Big props to my great friend and co-conspirator Dan Sieradski of Orthodox Anarchist for the new design for my blog, which he whipped up in a matter of minutes! Hope you like the new banner and colour scheme that are more in tune with the actual book!
Started working on getting together a book tour for Germany, Holland and the UK this summer - details soon!
Here’s the piece Lucy and I published in Haaretz (english editions).
Food troubles are here to stay
By Uri Gordon and Lucy MichaelsThe government sends calming signals and says no dramatic shortages are expected. The Economist says do nothing, market forces will sort it all out. But as the global food-price crisis hit Israel this week, something told us we are not being told the whole story.
Around the world food prices are soaring. Since January 2006, the price of rice has risen by 217 percent. Wheat, corn and soybean prices have more than doubled, and in several countries, milk and meat prices have also doubled.
Food prices and falling wages have sparked riots in more than 30 countries from Bangladesh to Egypt to Haiti - where the prices of rice, beans, fruit and condensed milk have gone up 50 percent over a few months, while the price of fuel has tripled.
The poor are being hit the hardest. The steep price rises make a huge difference in countries like Indonesia, where food purchases alone eat up over half of a family’s disposable income (compared to 7.3 percent in the United States, and close to 20 percent in Israel).
With Israel’s high dependence on food imports, it is no surprise that prices are rising. The country imports over 90 percent of its cereals, 70-80 percent of its fish and beef, and half of its pulses, oilseeds and nuts. We may soon be relying far more on Israeli potatoes, fruit and vegetables, since the present crisis appears to be part of a worrying long-term trend.
The striking fact is that from 1974 to 2005, real food prices dropped by 75 percent globally. So what can explain this sudden and aggressive upturn? Though it has been played down in official reactions, the obvious explanation is staring us in the face: the dramatic rise in oil prices.
In January 1999, crude oil cost $8 a barrel. Today it costs $119. Oil is vital for every stage of industrialized agriculture: from synthetic-pesticide and fertilizer production, to fuel for farm machinery and international freight. All of these have seen steep price hikes, and not surprisingly, food prices have risen with them.
The reality is that we are effectively “eating oil.” The shift to industrial agriculture over the last 60 years has left our food systems dependent on a nonrenewable resource. Now we are paying the price.
The rise in oil prices betrays a genuine market concern about “peak oil.” Most geologists today agree that world oil production is reaching, or has already reached, its point of historical maximum. Like with any other nonrenewable resource, once the peak is passed, oil availability begins to decline and prices rise to reflect the growing scarcity.
Western governments don’t publicly talk about peak oil, but they have been quietly and efficiently subsidizing the massive expansion of biofuels: converting the use of millions of acres of land from food to fuel crops, such as maize and canola, again contributing to rising food prices. Meanwhile, land previously used to grow food is increasingly converted to grow animal feed, as the globalization of the American diet results in an increasing demand for meat worldwide.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization hopes that a projected 2.6-percent increase in world cereal production next year will ease the crisis. But this depends on favorable weather. This year, droughts in Australia and unseasonable rains in India caused crop failures that contributed to the crisis. If these events represent a new era of erratic and unpredictable weather patterns driven by global warming, the projections may fail to materialize.
Between peak oil and climate change, this may be the “perfect storm” that marks the beginning of the end of our civilization in hyperdrive. At the very least, the situation forces us to recognize that our modern industrial food system is extremely vulnerable and cannot be sustained on the current model.
The good news is that around the world, and in Israel, too, people are creating solutions that can make our future less precarious. Intelligent, small-scale and organic-farming methods, together with a resilient local economy, can help us weather the storm. This will require some serious transitions, but it is entirely possible.
Cuba survived its own version of peak oil with the collapse of the Soviet Union - its major source of food and oil imports. In response, the Cubans swiftly turned their gardens over for food production, and switched from industrialized agriculture to cooperatively owned organic farms.
Israel will also need to confront the challenge of self-sufficiency. Connecting the dots, the food and fuel crisis this year will only be exacerbated by the serious water crisis caused by the cold dry winter. Israel’s clever “techno-fix” for the water crisis, desalinization, is not the solution, since it is hugely energy intensive. Breaking the addiction to oil is clearly a necessary step in a transition to a healthier and more sustainable society.
