'The System'

I recall something Miguel Littín told me five or six years ago. He had just filmed La tierra prometida in the Ranquil valley, a poor region of Chile.

The local peasants were "extras" in the scenes where there were masses. Some of them played themselves. Others played soldiers. The soldiers invaded the valley, and with bloodshed and fire, threw the peasants off the land. The film was the chronicle of the massacre.

The problems began on the third day. The peasants who wore uniforms, rode horseback, and shot blanks had become arbitrary, bossy, and violent. After each day of filming, they would harass the other peasants.

-- Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War

Communism and anarchism

So I'm going through this phase where, as a means of procrastination, I'm reading a lot about the Soviet Union and the history of interaction between communists of the state and anarchist varieties, such as Emma Goldman's book, My Disillusionment in Russia, and Peter Kropotkin's vision of a possible anarcho-communist revolution, The Conquest of Bread.

You'll see that I used the word "possible." One of the key differences between anarchist and state communist thinkers is the dogma: the former, like Kropotkin, though willing to lay out a general outline of what they think must be done, aren't willing to dictate a One True Way to anarcho-topia, whereas your Lenins and Trotskys would argue that there must be a revolutionary party that must seize the existing institutions of state power and must institute a centrally administered dictatorship of the proletariat.

The more dogmatic, uniform nature of state communist thinkers is evident in their lexicography, anarcho-communists and other leftist dissenters are but "petit-bourgeois," to be purged the moment the Party has assumed power. Or maybe sooner. Trotsky, for example, calls anarchism "an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine" due to its principled anti-statism, blaming it for the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War:

To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest of power.

Trotsky, of course, wrote those words while living in exile, having been purged from the Communist Party leadership by Stalin, who later had him assassinated. Live by the conquest of power, die by the conquest of power.

Preach it, Peter

Anarchist Communism maintains that most valuable of all conquests
—individual liberty—and moreover extends it and gives it a solid basis—
economic liberty—without which political liberty is delusive; it does not ask
the individual who has rejected god, the universal tyrant, god the king, and
god the parliament, to give unto himself a god more terrible than any of
the preceding—god the Community, or to abdicate upon its altar his
independence, his will, his tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which
he formerly made before the crucified god. It says to him, on the contrary,
"No society is free so long as the individual is not so! Do not seek to modify
society by imposing upon it an authority which shall make everything right;
if you do, you will fail as popes and emperors have failed. Modify society so
that your fellows may not be any longer your enemies by the force of
circumstances: abolish the conditions which allow some to monopolise the
fruit of the labour of others; and instead of attempting to construct society
from top to bottom, or from the centre to the circumference, let it develop
itself freely from the simple to the composite, by the free union of free
groups. This course, which is so much obstructed at present, is the true
forward march of society: do not seek to hinder it, do not turn your back on
progress, but march along with it! Then the sentiment of sociability which is
common to human beings, as it is to all animals living in society, will be able
to develop itself freely, because our fellows will no longer be our enemies,
and we shall thus arrive at a state of things in which each individual will be
able to give free rein to his inclinations, and even to his passions, without
any other restraint than the love and respect of those who surround him."

#####

We do not advocate Communism and Anarchy because we imagine men to
be better than they really are; if we had angels among us we might be
tempted to entrust to them the task of organising us, though doubtless
even they would show the cloven foot very soon. But it is just because we
take men as they are that we say: "Do not entrust them with the governing
of you. This or that despicable minister might have been an excellent man if
power had not been given to him. The only way of arriving at harmony of
interests is by a society without exploiters and without rulers." It is
precisely because men are not angels that we say, "Let us arrange matters
so that each man may see his interest bound up with the interests of
others, then you will no longer have to fear his evil passions."

