement of bourgeois
civilization, has built-in properties that go all the way back to its
origins here in Athens thousands of years ago.
The Founding Fathers of every nation imagined themselves as the
governors of uneducated savages, perverted masses of poor people ready
to commit all kinds of crimes as soon as they were not controlled.
Democracy was constructed by people with a political and economic
interest in keeping the masses under control by means of words rather
than the sword (and with the sword whenever words are not enough).
Representative democracy is a system of mind control offering a
pseudo-reality of freedom in which you cannot have any serious influence
over the fundamental decisions about your life.
The Founding Fathers of democracy—like all fathers, perhaps—fear the
critical thinking of their children. Democracy keeps people stupid: we
are forced to remain in a childish state of mind, participating in
obligatory social structures in which we cannot realize the totality of
our capabilities and desires. There is no need to know the exact details
of the decisions that determine your life: you have just to vote for who
seems good enough to govern your life. Democracy spreads corruption: the
leaders drain the resources of the community. Democracy keeps people
apathetic. Nobody gives a damn about your opinion; you are just one
statistic among millions. Democracy will never teach you to speak in
public, just to remain silent and listen to your governors speak. You
are there to applaud. Throughout your entire political life, you have
been absent, represented.
Democracy keeps you afraid, afraid of the enemies of democracy that have
hidden within your tribe, your democratic community, your nation.
Democracy created borders in your life and now you have to protect these
borders with your own body. The borders are imaginary, social
inventions, but your dead body on the battleground is real. Democracy
excludes the rest of humanity from your community and it prepares an
army, including you, to kill all the excluded ones. The moment you
refuse to kill for the sake of democracy, you too are excluded.
This system has an amazing ability to reproduce itself. It produces
schools, hospitals, theaters, kindergartens, military camps, university
campuses, galleries, museums, and amusement parks. You can spend your
whole life inside those institutions, and if you try to escape from
them, you will probably end up in an asylum for homeless people, a jail,
or a psychiatric clinic (all of which are also democratic institutions).
The flipside of this amazing ability to reproduce itself is that
democracy is unable to surpass itself, to evolve into something
different, in the same way that the Soviet Union never arrived at a
communist paradise. Listen to what the democratic states say against
those who revolt: “Nobody can blackmail democracy.”
So democracy never changes. Statutes and politicians may be replaced,
but it is always the same oligarchic system, aristocratic in its core.
Democracy is always searching, through elections and business contracts
and nepotism, for the best ones to perpetuate it.
This should come as no surprise. Democracy is a conservative tribal
method by which certain ancient Greek tribes reproduced themselves. It
will never allow you to become different until you escape from the
tribe. And today, when the control of the capitalist market and
democratic state are absolute all around the world, there is no other
way to escape democracy except to destroy it.
Even knowing all of this, some people defend democracy. They want to
find a form of democracy that doesn’t end up in oligarchy, just like the
21st century communists who are searching for communist systems that
don’t lead to totalitarianism. But the Founding Fathers of all nations
stand over democrats of all kinds, looking on approvingly as normality
reasserts itself—the same conditions of exploitation, new faces in the
same old positions of authority.
This world will never change as long as we are afraid to cut the roots
of this order. Democracy is the final alternative for all who are afraid
to step into the unknown territory of their own desires, their own
power. Likewise, the demand for “real” democracy is the last way for
social movements to legitimize themselves in the supposed “social
sphere” (and to avoid criminalization). Just as it is the final step,
democracy is also the final obstacle to new possibilities arising in
social movements.
Could any form of democracy save us from democracy?
Direct democracy offers us an alternative way to govern our lives. But
is this really what we need? Do we want to reproduce the limits of the
old world on a smaller scale? Do we want the “general assembly” to
decide about our lives? Or do we want to expand our lives into new forms
of self-determination and open sharing of creativity, to offer our power
freely for the benefit of all humanity, however we (and those with whom
we share our lives) see fit?
When I take part in the assembly of Void Network, I have to take into
account the needs and interests of all my comrades, and our group has to
take into account the needs and desires of the greatest possible number
of people in this world. If we do not take care of each other, there can
be no Void Network, and if we do not take care of the people outside our
group, there will be no connection between us and the world. There is no
general assembly that could know better than we do how we can make the
most of our abilities to benefit the people around us. This is the
difference between an affinity group, which produces a collective and
expansive power, and a democratic assembly, which concentrates power
outside our lives and relationships, alienating us from ourselves and
each other.
