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Title: Ekstasis Journal 1
Author: Ekstasis
Language: en
Topics: capitalism, ethics, cynicism, transphobia, anti-fascist action, philosophy
Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10WBxZ4f_HNhfA-hCTnryIXhy5sGTTv8L-bQo7X3miz4/edit?usp=sharing

Ekstasis

Ekstasis Journal 1

Introductions

Editor’s Note:

As the philosopher Herbert Marcuse once wrote, we live in an age haunted

by ‘the spectre of a world that could be free’; the proponents of the

status quo may obfuscate this all they like, reminding the masses of the

debt they owe to society, God, or whoever else, and nobody has any real

power to oppose them.. One feels that one has an obligation to the

‘betterment of society’, to ‘progress’ and ‘expansion’ regardless of the

cost - even the revolutionaries, those who once professed to ruthlessly

critique all that exists, play according to the rules of the predominant

social-economic order, oftentimes in spite of themselves.. We have been

abandoned by everyone, even ourselves - in the first world, when direct

action is performed it is often subdued or without direction, and in the

third world, it is crushed by American or European bombs. One can only

conclude that a concerted effort is required to break our chains, not

merely - as some would have it - by action but also through a radical

reconstitution of the psyche as it currently exists. We cannot even

conceive of a world beyond capitalism - when we try, we merely imagine

capitalism under a different guise. Therein lies the fatal paradox with

which we are ensnared: we cannot see beyond the situation of capitalist

society, yet must see beyond it in order to escape. The solution resides

upon the margins of these questions - upon the precipice of an abyss, we

must take the plunge and discover again the world as if seeing it for

the first time. We must question everything, doubt everything, critique

everything - and must indulge the absurdity of existence in all its

gratuitousness; our great revolt must manifest itself as the cataclysmic

negation and reconstruction of all things -- total and unrelenting, it

shall destroy all which seeks to maintain the ideal order of things, all

which promises man a salvation which can never be realized. It is not

salvation we seek - not a Kingdom of Man at the end of time - but

freedom exercised here and now, freedom and creative potential

unrestrained by the fetters of our oppressive society. Our revolution

must begin today.

I am delighted to introduce you to the inaugural issue of Ekstasis, a

political, philosophical and literary journal dedicated to the

proliferation and distribution of radical ideas; our intent, if it is

not already clear, can be expressed as the steadfast desire to reawaken

the revolutionary consciousness of the masses in order to bring about a

total upheaval of the world as it currently exists. In this issue, the

recent wave of strikes overcoming the United States and how it could be

better applied along revolutionary lines; the politics of queerness;

whether liberation is possible for us in the 21st century.

Supporting us - no matter how small the donation - is greatly

appreciated, although it is by no means required. Greater funds will

allow us to invest in developing networks for direct action across the

United States, the United Kingdom and beyond.

Elizabeth Moore, Editor

'We are those children of the failed revolutions, the fleeting dreams

and forgotten hopes who carry on with the single objective of exercising

our revolutionary potential here and now; we are the screams and cries

of a youth which refuses to be drowned in the deluge of our oppression;

we are a storm, a lightning strike, which shall announce in no unclear

terms our discontent; we are Ekstasis. Through polemic and literature,

art and debate, it is our steadfast intent to produce works that provoke

discussion and reveal the various absurdities which constitute our

condition - and in doing so, inspire direct action wherever and whenever

it may need to arise. We do this because we must - our freedom has been

denied at every step, and we shall be unrelenting in our turn. In this

journal - and all those which follow it - we shall offer you with our

tips to survive being drowned in the tide of

Society and Capital.'

I

Current events

Why Does Nobody Care About the Pandora Papers?

Cynicism and Capitalist Realism

By I. Cherepakha

About a month ago, a collection of almost 12 million documents detailing

the financial secrets of some of the wealthiest and most powerful people

on the planet was released by investigative journalists. Contained

inside was evidence of trillions of United States dollars worth of

secret, offshore holdings that were being used by the ultra-rich to

circumvent national regulations, public scrutiny, and tax laws. On the

list were current and former public officials (including prime ministers

and presidents), CEOs, members of royal families, international

criminals, and basically everyone you’d expect to be involved in such an

affair. This set of documents was dubbed “The Pandora Papers”.

And what has come of this leak? Well, compared to the scope of the

information that was leaked, not very much! Not much at all! Sure, a few

investigations have been started by various government agencies, a few

politicians have gotten some bad press, and some mild tax reforms might

get passed. Compared to the scope of the leak though, that’s relatively

tame. It’s about the same as what happened with the Panama Papers and

the Paradise Papers, the last times similar information was leaked.

Likely what will happen is the allegations will be denied, a handful of

people might get fired, lose an election, or go to jail, and the world

will continue on as if nothing happened.

However, if there’s anything this leak, and the fact that it’s only the

latest of several, shows us, it’s that it isn’t nearly enough to just

get rid of a few bad people and call it a day. These problems of tax

evasion and secret transaction are endemic, they stem from flaws at the

core of how we organize our society. The political and economic

institutions of the contemporary world allow for and, in fact, encourage

this kind of nefarious behavior on a structural level. I can’t even

fully blame the people in those logs, they’re just doing the rational

thing, in the context of their position in the current system. If you

want to maintain your wealth so you and your family can have a good life

and not be out competed by other, more ruthless businessmen, you will

take any opportunity to better your standing, even if that means bending

legal and ethical codes.

The desire, the necessity even, for wealth accumulation isn’t an

intrinsic part of humanity (despite what some ideologues will try to

tell you), these are goals fostered by capitalism. If you or I were in

the positions of the people in the

Pandora Papers, I guarantee we’d probably be doing something similar.

What has to happen, then, is to eliminate those positions entirely,

build a different society where your access to resources isn’t based on

you being willing and able to undermine other people and where no one

has authority to abuse in the first place.

In a world where commodities (especially money) are the main way we meet

our needs and are thus valued above all else, a world where a small

percentage of the population owns virtually all the resources needed for

society to function, a world of corruption of shady dealings between big

businesses and governments, a world splintered up into petty

nation-states that are seemingly incapable of working together except

when it comes to killing millions in a war, that is, in a capitalist

world, is it really surprising that this would happen? Is it at all

chocking that people with a lot of money and the motivation to get more

might use the cracks in a nation-based, capitalist system to hide their

money, to hide from responsibility?

The answer is of course not! Practically everyone already knows the

system’s broken these days. The interesting thing about the Pandora

Papers situation is not even the information that was revealed, the fact

that so many of the world’s richest and most powerful people were hiding

their transactions and dodging taxes through offshore asset holdings,

but it’s that everyone already knew that they did and nobody seems to

care!

People who explicitly defend capitalism as the best and most moral

system, and who try to justify the exploitation routinely carried out by

the rich and powerful are less and less common these days. The trend now

is what Mark Fisher famously termed “capitalist realism” (a play on the

“socialist realism” which became the state-mandated art style in many

20th-century “communist” experiments, most [in]famously the USSR under

Stalin). Capitalist realism described a kind of controlled cynicism. In

a Capitalist realist society, the flaws of capitalism are openly

acknowledged but no alternative is ever presented (“it might not be

perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve got”). Similar to how toil and

exploitation were depicted as necessary parts of building socialism in

socialist realist art, the inequalities and abuses of capitalism are

readily pointed out. The loyal defenders of capitalism (at least, in its

current state) as the pinnacle of human achievement, while they still

exist, as becoming rarer in this day and age. Practically everyone

already knows that the government and big businesses are corrupt and

oppressive, but the root causes of these issues are never examined. That

is to say, we never ask the question of whether you can have business

and governments that aren’t corrupt or if, maybe, abuse of power is

inherent in such institutions; and, if such questions are posed, the

answer is typically that these are “inevitable” part of “necessary”

institutions, to which there are supposedly no alternatives.

We live in an era of post-modernity. Religions, families, nations, and

all kinds of traditional institutions have been broken up or pacified to

make way for a flexible stream of finance capital that has come to

dominate the contemporary economy in most of the world. Capitalism has

established a worldwide division of labor through imperial expansion.

The result is horrific working conditions and wars of aggression in the

imperial periphery, the so-called “third-world”, over resources and

cheap labor while, at the same time, the use of new technologies and new

social structures by big corporations to undermine and even appropriate

the things that might have kept them in check around the world and

especially in the imperial core or the west, the “first-world”.

The radical political movements of years long past have largely either

died out or been co-opted into establishment politics where they serve

as little more than controlled opposition, arguing for (at best) a

kinder version of capitalism but capitalism nonetheless, capitalism with

all its basic flaws still maintained and so slowly sliding clawing away

at any concessions that might have been made and holding back any truly

subversive advancements. Rebellious movements and anti- capitalism in

art and music are quickly co-opted into the mainstream and stripped of

any real substance. Competition between capitalist firms has largely

been undermined as big corporations use their wealth, new technologies,

and the government to undercut their opponents, leading to the

accumulation of more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The

unions that would have typically given worker’s protection from the

excesses of capitalists, while they still exist, are not nearly as

combative as they once were and, what’s more, don’t include a lot of the

most vulnerable workers today in an age where more and more people work

in the service industry and the “gig economy”.

Capitalism has escaped from (or, in some cases, even used to its

advantage) all the already fairly loose restrictions placed on it by

traditions, by unions, by the press, and by national governments as the

Pandora Papers, the Panama Papers, and other leaks demonstrate. The

result, at least in the west, is growing cynicism, nihilism, and

alienation.

For generations, conservative critics have hailed this trend as the

degeneration of society, the beginning of the end for western

civilization (typically with some racist, anti-Semitic conspiracy

theories added in). Some more radical thinkers have posited that this

might, instead, be the liberation of mankind, the chance to move beyond

old, restrictive values and institutions towards a freer and more honest

world. The strange thing is, neither of these seems to have happened.

People still continue to come to work, the same basic structures are in

power (in some ways, with even more control over our lives), the world

keeps on turning. There have been some progressive cultural shifts but

even in that case, great care has been taken to assimilate them into the

existing order of things. Calls for queer liberation, women’s rights,

decolonization, and racial justice that, at one point, represented

genuine resistance have, in large part, been packaged up and sold back

to us as cheap slogans and vague metaphors instead of concrete demands

for change.

While social, cultural, and political norms have changed, the material

basis of society has remained, in large part, the same. Capitalism (i.e.

commodity exchange as the dominant form of meeting your needs, which

gives rise to private ownership of the means of production, private

enterprise, money, the concentration of resources, etc.) continues to

dominate and, in fact, has only seemed to have grown stronger with time

despite continuous efforts and resistance, wars, and economic crises.

The goal, at least in the imperial core, has been to keep the general

public just happy and comfortable enough to have a stake in the existing

system but not to the point where we might start thinking too highly of

ourselves or have the time and resources to organize genuine opposition.

Note, that there doesn’t need to be any grand conspiracy for this to

happen, for any of what I have described to happen. Instead, the

internal incentives of capitalism have functioned in a manner generally

immune to any individual’s will because they are what underpin and

direct will on the large scale. Resistance movements in the imperial

core had the best intentions but their struggle was ultimately subsumed

into capitalism, it became a means by which it could adapt. The

compromises the labor movements made gave birth to a gentler, more

flexible capitalism in which much of the most difficult intensive

industrial and agricultural work was “eliminated” or, rather, exported.

Our struggle became a part of the dynamics of capitalism, we helped it

adapt, we helped to create a populace that was more comfortable and more

cynical and, so, far easier to control.

Capitalism has embedded itself into the social consciousness as a system

that channels and controls people’s desires. Because of this, even

critiques of capitalism serve the purpose of reinforcing capitalism.

Cynicism, dissatisfaction with the system, is part of what helps keep

that system alive because as long as there exists this vague, general

consensus that the rich are corrupt and greedy, there’s no real impetus

to do anything. This is perfectly demonstrated in the Pandora Papers

situation! If you read about the Pandora papers in a novel, you might

expect it to be a big, climactic moment, but we don’t live in a novel.

Everyone already knew about the secret transactions, the tax dodging,

the abuse of power, and nobody particularly cared.

So what’s the way forward for those of us who want genuine change? How

do we move past this stagnant, cynical, capitalist realist

post-modernity? Well, in some ways, we can already observe a shift. The

2008 financial crisis, the COVID- 19 pandemic, and other crises have

energized the working class and petty- bourgeoisie yet again, it seems,

giving them the drive to fight and something to fight for. The age of

the “end of history”, of technocratic administration, of the political

and economic hegemony of western liberal capitalism, seems to be coming

to an end, the project now is to put forth new value, new ideas, new

systems in place of the old ones torn down by post-modernity.