-- Peter Kropotkin, The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution

Noam Chomsky, anarchist, on the impossibility of anarchism

After my last typically tedious post about Noam Chomsky, a blogger friend who took issue with my taking issue with the professor -- meaning he's of course now dead to me -- sent along another interview with the Chomster on what anarchism means to him. To clear up any misconceptions: I realize Chomsky is well aware of the corporate-state nexus. My issue is not his analysis of the status quo, but his solution to it, which he reiterates yet again in this excerpt:

Q: As far as we favor a stateless society in the long run, it would be a mistake to work for the elimination -- I've said that it would be a mistake to work for the elimination of the state in the short run, and we should be trying to strengthen the state, 'cause it's needed on the check of power of large corporations. Yet the tendency of a lot of anarchist research -- my own, too -- is to show that the power of large corporations derives from state privilege, and governments tend to get captured by concentrated private interests. That would seem to imply that the likely beneficiaries of a more powerful state is going to be the same corporate elite we're trying to oppose. So if business both derives from the state and is so good at capturing the state, why isn't abolishing the state a better strategy for defeating business power than enhancing the state's power would be?

Chomsky: Well, there's a very simple answer to that: it's not a strategy, and since it's not a strategy at all, there can't be a better strategy. The strategy of "eliminating the state" is back on the level of "let's have peace and justice". How do you proceed to eliminate the state? Okay? Can you think of a way of doing it? I mean, if there were a way of doing it in the existing world, everything would collapse and be destroyed. You just can't do it. I mean, there is nothing to replace it. If there was a rich, powerful network of, you know, cooperatives, community organizations, worker-controlled industry, you know, extending over the whole country, and the whole world, in fact, yeah, then you can talk about eliminating states. But to talk about eliminating the state in the world as it exists is simply to keep yourself in some remote academic seminar or small group, you know, saying, "Gee, this would be nice." It's not a strategy, so there can't be a better strategy. We are faced with realities. What is described here, and in fact it's true (I've written plenty about it, too), is that we have a number of systems of power, closely interlinked. One of them's corporate power, business power. That's by far the most dangerous of all. That means, effectively, unaccountable private tyrannies. A second, pretty closely linked to them, is state power. And the comment is correct (as the commentator says, I've written about it, too, a lot) that state power tends to be overwhelmingly influenced by concentrated private power.

Hey, Noam: You're an anarchist, bro! So why are you so condescendingly dismissive of strategies to eliminate the state? Peace and justice are also long-term, elusive goals, and yet we strive for them anyway -- and, importantly, we do so not by advocating more conflicts and instances of injustice, politicians and professional pundits excepted. Fighting wars to end war hasn't turned out so well and, mock though you may the smash-the-state crowd, Noam, increasing the power of the institution with a legal monopoly on the use of violence, the state, as part of a strategy to eventually abolish it -- which, if Chomsky's anarchism is anything more than intellectual pose, we can only assume is his goal as well -- is fraught with the same error in logic.

That is not to say corporate power is not a great evil. It undoubtedly is. But it is an evil enabled by the institution of the state; when I rail against the latter, I am railing against the former. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that the target of my blogging wrath is the corporate-state nexus Chomsky identifies, for without the coercion and legal cover government currently provides in the form of everything from the police and military to intellectual property and the tax code, corporations as we know them could not exist.

Argue all you want about which is the greater evil, but it's about as useful as debating which came first, the chicken or the egg. Atomic weapons, for example, may be built by nominally private companies, but it's the U.S. government that provides the tax money that makes them possible -- and the only institution that has actually used them. Private prisons may be evil, but it is the state that fills them with prisoners. Rather than adversarial, the corporate-state relationship is symbiotic.

Chomsky's own work shows this, which is why I find it all the more irksome he chooses to argue against what seems to me an anarchist strawman. There may be a few anarchists who would like to smash the state tomorrow, but most that I've come across believe an anarchist society can only come about after the long-term process of creating a society of anarchists and the building up of institutions, like cooperatives and mutual aid associations, built on consensus, not coercion. We talk about eliminating the state because that is a long-term goal to strive for, like peace and justice, not because it's something we think can or should happen overnight.

Yet all Chomsky seems to have is disdain for the mere talk of a stateless society as he argues against an anarchist caricature, falsely suggesting those anarchists who do not share his opinion on the wisdom of increasing state power would like to keep intact all the corporate privileges it provides; as if their enemy is corporate taxes, not corporate personhood.

