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Title: To Change Everything Author: CrimethInc. Language: en Topics: introductory, introduction Source: Retrieved on 2016.02.07 from https://www.crimethinc.com/tce/
If you could change anything, what would you change? Would you go on
vacation for the rest of your life? Make fossil fuels stop causing
climate change? Ask for ethical banks and politicians? Surely nothing
could be more unrealistic than to keep everything the way it is and
expect different results. Our private financial and emotional struggles
mirror global upheaval and disaster. We could spend the rest of our days
trying to douse these fires one by one, but they stem from the same
source. No piecemeal solution will serve; we need to rethink everything
according to a different logic.
To change anything, start everywhere.
The phantom of liberty still haunts a world cast in its image. We have
been promised complete self-determination: all the institutions of our
society are supposed to deliver it. If you had complete
self-determination, what would you be doing right now? Think of the vast
potential of your life: the relationships you could have, the things you
could experience, all the ways you could give meaning to your existence.
When you were born, it seemed there was no limit to what you could
become. You represented pure possibility. Usually, we don't stop to
imagine any of this. Only in the most beautiful moments, when we fall in
love or achieve a breakthrough or visit a faraway land, do we catch a
dizzying glimpse of all our lives could be. What limits how you can
fulfill your potential? How much leverage do you have over the
environment around you, or how you spend your time? The bureaucracies
that appraise you according to how you follow instructions, the economy
that empowers you according to how much profit you generate, the
military recruiters who insist that the best way to “be all that you can
be” is to submit to their authority—do these enable you to make the most
of your life on your own terms? The open secret is that we do all have
complete self-determination: not because it's given to us, but because
not even the most totalitarian dictatorship could take it away. Yet as
soon as we begin to act for ourselves, we come into conflict with the
very institutions that are supposed to secure our freedom.
Managers and tax collectors love to talk about personal responsibility.
But if we took complete responsibility for all our actions, would we be
following their instructions in the first place? More harm has been done
throughout history by obedience than by malice. The arsenals of all the
world's militaries are the physical manifestation of our willingness to
defer to others. If you want to be sure you never contribute to war,
genocide, or oppression, the first step is to stop following orders.
That goes for your values, too. Countless rulers and rule books demand
your unquestioning submission. But even if you want to cede
responsibility for your decisions to some god or dogma, how do you
decide which one it will be? Like it or not, you are the one who has to
choose between them. Usually, people simply make this choice according
to what is most familiar or convenient. We are inescapably responsible
for our beliefs and decisions. Answering to ourselves rather than to
commanders or commandments, we might still come into conflict with each
other, but at least we would do so on our own terms, not needlessly
heaping up tragedy in service of others' agendas.
The workers who perform the labor have power; the bosses who tell them
what to do have authority. The tenants who maintain the building have
power; the landlord whose name is on the deed has authority. A river has
power; a permit to build a dam grants authority.
There's nothing oppressive about power per se. Many kinds of power can
be liberating: the power to care for those you love, to defend yourself
and resolve disputes, to perform acupuncture and steer a sailboat and
swing on a trapeze. There are ways to develop your capabilities that
increase others' freedom as well. Every person who acts to achieve her
full potential offers a gift to all.
Authority over others, on the other hand, usurps their power. And what
you take from them, others will take from you. Authority is always
derived from above:
The soldier obeys the general, who answers to the president, who derives
his authority from the Constitution—
The priest answers to the bishop, the bishop to the pope, the pope to
scripture, which derives its authority from God—
The employee answers to the owner, who serves the customer, whose
authority is derived from the dollar—
The police officer executes the warrant signed by the magistrate, who
derives authority from the law—
Manhood, whiteness, property—at the tops of all these pyramids, we don't
even find despots, just social constructs: ghosts hypnotizing humanity.
In this society, power and authority are so interlinked that we can
barely distinguish them: we can only obtain power in return for
obedience. And yet without freedom, power is worthless.
In contrast to authority, trust centers power in the hands of those who
confer it, not those who receive it. A person who has earned trust
doesn't need authority. If someone doesn't deserve trust, he certainly
shouldn't be invested with authority! And yet whom do we trust less than
politicians and CEOs?
Without imposed power imbalances, people have an incentive to work out
conflicts to their mutual satisfaction—to earn each other's trust.
Hierarchy removes this incentive, enabling those who hold authority to
suppress conflicts.