Will they succeed? That remains to be seen. Is this a worthwhile

project? Well, it does provide a challenge to pervasive capitalist

realism, to the idea that there is no alternative, and that could mean a

chance to improve society, to liberate us all! At the same time, there

are most definitely unpleasant elements to many of these movements.

Nationalism, bigotry, anti-intellectualism, and authoritarianism are all

also on the rise, masquerading as genuinely anti- establishment,

anti-capitalist movements when they really only represent capitalism’s

cruder form. More broadly, I fear we may be jumping too quickly to

“create” without having much of a basis or a direction for that

creativity. The suffocating blanket of capitalist realism has made us so

desperate for something new that many of us will take any change, we

want a breath of fresh air even if that air could be poisoned!

Going forward, we can’t wallow in post-modernity but we also can’t

forget the insights it revealed. The Utopian projects of the 20th

century failed, we have to admit that. Simply trying to recreate old

movements, dressing ourselves up in dead men’s clothing will help no one

and will only lead us to repeat the same mistakes that happened before.

The destruction of old institutions all over the world (often through

violent means) has left many people alienated, disaffected, and

vulnerable to exploitation but it also provides us with a unique

opportunity: we are free from the rigidity of tradition. Capitalism’s

drive for accumulation has helped to break down the divisions between

people, foster cooperation on a large scale, but it still remains loyal

to profit and so it can’t finish the job, it recaptures the cooperative

creativity it unleashed. What we must now do, whether we like it or not,

is to complete this process and then move past it, build something new

from the wreckage.

The Pandora Papers serve as a reminder of the inequality, corruption,

and secrecy of today’s society but, on a more meta-level, they also

expose how little the majority of people seem to care.

On one side, liberal capitalism has been ingrained so deeply in so many

people’s minds that even those who call themselves anti-capitalist

rarely manage to provide any meaningfully different alternative. The

media, the entertainment industry, communication networks, all the ways

information is disseminated are, in a capitalist society, owned by

capitalists so, even if not intentionally, the ideas we consume are

filtered through the interests of the capitalist class. When these more

subtle ways of influencing public opinion fail, there’s always the

option of the government coming in to quash resistance.

On the other side, there’s also a more practical reason for this

disengagement: materially, people have neither the motivation nor the

means to do much about it. For workers in the west, when it comes to

motivation, the majority are, while still subject to exploitation,

afforded certain benefits from their employers and the government to

make their lives slightly better. Meanwhile revolutionary change

typically only happens when there is a level of desperation on the part

of the populace. In terms of means, neoliberal economic policies and new

technologies have weakened the workers’ movement. Businesses promised

“freedom”, “being your own boss” and “having input” but all that we got

was less stability, fewer protections, and new ways to spy on us!

Meanwhile, workers in the imperial periphery with greater motivation to

rebel and more opportunities for traditional worker’s struggle are more

abundant are kept done with repressive, authoritarian states and are

distanced from the where the biggest holders of capital reside.

Finally, the environment we exist in naturally shapes the way we are

able to think about the world, the systems we are able to imagine, the

horizon of possibility. Capitalism is virtually a global system and has

been for a long time, practically no one has memory of anything else,

even the (failed) attempts at creating “socialism” in the 20th century

are becoming ever-more distant. Our surroundings limit our minds.

Capitalism’s strategy, at least in its most developed form, has been to

keep people just happy enough to have a stake in the system but not to

the point where they might start thinking too highly of themselves and

decide to start making demands or have the time and the energy and the

security to be able to put pressure on those in power. This, in a sense,

is the ideological reflection of how wages and class struggle function

economically: workers have to be paid enough to compensate for the food

they need to eat, the necessity of producing more workers (having and

raising children), and for developing the skills needed for specific

kinds of work so capitalists can still make money and society continues

to function but, beyond that, the capitalist class tries to keep as much

money as possible from the rest of the population.

So, what is to be done?

Well, to counter ideological disaffection we need to establish new

media, new avenues of communication, and create new narratives that

incorporate a diversity of new perspectives. The internet, here, is our

friend. We must always be vigilant though, and be willing to criticize

ourselves because, otherwise, we can easily be co-opted and folded into

the establishment. Never compromise your beliefs for short-term

political gain, doing so has killed countless radical movements.

We must dare to propose new systems, new utopias but, at the same time,

we must be flexible with these visions, recognizing how they are

necessarily limited by the conditions we find ourselves in and being

wary of how they can be come restrictive or corrupted.

For materially-based disaffection, we have to build new social

structures that help to meet people’s needs better than the prevailing

capitalist order, in doing so severing their loyalty from these

oppressive forces while also giving them the support they need to not

only survive, but participate in action to change the systems that keep

us all down.

One more thing that must be stressed is that we can’t allow stories like

the Pandora Papers and the countless other examples of capitalism’s

bizarre corruption and cruelty to be swept under the rug, turned into

“old news”. In a world of social media and 24-hour news coverage, our

attention spans have become increasingly short and, seemingly, so has

our collective memory. New, shocking stories are beamed into our

eyeballs only to be forgotten a few days later when the next big thing

comes around. It’s not healthy for us, for any of us. Obviously, it’s

too much to expect every person to care about everything all the time or

to be an expert on all issues. The only way we can possibly survive this

barrage of information is through cooperating, through a certain

flexible division of labor when it comes to the issues we know about and

the issues we pursue, and through a balance of trust and healthy

skepticism.

Combating oppression isn’t always glorious revolutions or shoot-outs

with the police, sometimes it’s the slow and often boring task of

changing people’s minds, undoing the indoctrination that’s led many of

us to simply not care, even in the face of obvious injustice. Social

change can only be won one step at a time.

On the BBC Controversy

Quite frankly, I could end this argument now by arguing that this is not

the BBC’s first time defending transphobia. After all, these are the

same people who nominated JK Rowling for an award on her simply bigoted

and plain inaccurate “trans rights” essay. But some of the claims made

here in this piece are so absurd that even Aaron Donald couldn’t defend

it. They mention a tweet that compares trans activists to “straight

dudes,” telling them they’d be straight if they gave them a chance.

Falsehoods like these are outdated takes that embrace the dangerous

rhetoric that trans women are just chasers who only pretend to be trans

because they want to sleep with women, which was proven wrong numerous

times. There’s also an argument that you can “hear their male vocal

cords” and “see their male jawline.” The logic to me makes even less

sense. Women can have masculine features; they shouldn’t get forced to

conform to femininity. By this logic, someone like Britney Griner, a 6’9

world-class athlete who happens to have a deep voice, isn’t a real

woman. And you could also argue the inverse with this; does this mean

every twink you see on the street isn’t a guy? Of course not. Another

issue I have with this is that we are told about a trans woman

repeatedly pressuring someone else to have sex. The problem here isn’t

that it’s a trans woman; the issue is that they’re pressuring them to

have sex, which the article entirely misses.

Anytime a trans person does something wrong, you can guarantee that

people will frame it as a trans thing. It shouldn’t be a murder who is

also a trans person, but a trans person who is a murderer. Someone’s

gender orientation isn’t going to make them into a hardened criminal

suddenly. And now we get to the sprinkles on this disaster sundae. They

decide to bring in Angela Wilde, who co-founded “Get the L Out,” a terf

movement, to drive their point home. This inclusion is so out of touch;

it’s like if you got Reagan to explain why AIDS was a good thing for the

lgbtq+ community. She mentions far-right talking points, like how “the

trans ideology is so silencing everywhere.” It’s ironic because we live

in a time where Dave Chappelle can shit on the trans community for 72

minutes and get critical acclaim for it from fans who, at best, are

profoundly incurious to the plights of the trans community. Hell, even

the article itself, which continuously

perpetuates harmful stereotypes, is an example of it!

We get an unnamed lesbian who compares the idea of dating a trans woman

to conversion therapy, which is incredibly disrespectful to anyone who

has gone through it. We get some agreement from YouTuber Rose on Dawn,

who has continuously proven herself to be a “pick-me” member of the

community. She has claimed that non-binary genders are non-existent,

defended JK Rowling, and contended that “Antifa” hijacked the George

Floyd protests. All these inclusions point to the sign of this article

just being another stale repetition of contrived alt-right talking

points that you would see in a Tom MacDonald track have proved to be

wrong time and time again. Of course, we have to bring in another terf

organization. This time, the LGB Alliance, a group that notably opposes

gender dysphoria treatment for children and has been called a hate group

on more than one occasion. The group claimed that a “sizable minority”

of trans women pressured lesbians into having sex with them. Note that

there is no actual context or verifiable statistics. Why? Because terfs

are allergic to logic. And any time someone defends trans women in this

article, they only get a cursory glance and are often the victims of

instant rebuttal. They are only here to make the conservatives reading

this feel that they looked at both sides of the issue while only gaining

a cursory view of their already incorrect viewpoint and a harmfully

biased view of the trans community. Overall, suppose we are objective

here. In that case, this is an article tailor-made to attract the

far-right and push transphobic narratives that have plagued discourse

since the ’80s with South Park-style criticisms that ultimately makes

this an unbearable article to anyone who is empathetic to the trans

community.

II

Politics

Interviewing an Anti-Fascist Hero

In terms of theory, online discourse is very theory rich, chock loaded

with it, but I often see that some practical advice can get lost in the

endless sea of memes and new prefixes to not yet very old ideologies. To

combat this I have reached out to somebody I’d not hesitate to call a

hero, an Anti-Fascist medic who was present and saving lives in the

chaos and brutality of the DC riots. I gathered up some questions from a

few brilliant minds here at Ekstasis, and delivered them delicately to

this most praxisful of comrades. I feel that I got a lot out of the

discussion, and hope that y’all also can gain something from their

words.

Q: "What steps can people/the government take to assist healthcare

workers during the pandemic?"

A: "Get vaccinated against covid, promote being vaccinated, educate

people on being vaccinated. Wear surgical masks, not gator masks, not

vented N95 masks. Learn hands free CPR, drive safely. Look up leading

causes of death in the USA."

Q: "Q: What causes the most death among protesters?"

A: "I don’t have a way to answer that question unfortunately. I would

also be doubtful of statistics claiming ‘the most deaths among

protesters’ because of how hard it would be to answer that question-

statistics must be collected in the first place which opens people to

exposure."

Q: "What steps can protesters take to ensure they are safer?"

A: "Steps protesters can take to ‘ensure’ they are safer is stronger

phrasing than I am comfortable leaving unmentioned. You don’t go to a

protest thinking it is the safest option for you. That caveat over with:

Ways I would mention to mitigate risk: Prior to, during, and after,

listen to ⚱ about how smartphones, signal, and discord are not ideal

protest comms and maintaining technological hygiene. The physical part:

know your limits. Can you walk for eight hours? How fast can you 22

sprint for four minutes? Can you run carrying another person, or

dragging a weight along the ground? Can you do these things after a full

day of activity? Are you familiar with going to the hospital? Are you

comfortable with medical bills after going to a hospital for thousands

or tens of thousands of dollars? A relatively simple thing is this: if

you aren’t comfortable with a high chance of injury, leave the town or

city or site of the protest and be in your home by nightfall. If you are

not comfortable with the thought of being attacked whether you are

injured or not, don’t go. Fund raise, donate, get sealed supplies, ask

your medic collective what they need."

Q: "I guess I'd want to know how to access and balance the risk"

A: "How to assess risk: what groups are going to this location? What is

the police presence there? What is the political climate? Have there

been months of protests with violence during the day and attempted

murder at night? Get in contact with people who have been at the

protests in this area. Ask other protesters about violence that has been

recent. Ask the spokesperson/organizer of the protest of expected

violence. Things can also change throughout the day. If you see people

massing, short skirmishes of small groups of two, three, four, or more

people fighting and the fights breaking up and the situation on the day

seems changing, figure out if you are here to fight, because that is an

increased potential reality for you now."

Q: "What equipment/medicine is most important to bring?"

A: "What medical equipment/medicine is most important to bring: as a

medic or as another role? Bring your own medication in a med bottle with

cushioning inside it. I keep bottles with medical gloves inside that

I’ve turned into pockets to keep different meds in. That keeps them from

shifting around during the day and turning to powder. Those are my

personal meds. If you are a protester other than a medic, you don’t have

to carry meds or equipment. Weight throughout the day matters. Medics

should figure out their own load out with their running partner or the

members of their triad. I know I was grateful for water to irrigate

people’s eyes and wounds from tear gas and to clean off blood; Combat

Application Tourniquets- I used one of my two in a stabbing, and if I

use both up due to needing to stop a spurting or a steady strong flow of

blood, I can use my belt, torn shirts, or pant legs if I need to cut and

strip off my pants to make something to function as a tourniquet. Tie it

two inches above the arm or leg wound, tie it tight enough the flow has

stopped. If you needed a tourniquet, that person needs a hospital,

because you are using one to hold off death by hypovolemic shock. Get

the injured person extracted by someone else, and continue triage if you

are a medic. It depends on what your role is though- if you are a shield

bearer, you don’t want gauze, water, CATs, a bag valve mask, occlusive

dressings, and splints on you as well while you are out and about.