And while Chomksy casts himself as wisely pragmatic, the more I read about his solutions the more I find them naive and indistinguishable from those offered by a standard-issue liberal. Indeed, later in the interview excerpted above he even bemoans the loss of the loathsome Martha Coakley in the Massachussets Senate race a few years back, complaining that the electorate yet again voted against its own self-interest -- as if the Democrats, and former prosecutor no less, favor anything more than a marginally more subtle assault on those interests.

If one wants to be pragmatic, there are many ways a philosophical anarchist can act that don't depend on the dubious notion of short-term increases in state power. Economist Dean Baker details this in his new book, from patent reform to removing tax loopholes, and I'd argue they're at least as politically viable as instituting a the type of national health care system Chomsky favors. Indeed, when Democrats took back the White House and both chambers of Congress and had the opportunity to implement that very health care reform, which Chomsky accurately notes enjoys broad public support, they instead turned around and only increased the power of pharmaceutical giants and corporate insurance providers, even mandating the purchase of the latter's products.

And that illustrates a key point: increasing the power of the state, as the individual insurance mandate indisputably does, has historically been accompanied not by a decrease in corporate power, but an expansion of it. Just as wars for peace have only led to more wars, expansions of state power often enable only greater economic exploitation. While the state may be subject to influence as Chomsky contends, it's those with the most money who tend to do most of the influencing -- and who in turn use the state to ensure their power is not subject to the nuisance of labor unions and general strikes.

So who's really naive: the person who wants to limit corporate power by decreasing the power of the state, historically its chief enabler, or the one who believes that this time around the power of the state can be harnessed for good -- and that the road to a less coercive society depends on increasing the power of an institution whose unique feature is its legal monopoly on coercion?

Somalia: 'libertarian paradise'

I'm not sure in what context this remark was made, but I think it's worth pointing out that this critique is no different than a conservative or right-wing libertarian responding to a criticism of modern state capitalism by snorting, "oh yeah, and how did the Soviet Union turn out, ya Marxist?" It's intellectually dishonest. It's lame. It's -- perhaps most damningly -- just plain unoriginal, returning "About 210,000 results" on Google. And it's a damn weak attempt to hang around the necks of those who would dare imagine a world where people are free to organize and live in communities not subject to the coercive interference of an outside, centralized power, a failed state -- Somalia -- that has been torn apart by decades of Western state intervention, as noted by libertarian socialist Noam Chomsky and none other than Jeremy Scahill.

From a U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion and brutal military occupation that left more than 16,000 civilians dead and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, destroying the first semblance of normalcy the country had experienced in nearly two decades, to an ongoing U.S. war involving CIA torture chambers and drone strikes, Somalia has been ravaged by powerful nation-states, not anarchy.

But hey, let's put that all aside and just concede for a moment that Somalia is in fact some anarchist's wet dream, "a libertarian's paradise." Let's just ignore the fact Somalia was ruled by a military dictator for decades and not make the cheap point that the period preceding its current "anarchist" stage therefore indicts anyone who believes in the justness and necessity of centralized power.

We can say this for the little 'ol anarcho-paradise that is Somalia: At least it hasn't, like some other countries in the region, murdered tens of thousands of its neighbors. At least, like another government I know whose legitimacy has never been questioned by any respectable liberal writers, dropped nukes on any Japanese cities or killed upwards of one million Iraqis or put one out of every 100 of its own citizens in steel cages.

Up next: Is North Korea, with its socialized health care and strict regulation of business, a "liberal paradise"?

Update: Scahill says the comment "was a joke." Okay. But what's the punchline?

Picking on Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky is great. Manufacturing Consent is a masterful look at how the mainstream media in America subtly and not so subtly serves the interests of the state and its corporate puppeteers. He has long been one of the most trenchant critics of the U.S. empire, a fact that's led to him to be ostracized from respectable political discourse – good riddance – and to be ridiculed by Weekly Standard neocons and Mother Jones liberals alike.

But – and with effusive praise like that, you just had to know there'd be a “but” – because I think he's generally on the side of Truth and Justice, like a relative or loved one (not always the same thing) he's thus open to more withering criticism from yours truly than your average tenured professor, Melissa Harris-Perry excepted.

My chief issue with Uncle Noam comes down to the fact that, while his analysis of the state often charms this anarchist's black heart, his professed allegiance to anarchism as a philosophy often appears like a lot of folks' professed Catholicism: something one claims allegiance to in order to keep up appearances – be it to before one's radical readers or just dear mother – but which one doesn't think twice about on weekdays, outside of May Day or Christmas.