Dr. Uri Gordon teaches at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, and is the author of “Anarchy Alive!” (Pluto Press). Lucy Michaels is a doctoral environmental policy researcher at Ben- Gurion University.
by Jyoti Roi at Feminist Review…and she seems to like it! Great to see every ideological tag getting scent-marked in turn…See Jyoti’s own blog here
In Anarchy Alive! Israeli activist and ‘anarchademic’ Uri Gordon draws on his own activism as well as extensive researching of anti-authoritarian lifestyles, philosophies, and actions of activist communities to propose a theorem of contemporary anarchist ideology. The time at the end of the twentieth century where there was a global uprising against corporate tyranny is recalled and exemplified in mass demonstrations such as the worldwide J18 demonstrations, the Seattle WTO protest, and the Genoa protest against the G8 summit. Different activist communities were united in the fight to end oppressive systems, and it seemed a time, Gordon writes, that would “accelerate in an unstoppable crescendo until genuine social transformation was achieved.”
The change that came in late 2001 was not one people expected. The war against terror also became a war on the global activist movement, changing the way people demonstrated and engaged. Anarchy Alive! suggests the “tides are turning” again, and that “a new surge of struggle may be on the horizon.”
Offering his perspectives in a much larger conversation of contemporary political theory, he confronts issues such as ‘violence’ and ‘technology’ as areas where activists differ in perspectives, and uses historical as well as current examples to reinvigorate these debates. The chapter on power is particularly interesting for a feminist perspective, and Gordon does well of highlighting the contributions of feminist, queer, anti-racist, anti-war, and all other activists to this all-encompassing contemporary anarchist theory.
Gordon notes that what sets apart his contemporary anarchist theory from the old-school definitions of ‘capital A’ Anarchist theory is, in part, the wide variety of symbolic actions of protest against dominant culture, whether one is defined an anarchist or not. Hacking a corporate computer system, starting a community garden, and spraying paint on an advertisement are all acts of anti-authoritarian direct action. Not just celebrating these acts of culture jamming and DIY action, Gordon is proposing a common way forward, to extend past these acts and to envision an end result. He attempts to weave these anti-authoritarian threads together to re-form a solid movement under the term ‘anarchism’.
The most interesting aspect of Anarchy Alive! is the final chapter in which Gordon visits the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. He talks of his involvement with Anarchists Against the Wall – a group of Israeli activists who oppose the barriers being constructed between Israeli and Palestinian territories. From this he talks of the idea of ‘bioregions’, which is a model of co-existence not built upon nation states, or the hierarchical features of them: patriarchy, racism, consumerism, etc. It is in this idea of co-existence that the wide variety of anti-authoritarian protests and actions are called to once again unite their actions for this common goal.
A result of his doctorate on contemporary anarchist theory written at Oxford, Anarchy Alive! assumes some knowledge of contemporary activist issues, and perhaps anarchist leanings. It is written in a heavy academic style, but is engaging and dynamic, offering an intelligent, inclusive, and ideological vision of contemporary anarchist politics.
This is from On Faith, a Washington Post / Newsweek column on religion that she writes for.
Denied Entry Into Israel
By StarhawkOn the outskirts of Ben Gurion International Airport there is a jail where those who are denied entry into Israel are taken to wait. It’s not a horrible place, as jails go - the windows open, albeit with bars on the other side, admitting the dawn chorus of birdsong and a breeze that hints of rain. The food is as bad as only institutional Israeli food can be - but no one is starving, or screaming. Much worse places exist, especially for Palestinians, who can be held for months in ‘Administrative Detention’ without formal charge or trial. Yet this is a sad place, full of disappointment and shattered hopes.
That’s where I was put a few weeks ago when I was denied entry into Israel.
My companions each had their own, sad tale. A slim, Muslim American law student in a tightly wrapped headscarf had been plucked out of a human rights course she helped to organize and plan. A young Filipina, her face scarred by acne, her belly six months swollen with child, had overstayed her visa and is being sent away from her Arab lover. A Siberian gynecologist, after eight years in Israel, instructed me to drink her Orangina and shrugged her shoulders.
