It is certain that justice demands of us our labors.
Perhaps, if we were the true and honest laborers of justice, we would make common cause.
Perhaps, in our justifiable action, we would enter The House of the White, and out we would drag Joe Biden.
We would string him up by the feet, a vision of Mussolini. And there he would stay, as a warning.
And then, perhaps, in 80 years, his granddaughter would revive his fascism. And get elected. And we would fail to stop it then.
Perhaps there is something to be learned in following, or not following, this Italian fashion. Perhaps history can propose us a question;
I wonder, what are we to do, in this hitler and mussolini election?
——
Too often, however, we only ask the question of justification.
What would we be Justified to do to our enemy?
To the ones who hurt us?
Who bound us to this devastation?
We ask it at the expense of this;
What would make this harm cease hurting?
What would stop it from happening again?
Is Justice the art of Retribution?
Or is it the act of Restitution?
The Art Of Making Things Right?
I won’t ask you not to kill Joe Biden, even as I tell you to vote for him. Come Robespierre, if you wish, to claim your prize. But I will ask you this;
What then? What then?
The World To Come Can Only Come From What is.
What Will You Do With The Time That You Win?
What then? What then?
Will your head be next for the basket?
No act of simple violence can end colonial domination. And an unplanned, inarticulate expression of violence will always be leveraged to create the will for even greater colonial devastation. Let us not forget, It was an anarchist who shot Franz Ferdinand. Let us not forget, a great suffering came from our action.
I know most people don’t see it this way, but to me, we are in a slow war. The police are an occupying military. The project of colonization hasn’t ended. Everyone is constantly being recolonized.
And because of this; Everything I do is about building supply lines, undoing the damage, making the world survivable. It’s about being strategic.
It is our responsibility to bring this system of suffering to an end. But to do so, we have to have the courage of a radical imagination. Not just the courage of the revolutionary, but also, the courage of the Utopian.
The State, (by which I mean, the whole of governments, militaries, bureaucracy, law, policing, and judgment) is an institution built by and for colonial domination. Devastation is the purpose. It exists only to maintain itself. Any bones it throws for you to gnaw on will rot in your belly; they are already cooked. The State cannot grant you anything it has not already taken. It can only exist on Death. Every mechanism of its maintenance is a mound of skulls piled high. We do not need it. It is not worth the cost. We have not always been this way. We need not be again. Join me in imagining a world where we are really, truly free.
What would a world like that look like, I wonder?
I was raised from seeds sewn in a small town, and the ethics of living fostered by this are still inside of me, still trying to grow.
We had a Food Pantry. It was no simple soup kitchen. It served as a receptacle for mass donation of dry goods and fresh ingredients. Much love was to be had in their distribution. The hunted meats and giant catfish supplemented this with delightful jubilation. Small farmers filled the bellies of the old and of the children.
This, my friends, is anarchism. The principles of anarchism, at its center, are this;
From Each Their Ability, and To Each Their Need.
We Only Go The Direction That We Step In.
In the Seeds of anarchy that exist, we find our liberation. The path to revolution is infrastructural, it must be built to be trod upon.
And It begins in the food pantry.
What needs to happen for us to live in a stateless, classless, moneyless society?
Well, we need everything to be free. We need to take care of one another without being forced. We must meet each others needs directly, systemically, and without accruing any ideas of deserving, earning, owing, or owning.
Put simply, for the farmer to donate the whole of her crop to the community, the community must donate the whole of everything the farmer needs to her directly.
We must be held, be provided for, to provide freely.
I have seen as we plant these seeds that they grow towards beauty. Community, undertaken as a beloved path toward the meeting of material and soulful needs, grows constantly towards providing. It is our responsibility as anarchists to nurture this.
But what, then, do we do in the meantime?
We have to ask ourselves how we can survive, even while the Reign of Domination still Swallows the Earth.
This is no simple task. It requires of us a willingness to accept our role and our culpability within the global structure which is destroying all life on the planet.