By that I mean, while Chomsky professes anarchy to be his end-goal, his strategy on how to get there doesn't strike me as substantively different than the Marxist-Leninists he mocks. That is, he views the state as a necessary bulwark against the privations of corporate capitalism; a necessary evil that ought to be maintained and even strengthened in order to prevent private tyranny. But, like the communist he derides for believing the dictatorship of the proletariat – or rather, the dictatorship of the Party – will voluntary wither away and cede power to a society of anarchists, Chomsky never really elaborates on how to get from a system of centralized power and coercion to a decentralized world of consensus.

"What, is the state just going to give up that power all on its own?" Chomsky might witheringly ask.

Take the good professor's response when asked about “the prospects for realizing anarchism in our society”:

Prospects for freedom and justice are limitless. The steps we should take depend on what we are trying to achieve. There are, and can be, no general answers. The questions are wrongly put. I am reminded of a nice slogan of the rural workers' movement in Brazil (from which I have just returned): they say that they must expand the floor of the cage, until the point when they can break the bars. At times, that even requires defense of the cage against even worse predators outside: defense of illegitimate state power against predatory private tyranny in the United States today, for example, a point that should be obvious to any person committed to justice and freedom -- anyone, for example, who thinks that children should have food to eat -- but that seems difficult for many people who regard themselves as libertarians and anarchists to comprehend. That is one of the self-destructive and irrational impulses of decent people who consider themselves to be on the left, in my opinion, separating them in practice from the lives and legitimate aspirations of suffering people.

Insofar as Chomsky asserts that there is no one easy, “right” answer to this question, I agree. While I think it's important to lay out a vision for the world you would to build, I personally see anarchism as a process: I would like to minimize the centralization of power and use of coercion in society, as I believe both lead to great evils in the hands of flawed, fallible human beings. In that sense, I see the use of co-ops in Nicaragua's Ometepe, for instance, as an example of anarchism in actiom. a significant step toward a world based on consensus, no coercion, where people can be free and self-reliant, dependent on neither politicians nor capitalists.

At the same time, though, I take issue with Chomsky answering a question on how to realize anarchism almost entirely with an attack on his fellow anarchists. And I find particularly irksome his seeming acceptance of the left-liberal framing of the state as the common person's last best defense against corporate power. I believe Chomsky himself would admit – and the much less radical, left-liberal economist Dean Baker details in his latest book – that it is the state which is in fact the chief enabler of that power, from “intellectual property” laws that guarantee monopoly profits to drug companies to the doctrine of “corporate personhood” that enables those very companies to skirt full financial and legal responsibility for their actions.

As an anarchist, Chomsky ought to have detailed why the divide between “public” and “private” power is less than meet the eye; that, in fact, the state and corporation collude to screw the public and to redistribute wealth from the lower classes to the wealthy; that, in fact, there is no real distinction between the two at all. The Federal Reserve is a perfect example of this: a government-chartered institution that is almost entirely run by the quasi-private banking industry to -- surprise! -- the benefit of bankers.

While those who would remove limits on corporate power while keeping in place the privileges are worth criticizing, Chomsky attacks “libertarians and anarchists” with far too wide a brush, most irksomely by deploying a red-flag raising phrase like “a point that should be obvious” and a groan-inducing appeal to those who “think children should have food to eat.” Really, Noam?

My other point of contention is Chomsky's contribution to the sort of political in-fighting he often decries, namely his denunciation of anarcho-capitalism, a system that he says, “if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history.”

First things first: I'm no anarcho-capitalist. I think those who adopt that label often have an almost self-parodying view of the role markets and the profit motive play in society, every potential problem that might arise discussed by pointing to how a private company could meet Social Demand X or Y, complete with the appropriate citation of some book by Murray Rothbard. Many, though not all, seem to leave no room for other forms of social cooperation, anything that doesn't involve a profit appearing suspiciously commie. And many do not seem to have ever questioned the moral basis for private property and the role the state has played in upholding that particular institution – and in determining who has come to hold property – and whether it could truly be maintained in a world free of coercion and the subsidy of state protection.