“Lawyers, no good,” she told me. “Shekels, shekels, shekels.” She rubbed her fingers together in the universal sign for coins. “If they want you to go, you must go.”
I had my pocket Tarot cards with me, and I read for the pert blonde from Moldova who had been there for a month while her lawyer shepherded her case through the courts. She was so radiantly cheerful that I wondered what her life must have been like outside these walls. I read for two young Filipina sisters, delicate and beautiful as birds, and saw their scared, sad eyes light up for a moment, with hope and visions of the world outside the walls.
Their transgressions are economic. Having closed her borders to the Palestinians, the closest pool of chap labor, Israel now attracts the poor and ambitious from around the globe. They work as domestics or sex workers or field hands, or earn more money in skilled professions than they can possibly make back home. Until they stay too long.
I found myself in their company for other reasons. I am now a member of a small, exclusive club – the ranks of Jews not welcome in Israel.
As a Jew, there are many things I can be faulted for. Reviving the Old Religion of the Goddess may be my worst theological transgression, although in the eyes of my family it barely counts against my far worse failures: to marry a Jewish man and produce a Jewish child. Yet none of these were at issue on the day I was denied entry.
The reason I was given was that my past work with the International Solidarity Movement, a group that supports Palestinian nonviolence. The ISM brings internationals to support demonstrations and civil resistance, for their presence adds a slim margin of safety that makes this method of protest possible. Founded by Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, it is one of many groups that has helped nurture a nonviolent movement that daily grows stronger in spite of its near invisibility in the media and on the international scene.
Members of the ISM have stood witness in refugee camps under siege by the Israeli military. They have camped beside Palestinians and Israeli allies in the path of the bulldozers clearing land for the ‘security’ wall which confiscates Palestinian farmland without compensation. They have marched in demonstrations, organized activities for children confined and frustrated by months-long curfews, negotiated with soldiers at checkpoints, and reported on a side of the occupation rarely seen by outsiders. Two have been killed in the course of their actions: Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer when she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home, and Tom Hurndall, shot by an Israeli sniper in Rafah as he ran to the aid of a group of children under fire.
The wall which Israel has been building for more than four years wanders deep into the territory once reserved for a Palestinian state, protecting Jewish settlements which themselves grab crucial territory and sit atop vital aquifers. As it has progressed, a nonviolent movement has grown as village after village in its path has resisted with peace camps, demonstrations and civil disobedience instead of rockets and suicide bombs. They invite Israelis to join them, and many do, crossing the lines of division and cracking the entrenched belief that Israelis and Palestinians can never get along.
“We are not Israeli or Palestinian,” one young protester said to me. “We are people working together against injustice.” I see this movement as a tiny ray of hope in the entrenched bitterness and despair of an intractable situation. I’m proud to have had some small part in it, though the journey to get there was not easy.
For someone born and raised in the post-war Jewish community of the Fifties - even for a flagrant Pagan - the existence of Israel, of a refuge, a safe haven in a potentially hostile world, has always been a deep, unconscious ground of security. To consider that Israel might be doing wrong, might herself be oppressing another people, is excruciatingly, emotionally painful. And yet it is the values of my Jewish upbringing that pushed me toward involvement. I am Jewish and Pagan, and both sets of values are in me, inextricably intertwined. They deeply make me who I am.
“Justice, Justice, You shall pursue” is one of the Biblical verses that stays with me, always. To me, that means an obligation to go where truth and justice lead - even into places that are painful and hard to face.
Ironically, I had come to Israel this time not to work with the ISM, but with the intention of teaching and learning from Green organizations. I had been invited by three Israeli groups to present my work in Permaculture and ecological design, and to learn from the innovative work they are doing.
For On Faith, I had hoped to talk to people about their faith and its role in the struggle. I wanted to ask a spectrum of people three questions: What do you believe in? How does that belief affect your choice of how to fight? And how does it affect your relationship to the land? Lying in jail, unable to sleep through the long, tense, night, I ask myself those questions. What do I believe?