At its best, friendship is a bond between equals who support and
challenge each other while respecting each other's autonomy. That's a
pretty good standard by which to evaluate all our relationships. Without
the constraints that are imposed upon us today—citizenship and
illegality, property and debt, corporate and military chains of
command—we could reconstruct our relations on the basis of free
association and mutual aid.
“Your rights end where another's rights begin.” According to that logic,
the more people there are, the less freedom.
But freedom is not a tiny bubble of personal rights. We cannot be
distinguished from each other so easily. Yawning and laughter are
contagious; so are enthusiasm and despair. I am composed of the clichés
that roll off my tongue, the songs that catch in my head, the moods I
contract from my companions. When I drive a car, it releases pollution
into the atmosphere you breathe; when you use pharmaceuticals, they
filter into the water everyone drinks. The system everyone else accepts
is the one you have to live under—but when other people challenge it,
you get a chance to renegotiate your reality as well. Your freedom
begins where mine begins, and ends where mine ends.
We are not discrete individuals. Our bodies are comprised of thousands
of different species living in symbiosis: rather than closed fortresses,
they are ongoing processes through which nutrients and microbes
ceaselessly pass. We live in symbiosis with thousands more species,
cornfields inhaling what we exhale. A swarming pack of wolves or an
evening murmuring with frogs is as individual, as unitary, as any one of
our bodies. We do not act in a vacuum, self-propelled by reason; the
tides of the cosmos surge through us.
Language serves to communicate only because we hold it in common. The
same goes for ideas and desires: we can communicate them because they
are greater than us. Each of us is composed of a chaos of contrary
forces, all of which extend beyond us through time and space. In
choosing which of these to cultivate, we determine what we will foster
in everyone we encounter.
Freedom is not a possession or a property; it is a relation. It is not a
matter of being protected from the outside world, but of intersecting in
a way that maximizes the possibilities. That doesn't mean we have to
seek consensus for its own sake; both conflict and consensus can expand
and ennoble us, so long as no centralized power is able to compel
agreement or transform conflict into winner-takes-all competition. But
rather than breaking the world into tiny fiefdoms, let's make the most
of our interconnection.
Growing up in this society, not even our passions are our own; they are
cultivated by advertising and other forms of propaganda to keep us
running on the treadmills of the marketplace. Thanks to indoctrination,
people can be quite pleased with themselves for doing things that are
bound to make them miserable in the long run. We are locked into our
suffering and our pleasures are the seal.
To be truly free, we need leverage over the processes that produce our
desires. Liberation doesn't just mean fulfilling the desires we have
today, but expanding our sense of what is possible, so our desires can
shift along with the realities they drive us to create. It means turning
away from the pleasure we take in enforcing, dominating, and possessing,
to seek pleasures that wrench us free of the machinery of obedience and
competition. If you've ever broken an addiction, you have a taste of
what it means to transform your desires.
Bigots typically blame a specific group for a systemic problem—Jews for
profit-driven capitalism, immigrants for economic recession—the same way
people blame individual politicians for the corruption of politics. But
the problem is the systems themselves. No matter who holds the reins,
they produce the same power imbalances and petty indignities. The
problem is not that they are broken, but that they are functioning in
the first place.
Our enemies are not human beings, but the institutions and routines that
estrange us from each other and from ourselves. There are more conflicts
within us than between us. The same fault lines that run through our
civilization run through our friendships and our hearts; this is not a
clash between people, but between different kinds of relations,
different ways of living. When we refuse our roles in the prevailing
order, we open up those fault lines, inviting others to take a stand as
well.
The best thing would be to do away with domination entirely—not to
manage its details more fairly, not to shuffle the positions of who
inflicts and who endures, not to stabilize the system by reforming it.
The point of protest is not to call for more legitimate rules or rulers,
but to demonstrate that we can act on our own strength, encouraging
others to do the same and discouraging the authorities from interfering.
This is not a question of war—a binary conflict between militarized
enemies—but rather of contagious disobedience.
It is not enough only to educate and discuss, waiting for others' hearts
and minds to change. Until ideas are expressed in action, confronting
people with concrete choices, the conversation remains abstract. Most
people tend to remain aloof from theoretical discussions, but when
something is happening, when the stakes are high and they can see
meaningful differences between opposing sides, they will take a stand.
We don't need unanimity, nor a comprehensive understanding of the whole
world, nor a road map to a precise destination—just the courage to set
out on a different path.