Direct democracy is supposed to get rid of the apathy produced by
representation, since it appears as a “participatory” form of democracy.
But is the idea that we will have an assembly of millions of people?
Would such an assembly really be capable of offering us freedom and
equality? Each of us would just feel like a statistic in it as we waited
for days for our turn to speak. On the other hand, if we reduce that
form to the miniscule level of a neighborhood assembly, don’t we trap
ourselves in a microcosm like oversized ants?
Any kind of “direct democracy” reproduces the same conditions as
representative democracy, just on a smaller scale. The majority
suppresses the minority, driving them into apathy. Often, you don’t even
try to express your opinion, as you know you will have no chance to put
it into practice. Often, you are afraid to speak, as you know that you
will be humiliated by the majority. Homogeneity is the ultimate
imperative of any democratic procedure, “direct” or representational—a
homogeneity that ends up as two final opinions (the majority and
minority), losing the vast richness of human intelligence and
sensibility, erasing all the complexity and diversity of human needs and
desires.
This is why even directly democratic assemblies can end up deciding to
carry out inhuman genocides, like the one ancient Athens inflicted upon
Mylos in 416 BC. Excluded people have been enslaved and raped as a
result of direct democratic decisions. Direct democracy is “members
only.” Because it is smaller, it excludes even more people than
representative democracy—producing isolated bubbles that fight each
other like the city-states of ancient Greece. Everybody is an outsider,
a foreigner, a possible enemy; that’s why the community has to build
armies to defend itself and you have to die to protect the opinion of
the majority even if you disagree with it. Whoever will not go along
with the decision must be punished—like Socrates, the world-famous
victim of democracy, and thousands of others. The charismatic leaders
find the best possible direct connection with their followers, and the
democratic mechanisms for manipulating public opinion work directly
better than ever! Direct democracy will never liberate us from
democracy.
Months later, I find myself at my mother’s house again. It is early in
September 2011, a few days before Occupy Wall Street begins. I am
sending out emails to comrades in the USA, urging them to expand the
encampments all over the states, to spread anarchist ideas and
methodologies in the Occupy movement assemblies.
My uncle is also there. As I am looking at my screen, he says to me, “We
decided now to move”—I look up at him—“away from PASOK, to try the
European communist party of SYRIZA.” I feel terror, because I know that
when he says, “We decided,” he speaks for about two million people. It’s
as if he knows them all individually—they are the betrayed followers of
PASOK, and he was in the social-democrat party from the first day to the
last. Syriza had only 4% of the votes just one day ago. I am looking at
him, seeing two million zombies walk just a few steps from one party to
another. I want to shout, “YOU HAVE TO MOVE FURTHER! EVERY STEP IS A NEW
OBSTACLE! YOU CAN’T STOP THERE…”
Anarchists have a lot to do before we can speak to this kind of people.
They are the realists, these people who understand politics as the
management of reality.
I imagine history as a beautiful girl: she smiles, and riots explode in
Athens. I feel history going away from Athens after staying a long time
in my city, now that the Parliament has found a new way to reestablish
delusional hopes in people’s minds. Three and a half years later, in
2015, the streets are still silent and the Euro-communists of SYRIZA win
the elections with just one word for a campaign slogan: HOPE. (The last
thing left in Pandora’s box.) To me, it seems more like DESPERATION.
One of the first decisions the new government of Syriza makes is to
remove the protective metal bars and riot police from around the
Parliament. The Parliament is safe again. Democracy never changes. It
just reforms and reproduces itself.
Every step is a new obstacle. 2600 years ago in Greece and two centuries
ago in Europe the struggle for democracy liberated the poverty-stricken
masses from their misery. They found themselves some years later in
exactly the same conditions—in eternal war with all possible outsiders,
plus the right to vote for it. Christianity and Islam attracted millions
of poor people with promises of social justice and eternal love; some
years later they became ideological tools for massive genocides all
around the world, absolute enemies of human emancipation and obstacles
to the arising of human spirituality. The Communist Party, proclaimed to
be the voice of all those without voices, became the worst enemy of
freedom of expression. Anarchists became ministers and governors in the
Spanish revolution—and the CNT, the great organization for the
liberation of the workers, organized them to work at the factories for
their whole lives until their heroic deaths. It is very possible to
sacrifice our lives to liberate ourselves from the old world’s prisons
and find ourselves entrapped in a new high-quality jail.