‘most important’ is hard to ascertain, really. If people are conscious,

you need them to keep breathing and the blood flowing in a circle. Air

goes in and out blood goes round and round."

I hope that the rest of you are as helped by this as I am, and that you

too will join us in the campaign for less dead and brutalized

Communists.

Sincerely - ⚱

Why We Fight

By I. Cherepakhad

Introduction

How many van Goghs have never finished a painting because they were too

tired from working in the wheat fields? How many Shakespeares never got

the chance to pick up ink and paper because they died in factory

accidents? How many Einsteins could never even study mathematics because

they were barred from doing so? How many great artists, scientists,

scholars, leaders, innovators have we lost? How many more will we

tolerate losing?

What’s more, how many unique organisms (whether animals, plants, fungus,

or even bacteria), or even entire species of organisms, are now gone

forever, driven out of their homes, burnt for fuel, or choked in

smog-filled skies and scorching fires? How much life has been stamped

out before we even got a chance to study it, let alone understand it or

experience it in person?

Even if we look past these great tragedies, there are so many little

moments that have been murdered. Each of us, in fact everything in the

universe, is a wholly unique tapestry of experiences, impressions, and

drives that all weave together to create an always unfinished tapestry:

our universe! This is why every death is a tragedy; why every family

torn apart, every child who never gets to learn about the world, every

person who spends their life trapped in monotony, every ecosystem

destroyed, every dream not pursued, every memory that never will be is a

unique web of existence lost forever. That’s an affront to us, to all of

us!

This all sounds nice and poetic, and this would normally be the part

where I tell you to appreciate the things you have and take time to

pursue your passions or something along those lines. Sure, you should do

those things, but let’s not pretend it’s that simple. This massacre of

the beautiful complexity of the world is not something we can

begrudgingly accept, it is our responsibility to fight against it, tooth

and nail!

We have been robbed of so much beauty, so much diversity, so much

creative potential because the systems of power that govern our lives

are more interested in concentrating more wealth and power in the hands

of an already obscenely wealthy ruling class and producing cheap,

disposable, easily- consumable commodities. If life is to flourish, or

even if it’s to survive, this needs to change and needs to change

quickly, but why? How?

First, let us lay the groundwork for this analysis.

Part 1 - Creativity and Control

Everything is always changing and being changed, exerting all kinds of

forces on the world in new and unique ways. It’s only because of how

something changes the world, how it exerts its influence (even if it's

as simple as reflecting light or taking up space) that it can even be

said to exist! The universe is a swirling ocean of forces of change!

Everything we hold dear, from art to food to family to the ground we

walk on and the communities around us, was born out of a long process of

creativity, of people and things coming together in new and disruptive

ways, building on top of what came before them but also transcending it

to something innovative.

Life, especially human life, is powerful, creative, and disruptive, but

structures have been put in place to restrict and exploit this vital

force. Capitalist property relations (and, in fact, all property

relations) serve to restrict the tools of creation to a few wealthy

individuals, forcing everyone else to labor on their terms if they want

access to what they need to survive, let alone live fulfilling and

productive lives (and this includes intellectual property which serves

only to construct barriers to artistic freedom). The vast majority of

the world’s population lives in servitude. Tens of thousands are still

kept in literal slavery, bought and sold by human traffickers like

objects, made to endure conditions so horrific that words fail to

describe them. Millions of people in the United States alone, especially

racial minorities and the poor, are locked up in jail and made to do

prison labor for meager pay. Countless are made dependent on and forced

to serve big businesses through the regime of private property and

finance capital. Needless to say, it’s difficult to be an artist or a

scientist or an inventor if you’re too busy being a slave.

Even when people do get the chance to innovate and be creative, art,

science, etc. are rarely best when they’re driven mainly by profit, but

profit exists as the one drive above all others in a society based on

private property because money acts as the key to everything else so,

eventually, money itself becomes the goal, money itself takes on a kind

of mystical power.

The division of labor, another aspect of our current economic regime,

has a similar role. At one point, dividing up tasks between different

people might have allowed each person to specialize and develop their

unique individual talents, creating a more affluent society for all in

the process, but specialization has become so developed that now it,

conversely, simplifies the labor of each worker, turning each into just

a cog in a machine. So, labor goes from a creative activity that’s done

for yourself and for your community to an alienating, monotonous task

you’re forced to do on someone else’s terms.

The ownership of property would typically be seen as an escape from

poverty and alienation, a key to freedom, but this freedom always comes

at someone else’s expense. What’s more, even the wealthy property owners

have, more and more, been turned into servants of the property they own!

The small business-owning entrepreneur (already a heavily distorted

image) becomes rarer and rarer, replaced with endless hordes of

shareholders, middle-managers, and corporate conglomerates. More and

more we are made subservient to an abstract money machine with a mind of

its own! It seems even the richest kings on the planet are like monkeys

to the social systems they’ve built, the real apex predators of this

era!

The government, with its standing armies and bureaucracies, plays its

part as it puts restrictions on any actions that might challenge the

entrenched ruling class. The government claims that it exists to stop

violence and destruction and ensure people their rights, but what is the

police and military if not violent? Are we preventing violence and

destruction if our means of doing so are themselves incredibly violent?

And if our rights are given to us by this apparatus, can they not just

as easily be taken away if they become inconvenient?

Beyond the more obvious and direct forms of oppression, subtler social

pressures also serve to funnel creativity into approved channels.

Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and all forms of

bigotry serve to exclude and oppress people based on their identity,

restricting how they can act and even exist. Gender roles and

queerphobia constrict the vast array of possible relationships and

identities to a few pre-designed molds. Even when women’s rights, gay

rights, trans rights, etc. are won a concession, these identities are

only accepted when an appeal is made to how “normal” they are, when they

are assimilated into a broader model. Racism, too, divides people

against each other, justifies exploitation, and forces different people

into different roles on the basis that it’s “in their nature”. These

forms of discrimination and countless more only serve to put unique,

diverse people into boxes so they can then be easily used as tools.

Religions and moral doctrines are spread to aid the institutions of

control, to control not only people’s actions but their minds. It should

be made clear that I have no issues with anyone believing in and

practicing any sort of beliefs on their own, but it is precisely because

of this conviction to religious and intellectual freedom that I believe

we should oppose all institutionalized forms of religion, all socially

enforced moral codes, all political parties and ideologies, everything

that seeks to infect the mind, make it feel hatred and guilt for the

things that are a part of life!

I also shouldn’t have to mention the reckless exploitation of nature

these systems create, destroying biodiversity, forcing animals into

inhumane and unsanitary conditions, burning fossil fuels, and polluting

the planet because of a constant hunger for more and more economic

growth. Nature is split into private plots, seen as just a bunch of

“resources” to be exploited instead of a complex and ever-changing

ecosystem that we are all dependent on.

All these forms of oppression and countless more overlap and strengthen

each other. They subsume the intense multiplicity of life, making

everything into a means to an end. All these forms of oppression also

have one base: separation. I mentioned great figures like Vincent van

Gogh, Shakespear, and Einstein at the beginning of this article but,

while their genius certainly shouldn’t be overlooked, we can’t attribute

their creations to them alone. Creativity is always a cooperative

process. Nothing is ever created ex-nihilo or “out of nothing”,

everything comes from a hurricane of different creative forces, whether

that’s different people, different objects, different organisms,

different ideas, etc. all swirling together. Van Gogh, Shakespeare,

Einstein, and every genius built on the work that came before them, was

inspired by someone or something even if it was unconscious. The tools

that they used, whether those tools were paint and an easel, ink and

paper, or the scientific method and the language of mathematics all have

their own histories and all had to be made by someone, usually by a vast

number of someones! Separation, division, is poisonous to creativity!

Capitalism separates workers from the tools of production, makes them

into cogs in a machine, and pits them against each other; the state

creates bureaucracies and police/military forces that you have to go

through to do many things or else be thrown in prison; people are pitted

against one another based on race, sex, gender, sexual orientation,

religion, nationality, etc.; nature is privatized and made alien from

us. Let me be clear, by separation I don’t just mean conflict or

competition. Conflict and competition can, sometimes, even often, be

used as tools of separation but can also sometimes be healthy for

creativity. In fact, if you are competing with someone, fighting with

someone, if you really hate someone in particular then you aren’t

separated from them, if anything you’re very close to them. Separation

involves building barriers between people and things that restrict how

they can move, how they can act. In this way, access to the tools of

creation is gate-kept away from the majority of people so they either

have to create in service of those in power (working on behalf of a

capitalist and having the product of your labor sold on the market,

reproducing the forms of family and community that are a part of the

social order, etc.) or are barred from doing anything that might

threaten those in power (dividing workers against each other along lines

of race, the government suppressing rebellion, etc.).

This division condemns massive sections of the population to poverty,

suffering, and slavery. They are deprived of basic needs as simple as

food, water, shelter, medicine, clean air, and free time. Things that

every person needs to live a healthy and dignified life, but that are

still denied to so many even when we live in an age of supposedly

unprecedented prosperity, even when we have enough food, water, shelter,

etc. for everyone to have enough to live off of with some leftover, and

yet so much of it is wasted! How can we accept such a system? How can we

live in a world where the ability of so many people to survive is taken

out of their hands and made dependent on a vast, impersonal system of

exploitation? A world where countless people are still the victims of

poverty, repression, bigotry, and all kinds of vile curses? How can we

continue to sit idly by?

There is a dangerous myth in our society that far too many people buy

into, it’s the idea that suffering is somehow healthy, virtuous, and

good for creativity. It’s true that there’s a certain health benefit, a

certain virtue, and a certain necessity if you want to be creative in

struggle, but there is a difference between struggle as something

active, something that you choose to pursue, that’s done on your own

terms, and that’s something you can overcome versus a dull, constant,

exhausting pain, the kind characteristic of disease, depression, and

poverty. Poverty, in the long run, only restricts creativity.

There is no virtue in needless suffering. Too often is some ideal of

“the common man”, “the meek”, “the worker” romanticized in our society,

especially by religious institutions, politicians, and middle-class

academics seeking to exert control, but there is nothing romantic to be

found in needless toil, those who live that life rarely choose to do so

out of some virtue. We cannot demonize poverty and suffering but it’s

just as unhelpful to romanticize it.

Even those who have found themselves in a comparatively privileged

position in the world, free from having to suffer the brunt of such

oppression, often still experience a profound alienation from their

work, their communities, nature, and each other. Hell, even those at the

very top are harmed in the long run. They might benefit greatly in the

short term but dividing the world and restricting creativity in such a

way leads to stagnation and rigidity long-term, which means less

innovation for them to benefit from. Not to mention that such conditions

of oppression typically foster desperation and resentment among the

masses against the ruling classes, which typically doesn’t end well for

those in power.

The division of society has taken many forms, from early tribal,

patriarchal, and gerontocracy societies to slavery and serfdom to the

contemporary world in which it finds its basis in capitalism. From this

vile root, and the remains of those that preceded it, springs countless

other forms of division that serve to divide, suppress, and exploit the

creativity of life. All of these divisions overlap and reinforce each

other and, so, for any one of them to be fully defeated, all of them

must be overcome.

The divisions in society can’t be overcome just by passing some reform

through the government or killing some rich officials, they are the

products of deeply ingrained social systems that need to be combated on

an institutional level by building new communities, new systems, new

structures of relations. We might never be completely free from all

forms of oppression, but the struggle itself, I think, is worthwhile.

Part 2 - Principles of Liberation

To escape the many crises that face the world today, we must build new

organizations to base society on, but what should these organizations

look like?

Well, they must be fluid and reflect the environment they're meant to

work in or they’ll become rigid and oppressive, the very kinds of

structures they were built to oppose! Laying out a blueprint for every

little thing about a future society goes against our entire goal, and is

bound to fail anyway as circumstances change and we’re forced to evolve!

We must be flexible, adaptable, scientific, and most of all creative in

our approach to liberatory action. How can we foster creativity if we’re

not creative in how we go about it?

That said, while we can’t be too rigid, there’s also a risk in being too

flexible. Creating a Utopian mold and then trying to cram the real world

into it rarely goes well, but neither does having no overarching

principles at all which opens the door to opportunism! So, while I can’t

lay out a strict model for the way human society should be organized

best, there are a few basic principles I think we should try to observe,

namely: we should seek to build social organizations that are

cooperative, based on mutual respect and understanding, and conducive to

diversity and excellence.