What are the signs that you are in an abusive relationship? The abuser
may try to control your behavior or dictate your thoughts; block or
regulate your access to resources; use threats or violence against you;
or keep you in a position of dependence, under constant surveillance.
This describes the behavior of individual abusers, but it also goes for
the IRS, the NSA, and most of the other institutions governing our
society. Practically all of them are based on the idea that human beings
need to be policed, to be managed, to be administered.
The greater the imbalances that are imposed on us, the more control it
takes to preserve them. At one end of the power continuum, control is
exercised brutally on an individual basis: drone strikes, SWAT teams,
solitary confinement, racial profiling. At the other end, it is
omnipresent and invisible, built into the infrastructure of society: the
equations that determine credit ratings and insurance premiums, the ways
statistics are collected and turned into urban planning, the
architecture of dating sites and social media platforms. The NSA
monitors what we do online, but it doesn't wield as much control over
our reality as the algorithms that determine what we see when we log in.
When the infinite possibilities of life have been reduced to an array of
options coded in ones and zeros, there will be no more friction between
the system we inhabit and the lives we can imagine—not because we will
have achieved total freedom, but because we will have perfected its
opposite. Freedom doesn't mean choosing between options, but formulating
the questions.
There are many different mechanisms for imposing inequality. Some depend
on a centralized apparatus, like the court system. Others can function
more informally, like good ol' boy networks and gender roles.
Some of these mechanisms have been almost completely discredited. Few
still believe in the divine right of kings, though for centuries no
other basis for society was even thinkable. Others are still so deeply
ingrained that we cannot imagine life without them. Who can picture a
world without property rights? Yet all of these are social constructs:
they are real, but not inevitable. The existence of landlords and CEOs
is no more natural, necessary, or beneficial than the existence of
emperors.
All of these mechanisms developed together, reinforcing each other. The
history of racism, for example, is inextricable from the history of
capitalism: neither one is conceivable without colonization, slavery, or
the color lines that divided workers and still determine who fills the
world's prisons and shantytowns. Likewise, without the infrastructure of
the state and the other hierarchies of our society, individual bigotry
could never enforce systemic white supremacy. That a Black President can
preside over these structures only stabilizes them: it is the exception
that justifies the rule.
To put it another way: as long as there are police, who do you think
they will harass? As long as there are prisons, who do you think will
fill them? As long as there is poverty, who do you think will be poor?
It is naĂŻve to believe we could achieve equality in a society based on
hierarchy. You can shuffle the cards, but it's still the same deck.
If a foreign army invaded this land, cut down the trees, poisoned the
rivers, and forced children to grow up pledging allegiance to them, who
wouldn't take up arms against them? But when the local government does
the same, patriots readily render their obedience, tax dollars, and
children.
Borders don't protect us, they divide us—creating needless friction with
the excluded while obscuring real differences among the included. Even
the most democratic government is founded upon this division between
participants and outsiders, legitimate and illegitimate. In ancient
Athens, the famed birthplace of democracy, only a fraction of the men
were included in the political process; the Founding Fathers of
modern-day democracy owned slaves. Citizenship still imposes a barrier
between included and excluded inside the US, stripping millions of
undocumented residents of leverage over their lives.
The liberal ideal is to expand the lines of inclusion until all the
world is integrated into one vast democratic project. But inequality is
coded into the structure itself. At every level of this society, a
thousand tiny borders divide us into powerful and powerless: security
checkpoints, credit ratings, database passwords, price brackets. We need
forms of belonging that are not predicated on exclusion, that do not
centralize power and legitimacy, that do not quarantine empathy to gated
communities.
You can only have power by wielding it; you can only learn what your
interests are by acting on them. When every effort to exert leverage on
the world must be channeled through the mediation of representatives or
translated into the protocol of institutions, we become alienated from
each other and our own potential. Every aspect of our agency that we
yield reappears as something unrecognizable and hostile to us. The
politicians who always disappoint us only show how much power we have
given up over our own lives; the violence of the police is the dark
consequence of our desire to avoid personal responsibility for what
happens in our neighborhoods.
In the digital age, when every person must continually serve as his own
secretary to manage his public image, our very reputations have become
external, like vampires feeding on us. If we weren't isolated from each
other, competing to sell ourselves on so many professional and social
markets, would we invest so much time and energy in these profiles,
golden calves made in our own image?
We are irreducible. Neither delegates nor abstractions can stand in for
us. In reducing human beings to demographics and raw experience to data,
we lose sight of everything that is precious and unique in the world. We
need presence, immediacy, direct contact with each other, direct control
over our lives—things no representative or representation can deliver.