I believe the sacred is present in the world, in nature and in every human being, moving through us as love, creativity, and the thirst for justice: powers ultimately greater than the gun and the bomb. Because of that belief, I choose nonviolence as my method of struggle, for it allows me to honor the sacred even in those who oppose me. And I believe that nonviolence is a powerful strategy for breaking the vicious cycles of attack and revenge that trap us. Nonviolence is unexpected.
What is my relationship to this land, which I have now been banned from, and where I can no longer seek refuge? It is the land of my ancestors. I love it, but I do not wish to own it or claim it or exclude others from it. Those who truly love the land will build soil, not walls, and plant trees, not bulldoze them down. And they will take the risk to love all the peoples of the land, to dare to bridge the divisions and together pursue justice.
Written by Alex Prichard, in the new issue (16:1) of Anarchist Studies
Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto Press, 2007), ISBN 9780745326832 (Paperback), £15.99.
It is widely recognised that these are exciting times for anarchist theory. Uri Gordon’s book is one of many by the young veterans of the varied anarchist practices of the last ten years (at least) and can only add to this excitement. It is hugely learned and yet easy to read; it is also short and to the point, un-pompous and hugely informative, for the adept or novices in anarchist thought alike. For those with more theory than practice, this book ought to be required reading. In fact, I’d say that not only will it become required reading in the anarchist movement, but it will have a sizeable impact on the academy, (or ‘anarchademics’ (p. 163) – one of a number of neologisms, like ‘r/evolution’, I loved). In short, I believe this will be a defining text in anarchist circles for the next few years at the very least.
But why? What are the virtues of the book and where do they come from (aside from style and length of course)? Let’s begin, somewhat conventionally with the introduction. It is short but clear in positioning itself in pedagogic social praxis. It is the product of participant observation and theoretical reflection and it is unashamedly contemporary in terms of both. The book is not designed to contribute to academic debates about the fineries of anarchist theory (though, as I will show, it does), but is designed as a tool for activists trying to understand anarchism, and inadvertently helps theorists see that practice helps us understand theory. The book does this through engaging with some key practical and theoretical conundrums facing the contemporary movement. This makes it something of a user’s manual for anarchist activism, written by an engaged and intelligent academic that has seen his fair share of the front line.
The impact of Gordon’s Oxford background, particularly the ideas of Michael Freeden who has blazed a trail through the study of ideologies, is clear. Gordon discuses anarchism as a ‘political culture’ or social praxis, ironically simply allowing Gordon to be an anarchist in refusing to reduce ideas to other social, economic or political forces and to see anarchism as a lived plethora or ‘network’ of ideas and practices in social and historical context. Unfortunately Gordon’s historical context does not stretch far enough back into the past and so the novelty of contemporary ideas is overplayed. For example, Gordon argues that “the most prominent feature of the new anarchist formulation […] is the generalisation of the target of anarchist resistance to all forms of domination in society” (p. 30). This presentism is a standard flaw in contemporary anarchist literature. Anarchism has always been about more than just the state and capitalism. Emma Goldman was a feminist, Reclus an ecologist, Landauer and Rocker were concerned with race and ethnicity. Still, this is not to detract from the force of Gordon’s work, only to contextualise it within the dominant discursive frameworks set by Marxism as a way of understanding the left’s past.
However, the book is not a history of ideas. It is about how anarchist practice can help us understand and develop anarchist theory. Chapter 3 investigates the ongoing issue of power and authority within the anarchist movement and settles a number of debates in unexpectedly clever ways. For example, Gordon argues that democratic participation is not always a good in itself. Rather, the values of democratic practices need to be understood in context. Protesters cannot always be transparent and not everyone wants to take part, so neither democracy nor transparency is a transcendent good. Gordon claims that while both participatory democracy in anarchist communities and consensus are valuable, they are not imposable because “anarchist organising is built on pure voluntarism” (p. 76). The ethic is clear here, but perhaps he overstates this a little. Gordon discusses how patriarchy clearly affects social dynamics in anarchist groups, and voluntarism in this context is not always possible and not always protected, let alone protested. Anarchist organising is far messier than the concept of voluntarism implies. But this is a minor quibble, born of a rare example of overstatement.
