If you ask a person what sort of behavior is acceptable, they will likely reply, “Do whatever you like so long as it doesn’t harm others.”

The principle described above is a “liberal” principle. Liberal, derived from the root word liberty, concerns the freedom of individuals to do as they please, as well as their individual rights which cannot be infringed upon by others.

The formal philosophical name of that principle is the “non-aggression axiom,” and it means that the initiation of force against another person is immoral. It is the single foundational principle of anarchism. Anarchism is a political philosophy that asserts this principle to be the sole moral law, and in doing so comes to a logical conclusion: the institution we call the “government” is in the business of breaking this law constantly.

We are all aware of it. Most obviously, the government takes a portion, about one third, of all of our earnings. We have no choice in this matter, and we have absolutely minimal view on how it is spent. This directly violates the ethics of liberalism.

Secondly, the government decrees certain items and actions to be “illegal”. There was a time the government outlawed alcohol in the United States. In many governments, one is supposed to have certain religious beliefs, which makes merely thinking certain thoughts illegal. The mere concept of illegality is illiberal.

Naturally, one must object, “But don’t we need the government? Isn’t it only practical? Who will punish murderers? Who will feed the poor? Who will defend us from enemies?” These are all good questions, which we as open-minded people must further explore. But the point stands for now that to accept government is, logically, to reject that common sense principle of individual liberty.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

according to this article, you are being lied to about pirates. in the 17th century, pirates were extremely popular in England because they generally operated democratically and without brutal British discipline. likewise, today's Somali "pirates" have the support of the populace, as they are taking action against European ships stealing all the fish and dumping nuclear waste (presumably, the fishermen had no idea the mafia was dumping toxic sludge there). in any case, since Somalia has no state, the "pirates" are more like a volunteer coast guard. yarh!

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits to be those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.

http://community.livejournal.com/ljuser_buyout/

Once upon a time, Brad Fitz sold LJ to SixApart, which then promptly sold it again to Sup for $30 million.

Sup, in the meantime, has had difficulty making a profit on LJ and now seems to think the whole deal was a loser. They recently fired 20 of LJ's 28 employees, leaving only a caretaker financial staff with little or no technical expertise. It turns out to be very difficult to make money on a network and blog site like LJ.

Which means LJ will languish and wither for lack of support, or be sold off to somebody else to see if they can make a go of it.

But what if a million or two LJ users got together and pitched in to create a not-for-profit foundation to buy LJ back and run it for the benefit of its users?

This community now exists as a rallying point for the organization of exactly such an effort.

Welcome. If you are interested in joining us in planning, organizing, and effecting a user buyout of LiveJournal, please join us.

The general strike in Barcelona in 1902 roused, as we have seen, a good deal of enthusiasm among the working classes of the rest of the country. Terrorism had been tried and had failed, half a century of peasant revolts had produced no result beyond long terms of imprisonment and executions: surely the general strike was the key which would unlock the door to happiness and plenty! An extraordinary ferment, as sudden and as apparently as causeless as a religious revival, swept over the country districts. In the fields, in the farms and wayside inns only one subject was discussed and always with intense seriousness and fervour. In the midday rests, and at night after supper, groups were formed to listen to a labourer reading aloud from one of the Anarchist newspapers. Then came speeches and comments. It was what they had known and felt all their lives. How could they shut their ears to it? And immense desire sprang up to read and learn, so as to have access to this store knowledge and wisdom provided by the Anarchist press. One met peasants reading everywhere, on mule back, at meal time under the olive trees. Those who could not read, by force of hearing others spell out aloud their favourite passages, would learn whole newspaper articles by heart.

Sometimes, after a single reading from Tierra y Libertad or El Productor, a labourer would feel illuminated by the new faith. The scales would fall from his eyes and everything would seem clear to him. He then became an obrero consciente. He gave up smoking, drinking and gambling. He no longer frequented brothels. He took care never to pronounce the word God. He did not marry but lived with his compañera, to whom he was strictly faithful, and refused to baptize his children.

--Gerald Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

so i stayed up till 3 am last night finishing Cory Doctorow's latest novel, Little Brother (on-line in its entirety for your reading and remixing pleasure, as usual). it is a very-near-future (in a world only slightly more dystopian than our own) techno-thriller starring a teenager who, after the Bay Bridge in San Francisco is blown up, is apprehended by Homeland Security and taken to a Guantanamo-like facility somewhere in the Bay Area. as a result of this incident, after the protagonist is let out, he begins a one-man crusade against the security state which kind of morphs into an open-source counter cultural-youth-movement cum direct action network. about a thousand Doctorovian themes are touched on: crypto, linux, MMORPGs, LARPing, civil liberties, Pirate Bay, sex, drugs, rock and roll, RFIDs, flash mobs, Emma Goldman, the list could go on and on. it's like an accidental post-BoingBoing teenage hacker resistance movement kind of novel. in other words, right up my alley. i was fairly riveted by it. the crazy thing is that this is like, a cross between an ideological manifesto and a revolutionary technology HOWTO guide - disguised as Young Adult fiction. the thought of masses of contemporary adolescents reading this thing floods me with an extreme sense of optimistic glee. as Neil Gaiman said:

I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.

Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/klein_lewis

you gotta love a small-scale anarchist revolution brought about by necessity in the wake of capitalism's collapse.

Almost entirely under the media radar, workers in Argentina have been responding to rampant unemployment and capital flight by taking over traditional businesses that have gone bankrupt and are reopening them under democratic worker management. It's an old idea reclaimed and retrofitted for a brutal new time. The principles are so simple, so elementally fair, that they seem more self-evident than radical when articulated by one of the workers in this book: "We formed the cooperative with the criteria of equal wages and making basic decisions by assembly; we are against the separation of manual and intellectual work; we want a rotation of positions and, above all, the ability to recall our elected leaders."

The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale--some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country's other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country's deeply unequal "recovery." Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: This is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.

Like a number of other emerging social movements around the world, the workers in the recovered companies are rewriting the traditional script for how change is supposed to happen. Rather than following anyone's ten-point plan for revolution, the workers are darting ahead of the theory--at least, straight to the part where they get their jobs back. In Argentina, the theorists are chasing after the factory workers, trying to analyze what is already in noisy production.

These struggles have had a tremendous impact on the imaginations of activists around the world. At this point there are many more starry-eyed grad papers on the phenomenon than there are recovered companies. But there is also a renewed interest in democratic workplaces from Durban to Melbourne to New Orleans.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/2007/07/09/070709on_onlineonly_surowiecki

yargh!

When Bob Dylan sang, “To live outside the law you must be honest,” he probably wasn’t thinking of seventeenth-century pirate captains. Nonetheless, his dictum seems to apply to them. While pirates were certainly cruel and violent criminals, pirate ships were hardly the floating tyrannies of popular imagination. As a fascinating new paper by Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University, and “The Republic of Pirates,” a new book by Colin Woodard, make clear, pirate ships limited the power of captains and guaranteed crew members a say in the ship’s affairs. The surprising thing is that, even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in Leeson’s words, among “the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.”

Leeson is fascinated by pirates because they flourished outside the state—and, therefore, outside the law. They could not count on higher authorities to insure that people would live up to promises or obey rules. Unlike the Mafia, pirates were not bound by ethnic or family ties; crews were as remarkably diverse as in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Nor were they held together primarily by violence; while pirates did conscript some crew members, many volunteered. More strikingly, pirate ships were governed by what amounted to simple constitutions that, in greater or lesser detail, laid out the rights and duties of crewmen, rules for the handling of disputes, and incentive and insurance payments to insure that crewmen would act bravely in battle. (The rules that governed a ship that the buccaneer John Exquemelin sailed on, for instance, provided that six hundred pieces of eight would go to a man who lost his right arm.) The Pirates’ Code mentioned in the “Caribbean” series was not, in that sense, a myth, although in effect each ship had its own code.

Not only the black bloc was huge that day (more than 5,000 people of mixed gender and nationality: a Black Sea by the Baltic) and was at the head at the demo, but most of the demonstrators in the sandy plain next to the Move Against G8 concert stage supported materially and morally the fierce resistance (the sky was clouded with stones and bottles) put up by black-clad protesters, who repeatedly forced the riot cops to retreat. When after a few hours of rioting more than a dozen water cannons were pulled in and we got fully encircled with only water behind our shoulders, antifa and intervenionist leftist trucks interposed themselves between protesters and police. There was a silent, tense standoff.

Then Bob Marley blared from the soundsystems and protesters started dancing on armored vehicles, completely disorienting the exhausted riot cops: after hours of chaotic clashes, the battle of Rostock was finally over. Many boys with black hoodies, sunglasses and baseball hats then returned to the camp with pink flowers in their hair, while most of the girls had their hair dyed shocking pink.

What I mean by this is that violent resistance is just an element of the ecosystem of protest unveiled at Rostock. Black resistance and pink blockades go hand in hand, and pink clowns were defended by black anarchists when the police roughed them up during the actions and demonstrations: pink and black are complementary and not substitutes, like many, including myself, were led to believe in the past few years.

Furthermore, the black sweatshirt has become a universal symbol of anticapitalistic self-identification, even among people that would never throw a bottle: it simply means you’re on the side of Ungdomshuset, Mehringhof, Rote Flora, Köpi, and other nodal European social squats currently threatened with eviction and persecution. Urban rebellion is spreading across many European cities because there is a widespread feeling that the whole anarcho-punk, radical-autonomist, pink-queer way of life could be wiped out if we don’t put up major resistance against police repression and the assorted forces of bourgeois and clerical respectability.

I’d like to touch on symbolic aspects of political iconography and vexillology that in my opinion point to future developments in the manifestations of social dissent by the European radicalized youth. The major presence of antifa red&black and antimperialist red groups notwithstanding, the most innovative expressions seen at Rostock were pink, black, pirate.