1. A liberatory organization has to be cooperative: It is a myth that

freedom and individuality are somehow opposed to collective action. In

most cases, the opposite is true, we can only flourish as individuals

when our communities flourish and vice-versa. Cooperation lets people

specialize in tasks they excel at, meaning they are able to gain a

deeper understanding of the task and, so, everyone benefits (so long as

the specialization remains flexible and on a human scale, that is).

Cooperation also lets people share knowledge and experience as well as

tools and resources, not to mention that it lets risk be distributed so

no single person has to bear the brunt of failure.

Let’s face it, none of us are perfect, we all have our flaws, our blind

spots, our limits. We can recognize this and work through it by working

together so that our strengths make up for others’ weaknesses and our

weaknesses are covered by others’ strengths. In a way, we are all

incomplete. Like I said before, creation (whether we’re talking about

art, science, craftsmanship, agriculture, organization, evolution, or

love) is a cooperative act that always requires multiple forces, each

pushing and pulling on the others in countless unique ways.

Cooperation can’t just be a mantra though, and it can’t just mean

keeping the same old exploitative systems but making them “democratic”.

These days, every brand, school, government, etc. constantly wants your

“participation”, but all this usually equates to is endless meetings and

surveys that don’t have any real effect beyond being a way for them to

collect more of your data. Even if we

could meaningfully turn every company, government, etc. into a direct

democracy that would only end us up with everyone exploiting everyone!

No, real cooperation has to be voluntary and flexible. Communities need

to be open to strangers joining, open to members leaving, and open to

people who exist on their outskirts and aren’t particularly involved in

community affairs, or else these cooperative communities will become

just another rigid, separative form of authority. The tyranny of the

majority and/or the tyranny of public pressure are both powerful and

potentially dangerous forces that we should take care to avoid. Tension

between creative forces is to be expected. In fact, it can be healthy!

Debate, disagreement, conflict, and different people/groups pursuing

different activities should be encouraged! The organizations we build

should aim to be less like formal decision-making bodies and more like

arenas for people to cooperate, conflict, and negotiate organically.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that organizations can’t have basic rules

and responsibilities for their members, having a complete lack of

structure can prove just as paralyzing and enabling abuse as having too

much of it. We should aim for a balance, allowing for spontaneous action

but also being able to come together and make a decision as a group if

need be. In the latter case, the principle of cooperation must still be

observed: everyone should get a chance to participate and everyone

should get their voices heard. It’s only by combining collective self-

governance and individual freedom, by combining rationality with

spontaneity in a way that compliments both that creativity can really

shine!

2. A liberatory organization has to be based on mutual respect and

understanding: We all have our strengths and weaknesses and we each have

a different set of wants and needs. When it comes to building a society

that works for everyone, this is something we need to be mindful of.

True equality doesn’t come from imposing uniform standards on everyone

but from recognizing the unique situations of each individual and

community!

Being active and involved is important, but it's easy sometimes to

overstep your boundaries. If we want to solve the issues that face the

world today, we all have to approach these issues with a degree of

humility and understanding. This especially goes for radicals coming

from a comparatively privileged background (myself included) who too

often take up a kind of savior attitude towards those in need. This is

an approach that must be rejected. Oppression is typically best

understood by those who face the brunt of it, and oppressed groups will

only achieve true liberation if it comes by their own hands and on their

own terms, otherwise it’ll just be another imposition of authority from

someone who thinks they know better. This doesn’t mean that those of us

outside a given oppressed group can’t help them, of course not! It also

doesn’t mean that movements of oppressed people aren’t sometimes worthy

of criticism, they can be. The thing is, though, both aid and criticism

have to come from a place of mutual respect and understanding for it to

be effective. Again, to really help a person or a community you have to

go to them and ask them what it is they need, you have to respect their

dignity and autonomy, and you have to be mindful of their and your

situations and the ways that might influence both of your approaches.

This is what separates charity from mutual aid. Charity, while it can

definitely be helpful, is done on the terms of the person giving, not

the person receiving, and so often ends up missing the roots of the

issues it seeks to address. Mutual aid, meanwhile, is done on the terms

of the oppressed and works to not only heal the effects of oppression

but address its causes on an underlying, institutional level. Charity

is, a lot of the time, done out of the desire, on the part of the

charity giver, to look good to other people, to alleviate a feeling of

guilt, to get some monetary benefit, or something else of the sort.

Mutual aid, on the other hand, has to come from a genuine solidarity

between interconnected people and an earnest desire to be involved.

Many modern anti-capitalist movements (and political movements in

general), especially in the western world, remain largely dominated by

young, straight, white, middle, and upper-middle-class men. This is a

problem, as it perpetuates the forms of oppression we claim to be

fighting against and cuts us off from many incredibly valuable people

and their perspectives. This is not to say that straight, white, middle

class, upper-middle-class, and/or male individuals shouldn’t participate

or give support to radical movements, we need all the help we can get

(and, besides, I fall into a decent chunk of those categories by most

accounts so saying otherwise would be rather hypocritical)l. We must,

however, learn to recognize the ways our perspectives may be limited by

our relative positions of privilege and know when to step back and let

others with more experience take charge.

Simply being “conscious” of biases isn’t enough though, there must be an

active effort to address them on a structural level. There must be an

active effort to reach out to oppressed communities on their own terms

from a place of mutual respect and understanding, and we must also

examine why so many liberatory spaces seem to repulse these groups. The

answer is manifold, and largely to do

with the rhetoric and the organization of these spaces. Too often is the

struggle of immigrants, racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous people,

women, the old and the young, the disabled, queer people, and countless

others diminished in favor of vague, broad rhetoric about “unity” and

“opposing all forms of injustice”. While it may be true that these forms

of oppression find root in capitalism, and more broadly in the

socioeconomic systems of today, there is a difference between

recognizing the root of this oppression and simplifying it to just an

issue of capitalism. Opposing injustice also can’t just be vague

lip-service, there must be an active effort to address the particular,

concrete issues of different peoples. Unity, in a sense, is, of course,

important, but such unity can only be achieved if it comes about

voluntarily, does not infringe on the multitude of life, and leaves room

for different individuals and communities to breath instead of

smothering everything under one massive blanket movement that hides the

passive bigotry underpinning it.

If poor people, working people, queer people, people of color, and all

communities do not liberate themselves on their own terms but, instead,

have their creative rebellion funneled into a homogeneous movement

dominated by a few privileged voices then the resistance we mount will

ultimately fail. Even if it can succeed in its immediate goals, it will

fail in eliminating exploitation, only recreating it with a new face.

A truly free, equal, and creative society has to be mindful and

understanding of the many different and complex situations people might

find themselves in and have a profound respect for all life.

3. A liberatory organization has to be conducive to diversity and

excellence: Too often do mass movements for the oppressed fall into a

kind of vulgar populism that demonizes science, art, journalism, and

“academics'' and looks down on any striving or success within the

existing system. Such a view, though it might paint itself in the colors

of liberation, is toxic to all aspirations of freedom.

To start off with, it’s true that in a media and education system

controlled by a small handful of wealthy capitalists; science, art,

journalism, and academia will often serve capitalist interests, but this

doesn’t mean that any of these are inherently capitalist. In fact, the

opposite is closer to the truth. Science and journalism with their

pursuit of truth, art with its vibrant creativity, and academia with its

winding and deep inquiries all push against the divisive, profit-driven

instrumentalism of capitalism, of the state, of all forms of oppression,

and can only be controlled when they are fundamentally subverted. It’s

also true that scientists, artists, journalists, and academics can have

a tendency to be disconnected from most people’s everyday lives but this

is also largely a product of a hierarchical system that privatizes

access to art and information and puts knowledge only in the hands of a

few. In a society based on the free flow of information, practitioners

of science, the arts, etc. wouldn’t form a distinct caste cut off from

the rest of the population but would be a diverse and ever-shifting

network of people that are part of a broader, interconnected web of

creativity. A movement that liberates the masses shouldn’t demonize

intellectual aspiration, it should open it up to more people and

strengthen it!

We should also be careful of falling into the same instrumentalist logic

as our enemies. The accusation that philosophy, art, etc. are to be

largely disregarded because they aren’t useful to everyday life or

aren’t in line with “the will of the people” is, first of all, wrong (at

least in the first case) and, second of all, dangerous! There is a

reason that these intellectual types are often the first to be gone

after whenever some wannabe tyrant comes to power, because they have a

tendency to resist instrumentalization. This sometimes makes them aloof

and harmful to mass movements, true, but it also provides a benefit. It

serves as one of many perspectives that help to create a balanced

movement.

Whether or not anti-intellectualism springs up because suppressing the

truth is profitable or because it’s “the will of the people”, it makes

no difference. Any free and intellectually developed society has to have

room for things that aren’t strictly “useful” in a large-scale,

instrumental sense.

As for the demonization of success, it’s true that success in our

society as it exists today typically involves some kind of exploitation,

if only directly (“there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”)

and excesses of it should be criticized. We also have to be wary not to

fall for various toxic capitalist mindsets, like the modern phenomena of

“hustle culture” or the idea that the poor somehow deserve their

position, that promise huge riches but rarely, if ever, provides

anything more than an unhealthy work ethic. At the same time, hinging

all of our hopes on the promise of a distant revolution or something

along those lines isn’t much better. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t try

to build a movement and have long-term political goals, just like this

isn’t to say that you shouldn’t save your money but it is to give us

some perspective on what we need to focus on. A communist utopia and

getting rich are both, at the moment, nice but unlikely dreams. Dreams

can be beautiful and they can also be incredibly useful but, at the end

of the day, dreams alone can’t feed anyone’s family, can’t get rid of

anyone’s debt, can’t erase the injustices that exist in our world, can’t

give us the freedom to be who we want to be. That has to come from

concrete action in the here and now. That’s why we should focus on

meeting people’s needs, including our own needs, instead of basing our

politics on some lofty ideal.

Now, of course, we also have to avoid becoming just another group of

“charitable organizations” that try to meet people’s immediate needs but

not on their terms and with no mind to the broader systemic causes of

injustice. Direct action must be interwoven with politics, with building

a new society. In fact, it’s only through meeting people’s needs in such

a way that you can start to build the kind of mass movement needed for

big political action in the future!

Of course, there are risks involved in any form of organization,

especially organization that aims for radical social change, but we must

still minimize unnecessary risk where we can. We cannot, in good faith,

call on people, especially already oppressed and vulnerable people, to

make massive sacrifices for the sake of our poetic philosophical musings

or grand visions of utopia, especially if we ourselves are not willing

to put ourselves on the line to support them. Even less so can we wish

for or try to bring about worse circumstances to foster “radical

sentiment” or whatever. Doing so is the mark of intense privilege and

ignorance. To build a movement, we must meet people where they’re at and

not shame them for looking out for themselves or being successful in

their own right.

Also, by “success” here I don’t just mean wealth or power. It seems like

we’ve lost sight of what success really means. Wealth and power are, at

the end of the day, just tools. They’re stepping stones towards what can

truly be called success: happiness, fulfillment, mastery of a skill,

experiences that bring joy and new perspectives, creative struggle, and

excellence in all its forms! Striving for such things isn’t a sign of

the decadence of the rich or the envy of the poor but a natural and

necessary part of all life. We mustn’t demonize such excellence, though

the successful certainly aren’t free from criticism either. I ultimately

cannot fault someone for wanting the best for themselves and their

families, and if they have the opportunity, wealth is the best way to do

that in the current society. What I can fault them for is using that

wealth for nothing, or even worse to exploit other people instead of

using it to help others and live a more creative, fulfilling life.

Perhaps here I will make some enemies but, I’ll be frank, I do not care

for “the people”, “the masses”, “the workers”, “humanity” or any other

abstraction of that kind very much. Who I do care for are all the unique

people who make up the mosaic of my life, and life in general. I care

about making their lives better (and my life better, to be frank)

concretely, in the present as much as I can.

We can’t let the multiplicity of life be absorbed into some generalized

idea of “the people”, “the workers”, “the masses”, etc. It’s only by not

just accepting but fostering this natural, spontaneous, complex striving

that exists in all life that a free society can finally be built!

On a related note, one more thing any movement that wants to make

change, that wants to the oppression that faces us today (whether it be

capitalism, the state, white supremacy, or otherwise) must accept that

it will encounter conflict, sometimes even violent conflict, externally

and internally.

For external conflict, the fact is that we are going up against the most

powerful groups on the planet who will fight tooth and nail to preserve

their power, and so we must fight tooth and nail to destroy it.

Obviously, peaceful means should be pursued where they are effective,

but the divisions and exploitation we face are inherently violent, and

so violent resistance can’t be out of the question.