Chapter 4 looks at the issue of violence which, I found interesting to read, is no longer an issue in the movement – it having been settled according to the principle of “diversity of tactics”. Still, violence raises important questions about anarchist praxis, which Gordon investigates at length. Here he leans on the concept of prefiguration to understand how to legitimise and understand the rationale behind acts of violence. Again this implies context. Right and wrong can only be understood in context, means are ends in the making, and that there is no mathematical formula for social right, only the constant interpenetration of theory by practice and vice versa.
Chapter 5 looks at technology and its place in society and the movement. One chapter had to come last in terms of how it appealed to me and this was it – though of course the bar had been raised quite high by this point. This may have been because the debate itself is rather tired and we all know the arguments about technology and power, nature and capitalism and so on. Gordon solution is also unsurprising: permaculture, low-tech lifestyles and anarchist principles.
If there is one sticky issue I’ve always worried about, it is how to support or affect macro-social change as anarchists, and nationalism and self-determination within a statist structure of social relations, the focus of Chapter 6, are a case in point. Again, Gordon’s solution is far simpler that I had anticipated and one which makes me so glad that anarchism is in such rude health. Gordon shows that direct action helps in the here and now and that that issues of global politics cannot be lived in micro communities and by activists. Gordon suggests we ought to understand it the other way around. We ought to think about how micro social practices help generate macro change. Thus the importance of thinking about how to organise along anarchist lines. This helps us support the emergence of self-governance and communal modes of emancipation without the need for grand historical blueprints and appeals to mass constituencies. To paraphrase Ghandi, anarchist prefiguration is nourishing the change we want to see in the world within our groups.
In sum, Gordon makes clear that anarchism is all about context and prefiguration and the constant struggle for emancipation from all forms of domination. Anarchism demands and seeks to institute the creation of forms of community and institutions that help us to achieve this without foreclosing on the idea that we may have to change our minds and our institutions as society changes in the future. In fact, as technology and ideas change society we must constantly reflect on the impact of all three on self-governance and structures of exploitation. Theory is important to understand how the world works; but we need to act to make theory truly valuable. But this ought to compel us to be reflective on our practices, implying that anarchism will always be in a process of change. Basically, anarchism is a messy business, but this book has the potential to chart a path through this messiness, and arm us with conceptual and practical clarity at the very least.
This appeared on Saturday, you can see the original page here.
Anarchy Alive!, by Uri Gordon (Pluto Press, £15.99)
Anarchists are ubiquitous, at high-profile rallies and protests, but most of them describe themselves as “autonomous”, “anti-authoritarian”, or “horizontal”. An academic and activist himself (”Uri Gordon has been tear-gassed in several major European cities”), Gordon calls them all anarchists anyway, so as to offer them a conceptual framework, examining the problems of organisation within anarchist groups themselves, or suggesting that they need to confront explicitly the question of their attitude to political violence rather than sweeping it under the carpet. (In this context he tells some interesting stories about the protest movements among young Israelis in which he was involved.) Finally, Gordon addresses the apparent contemporary paradox that anarchist-style movements express resistance to new technologies while making fruitful use of the internet and mobile messaging. Interesting to see that anarchists themselves do not eschew euphemism or Unspeak, viz the agenda of some “green anarchists” to take part in “the assisted decomposition of industrial civilisation”. “Assisted decomposition” is a splendid circumlocution, as though smashing the modern world were just the same thing as lovingly nurturing a compost heap.
This one was recently noticed by Ronald Creagh and posted to the Research on Anarchism forum.
Mark F. Ettin and Bertram D. Cohen, “Working through a Psychotherapy Group’s Political Cultures” in International Journal of Group Psychotherapy. (2003) 53 (4) : 479-504.
ABSTRACT: Macropolitical evolution, starting with authoritarian monarchism, has moved through anarchistic transitions either to the totalitarianism of fascism and communism or to liberal and social democracy. We posit analogous micropolitical development in process-oriented therapy groups: “dependence” and “counter-dependence” corresponding to monarchism and anarchism; and “independence” and “interdependence” to liberal and social democracy, respectively. Transition from counter-dependence to independence and interdependence may be: (1) facilitated through group members’ cooperative experience of rebellion, or (2) blocked by collective identification, the internalization of dystopian or Utopian fantasies that coalesce as “group-self” perceptions. We explore how group therapists work clinically with and through these several “political cultures” in the service of group and self transformation.