Leadership is a social disorder in which the majority of participants in
a group fail to take initiative or think critically about their actions.
As long as we understand agency as a property of specific individuals
rather than a relationship between people, we will always be dependent
on leaders—and at their mercy. Truly exemplary leaders are as dangerous
as the obviously corrupt, in that all their praiseworthy qualities only
reinforce their status and others' deference, not to mention the
legitimacy of leadership itself.
When the police arrive at a protest, their first question is always
“Who's in charge?”—not because leadership is essential to collective
action, but because it presents a vulnerability. The Conquistadores
asked the same question when they arrived in the so-called New World;
wherever there was an answer, it saved them centuries of trouble
subduing the population themselves. So long as there is a leader, he can
be deputized, replaced, or taken hostage. At best, depending on leaders
is an Achilles heel; at worst, it reproduces the authorities' interests
and power structure inside those who oppose them. It's better if
everyone has her own agenda and a sense of her own agency.
Governments promise rights, but they can only take liberties. The idea
of rights implies a central power to grant and guard them. Yet anything
the state is powerful enough to guarantee, it is powerful enough to take
away; empowering government to solve one problem only opens the door for
it to create more problems. And governments do not generate power out of
thin air—that's our power that they wield, which we can employ far more
effectively without the Rube Goldberg machine of representation.
The most liberal democracy shares the same principle as the most
despotic autocracy: the centralization of power and legitimacy in a
structure intended to monopolize the use of force. Whether the
bureaucrats who operate this structure answer to a king, a president, or
an electorate is beside the point. Laws, bureaucracy, and police are
older than democracy; they function the same way in a democracy as in a
dictatorship. The only difference is that, because we can vote about who
administers them, we're supposed to regard them as ours—even when
they're used against us.
Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and
brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle
for freedom anew. But promise every man a chance to impose the will of
the majority upon his fellows, and you can get them all together behind
a system that pits them against each other. The more influence people
think they have over the coercive institutions of the state, the more
popular those institutions can be. Perhaps this explains why the global
expansion of democracy coincides with incredible inequalities in the
distribution of resources and power: no other system of government could
stabilize such a precarious situation.
When power is centralized, people have to attain dominion over others to
gain any influence over their own destinies. Struggles for autonomy are
channeled into contests for political power: witness the civil wars in
postcolonial nations between peoples who previously coexisted
peacefully. Those who hold power can only retain it by waging perpetual
war against their own populations as well as foreign peoples: the
National Guard is brought back from Iraq to be deployed in Oakland.
Wherever there are hierarchies, it favors the ones on top to centralize
power. Building more checks and balances into the system just means
relying on the thing we need to be protected from for protection. The
only way to exert leverage on the authorities without being sucked into
their game is to develop horizontal networks that can act autonomously.
Yet when we're powerful enough to force the authorities to take us
seriously, we'll be powerful enough to solve our problems without them.
There's no way to freedom but through freedom. Rather than a single
bottleneck for all agency, we need a wide range of venues in which to
exercise power. Rather than a singular currency of legitimacy, we need
space for multiple narratives. In place of the coercion inherent in
government, we need decision-making structures that promote autonomy,
and practices of self-defense that can hold would-be rulers at bay.
Money is the ideal mechanism for implementing inequality. It is
abstract: it seems to be able to represent everything. It is universal:
people who have nothing else in common accept it as a fact of life. It
is impersonal: unlike hereditary privileges, it can be transferred
instantly from one person to another. It is fluid: the easier it is to
change position in a hierarchy, the more stable the hierarchy itself is.
Many who would revolt against a dictator readily accept the authority of
the market.
When all value is concentrated into a single instrument, even the
irrecoverable moments of our lives are drained of meaning, becoming
tokens in an abstract calculus of power. Everything that cannot be
financially quantified falls by the wayside. Life becomes a scramble for
financial gain: each against all, sell or be sold.
To make a profit: that means to gain more control over the resources of
society relative to everyone else. We can't all profit at once; for one
person to profit, others have to lose leverage, proportionately
speaking. When investors profit on employees' labor, that means the more
the employees work, the wider the financial gap between them becomes.