Pink was omnipresent in Rostock, in the feminist, queer, and downright heretic (i.e. pinko) sense of the word. Make Capitalism History had a pink star as symbol and the actions at the Bombodrome (a military base) sported a pink&black antifa flag and pink pyramids. At the June 2 demo, the much-applauded Euromayday contingent of superheroes against precarity carrying balloon-signs and organized by Fels (Für eine linke Strömung – “For a Leftist Current”) and Die Überflüssigen (The Superfluous), the cross-metropolitan activist network against welfare counter-reforms, carried a big pink banner saying: “Let's make the g8 precarious, flexifight vs. the new world order!”.

The June 4 demo to assert the rights of migrants, stop deportation and shut down detention centers for sans papiers waved a pink flag with a black star and people in front carried a huge pink banner over their heads saying “Don’t have sex with a nazi”.

The fantastic actions performed by the Clown Army (pink and green camouflage, harlequin flag) and the pink samba bands (silver jolly roger with two crossed swords over pink flag) were the most evident expressions of this political tendency that has progressed immensely since the pink block emerged in London and Prague around 2000 and then spread to all culturally deviant Europe. The Queer Barrio in Reddelich advertised by a poster with pink bunnies, and the Pink Rabbits providing the alert system when cops showed up at the Rostock camp were other instances of the flowering of pink in Rostock-Heiligendamm.

Pirates and piracy are immensely popular among kids and youngsters and were another defining chromatic feature of Rostock’s protests. As the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise scores high at the box office, Pirate Bay is bankrupting Hollywood with its free p2p filesharing service. Pirates have traditionally been about challenging state sovereignty (see Marcus Reddiker and Hakim Bey) in order to build post-sovereign forms of self-government based on horizontal networking and mulatto camaraderie: Tortuga as the first modern autonomous zone. True to form, the Jolly Roger was waving on many tents and in all the actions, often either black-on-pink or pink-on-black. And Sankt Pauli soccer supporters with their black and jolly-rogered sweatshirts descended en masse to Rostock from Hamburg to join the fray.

In Rostock, we understood that we have been left alone to build an anticapitalist opposition in Europe, that the radicalized and precarized twentysomethings and thirtysomethings from all the cities of the continent, both East and West, must bear the brunt of the securitarian Europe put in place by Merkel, Sarkozy, and EU government and business elites. But the future is unwritten and our black-and-pink pirate flag waves higher and higher, while the paler and paler red and green colors of the middle-aged European left recede into irrelevance, due their timidity and pusillanimity. The movement managed to fight back against police intimidation and went on to block the summit. At this stage, it seems like we are the only hope left versus the undemocratic system of unified markets and coordinated policing European élites have in store for us. [+]

http://www.myspace.com/offthegridmovie
http://www.reason.com/news/show/120512.html

a movie about the national hard-core off-the-grid anarcho-patriot TAZ network. in other words, my kinda people.

In 15 square miles of abandoned land, about 400 misfits—aging hippies, disillusioned veterans, teenage runaways—have built a community where no one cares if you smoke pot, fire your rifle all day, let your kids drive your car, or walk around naked in the desert heat. It's a landscape of beat-up old trailers, shacks jerry-rigged from recycled materials, solar panels, little farms, greenhouses, and at least one tipi. "Where I live is the last remaining land of America that is left," says Dreadie Jeff, another Mesa resident. "You can do what you fucking want there."

The local culture defies easy stereotypes. "Going into this community with this traditional mainstream liberal ideology," Jeremy says, "we realized all our preconceived notions were bullshit. These people were extremely into their Second Amendment rights, and they were also into marijuana legalization. They don't fit into these molds." There's a touch of madness to the place as well. Mama Phyllis, a Mesa woman who used to be a psychiatric nurse ("I couldn't do that anymore," she says, and leaves it at that), calls it "the largest outdoor insane asylum." The governing philosophy is a mix of anarchism, patriotism, New Age stoner wisdom, and a militia-style distrust of the state. Early in the film Dreadie Jeff, a veteran of the first Gulf War, exclaims that his military oath was not "to defend this land, it's not to defend the people, it's not to defend the motherfucking asshole president of the United States. My military oath goes, 'I solemnly swear to defend the Constitution of the United States of America from all enemies, foreign and domestic.'" The Constitution's "biggest enemy," he adds, is "this fucking government that is in place right now."

Even as it melds different subcultures—"it's the crossroads," Jeremy says, "between utopian idealism and a post-apocalyptic world"—the Mesa also represents a subculture of its own. At the end of the picture there's a hint of a larger network hidden somewhere in the folds of the map: One of the film's characters, we learn, has moved to a similar community in Hawaii. "There's a circuit," says Randy. "There's a whole off-grid underground." The members of that world range from relatively wealthy environmentalists trying to make a statement about sustainability to poorer people in places like the Mesa, people whose central interest isn't going off the grid so much as it's getting off the radar.