Outrageous. Original link with author contacts
Just finished doing this piece for upload - a really interesting account of the use of “soft” martial art techniques in protest situations.
Kitaido and Nonviolent Resistance
by Aviv Tatarsky
www.notes.co.il/aviv/[Translator's note: Kitaido is a movement system and body/mind practice rooted in Japanese martial arts such as Shintaido and Karate. Wakame is a technique based on the movement of the Japanese kelp of the same name. For background on Bil’in and the joint struggle see links below.]
On Friday I joined a demonstration in Bil’in – a Palestinian village in the occupied territories – against the theft of more than half of the village’s lands as part of the construction of the separation fence. The event saw extremely violent behavior of the security forces, but this angering and frustrating behavior also gave me an unexpected opportunity to practice Kitaido.
It begins when 80 people from Jerusalem get on transit vans that are supposed to drive them from where the army stopped our buses to Bil’in. Three Humvees try to block the road in front of the cars. I join another three people and we stand in front of the Humvees so they can’t move. Soldiers get off the Humvees and push us aside. We get back in front of the Humvees. We stand, the soldiers shove us and we get back in front of the Humvees. Quickly the soldiers become more violent. We continue to resist passively. The Humvees advance but very slowly and our transits retreat. The soldiers’ violence increases. Harsh shoving, threatening, waving. They have no authority to stop the transit cars. The soldiers are stronger than me; I can’t prevent them from pushing me. Instinctively I do Wakame with them. My body is soft and lets itself be pushed. Not only does it protect me from injury, it also allows me to lightly get back in front of the Humvee while using the momentum that the soldier gave me. A soldier with murder in his eyes rushes at me. He weighs much more than I do and intends to collide. The Wakame leaves me unharmed time after time.
The Wakame technique also has a significant psychological effect. First of all there is no fear. The shoving, the blows, the fact of being thrown in every direction are something to flow with, to become one with – there is no need to resist. And my body knows how to do that instinctively. I don’t need to transmit any order or any calming signal. Usually I’m afraid to be injured. Here I am thrown to the curb of the road and might stagger among rocks and building debris – somehow I stay calm. Another psychological effect is even more significant. Since I want to prevent the Humvees from moving I might get too insistent, angry when the soldiers manage to move me. The frustration could turn into violence on my behalf or into despair, exhaustion. But the perseverance of Wakame always takes into account the force working on it (I almost wrote “against it”). Years ago I wrote about this: “Falling is good, getting up is good”. This time to my delight I manage not to fall and that old sentence changes to “Being thrown aside is good, and as soon as I can I get back in front of the Humvee, and that’s also good”. That way I don’t insist and also don’t give up. And there is no sense of exertion.
It is clear to me that I wouldn’t do well to resist the soldiers by force. I won’t be able to overcome a soldier pushing me and I may get hurt. So if any of my friends (we are four in all) stands in front of the leading Humvee (fortunately the road is narrow), it’s less important that I stand there. Once they manage to push him away I appear there instead of him. It reminds me of jumping in Kitaido when it’s important to me that there won’t be a moment when nobody is jumping, that even when I’m resting from jumping I pay attention to the others in the group and if it looks like in a moment there will be nobody jumping then I muster my will and hurry back. But this strategy also has another name. A major part of the art in martial art is the attention to gaps. Creating a gap on the opponent’s side, identifying that gap and getting into it. Avoiding gaps on my side, identifying gaps and filling them. So that’s what I do. Where there is a gap I try to fill it. Sometimes I also manage to attract the attention of more than one soldier and the gap created allows another demonstrator to stand in front of the Humvee.