For internal conflict, the trade-off for liberty is disagreement and

risk. In the long run, if handled correctly, conflicts and risks can be

healthy but they do mean that we sometimes have to make compromises and

learn to step back to let others take the lead, even if we think we’re

right. We all have our limits.

Also, when it comes to dealing with internal conflict, while it clearly

isn’t wise to pick unnecessary fights we also have to recognize where

genuine disagreements do exist and work to resolve them, part of which

is being willing and able to criticize our own movement. We can’t

obscure differences for the sake of some vague notion of “unity” among

“the workers”, “the left”, “socialists”, “populists”, etc. The preachers

of this “unity” quickly realize that there are some irreconcilable

differences in philosophy and practice between certain people, and so

usually end up getting nothing done or finding more and more backhanded

means of excluding the groups they personally disagree with as unworthy

of unity, as “not real leftists”, “not really working class”, etc.

Unity, for us, cannot just be a word, and there are some divisions that

cannot be easily papered over. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t

work with those we disagree with, but we must maintain our independence

when doing so and recognize conflicts where they exist.

Ultimately, the principles of liberation can be summarized as unity in

diversity, as cooperating to lift each other up while at the same time

recognizing and embracing our differences in perspective, ability, and

need. This means we must be understanding and respectful in our efforts

to build a better world, working to address people’s concrete desires

(and that includes your own) instead of trying to cram reality into a

pre-set box. Only by approaching the issues of our time through this

lens can we start to make progress.

Part 3 - The Rebirth of the Commons

So, what could a movement based on these core principles look like? What

kind of a society would that movement create?

Well, again, it’s difficult to say for sure, but there are still a few

things we can try to predict, if not in terms of what will happen then

in terms of what should or, even, must happen.

A movement based on the principles I’ve just outlined would be

heterogeneous. It would be a mix of different people, communities, and

organizations, all working together towards a common goal. These various

groups would connect through a confederation, allowing for a unity in

strategy but a great diversity in tactics and perspectives, with each

person contributing what they can to the movement and having their

weaknesses covered by someone else. This would allow the movement to be

effective in times of intense political conflict while still being

flexible and staying true to its goals.

Such a movement would focus on serving the needs of individuals and

communities instead of abstract idols and Utopian visions. It would work

primarily on the local level but cooperate internationally!

The society such a movement would (or, at least, should) create would

combine the good of the community with the good of the individual, not

by compromising between them or simply stapling them together but

synthesizing them so they each complement each other.

The economy of such a society would be based on cooperation,

sustainability, and flexibility, starting on a small scale and working

up. We would see a rebirth of the commons. Land, water, industry,

information, and other kinds of property would no longer be concentrated

in the hands of wealthy capitalists or a bureaucratic government, but

owned by everyone and managed through a confederation of agreements and

democratic organizations.

Common ownership should be distinguished from government ownership,

which is just the exclusive ownership of resources by a different set of

elites. Common ownership should also be distinguished from collective

ownership (like in joint-stock companies, cooperatives, and communal

modes), which is essentially just private ownership but by a small

handful of proprietors instead of just one. Finally, ownership in common

shouldn’t be confused with democratic ownership, since, while votes and

elections might be a tool that common ownership organizations might use,

purely democratic ownership functionally means ownership by a majority,

not by everyone. Common ownership is a flexible kind of ownership by

everyone in which property (if it can even be said to be property in the

way we typically think about it) is managed through agreements and

guidelines set at the level of the communities who directly work and

live off of it through freely formed associations. The basis of economic

oppression is and always has been a small group gatekeeping access to

productive property. The goal of common ownership is to allow as many

people access to the means of production as possible, so everyone can

provide for themselves and their communities and everyone can freely

create, freely live, on their own terms.

Of course, there will always be unpleasant work to do, we can’t get

around that, but a commons-based system would mean that A) this work

would be distributed as widely as possible, B) wasteful practices like

planned obsolescence, artificial scarcity, and irresponsible investment

would be curbed without the drive for constant profit, and C) new

technologies and methods of production could be implemented on a larger

scale thanks to the wide availability of resources (including

information) and the lack of barriers.

What’s more, the work you do would be done on your own terms, for the

benefits it provides to you, the people you love, your community, and

society as a whole, not for an abstraction like money (the majority of

which goes to someone else) or to fill a quota. All in all, a

commons-based society would mean more free time for everyone to relax

and pursue their creative drives, with the eventual goal of getting rid

of the rigid dichotomy between work that benefits society and

creativity for the sake of enjoyment altogether, allowing for a

synthesis of collective good and individual freedom!

Property on a large scale would be held communally and individual

ownership and/or stewardship would be based on active occupancy and use

of something, meaning absentee ownership where a business owner or

landlord rakes in profits off of tools or land they don’t use, don’t

live on or haven’t even seen would be eliminated. The right of usufruct,

to use and appropriate a piece of property freely so long as one doesn’t

destroy or degrade it (according to principles set by the community)

would be observed.

The so-called “tragedy of the commons” is often brought up to argue

against collective and/or use-based ownership, the idea being that

people will exploit and degrade resources unless they are privatized or

regulated by the government. This ignores the actual reality of

communities based on common ownership that have existed and, indeed,

prospered for many years, since the dawn of human history! The tragedy

of the commons model views people as isolated, “rational”, purely

self-interested actors and doesn’t conceive of the idea that people can

organize and establish guidelines for property use themselves, without

intervention from corporations or governments. If we assume everyone to

be selfish and incapable of ruling themselves, surely that applies to

the people in the government, private owners, etc., surely if people

can’t rule themselves then they have absolutely no business ruling

others!

If anything, what we’re seeing right now is a kind of reverse tragedy of

the commons. Natural resources have been splintered into private

holdings and been made subject to distant bureaucratic regulations,

disconnected from the people who actually live on/near and use those

resources. The result is reckless use of resources without any

accountability to the communities affected or responsibility for the

large-scale environmental impacts because the costs of actions on the

environment and humanity can be externalized.

Ownership in common would allow for a more equitable distribution of

resources. It would let everyone participate in creative, fulfilling

labor and share in its bounty. In the modern age, consumerism and a

drive for more and more economic growth have destroyed communities and

devastated the environment. The way to curb the excesses of capitalism

while still maintaining a level of comfort and prosperity for everyone

is through collective benefit. Maybe there isn’t enough land for

everyone to have a big lawn, maybe there isn’t enough metal and fuel for

everyone to have their own luxury car, maybe modern production means

that not everyone can be a craftsman, but collectively owned park space,

high-quality public transit, and cooperatively managed industry means

that everyone would get to participate in these things without having to

exploit people and nature! We should aim to move our economy in the

direction of expanding and emphasizing these social benefits, until one

day the principles of “from each according to his ability, to each

according to his need” may be observed!

A free, cooperative, and creative society would emphasize

sustainability, good craftsmanship, and DIY production. No longer would

we have electronics that are intentionally made to break down, degrade,

and become obsolete over time. No longer would we have crops genetically

engineered not to produce seeds, so new seeds have to be bought every

year. No longer would important access to often vital technical and

medical knowledge be gatekept behind unnecessary bureaucracies and

patent laws. The information would be widely shared and the means of

production would be held in common, allowing for more small-scale,

sustainable production, tailored to individual and local needs.

A big part of fostering community and ecological sustainability is

building food sovereignty. Obviously, there are some places that can’t

grow their own food for environmental and geological reasons (though

those places are rarer than you might think, even the desert can be

re-greened) and we wouldn’t want to return to subsistence peasant

farming and constant famines due to bad local conditions, so a degree of

industrialized, large-scale agriculture production would still have to

remain; however, as a general trend, we should try to focus our food

production on the local level. Oppressed individuals and communities

around the world should, in an effort to take back sovereignty, foster

self-sufficiency, while not forgetting about the importance of

cooperation. Whether in the country, the cities, or the suburbs,

permaculture techniques should be used to create ecologically friendly

ways of producing food that not only don’t destroy the environment but

can actively help to rewild the human world and foster biodiversity.

Using a combination of traditional knowledge and modern scientific

practice, we can design ways of living and producing that work with the

environment instead of against it to create abundance and sustainability

for all.

For creativity to flourish, property can no longer be concentrated in a

few hands and used for private profit. When that happens, managing the

economy would just become a matter of managing labor and distribution

(itself a form of labor). The way this would be done would be, on the

basic level, through voluntary association: contracts negotiated and

entered into freely by individuals. Since property, the government, and

other forms of power would be eliminated, this negotiation would take

place between relative equals and would, in most cases, happen inside

the framework of various small-scale, self-governing communities.

Different associations and communities could then make agreements and

form into larger confederations to organize on a larger scale. Any

reasonably complex society requires administration and the delegation of

tasks to some extent, but the difference between a free society and a

repressive society is that each person can choose their leader, not just

in the sense of voting for them (though that can certainly be a part of

it) but also in the sense of, on an individual level, being able to

leave and join any organization freely. In this way, leadership becomes

fluid, a matter of expertise and of communication instead of power. This

would allow for economic flexibility on the one hand, the economy

adapting the situation of each unique person and group into account,

while also allowing for mobilization on a mass-scale if need be. It’s

through such a heterogeneous web that the free society would be

governed.

On that note, how would the government work in a society like the one

I’ve been describing? Well, put simply, it wouldn’t! At least, not in

the way it does now. The government is just another form of authority

that exploits and divides people. It, in fact, is the guard of such

oppression, in a way. To maintain their rule, government officials have

to appeal to the support of powerful interest groups. The result is that

the government essentially becomes a private army whose job is

protecting private property, big corporations, oppressive social norms,

and all the other dominating forces I’ve already discussed. Some say

that the government secures our “freedom” but, think about it, if the

government is what gives you your freedom, can’t it take it away just as

easily? No, the government doesn’t make us freer. Throughout history,

it’s perpetuated violence and oppression, and even in the west today

which likes to pride itself on being a place where the governments are

looser with their restrictions and (supposedly, at least) more

democratic, they continue to spy on people, help big businesses, and

perpetuate wars overseas. For there to be freedom, real and meaningful

freedom, the government has to go.

The question then obviously comes up of who will be in charge of

administering the affairs of civil society, to which the answer is...

well... civil society itself! People would get the chance to be involved

in how their society is run, not just by voting for some asshole to rule

over them every few years but by being directly involved in their

communities! This is what the word “politics” originally referred to in

ancient Athens where democracy, in the modern sense of the word, really

started to emerge, it meant the self-management of the “polis”, of the

citizenry. Ultimately, policy-making is all about organizing people and

resources. There’s no reason why this requires some big structure with a

small political elite at the top to run, it can be done by the people

themselves, arguably more efficiently! With the burden of crushing

poverty, alienation, and exploitative labor lifted, more people would

have the time and energy to be directly involved in organizing political

action! It’s the mass movements and shifts in social/economic life that

drive politics, not the bureaucrats and politicians who mostly just come

in after the fact to take credit!

There’s also, of course, the question of what will be done with

“criminals” if there is no government. First of all, “criminal” is a

fairly vague term and a lot of people who are “criminals” today are

because they oppose the forms of oppression the government perpetuates!

Many crimes are harmless and only crimes because of political reasons.

This conversation should be framed around how we’d deal with “people who

cause harm to others'', people who have dangerously antisocial

tendencies, instead of “criminals''.

Starting from this angle, we also have to acknowledge that a lot of the

reason people are driven to harm each other is because of inequality.

Positions of authority lend themselves to abuse of power on the one hand

while poverty and oppression lead to desperation which can lead people

to crime on the other. Bigoted beliefs and social institutions often

field violence and as well. Poor access to education, mental health

treatment, and other resources also contribute, all of which are tied to

poverty. When these injustices are eliminated under a system of common

ownership, the suffering and violence they cause will be also. Beyond

that, rules and guidelines for how people are meant to act would be

established through the freely formed, self-governing organizations of

civil society. They’d be freely negotiated and freely accepted by each

member of an organization, as would the reprimands for violating them.

These rules wouldn’t be enforced by a specialized police force that

stands above the rest of the population but by volunteer militias,

accountable directly to their communities. If someone did bring harm to

someone else, the emphasis wouldn’t be on punishing or even

“rehabilitating” them, but on resolving the conflict and seeing why they

did it in the first place so it can be prevented from happening again in

the future. Of course, if any person thinks the benefit they gain from

being in an association with someone isn’t worth the rules they’re being

asked to follow and can’t convince the other members to change them,

they’d be more than welcome to leave and join another group or subsist

on their own if they so choose. So, the way antisocial tendencies would

be handled would be less like law enforcement in the modern-day and more

like contracts between equal members of a community.