The greatest complaint lodged at the face of Power is this; we cannot escape it. It has us all in chains. It has taken nearly ten thousand years, but in the past two centuries it has successfully swallowed the whole earth. We are all inside of it. It uses us to feed the gut microbiome of its underbelly. We are both the food and the digestive liquid. We cannot escape, not at this moment. We cannot fully stop ourselves from feeding it, from breaking each other down into its nutrients.
Each of us hold inside ourselves a share of the responsibility for every single death that is accrued in the war of domination. For we each of us fuel the supply lines of suffering which surround us. It weighs heavy on our souls. We seek to escape it. We cannot. Every dollar spent builds the system. Every hour of wages is only paid to buy your participation; your silence in the face of it. It deprives you. It does so because it must keep you reliant.
There is a reason that Domination as a force always seeks the destruction of the indigenous. A relationship to land, held in common and not in ownership, and always returned to through gifts freely given; This is what allows anyone to exist outside the system.
To be colonized is to be made to fight on the behalf of it, to fight for your own destruction.
Every need that you have is a colonial invention. All that which is not freely given, was taken, and is sold back to you — in payment for your aid in stealing it again, every day, over and over again.
The guilt of this drives us to blindness.
We get hungry. We get angry. We resort to drunkenness, or delusion.
The greatest delusion we resort to is a denial of our participation. A belief that we still have the possibility of inaction. It soothes our colonized souls to believe we have the simple choice to not participate in further colonization.
As though an uncast ballot will uncast the bombs.
But our culpability in each others deaths will not diminish because we hide from it. In fact, if we do not take responsibility for it, it will grow exponentially. The unexamined participation in devastation will always kill wider, and kill more painfully.
I have condemned you.
I am sorry.
You have tortured me.
I forgive you.
Just know the truth. Tell yourself the truth as you shoot me. Let that truth writhe through you. Let it be the fire in your belly that sets you to action.
Gather inside of you the culpability.
But then, I want you, simultaneously, to release it.
Take responsibility for that which you can change,
But do not shackle yourself with the burden of punishment.
We will not solve this through punishment,
Only through precise, loving, directed action, that is designed to make a material difference.
Ursula K. Le Guin tells us this, in all her wisdom.
“No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
Do not let the truth of your participation in the atrocities lead you to self destruction. The guilt on your soul that drives you to despair is also the State’s tool.
There is no deserving. There is no earning.
There is only that which we seek to build, and the work it will take to build it.
There is only this;
Take Active Responsibility For The Wellbeing Of The Whole World –
For The Interdependent Web Of Existence In Which We Are All A Part.
——
On the election;
We have to win time to fight, but we also have to fight. It is a two step process. We cannot prioritize one side or the other over our collective liberation.
Start building towards radical change that makes systems of power obsolete. Start now. Your vote in November is meaningless if you are not doing this.
Vote in November to buy yourself time to continue the work. Do not hand the fascists the tools to kill you. Pick your battle field. Choose your enemy. Be strategic.
And then keep fighting.
There is no electoral win condition. There is no one who will ever get elected to high office that is on the side of life on earth continuing. The very structure of the state is designed to destroy us all. And it is plunging us towards that future fast, and faster every day. Biden is an erratic driver, weaving through cars to speed us towards death. But trump is a brick on the gas and a cut break line.
Do what helps the most for the least effort. For those of you that don’t face much voter repression, voting is an easy thing to do to slow the speed of the collapse.
But also, what you build will be what matters. Nothing built by the state can last and stay good. It is always poisoned fruit. Do not believe the fiction that they hold the solution. Only we do. People, working together, caring for each other, holding institutions of care, love, support, and revolution.
Always be stepping in the direction of anarchy.
Be strategic. Be kind. Be thoughtful. Envision utopia. Fight.
Overthrow The Government.
———————————-
Here is a joke I couldn’t fit in.
The democrats have said they will kill you for a dollar, a vote, and a hot dog. The republicans campaigned on killing you for free.
After months of internal debate , the democrats are killing you for just the hotdog.
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