After 45 minutes the soldiers are tired of the game. They grab us. The others, who unlike me continue trying to reach the Humvees get seriously beaten up (without justification: none of us have raised their hand on a soldier all this while). To me it was clear that there’s not a chance – I spared myself the beating. Our hands are bound and the plastic zip-cuffs cut Amnon’s skin. He grunts in pain. After ten minutes we are released from the cuffs. Amnon is hard to release because any attempts to cut the cuffs will also cut his wrists. At the end they saw it off with a mini-saw. The soldiers release us on condition that we go back to Jerusalem. To the taxi driver taking us they say: “you’ve got five minutes to get out of the village or we’ll slit your tires”. We go to Bil’in, of course. God knows why the soldiers needed this stupid game, at the end of which they let out their frustration with blows and humiliations. Obviously they didn’t attain their goal – the transit vans with 80 people from Jerusalem arrived in Bil’in.
Israeli demonstrators also came from Tel-Aviv and Haifa and altogether we are 300 people. Together with the villagers a thousand of us march towards the route of the fence. On the other side I see the construction of the Matityahu East settlement, built on lands robbed from the village. In front of us stand about two hundred soldiers, border policemen, and riot cops. For some reason they will only let us demonstrate 500 meters away from the fence. The army decides that a certain line may not be crossed. Of course we ignore it. About thirty people pass but concussion grenades and baton blows stop the rest. Bloc facing bloc, soldiers confront demonstrators. I try to pass through the soldiers and get am thrust back. The strategy is clear now – creating a gap. Two soldiers who deal with me leave gap for other demonstrators to pass. But nobody joins me. It takes me a quarter of an hour to understand that I am being needlessly insistent in staying where I am. Nothing is going on here so I will go somewhere else – it’s OK to admit that the soldiers managed to stop me. In other places things are also stuck.
Finally something happens, movement begins and there is no way to stop the demonstrators without harsh violence. The violence is directed only against the “leaders” and one of them has his arm broken. Now there is the need to prevent the creation of a gap where we are. Five soldiers assault this or another leader and try to arrest him so others should immediately jump and join him together with another ten demonstrators to equal the forces.
We passed and we’re advancing towards the fence. I see that on my right a soldier is moving away to the side. He stops, aims his rifle, and fires towards the head of our column. One live bullet! I’m stunned. It’s clear to me what should be done but I’m afraid. Still, together with four others I run towards him and we stand in front of his gun. He managed to fire just one more bullet. That was also a situation of identifying the gap and rushing to fill it. To our luck the IDF still doesn’t so easily fire on Jews, so that there was no danger. An officer arrives and collects this nutter who lost his wits.
We arrive at the fence. OK, what happens now? We storm it? We destroy it? For less than half an hour people chanted slogans and sang songs. Then we turn to go back to the village.
The army lost, the demonstration made it to the fence and also proved that it is nonviolent. Clearly it cannot end this way. We return through a gate that is part of the complex of the fence. The riot police men face us. The final act. We stand in front of them and continue our demonstration. A few dozens of us take stones and start banging on a metal railing that is there – the din is deafening. And then it explodes. The policemen launch into us. When my turn arrives I am surprised by the force with which they yank me away. It’s scary. Other demonstrators grab me and manage to pull me to them. Border policemen jump on a single demonstrator, beating, throwing down, with truncheons too. I go to the side. All the wind is out of my sails. I don’t want to give in to them, but I also don’t want to get beaten up. After this release of rage, a few of the demonstrators go back to the railing and renew the din. Some of the demonstrators were injured by the truncheons, one has fainted. The demonstration is over.
For more information:
www.bilin-village.org
www.awalls.org
www.imemc.org
israel.indymedia.org
www.kitaido.org/Translated by Uri Gordon, anarchyalive.com
Starhawk arrived last Wednesday 12/3 and left on Friday 14/3
Her report is well worth a read:
Women of the Underworld: On Being Thrown Out of Israel
There’s a human tide of immigration that washes around the world, lured
by the gravitational pull of jobs and hope. Now and then, the waves
crash up against the seawall of a border and leave behind a human being
as the sea leaves mementoes of driftwood and shells..Now I had become a piece of that detritus. And for the other women with
me, some tide of hope has also gone out.
Another openly anti-anarchist review of “Anarchy Alive!”, this time from the Socialist Standard. They seemed pretty horrified with my anarchist rejection of democracy and majoritarianism, but at least thought the book “is well-written and can be read on a know-your-opponent basis”.