I also recognize that it's just a label; that some anarcho-capitalists or market anarchists could very well read the preceding paragraph while nodding their heads. I also recognize that, differences aside, I have a lot in common with these people. Indeed, Chomsky himself admits – when not suggesting anarcho-capitalism would be on par with the evils of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia – that he finds himself “in substantial agreement with people who consider themselves anarcho-capitalists on a whole range of issues,” and that for awhile they were the only ones he would publish his work. He also concedes that there may very well be a role for markets in his ideal anarchist world.

So why the over-the-top, tyranny “with few counterparts in human history” denunciation? While I'm no stranger to hyperbole, and I too have my qualms with anarcho-capitalists, I find it hard to believe that, at its worst, an an-cap world would be any more tyrannical than the one we have now, what with its state-privileged corporate monopolies and standing armies and massive prison complexes. Chomsky's critique, then – and the mirror image attack on anarcho-syndicalism from the clowns at the Mises Institute – strikes me as not unlike the bickering between Monty Python's Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea, where radicals that agree on 90 percent of the issues hate each other more than their shared enemy: the corporate state. Or was it the Romans?

Anarchists should be free to criticize other anarchists. Debate is good and keeps people honest. But let's not lose sight of the common foe: coercion, be it perpetrated by state or corporation, recognizing, I would add, that you can't have the latter without the former. Sure, we can and should debate the merits of syndicalism and the wisdom of municipal versus privatized police forces. But guys! We're a long way from there. We have a lot of coercion to remove from society before we get to the point where those debates will have real world consequences. We can discuss the workability of everyone's desired dream anarchist world as soon as we, say, live in a world where U.S. military bases are only to be found in the United States, okay?

And Noam, buddy: let's not forget, because I know you're aware of this, that right now at this moment the state is the chief deployer of coercion and, far from its foe, the chief enabler of corporate power. No, let's not do away with the social safety net or regulations that, however feebly, restrict corporate excess, at least not without first doing away with corporate privilege. But let's also not forget that, historically, increasing the power of the state as you would like to do has not been found conducive with minimizing coercion or corporate power in society. And as for reducing that power once you've increased it: ask your Marxist-Leninist friends how that worked out.

Anarchy and Ometepe

“I think they're sexual deviants,” my traveling companion said, leaning over a fruit salad at breakfast.

The not unexpected comment came after a night of alternately delightful and terrifying conversation with a couple who, over the course of three liters of Toña – Spanish for “Bud Light” – explained that they were in Nicaragua to swab frogs (for science, not pleasure). And that they had been more or less locked up in a ranger's station on the side of Ometepe's Volcan Maderas for the past six months with next to contact with anyone who spoke their language.

Which was Dutch. They spoke Dutch. They were Dutch people.

Sexual deviance, including a horrifically detailed discussion of what perhaps happened to Eva Perón's missing corpse? Explained. Left unresolved: whether the tale of a traveling Frenchman they met who got high smoking Mexican scorpion tails and decidedly poisonous secretions from the frogs they were swabbing had any basis in truth. I like to think that it did.

You meet a lot of interesting people in Nicaragua, from die-hard Sandinistas who fought as child soldiers during the 1979 revolution against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship to the aforementioned couple from Holland in the country to track down an apparently deadly, amphibian-based fungus. Oh, there are boors too. In the beach town of San Juan del Sur, you'll have to put up with the pressed-at-an-Abercrombie-factory bros and a few nausea-inducing, not-a-word-of-Spanish-speaking in town only to pick up a young Latin hunny, under-age if they can manage it. And in Grenada, a city burnt down 150 years ago by an asshole American, you can find his modern-day successors and the prostitutes and signs saying “no dogs” – and don't give money to the homeless kids – that they've brought with them.

Refreshingly, the Ugly Expat is not to be found in tranquil Ometepe, the pot-smoking “ex-CIA” man I met there last time the one possible exception. A tropical volcanic island located an hour's ferry ride out in Nicaragua's Lake Cocibolca, Central America's largest, Ometepe is lush year-round, with Quetzals and Howler monkeys filling the vacuum left by the lack of loud bars and nightclubs . The last time I was there, the active volcano that makes up the more populous and developed northern half of the island, Volcan Concepción, almost – in a complete dick move -- killed me after by tour-guide-who-wasn't forgot how to get back down from its sulfur-spewing crater. Fun times!