I won’t sugarcoat things, I am not proposing a utopia. There will be

aggressors, abusers, exploiters, and killers in any society. What a

society without government, without private property, without

systematized racism and patriarchy and queerphobia would mean is that

such oppression would not be universal, would not be rigidly enforced on

society, would not have the backing of big institutions and, so, could

be combated and held to account better. It’s not enough to simply

destroy the structures that perpetuate oppression though, we also have

to build new structures, new communities!

With the rebirth of the commons allowing political and economic

relations to take the form of a locally-based network of free and equal

producers and greater free time afforded to all, a real sense of

community would be fostered. No longer would people be pitted against

one another, no more would an endless drive for accumulation disconnect

us from nature, no more would society be made up of isolated individuals

and “nuclear families”. Instead, we would see a tapestry of diverse and

interconnected forms of kinship and community which would help to

provide stability and meet the needs of those that are struggling in a

way more effective and more personal than government welfare schemes.

It would be a mistake to, like some ideologues try to, turn these

systems of community into their own form of government. A local

community, for the benefits it offers, has the potential to be just as

if not more oppressive than a set of distant bureaucrats. Instead,

kinship ties, local communities, along with municipal assemblies,

workplace councils, and cooperatives could serve as arenas for social

conflict to play out, as places where people could come together to

debate, negotiate, organize, and freely come to decisions about how to

run their communities. Ultimately, that’s what running a society is all

about: getting people together and convincing them to rally behind a

cause. What we should aim to do is create a more level and open playing

field for this kind of genuine, grassroots political activity by tearing

down the systems of unequal power that exploit people, denying them the

chance to choose how they want to run things. With society organized on

our terms, the creative power of life can finally be unleashed!

It should also be here that a “community” here does not refer to a

rigid, geopolitical designation but a flexible model of organization. A

community is any organically emerging space that helps form people’s

identity, provides a platform for face-face discussion and organization,

and has a kind of life of its own because of how the connections people

have to and within it. Communities can come in all shapes and sizes but

are typically best when they are large enough to contain a diversity of

different people but small enough for each person to feasibly be able to

know a decent chunk of the community’s members well. With the end of the

artificial divisions between people that alienate them and force them to

compete, these sorts of communities would form everywhere, built around

cities and localities, workplaces, common pastures, schools, mutual aid

groups, etc., anywhere people live, work, learn, and/or spend their

leisure time together. Simply having an affinity group of people does

not make a community, however. Communities might form around material

desires, might start as means to ends, but they are in large part

defined by how the relationships that make them up evolve past this and

become a valuable goal themselves. A community can’t be fostered by

speeches, “team-building exercises”, and/or simply being physically

close to someone. Communities are only born through common struggle,

sometimes over a span of many generations. There will be bumps along,

for a community to be healthy it has to have some dissent, some tension,

some conflict. In fact, it’s unavoidable that you’ll probably hate at

least a few of the people in your community/communities, but the whole

point is to go beyond immediate utility or likability and instead forge

something that at once lasts and remains, something that is based on

creative struggle.

Politics throughout history has been based on stagnant social relations.

At first, most societies were typically structured around clan

relations, since these familial bonds were in large part biological and

emerged long before even the human species can be said to. Over time,

with various technological and social developments, new bases for civil

society emerged, among them being the “demos” of ancient Athens, which

were based on geography instead of blood and are where the term

“democracy” originates from. These days, in a lot of the world, we’ve

become so alienated and the task of governing society has been taken

over so much by the government, corporations, and other such groups that

“politics” in the classical sense barely exists, or if it does it’s

based on isolated individuals or small families, casting their votes and

participating in protests, petitions, etc. that are all based around

compelling the government or some other group to make a

change instead of directly (re)organizing society. These are rigid and

static modes of organization that can’t express the ever-shifting

diversity and creativity of human social life and often serve as just

another tool of exploitation.

The solution is to base politics, and civil society at large, not on a

homogeneous set of divisions based on family lineage, geographical

location, etc. but on varied and organic communities formed around

action. We must build a politics that isn’t based on static

administrative blocks that you’re simply born into or join but around

communities, founded on common creative struggle, that you actively

participate in, whatever form that active participation may take. Common

history, common values, and common struggle should form the basis of

society, not arbitrary divisions based on national borders, skin tones,

blood ties, or anything of the sort.

Local borough and village communities, agricultural commons, cooperative

enterprises, unions, guilds, fraternities, student associations,

citizens’ assemblies, and other such groups represent the active and

human-scale ways people concretely engage with society instead of just

being arbitrarily drawn government districts. The economic and social

units that represent the production, the self- management, the

creativity of a free society will cut across lines of tribal

association, ethnicity, locality, class, religion, etc. That said, such

units have to still be conscious of these elements of society,

recognizing the conflicts that exist there and the rights of different

(ethnic, local, religious, etc.) groups to self- determination.

A society based on the confederation of these base units into larger

agreements and associations would allow everyone a say in how society is

run but, at the same time, allow for a diversity of perspectives and

approaches. The way people express their political views won’t be

limited to votes and petitions begging the government to step in with

its iron-fisted bureaucracy. Instead, the fact that politics is a matter

of organization would be laid bare and people would have the chance to

have a say in the many different spheres of life they are involved with

and have a stake in (local living space, work, mutual aid, school, etc.)

directly. It also means those who want to disengage from politics can

freely choose to do so while those who have an immense will and aptitude

for shaping public policy can excel in doing just that since without a

violent apparatus, bigotry, or differences in access to resources, the

only thing that’s left is people and the communities they choose to be a

part of. Active participation in society would be encouraged but not

mandated. The best leaders would be led by virtue of their and their

community’s strength alone but, at the same time, freedom and popular

participation would be ensured on a level not possible in a government

system.

It’s through this flexible, heterogeneous, confederation of communities

that an economy based on common ownership would function. In such an

economy, the principles of mutual aid, of working together to meet

everyone’s individual needs, will dominate and all will be able to share

in the prosperity brought about by unfettered cooperative creativity.

It is only through the abolition of private property in favor of common

and use-based ownership, the abolition of the government in favor of

voluntary agreements and the self-administration of civil society, the

abolition of a competitive market based on endless growth in favor of a

network of mutual aid, the abolition of racism and patriarchy and all

forms of oppression in favor of solidarity and community that the

conflict between the individual and the collective can be reconciled,

and from that reconciliation a free, cooperative, prosperous, and (most

of all) creative society can bloom!

Part 4 - Eudaimonia and Beyond

There is a concept in Aristotle’s philosophy called “eudaimonia”. It

translates to something along the lines of “completion” or “full human

flourishing”. It essentially means living in a way where you can fully

develop your faculties as a person, mastering new skills, having new

experiences, and performing fulfilling labor. Some interpret eudaimonia

as just meaning “happiness” but this kind of misses the point.

Eudaimonia isn’t meant to just be a fleeting state of being, it’s meant

to be something that you actively and consistently practice. Eudaimonia

also doesn’t mean you exist in pure bliss or that you don’t experience

any hardship, if anything a lot of hardship and struggle comes with

achieving it. The point isn’t to just be happy but to be fulfilled and

to become, basically, the best version of yourself that you can be, to

fulfill your full potential.

The way to go about this, according to Aristotle, is by learning how to

moderate yourself, how to find a balance between different extremes like

not being stingy but also not being reckless with your wealth or not

being selfish but also not being self-sacrificing, for some basic

examples. The point isn’t to give in to all your hedonistic urges but

also not to suppress your desires like many religions and systems of

morality encourage us to. Instead, we should master our desires so we

can temper them and direct them towards useful, rational goals.

Eudaimonia can’t be achieved alone though. Participating in and helping

to manage the affairs of your community (i.e. “politics”) plays an

important role too. To be a well-rounded and flourishing person requires

that you are involved in social life! There’s also the undeniable fact

that a person’s material conditions affect their ability to live in a

way conducive to eudaimonia, a slave who’s forced to do difficult but

menial labor all his life on someone else’s terms will have a harder

time developing their true talents (which makes Aristotle’s support of

slavery pretty odd, to say the least).

Other thinkers have been inspired by the concept of eudaimonia and tried

to develop it in a more political direction. The most famous of these is

probably Karl Marx who, especially in his earlier work, made the way

capitalism denies a kind of eudaimonia to most people a central element

of his critique. Humanity, for Marx, is unique among all other animals

because humanity produces its own means of subsistence. Thanks to our

use of technology and our ability to cooperate, we actively change our

environment (instead of just reacting to it) on a level far exceeding

any other organism so we’re able to go through a process of consciously

planning, acting on, and reflecting on creative actions instead of

living on pure instinct and reaction to the environment. It’s through

this kind of conscious, rational creativity that people can achieve a

kind of eudaimonia, the argument goes. Capitalism, according to Marx,

alienates people from each other, from nature, and from the product of

their labor, which disconnects them from this creative process. Under

capitalism, you don’t own the tools and resources used to produce useful

objects, they’re the private property of a few wealthy individuals, so

you don’t work on your terms for the direct benefit labor brings to you

and your community or because you enjoy the labor in itself, but because

someone else owns everything society needs to function and so you have

to do what they say or else starve. This is not a system where people

can come together to consciously plan out, execute, enjoy the benefit

of, and reflect on creative activity. Planning production, doing the

work to produce things, and benefiting from that production are each

divided into different professions and delegated to separate and

competing groups of individuals. The result is that the rationality,

creativity, and unity that characterizes human society are squandered.

So, the tragedy of capitalism isn’t just that many people can’t meet

their basic needs but that even if and when they can they are prevented

from truly fulfilling their potential and, so, human society is

prevented from fulfilling its potential.

Many anarchist and anarchist-adjacent thinkers have also borrowed from

concepts related to eudaimonia too. One who’s greatly built on

Aristotle’s work is social ecologist Murray Bookchin. Bookchin

extrapolated the notion of fulfilling your potential and its connection

to community self-management to liberatory ends, as well as combined it

with a unique analysis of nature and its relationship with humanity.

Nature, in his view, isn’t just forests and static vistas like we often

think of it as, and it isn’t everything in existence either. Instead,

nature is a process of evolution, characterized by a continuous,

dialectical unfolding of potentialities that results in more and more

complexity, diversity, subjectivity, and freedom over time. Human

society is seen by Bookchin as the latest and (as of yet, at least)

highest development of this process, having immense potential for free

and diverse modes of existence, but hierarchical relations squander that

potential. The result is that the innate creativity of both human

society and nature is simplified as both are exploited more and more in

a never-ending drive for more and more growth. The solution Bookchin

develops, drawing off of many examples of communes and free cities

throughout history, is to remake society along the lines of a

confederation of local, egalitarian, self-governing communities. Only

then can the full potential of both nature and humanity be unleashed

through the unity of both, allowing for a kind of ecologically-minded

eudaimonia.

The notion of eudaimonia, in the various ways it's been interpreted, has

some very interesting and useful elements but it also has some flaws. It

relies on the idea of teleology, which has to do with things having a

kind of essential purpose. The classic example is a knife cutting. A

knife’s purpose is to cut, so a good knife is a knife that cuts well. A

knife might have a lot of properties, you might be able to do a lot with

a knife, but, according to Aristotle, its objective, intrinsic value

comes from this purpose. Similarly, humans, Aristotle posits, are

capable of all sorts of things but all of them are ultimately means to

an end, so their value is relative, dependent on how well they

accomplish a given goal. It’s only our ultimate purpose that has

intrinsic meaning, that’s valuable and worth doing for its own sake. For

a knife, that purpose is cutting. For a person, Aristotle thinks, that

purpose is reason. Humans are distinguished from animals by our ability

to reason and, so, the best life is lived when we fulfill this potential

to the fullest, i.e. eudaimonia.

Marx and Bookchin have a similar basis for their analysis, though theirs

is based more on the material development of humanity and nature, rather

than an intrinsic essence inside of people.

But can we really say that anything, least of all a person, has any

intrinsic purpose? On what grounds can we say that cutting something

with a knife is any more or less the knife’s purpose than putting it on

display, for example? What does the originally intended purpose matter

if it can also be used for something else? In the same way, how can we

say that reason is something to be strived towards outside of a given

set of circumstances?

What’s more, a knife cutting can mean it being used to prepare a salad

or it being used to slit someone’s throat. In the same way, reason can

be used both to bring benefit and to bring harm to oneself and others.

So, once again, there’s a relative quality to what something’s “purpose”

is and what value can be derived from it.

Can we say with certainty that anything has a predetermined purpose or

“essence”, especially something as complex as a human being or human

history? Looking backwards we can maybe construct certain narratives but

this overlooks that everything is ultimately contingent, dependent on

countless, interconnected, and overlapping events, sometimes completely

random ones! Can a knife be said to have the intrinsic goal of cutting

if it continuously degrades and has to be maintained in order to be

useful for that goal? Can the essential part of being a person be said

to be reason if it has to actively be fostered by philosophers? It seems

like the tendency among things is to flee from purpose if anything, to

constantly break down and destroy themselves, not to “fulfill

themselves” or “actualize themselves”.