Apart from that the review is quite inane and dismissive, and does not provide any serious arguments, only assertions. There is, for example, the usual misunderstanding that anarchists see the individual as an atom that does not exist in a social context - true of Ayn Rand but not of any anarchist I know. For Marxists, of course, the individual being “a part of society” is merely a justification for subordinating her/him to the Party which authoritatively speaks on its behalf!
Well here’s the piece anyway - make up your own mind:
Anarchists against democracy
Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory.
By Uri Gordon. Pluto PressThere are many currents of anarchism; some, often called anarcho-communist, hold political ideas not so different from our own. The course of the twentieth century, however, saw these currents fade, and by far the most common ‘anarchist’ today is the individualist or libertarian.
Because they start from the premise that individuals exist independently of society and that the freedom of the individual ego is the most important thing in the world, these anarchists have always had a problem with democracy. They have never been able to see why anybody should be bound by a majority decision; the individual must be free to ignore or even defy such a decision if he or she wants to, otherwise they would be being oppressed. That would be “the tyranny of the majority”. Some anarchists have been able to overcome this prejudice and try to practise democratic forms of organisation: but not Gordon, who launches a head-on attack on the whole concept of democratic control and accountability.
“Democratic discourse assumes without exception that the political process results, at some point, in collectively binding decisions. That these decisions can be the result of free and open debate by all those affected does not change the fact that the outcome is seen to have a mandatory nature. Saying that something is collectively binding makes no sense if each person is to make up their own mind over whether they are bound by it. Binding means enforceable, and enforceability is a background assumption of democracy. But the outcomes of anarchist process are inherently impossible to enforce. That is why the process is not ‘democratic’ at all, since in democracy the point of equal participation in determining decisions is that this is what legitimates these decisions’ subsequent enforcement – or simply sweetens the pill. Anarchism, then, represents not the most radical form of democracy, but an altogether different paradigm of collective action”.
Socialism, on the other hand, does represent the most radical form of democracy. The socialist justification for accepting majority decision-making is that people are not isolated individuals but only exist in and through society, and that when there is a genuine community (either society as a whole or some collectivity within society) the best method of deciding what it should do, on matters of common interest to it as a community, is by a vote of its members after a full and free discussion. Of course the field of community activity has its limits and some decisions should be left to the individual (what to wear and eat, for instance), but we are talking about matters which concern the community as a community with a common interest.
Capitalism resolves the problem by leaving common goods (basically, the means of production) in minority hands, so there is no popular debate about their use; socialism holds these goods in common, under democratic control; the anarchist trend is to minimise these common goods by wanting them small scale and being anti-technology, which as we can now see is more to do with a failure to resolve the democratic issue than a particular dislike of technology per se. Why do these anarchists like laptops but hate computer factories? The answer is a dislike of democracy.
Gordon’s book is an attempt to give some theoretical coherence to the tactics and ideas of the anti-authority wing of the amorphous anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movement. He openly admits they do not function democratically and is proud of it. They come together loosely – organise wouldn’t be the right word – in networks which do hold meetings with each other from time to time to discuss some activity. But those attending are not mandated delegates from their group, and no group is bound by any decision that might be reached; they are free to take it or leave it. Some do, some don’t. At demonstrations some will give out leaflets to the general public arguing a case, others will throw stones at the police. Hence the “pluralism” which Gordon celebrates but which is really a cop-out
Gordon goes further and argues that no individual anarchist or group of anarchists should be held accountable to anyone for what they do; they are quite free to take any action they like and that is how it should be. In answer to Jo Freeman’s important 1970 pamphlet The Tyranny of Structurelessness in which she argued that the absence of formal, democratic structures leads to domination by informal elites, Gordon says “Freeman’s proposals run against the grain of anarchist priorities”. He sees nothing wrong with some informal group of anarchists taking the initiative, it being up to others to decide whether or not to go along with it. The latter seem suspiciously like followers to us but in Gordon’s eyes they are merely showing “solidarity” with the unaccountable group. He doesn’t seem to realise that the same might be said of those who vote for some capitalist politician or party.
Gordon also discusses other matters such as the attitude of anarchists towards violence, technology and nationalism, which are just as confused – or “pluralist” – as over decision-making. But his book is well-written and can be read on a know-your-opponent basis.
ALB