My trip to the island this time around didn't result in any near-death experiences, sad to say, but I did get to leave the main port town to the see the rest of the place, spending most of my time at the base of Volcan Maderas, the inactive volcano that forms the much-less traveled southern half of the island, where nice paved streets turn into Oregon Trail-style, boulder-filled “roads” barely navigable by SUV. While I did spend one day biking out to the Ojo de Agua, a man-made lagoon filled with volcanic water that felt like swimming in a pool of Perrier, most of my time was spent at a hostel on the grounds of Finca Magdalena, a cooperative coffee farm that 28 local families expropriated from their wealthy, absentee landlord during the early years of Sandinista rule. A stately, century-old wooden house at the center of the estate, the hostel is surrounded by beautiful gardens full of butterflies of all colors and provides hammocks so you can lay around and watch them, which isn't a bad way to spend a day; if I were dying, I'm pretty sure I'd like to do it here. It's also the chief source of income for the coop these days, which might surprise you when beds go for just $3 a night.

Radical, anarcho-syndicalist credentials? Bolstered.

Say what you will about the Sandinistas today – I've met many a former member disenchanted with the party's drift towards neoliberalism and the personalty cult that's formed around its leader and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega – the party did institute several much-needed reforms upon taking power after the 1979 revolution, chief among them the redistribution of the country's land, the majority of which was in the hands of the ruling Somoza family and its cronies. It's that revolutionary reform, taking land from wealthy and politically-connected land owners and handing it to the poor peasant farms from whom it was originally stolen, that seems to have had the most visible lasting impact on the country today; it's also the one that helped spur the Reagan administration to fund and arm a right-wing insurgency that left 50,000 Nicaraguans dead over the course of the 1980s. It's that reform that made Finca Magdalena and thousands of other coops possible.

Land redistribution was a major issue not just for the FSLN, but for the man the party's named after: Augusto Sandino, an anarcho-syndicalist rebel leader made infamous for refusing to accept the legitimacy of the U.S. occupation of Nicaragua in the 1930s; he was ultimately martyred by the first in a 40-year line of U.S.-backed dictators from the Somoza family, making him a tragic hero not unlike Emiliano Zapata in Mexico – a man who died for his principles rather than conveniently compromise them for political power.

Even the popular red-and-black flag used by the FSLN today is none other than a slightly modified version of the red-and-black flag of anarcho-syndicalism that Sandino hoisted 80 years ago . As one would expect of a ruling government party, however, the colors have been stripped of their original meaning, no longer signifying “syndicalism” (red) nor, obviously, “anarchism” (black), but rather “blood” and “death.” And that makes sense: as a political party defined not but its eradication of state power, but by its capture of it, its leaders wouldn't want to be bound by any actual principles and political concepts that might be seem at odds with their penchant for centralized power; the more vapid, pliable notion of “sacrifice” will do just fine, thank you.

Indeed, the reasons for the co-option would soon become clear after the Sandinistas took over. Rather than maintain strict fidelity to the principles of the man whose name they adopted as their own and simply hand over land to poor farmers, the FSLN chose to install a state intermediary to administer the land. According to the operators of Finca Magdalena, it wasn't until the early 1990s that their land was legally recognized as an independent cooperative; before that, when the land was held by the Sandinista government, “the members' lives did not improve.”

With little apparent help from the government outside of the original land reform, which ultimately only removed the threat of state violence should local farmers reclaim that which was rightfully theirs, the Finca Magdalena coop has managed to raise the standard of living of not just the families who run it, but the surrounding community. Their livelihood, as far as I can tell, isn't dependent on the benevolence of politicians or capitalists. While the country is nominally socialist, there are next to no signs of government involvement on the island to begin with; on the south side where the coop is located, there's not even much in the way of infrastructure.