A system driven by profit produces poverty at the same pace as it
concentrates wealth. The pressure to compete generates innovations
faster than any previous system, but alongside them it produces
ever-increasing disparities: where equestrians once ruled over
pedestrians, stealth bombers now sail over motorists and homeless
people. And because everyone has to pursue profit rather than
accomplishing things for their own sake, the results of all this labor
can be disastrous. Climate change is just the latest in a series of
catastrophes that even the most powerful capitalists have been powerless
to halt. Indeed, capitalism doesn't reward entrepreneurs for remedying
crises, but for cashing in on them.
The foundation of capitalism is property rights—another social construct
we inherited from kings and aristocrats. Property shifts hands more
rapidly today, but the concept is the same: the idea of ownership
legitimizes the use of violence to enforce artificial imbalances in
access to land and resources.
Some people imagine that property could exist without the state. But
property rights are meaningless without a centralized authority to
impose them—and as long as a centralized authority exists, nothing is
truly yours, either. The money you make is minted by the state, subject
to tax and inflation. The title for your car is controlled by the DMV.
Your house doesn't belong to you, but to the bank that gave you the
mortgage; even if you own it outright, eminent domain trumps any deed.
What would it take to protect the things that are important to us?
Governments only exist by virtue of what they take from us; they will
always take more than they give. Markets only reward us for fleecing our
fellows, and others for fleecing us. The only real insurance is in our
social ties: if we want to be sure of our security, we need mutual aid
networks that can defend themselves.
Without money or property rights, our relationships to things would be
determined by our relationships with each other. Today, it is just the
other way around: our relationships with each other are determined by
our relationships to things. Doing away with property wouldn't mean you
would lose your belongings; it would mean that no sheriff or stock
market crash could take away the things you depend on. Instead of
answering to bureaucracy, we would begin from human needs; instead of
taking advantage of each other, we would pursue the advantages of
interdependence.
A scoundrel's worst fear is a society without property—for without it,
he will only get the respect he deserves. Without money, people are
valued for what they contribute to others' lives, not for what they can
bribe others to do. Without profit, every effort must be its own reward,
so there is no incentive for meaningless or destructive activity. The
things that really matter in life—passion, camaraderie, generosity—are
available in abundance. It takes legions of police and property
surveyors to impose the scarcity that traps us in this rat race.
Every order is founded on a crime against the preceding order—the crime
that dissolved it. Afterwards, the new order comes to be perceived as
legitimate, as people begin to take it for granted. The founding crime
of the United States of America was the rebellion against the authority
of the king of England. The founding crime of the society to come, if we
manage to survive this one, will do away with the laws and institutions
of today.
The category of crime holds everything that exceeds the limits of a
society—its worst and its best. Every system is haunted by all that it
cannot incorporate or control. Every order contains the seeds of its own
destruction.
Nothing lasts forever; that goes for empires and civilizations too. But
what could supersede this one? Can we imagine an order not premised on
the division of life into legitimate and illegitimate, legality and
criminality, rulers and ruled? What could be the last crime?
Anarchy is what happens wherever order is not imposed by force. It is
freedom: the process of continually reinventing ourselves and our
relationships.Any freely occurring process or phenomenon—a rainforest, a
circle of friends, your own body—is an anarchic harmony that persists
through constant change. Top-down control, on the other hand, can only
be maintained by constraint or coercion: the precarious discipline of
the high-school detention room, the factory farm in which pesticides and
herbicides defend sterile rows of genetically modified corn, the fragile
hegemony of a superpower.
Anarchism is the idea that everyone is entitled to complete
self-determination. No law, government, or decision-making process is
more important than the needs and desires of actual human beings. People
should be free to shape their relations to their mutual satisfaction,
and to stand up for themselves as they see fit. Anarchism is not a dogma
or a blueprint. It is not a system that would supposedly work if only it
were applied right, like democracy, nor a goal to be realized in some
far-off future, like communism. It is a way of acting and relating that
we can put into practice right now. In reference to any value system or
course of action, we can begin by asking: How does it distribute power?
Anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchy—every currency that
concentrates power into the hands of a few, every mechanism that puts us
at a distance from our potential. Against closed systems, we relish the
unknown before us, the chaos within us by virtue of which we are able to
be free.
When we see what all the different institutions and mechanisms of
domination have in common, it becomes clear that our individual
struggles are also part of something greater than us, something that
could connect us. When we come together on the basis of this connection,
everything changes: not only our struggles, but also our sense of
agency, our capacity for joy, the sense that our lives have meaning. All
it takes to find each other is to begin acting according to a different
logic.
To change everything, start anywhere.
The secret is to begin.