Whenever we attempt to set some sort of ultimate standard of “full human

development”, what we really do is impose our owns subjective value

judgments onto people and pretend as if these reveal some sort of

inherent truth about them. We blind ourselves to our own fallibility and

to how fluid and multifaceted people really are and, in doing so, we

essentialize them to essentialize people (indeed, to essentialize

anything) is dangerous! It ignores the countless forces that everything

is always subject to that can’t easily be categorized into

“internal/intrinsic” or “external/extrinsic”. What’s more,

essentialization has been the justification for horrific oppression and

exploitation countless times, and continues to be! If you declare that

there’s something “essential” to being human, that lets you easily

disregard the well being of anyone you declare to be outside of that

category. Whether it’s a soul, “humanity”, reason, etc. that are said to

be the essential quality, they can and have been used to promote the

divine right of kings, slavery, the subjugation of women, the abuse of

children, discrimination against queer people, exploitation of animals,

eugenics, and all other kinds of disgusting institutions which were once

justified because they were “natural”, “essential”. Saying that

Aristotle thought eudaimonia was the expression of every person’s

potential for reason may have been a bit of an exaggeration, since he

believed some people were naturally better off in a position of

servitude, in a position of helping other people achieve their

eudaimonia, and he used this to justify slavery!

Similarly, the Marxist assertion of the inevitability of communism and

the need to rapidly progress has been used to justify all kinds of

opportunism, oppression, and slavery, under the guise that it’s all in

the name of some imagined Utopian society, just over the horizon. To

live in service of someone else’s future is to deny your own life in the

world as it exists, and can only bring misery and exploitation.

Even if it isn’t used to justify any atrocities, if we essentialize

ourselves, don’t we end up being alienated? This is a central idea in

Max Stirner’s critique of religion, humanism, and other such ideological

trends. Any doctrine that puts forth that part of your person is more

essential, more important, more valuable than the other 1) restricts who

we can be, 2) alienates us from ourselves, and 3) can be used as

justification for ill-treatment of anyone possessing anything deemed a

moral failure, even if it’s part of who they are!

We cannot base our political project on fulfilling some pre-set

potential. Instead, we should base it on continuously going beyond our

“potential”, on constantly challenging ourselves and overcoming our

limits! We can draw on Fredrick Nietzsche and the philosophers he

influenced to help illuminate potential paths towards a politics based

on creative struggle and positive affirmation of life, instead of based

on hatred and resentment.

Nietzsche, though he certainly had his flaws, is a big influence on my

philosophy in many ways. His main project, like mine, is trying to get

us all to embrace life, embrace both the benefits given to us and the

challenges we’ll inevitably face, and be creative in how we live. He saw

that moral codes and old traditions restricted our ability to do this.

The morality of slavers and oppressors on the one side and the morality

of slaves and the oppressed on the other side both try to bind people,

essentialize people, force them to conform to moral standards and

worship “higher concepts”, denying the subjective, sensuous experience

of life in the process. To be free, though, we have to go beyond merely

criticizing ideas and actively combat what’s at their root: the systems

that divide, repress, and appropriate the creative force of life!

The idea of eudaimonia can be summed up as “flourishing” or “self-

actualization” but what does it mean to “actualize” oneself, really?

Things do not become more themselves, the opposite is true, they become

less themselves, they splinter themselves and lose themselves, they (for

better or for worse) go beyond themselves: ekstasis)!

Ekstasis, true to its name, is not an outright rejection of the idea of

eudaimonia but a transcension of it, a movement beyond it! It is not

simply the development of life’s potential but the continuous pushing of

boundaries and limits. It’s the constant striving for liberation which,

even if we might never reach ultimate freedom, is a cause worth

pursuing! Most of all, the aim of ekstasis is for us to go beyond

ourselves by coming together with nature and with other people and,

through this, being creative in all the ways creativity can manifest!

Let us embrace the fractured, multifaceted, ever-changing, imperfection

of life! Let us embrace that none of us will ever be “complete”,

whatever the hell that even means, but it’s that incompleteness that

lets us be free, cooperative, and creative and, at the same time, why

freedom, cooperation, and creativity are so vital to everything and

everyone! Let us take the good and the bad of life and work with what we

have to strive for a better world instead of clinging to static ideals

of perfection! Let us be free from ourselves!

Conclusion

We stand at a turning point in history. On the one hand, social and

scientific development has produced a never-before-seen amount of wealth

and prosperity, and the will to make positive change is vast, especially

among the young and the oppressed. On the other hand, we continue to

face poverty, war, authoritarianism, and steady destruction of our

environment on a massive scale. The common root of all these problems is

the social structures that unsustainably exploit and

restrict the creativity of life. The task is now to build new social

structures to combat the old and oppressive ones!

This will not be an easy process, everything worth doing comes with

sacrifice. Regimes rarely go out without a fight, and fight is what

we’ll have to tirelessly do if we want to see a better world. Those of

us living in comfortable positions within the current system will also

likely have to give up some of the luxuries we’re afforded because of

the exploitation of oppressed people and the environment. It is simply

unsustainable to have a new iPhone come out every year, for everyone to

have their own car, for us to consume cheap and disposable commodities

at the rate we do now. But, if that’s the trade off for a world where

the air and water are clean, where everyone has food on the table and a

roof over their head, where each person has the opportunity to be

creative and choose their own destiny, where a true sense of community

is fostered, where we all have the free time to relax and pursue our

interests, where science and the arts prosper, then that is a trade off

that I, at least, am willing to make, and I hope you are too. Lose your

resentful elitism. The way things are now, we’re all pawns in someone

else’s game. Just because some people might have it slightly worse than

you (or, for that matter, slightly better) does not give you any more

value, and the only reason you’re in that position is because it’s more

convenient for those in control at the moment, but it will not be

forever.

The world might look bleak at times and, I won’t lie, there are many

horrors out there, even more on their way. But, despite the darkness,

there’s always a spark of hope. So long as life, in whatever form,

continues to struggle and survive it will continue to resist the systems

of oppression that try to stamp it out. The creative force that drives

history, drives us all, always finds a way to slip out of the chains

that, over the centuries, have been put on. It’s this creative impulse

on which we base our fight!

If we break down the artificial divisions between people, we could

achieve a society where individual freedom and the common good aren’t at

odds but complement each other, and a world where every life form has

the chance to not only survive, but live! Thrive!

Such a world cannot be brought in overnight. Building a better society

is a slow, step-by-step process of concrete action, which is why we’ll

need your help! No matter who you are, you have something to contribute

to a liberatory movement, and it’s only with the support of a wide

diversity of people from

different backgrounds with different perspectives, organizing together

for a common cause that real change can come about!

So, let’s go beyond ourselves and towards a brighter future!

III

Philosophy

Alphabet Soup

Reactionaries will often mock the label “LGBTQIA+” as an manifestation

of radical leftist ideology gone wild. “These self centered pricks

simply want attention and a position in the oppression Olympics!” they

moan. Of course this critique is asinine, because identity is rooted in

our subjective interactions with external phenomena, and thus will

always be self centered. The identity of being a Green Bay Packers fan

is self centered because it centers around the individual selves

relationship to a sporting event and the team they ‘root for’, so to

speak. Furthermore, an identity doesn’t inherently signify oppression,

in fact queer repression is largely a product of the Patriarchal social

arrangements that exist today, hence those who refuse to submit to

cisheteronormative ideals face stigmatization and marginalization.

However, despite the reactionary misdirection that is prevalent in

critiques of the “LGBT” community, there is a genuine critique that must

be levied against the function of the LGBT alphabet soup and the

movement it has spawned. The genesis of the LGBT social label stems from

the progressive recognition of new queer struggles in society by the

activist movement, attempting to be inclusionary towards previously less

recognized social struggle. There is however an fundamentally

reactionary essence to this notion of the “LGBTQIA+” community.

The existence of such a label functions as a mechanism of social

exclusion, as new identities become recognized by the social organism,

they become included as “valid” within the binary of inclusion vs

exclusion that permeates within society. The Alphabet Soup of identities

refuses to challenge one of the core features of marginalization, the

dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion, but rather embraces this

dichotomy and includes new identities that society is allowed to

tolerate.

Rather than shattering a social organism that is predicated on

reproducing power through the phantasm of the “degenerate” other, the

LGBT label simply perpetuates this politics of exclusion but expands the

tent for what is acceptable. The LGBT community simply exists to

marginalize and repress new forms of expression and identification that

don’t conform to the new functioning social order.

This tendency is highlighted by the historical development of the LGBT

community. For example, many trans people were marginalized from

participating in the mainstream social struggle when “LGB” was the

dominating social label representing queer struggle. Separate protests

had to be organized that represent trans people, and only through

intense grassroots pressure were trans people given the recognition

within the queer movement that they deserved. Many people erased the

historical role trans people played in the queer struggle as displayed

in the Stonewall riots because the “LGB” label was intrinsically

exclusionary. Its existence depended upon deviant social practice that

couldn’t be encompassed by such a label.

Highly divisive conversations continue to fester in the Alphabet soup

community about what constitutes “truly” queer people. Are Asexual

people truly queer? Are Xenogenders a valid form of identification?

These vacuous questions are simply a byproduct of a vacuous movement

built on the notion that validity stems from institutional

acknowledgment, not internal affirmation of one's identity and

spontaneous choices of expression. Once gay and trans people are seen as

normative to the social order, there are new identities we must question

the validity of. So on and so forth.........

There is a reason why billionaires and their political puppets almost

universally proclaim support for the LGBT movement, and endless pro LGBT

propaganda floods the commodity society through commercials, products,

symbolism etc. It is because the LGBT movement perpetuates the existing

social order by implying that institutional and social recognition is

what defines the validity of social expression and identification. The

LGBT community just becomes another consumer subculture to produce

profit and continue the flow of endless production. Of course we cannot

be deviants and express ourselves without limitation! We are good, jolly

citizens of the global capitalist order!

Having gay orgies on police cars? Burning down companies that

discriminate against their employees? Nahhh, that would hurt our

institutional legitimacy! Instead, we will wave a flag, march on the

street and make sure to stay peaceful! Afterwards, we can go back to

being miserable wage laborers and take solace at the fact that our

favorite TV show has a trans supporting character! Of course, let's not

forget! We must also have time to argue on twitter about which

identities are valid and which identities are silly and goofy!

What is the alternative to this LGBT alphabet soup form of

representation for queer people? An absolute refusal of representation.

A spontaneous wildness that cannot be captured by public legislation or

algorithms or fixed linguistic terminologies. The absence of

representation for the queer condition will make us untouchable as

subjects for the continual production for productions sake. We will no

longer sell ourselves to the owner class, abide by laws imposed onto us

by abstract power structures that govern through manufactured consent,

or submit to social norms that replace our pure creative will to act and

express.

The refusal of being an institutional subject is the affirmation of the

self due to its pure, unrestrained actuality. No institution is

necessary to actuate the validity of identity. The choice is one between

liberation, and social control.

The Dead Speak

By Elizibeth Moore

To die a virtuous death is to die a thousand times; sacrificing one’s

life for an ideal ‘greater than oneself’ is to be absolved of all

rebellious potential, reduced to naught but a puppet within a pantomimic

rendition of history that demands your end be re-enacted ad infinitum.

All that you stood for in life ceases to bear any significance upon the

future - you have been absorbed into the network of the ideal, your

actions and projects reconstituted to express the ideal in different

ways. We, who communicate in signs, schemes and values -- are we not

susceptible to such a fate? Philosophers have attempted for centuries to

expel the spirits and spectres which haunt our minds and furnish us with

a guilty conscience, a seriousness, a subservience to virtue; we have

succeeded in our initial assault, yes, but our victory is far from

assured. I search for the one who has renounced virtue, and there are

many - but who among them has truly escaped it? It was posited by the

existentialists that the projects that one undertakes - and the meaning

that is thereby produced - could be ‘carried on’, so to speak, by those

who come after you. There is a certain beauty to be found within this

hypothesis, but I am afraid I must argue that meaning - should it be

maintained following your death - is not preserved but degraded by the

Other, that is to say, meaning is reconstituted as dependent upon the

Other. The meaning is no longer yours, it belongs now to the social

sphere - in this way, all deaths are noble deaths and all history is a

pantomime.