Anarcho-communism, an emancipatory vision that we all share in Void
Network, is an old vision of a world without money and without borders.
But it needs to be updated for the 21st century—otherwise, it will
remain in our minds like a mythological ghost, another obstacle. If we
want a world without money, this means we have to transform labor into
open-source creativity, to turn workplaces into beautiful parks of
voluntary creative participation in a global web that freely distributes
all material and mental production. Life has to be organized around the
production of desires and the enjoyment of needs. If we want a world
without borders, that means a world without “foreigners”—so you will not
be a “stranger” anywhere in the world at any moment of your life. We
have to transform “societies” into open and inclusive communities that
will be fully connected in a global network, so that everyone is welcome
and useful anywhere and anytime on this planet, not divided into
isolated, self-sufficient, xenophobic groups. We have to open
“ourselves” to the difference of all the “others.”
In the eight decades since the collapse of the Spanish Revolution,
anarchists have avoided offering solid plans for anarchist revolution on
this scale. Meanwhile, during those years, capitalism has evolved to
levels that the revolutionaries of late 19th century could not have
imagined. Global capitalism is here, global anarchism is not.
The only possible way that an anarchist revolution could happen is on a
planetary scale—not on a local scale, not on isolated islands. Even if
it will take 200 years for an anarchist revolution to extend to every
corner of this world, this has to be envisioned, planned, and realized.
If we reduce the scale of our organizational structures to tiny
neighborhood assemblies or miniscule eco-communities, we will find
ourselves dealing with problems that pass through our small community
like the huge ocean waves pass over a small, fragile fishing boat.
Neo-totalitarianism will never leave us alone in alternative-lifestyle
eco-paradisiacal bubbles (though neoliberalism might sell vacations
there to the rich). We cannot close our eyes to the suffering of this
world.
On the other hand, if we permit old or new forms of authoritarian mass
structures to oblige us to embrace their notions of efficiency and
practicality, we will end up in the belly of a new bureaucratic monster.
We need a global network of communities on struggle, a network of
millions of flexible groups ready to fight against totalitarianism, to
create public liberated zones, to defend them against their enemies and
connect them in a revolutionary wave of global social emancipation—and
to do all this without central control.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote in his book Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man that
The Greeks had the notion of a consensus or a faculty of “common sense”
that translated each sense into each other sense, and conferred
consciousness on man. Today, when we have extended all parts of our
bodies and senses by technology, we are haunted by the need for an outer
consensus of technology and experience that would raise our communal
lives to the level of a worldwide consensus. When we have achieved a
worldwide fragmentation, it is not unnatural to think about a worldwide
integration. Such a universality of conscious being for mankind was
dreamt of by Dante, who believed that men would remain mere broken
fragments until they should be united in an inclusive consciousness.
Could anarchy—total freedom, absolute social and economic equality, and
global fellowship—offer an inclusive consciousness to fragmented
humanity for the 21st century?
It is not simple even to begin thinking about it. And if we want a
vision of emancipation that is created socially and collectively, we
have to avoid simplistic solutions and the leadership of specific
individuals. For example, Karl Marx was a very smart man, but Marxism is
an obstacle for free thinking.
In any case, we are anarchists. We are fighting against the state and
capitalism to open passages—practices, strategies, and
methodologies—that lead to total freedom, social equality, mutual aid,
and self-determination. We have to find a way to connect with the many,
in order that together we may transform the conditions that produce our
reality. Against homogeneity, we have to empower diversity; against
certitude, we have to allow all truths to come true; against exclusion,
we want to defend the stranger, the queer, the old, the young, the
freak, the unknown; against borders, we want to live openheartedly;
against atomization, to care for others, to learn from each other, to
carry out our great plans and achieve our ultimate goals. Otherwise,
established political authority and economic interests will reassert
themselves in endless versions of the same conditions. This world will
never change until we dare to live free, to share everything, to spread
anarchy!