The life is a simple life – and a largely self-sufficient one. There aren't any flat-screen TVs. There's no Internet, outside of a few cafés. And there's not much if anything to do once the sun goes down. But people seem happy. And why not? They live on some of the most fertile land in Central America on an island made up of two beautiful volcanoes. If you want some food, you grow it or catch it from the lake. If you're bored you play baseball or go swimming. You watch a sunset. Who the hell needs HBO?

Of course, there are no doubt problems that I as a glib, know-it-all gringo backpacker am not going to pick up on. But in contrast to some places I've lived – North Philly comes to mind – the people here, though poor, seem content with their place in life, none of the visible brutishness of daily violence that characterizes a lot of major cities. Largely left alone, with absolutely no police presence in the more rural communities, meaning 95 percent of the island, the people of Ometepe in a lot of ways show the possibilities of working together collectively toward a common goal, rather than acting as the atomized capitalistic competitors that a lot of conservatives and libertarians appear to see as the only sane alternative to statism.

Whoa now, I hear you say. Let's talk about the pot-smoking CIA guy, not all this oh-glorious-syndicalism talk, crazy anarchist guy. And don't let ideology blind you, silly: Have the people abolished the state? Has capitalism been eradicated? Has a glorious workers paradise been established? Have the means of producing reggaetone been seized and destroyed for the good of the proletariat? Well, no, not exactly. But anarchy isn't just a utopian end goal, dear reader. It's a mundane reality.

Whenever people work together cooperatively without the need for coercion, that's anarchy in action. Twenty-eight families collectively working the same farm for their mutual benefit? That, my friends, is anarchy; a small window into a world where peoples lives are bases on consensus and cooperation, no coercion. And it's why I think every decent person ought to be anarchist. Hear me out: While we can argue and bicker over how to get to anarchtopia, or how long it might take or the details of who will deliver the mail and make sure the neighbor kid stays off your lawn, why shouldn't every person's goal be a society that minimizes the use of violence? Go ahead, say pure anarchy is unworkable, incompatible with human nature – to which I'd rejoin that governments with their mass murdering wars and nuclear weapons seem to be incompatible with human kind – shouldn't we at least strive to create a society that minimizes the use of violence to the greatest extent possible?

Anarchism is not about Molotov cocktails and car bombs, it's about cooperation; it's about order built from the bottom up, rather than imposed from the top down. And the people at the bottom have to want it for it to succeed. An anarchist society, if it is ever to come about, won't be the result of a mere political revolution like in Egypt or Libya, where the institutions of power are maintained, just staffed with different people. It will come from a social revolution -- from creating a society of anarchists who reject the notion of coercive power and the use of violence as a means of material and political gain. It will come from people coming to see, like the families of Finca Magadalena, the empowerment that comes from voluntary collectivism and from learning to appreciate the wisdom of devolving power from states and presidents to communities and individuals.

Already, most people reject the use of violence not because the government tells them that, say, murder is bad, but because they believe in their hearts it is wrong. It's why the vast majority of people don't ever kill anyone. It's how places like Ometepe, and most of the rest of the world, frankly, exist in harmony without the need for a uniformed officer with a handgun and a Taser on every corner.

The next step, and it's an admittedly difficult one that won't happen overnight, is convincing a critical mass of people that violence isn't just wrong in their personal life, but in their political life too. Murder by proxy – murder by politician – is just as evil as if you personally bashed an Afghan child's head open with a rock. Don't support and don't enable it. And that means rejecting the idea that any person or institution can or should claim a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of violence.

For a more cooperative society to succeed, people will also have to develop faith in themselves and in a world without leaders. And they'll need to know that anarchism isn't an ideology for some far-off utopia, but something they already take for granted in their own lives, whether its working at a coop like the one in Ometepe, helping out at a soup kitchen or just not killing that pesky neighbor kid when you know the police aren't around.

Put it like that, and I think you might be surprised how many anarchists there are – and how many acts of anarchy you commit everyday.

In the next installment, I get slightly less preachy and write about watching a stray dog chew on a horse's leg in the center of León, Nicaragua.

Pastor Proudhon

"[I]f you've got a clergyperson preaching anarchy, do you really think the police department shouldn't try to send somebody and listen and see if they're trying to foment a riot? You can't wait till the riot's on the streets." 

-- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Update: Turns out that, according to The New York Times, there at least used to be "Sunday Schools That Teach Children Anarchy" (exclamation point implied).

Anarchism and AlterNet

Help me out here.

On the one hand, AlterNet often posts radical critiques of the state, such as this interesting interview I came across earlier today with historian Howard Zinn on anarchism and his rejection of the legitimacy of both democracy and the modern nation-state. It also regularly publishes this anarchist crackpot.

On the other hand, as the Zinn article indirectly reminded me, AlterNet has provided an outlet for Sara Robinson, "One of the few trained social futurists in North America," to charge that there are people among us -- dangerous, "seditious" people -- who are bent on "systemically delegitimizing the very idea of US government."

So, my question: Does AlterNet know that a writer for AlterNet essentially accused it of providing a platform for sedition, which said writer took pains to note is a prosecutable offense? Maybe, albeit belatedly: Robinson hasn't been heard from since the eve of the 2010 elections, when she was last seen warning that the people she previously accused of rejecting the legitimacy of government were seeking, instead, to create a fascist state.

Smash it up

The (International) Noise Conspiracy por ben-never-scene

Juan Cole's war on anarchism

As a liberal supporter of invading Iraq who apparently believed the Bush administration's rhetoric about freedom and democracy, and felt that bombs and military occupations would be the best means of promoting it, Juan Cole sure has a lot of nerve attacking anarchism as philosophy that depends "on a naive reading of social interest." And while I have my own criticisms of right-wing libertarianism, I can't help but note the incongruity of attacking folks like Ron Paul on the basis that their beliefs will lead to privatized, corporate warfare when the wars Cole has supported and continues to support depend on legions of private guns-for-hire and defense contractors like Halliburton and KBR.

Nominally about the recent GOP presidential debate, Cole's attack on anarchy -- from "anarcho-syndicalists like [Noam] Chomsky" to the aforementioned Paul -- is perhaps a sign that liberals like him are fearful the anti-state position is gaining traction, especially given the conspicuous lack of change since liberal savior Barack Obama moved to the White House. Indeed, that would explain why, instead of addressing the world we live in now, where a Nobel laureate is waging war in at least half a dozen countries with the help of an army of private war-profiteering corporations and their mercenaries, Cole focuses our attention on a scary future where, without the state, "warmongering corporations [could] pursue war all on their own."

"The East India Companies of Britain and the Netherlands behaved that way," Cole writes. "[And] India was not conquered by the British government, but by the East India Company. Likewise what is now Indonesia was a project of the Dutch East India Company."

However, while intended as a critique of anarchism, Cole's examples only bolster the critique of the state. The East India Companies, after all, were chartered by the British government, granted trade monopolies by the British government, and had their claim to properties, most of which were looted from poor foreigners, protected by the British government. And while I won't claim to speak for Ron Paul, most anarchists -- and it shows Cole's muddled thinking that he lumps "limited government" advocates like Paul in with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon & Co. -- don't just oppose "the state," they oppose the use of violence and coercion. It just so happens that states with their claims to a "legitimate monopoly on the use of violence" tend to be the greatest purveyors of it.

If in some future anarchotopia a private corporation -- let's not get into the fact that corporations are created by the state -- should wage war, then they would be acting like states and would be opposed just as vigorously. Indeed, to an anarchist the distinction between corporation and state is the same as a Christian's distinction between God and Jesus: though taking different forms, they're one and the same, the difference academic.

While Cole's fixated on a future of corporate war, he seems unaware that a world of Big Bad Corporations waging war on the world exists right now and that, rather than checking this aggression, the state is aiding and abetting it. Liberals can rail against Blackwater/Xe all they want, but in the end its Hillary Clinton's State Department that's giving them millions in tax dollars.

Speaking of oblivious, Cole writes:

Right anarchists seem not to be able to perceive that without government, corporations would reduce us all to living in company towns on bad wages and would constantly be purveying to us bad banking, tainted food, dangerous drugs, etc.

It's almost as if he's unaware we already live in a world where Goldman Sachs exists and where wages have been more or less stagnant since the 1970s. Instead of scaring his readers away from an anarchist world, he likely just left them wondering what the difference would be.

(My Saturday afternoon ruined via BDR)