The stench of the dead lingers within moralistic thought; behind every

priest is an ancient resentment, dictated by societies long extinct

which seek to restore an idol to the throne. A slave-morality fit for

kings -- how else could one go about describing the prevailing ethical

framework of the contemporary epoch? All sides of the political spectrum

are beset by reactionary forces, demanding of the oppressed a sickly

asceticism and of the oppressor a ‘humility before God’ - sick men and

their imitators are the leaders of nations, puritanism the prevailing

attitude among the evangelical partisans. Yet oppression persists, the

police force arrives all the same - the man from which they take their

orders is not a warlord but a saint, who seeks riches and power not for

himself - or if he does, conceals it behind appeals to justice and the

people - but for their respective God. It is fortunate, then, that there

should be so many minorities to which the forces of reaction can direct

their ire - indeed, the slaves [having taken power] must reckon with the

contradiction that those they resent are now the weak they once claimed

to be fighting for. To resolve this, they paint their enemies as

simultaneously holding all the cards and none at all - in the same

stroke that they admit their newfound power, they place themselves in

the position of the rebel once again. I’m sure you’ve heard the right-

wing commentators who loudly proclaim that they, the conservatives, are

the ‘counterculture’ -- even a paradox such as that does not dissuade

them of their delusions.

Everything is recuperated into the ceaseless march of the idols -- the

revolutionaries play according to the rules of conventional morality,

appealing against the ‘evil’ of Capital and seeking nothing but

vengeance against the capitalists; they may also profess the ‘goodness’

in their pacifism if violence is deemed immoral, thereby attempting to

make themselves the ethical superiors of the oppressors. The rulers

claim they fight for the ‘people’, and in the next moment shall pocket

the surplus value of the laborer. The master-morality is extinct -- or

rather, it is no longer fashionable. Master and slave alike

imagine themselves to be rebels, fighting for ‘justice’, ‘family’,

‘God’, ‘the people’ and so forth - but nobody in this conflict is

rebellious, no side desires anything other than the preservation of the

ideal order of things. It can be said that one does not even need to

wait until death to be integrated with the ideal network; one’s entire

life is a struggle to assert one’s own projects and meanings in the face

of overwhelming odds. The fixed idea is not peculiar to one’s own

experience - one cannot rid oneself of delusion and conclude that the

matter is resolved - but is an institution, built upon debt and piety;

as an institution, subsequently, it exercises certain rights and

privileges that an otherwise wholly individual phenomenon would not be

permitted. Just as ‘socialism in one country’ cannot prevail over the

forces of Capital, nor can we destroy an institution by merely rejecting

it upon an individual basis - it requires not just reflection, but

action upon the material plane. It is a personal struggle, yes - but it

is fought not merely within the psychic life but also within the world

of things. The institution is a fixed idea which, using the Other as its

puppet, exerts a dreadful influence over the proceedings of human

existence; every moment of guilt or anguish is rendered unto oneself as

a worldly torment which seeks only your submission rather than your

understanding. It does not seek your understanding - if it did, its

power would cease.

And yet -- all they, as humans, seem to be capable of doing is

substituting God - ‘Good’, ‘Man’, or whatever else - with yet another

idol. Do they crave subservience that much? Are they unable to bear the

idea of a world without salvation? If only they opened their eyes - we

are already there, in that strange climate where nothing seems real or

substantial enough to satiate us. There is nothing to save us here. I

use the word ‘us’ to describe my relationship with others - as if I

share some comradeship with them - but it means very little. They are

more ghosts than they are real people. What, then, is to be done? Either

we are paralyzed or complicit - how does one get out of a prison of

one’s own making? The proposed solutions to these all-too-human crises

cannot be readily administered as some would have you believe; there is

no quick resolution, perhaps none at all, to this situation we find

ourselves in. Reverse virtue and live as blasphemists? Create our own

virtues? In both cases, pushing against the ideal order merely

reinforces it - the more we fight, the tighter its grip becomes. If we

‘reject virtue’, we merely live according to its vulgar perversion; if

we create our own virtues, we cannot escape the prison and end up

recreating the same virtues with different names. We cannot adopt a

‘positive programme’ until the dissolution of the present social order

has been brought about, lest we become consumed by the network of the

ideal; the total negation of society as it exists must be brought about,

no matter the consequences.

The question of ethics is therefore also the question of nothingness, or

rather, of negation; it is also the question of meaning. It is the fool

who supposes that the ethical project is necessarily and wholly positive

in its constitution; even moralistic propositions which seemingly

possess no negative dimensions can be refused or rejected outright, that

is, one can always reply ‘nothing’. One may object here by arguing that

it is only in the value-judgment that one can furnish a negative

response, that negation - total negation - is ‘unthinkable’. We can see

where this line of thinking leads - the world itself is positive, and

thus, negation is an irreal phenomenon that exists only in relation to

the mind as it processes an affirmative response. This is patently

absurd, and many thinkers prior to me have rightly dismantled such a

position - we shall only discuss it here as a formality. To begin with,

negation is not merely a quality of judgment. The question may very well

be formulated by an interrogative judgment, but its nature as a question

forbids it from following on from a judgment - it is necessarily

pre-judicative. Moreover, each question discloses the possibility of

negation as implicit within its questioning - as Jean- Paul Sartre

writes, ‘if I expect a disclosure of being, I am prepared at the same

time for the eventuality of the disclosure of non-being.’ Let us use

another example - I arrive at home, and I expect to find my father

working on something or another. He is not there. Yet my attention was

fixated upon what it supposed would be his presence - the furniture

where he would typically sit, the walls and the floor did not have my

attention and thus had dissolved into ground [that is, unattended being]

and the figure of my father had become nothingness. This is not to say

that my father is not elsewhere - merely that he is not here. What does

all this teach us about negation? It tells us, first of all, that being

and existence are not identical - that which lacks being can exist, or

in other words, nothingness is real. What is its origin? To put it

bluntly - we are.

For the ‘faithless disciples of Hegel’, of which I am among the ranks,

it is posited that the fundamental origin of nothingness - and therefore

of contradiction - rests within man himself; that is to say,

human-reality is a conflict without resolution. Two opposing terms there

may be, but no manner of synthesis such as in the Hegelian dialectical

system can resolve the conflict - it eliminates synthesis altogether in

favour of tragedy. But we must understand before proceeding, like Sartre

prior to us, that such contradiction is not given, a fact - it produces

itself. ‘Man creates himself as conflict.’ Let us elaborate upon what we

mean when we say human-reality is a nothingness - an object, a thing,

this is what it is. It does not affirm nor negate itself, it is in total

cohesion with itself - in short, non- consciousness. There is not a

distance between itself and itself, a discrepancy, that would allow it

to acknowledge itself - it merely is.‘It does not refer to itself as

self-consciousness does. It is this self.’ This is the being-in-itself -

the thing which is. We, on the contrary, are a nihilation of this

being-in-itself - that is to say, a being conceived of as a lack of

being. ‘Refer’ - do we not find ourselves where we began, that is to

say, at the notion of the question? The human is a nothingness insofar

as it is constantly in question of itself - the question is itself, or

rather, the question is whether there is value in being consciousness.

Value - this is the question of the human-reality; while it is

undoubtedly true that value is a thoroughly human phenomena, it is

imbued with a life of its own - it is something which haunts us, and

like the world, envelops us from all sides. In every project we

undertake, we seek to fulfill it - in assuming the role of waitress,

writer, actor, we attempt to be. Every transcendence seeks to become a

consciousness which also retains being - to wit, a God - every

transcendence surpasses itself in order to be. Ethics, therefore, is a

negative project; it aims at what one ought to be rather than what one

is, it aims to fulfill a lack and thus can be understood as the

embodiment of that questioning which constitutes human existence. We may

now understand why the common man seeks salvation, be it brought by

religion, ideology or economy - as a having-to-be, we are seduced by

anything which promises us Godhood. Even if the price is a lifetime of

slavery, piety, weakness - we shall happily exchange our freedoms for a

taste of being once again. The ideal order of things is merely a

reflection of the ontological desire for completion, for wholeness, for

unity - it is the movement of humans towards establishing

their own chains. One would be wrong to conceive of the fixed idea as a

force or entity unto itself - it is constituted by us, given power by

us, perpetuated by us, all in some sickly attempt to attain a state of

enlightenment that is unrealisable.

Freedom or purpose - one cannot have both, and so the coin is tossed;

yet it was tossed long ago, before you or I, and we live with its

consequences. Each time a child is born - oh, how they weep! - it is

told, the moment it leaves the womb, that this world is a trick, a

sham - ‘we were promised life!’, they scream, and they were delivered a

delayed death. They forget, it is true - soon everything seems eternal,

and in exchange for servitude they are promised a life beyond life; from

therein, freedom is hardly evaporated but it is made a mockery, a shell

of its former self. One does not make the choice to be indebted to the

network of the ideal - this great and terrible war-machine has engulfed

the entire planet, there is nothing left that has not been wholly

violated by its presence. We speak as if an original sin has been

committed, we speak as if we must atone - perhaps that is the logical

conclusion of the theory that we are positing. Yet, unlike the adherents

to the Abrahamic school of thought, we do not accept the blame for this

cataclysm; it is the greatest tragedy of all that we, the children of

the dead, should pay for their mistake. It is they who, realizing

themselves to be alone in this world, invented tales of God and goodness

to supplant their despair who ought to be damned - not us, not us.

The whole human drama is characterized principally by its capability for

self-reproduction; the pantomimic mockery that is the historical is but

the surest expression of this tendency towards the preservation of the

ideal order of things. Just as the sophist Thrasymachus said that the

strongest were the sole beneficiaries of justice, so is it the case that

the ideal is the sole beneficiary of history -- we, who philosophizes

with hammers, shall not shy away from destroying even the most

consecrated of concepts in order to break the network of the ideal. The

human-reality, precisely insofar as it defines itself in relation to the

situation, is condemned to repeat itself if the situation is dictated by

the historical movements of the ideal.

To some, we will signify the end of all things - for the priests and

their followers, for the bureaucrat and profiteer, for the soldier and

their armies; we shall not comfort them. To others, we would be the

liberators of all mankind -- they would be wrong. Our revolt is the

negation of everything - it is the triumph of nothingness against plenty

and freedom against virtue, and whatever the cost, we shall accept it. I

recognize, now, that the question of ethics is not merely whether it is

of a negative or positive constitution; it is rather what the negative

intentions are aimed upon. Ethics aims upon us - we are to blame, we

must change. Total negation, conversely, condemns everything -

especially that which disguises itself with the promise of salvation, of

a positive future. Our crisis will overwhelm even the pious man -- even

he, the most self-satisfied and ‘whole’ man shall know of the abyss

which stares back. Make no mistake - our revolution shall be unlike

anything which has preceded it. The Bolshevik and the Jacobin bear no

resemblance to us; their terror, state terror, comes from on high - our

terror does not oppress, it seeks only to free the mind through a sudden

awakening. If they shall not listen to reason, it is only inevitable

that a great, rapturous realization should be visited upon them - the

realization of rebellion, that is, of the rebellious possibility that

already exists within the human-reality. We do not ask humans to change

to something new - we ask them to recognize what they are, cast off the

yoke of the ideal network, and destroy all that seeks to further

constrain them. And what is it that ‘we are’? A nothingness, a tempest,

a deluge -- that shall wash away the empires of old and install in its

place total freedom; freedom to be for oneself.

There is an objection commonly leveled which would suppose that

freedom - of all things - lacks any concrete meaning, that if one wishes

to set up a truly liberatory project one must speak in terms that give

practical advice to the revolutionary militant. ‘How’, they wonder,

‘could freedom be useful to us? We fight for the communist society, not

some abstract principle.’ We shall respond to this with a question of

our own - what do you think freedom is? What do you believe freedom to

be if not the very basis from which one’s actions and choices are

concretely constituted in a given situation? From the phenomenological

perspective, one’s very consciousness of an object, be it psychological

or mundane, is constituted just as much by the intentionality of

consciousness as it is the contingency of the object and the situation

which encompasses both; similarly, every choice is determined not by its

outcome but by the way in which one aims upon one’s possibilities. Upon

the street corner, in the cafe, or alone - at every instant do we

express our intent towards this or that, towards futures of new

situations and new possibilities. Freedom, moreover, is what produces

meaning - how else could one derive purpose if not through the free

pursuit of projects in-the-world? We shall concede that there are,

however, two limits to our freedom - one that can be destroyed, one that

cannot. The ideal -- and the dead.

We are predisposed to finitude - insofar as we choose to live, we are

condemned to die. I have written elsewhere that the ontological

constitution of human consciousness gives the world and the situations

we encounter a certain duration - as soon as a babe opens its eyes, the

whole world stills and those around it are struck with the realization

that the eyes of the child shall one day close. And it is those dead who

preceded us - who have returned to the abyss, the abyss of plenty - who

are responsible for the ideals which we perceive as absolute in those

early years.