Today the various states only survive with an delusional and perpetual threat, which in turn allows the state to continually increase surveillance and control over it citizens. The individuals ever increasing desire for freedom is always a threat to the state and its power. The time has long since gone, if it ever existed, when the state was deemed to do the bidding of its citizens and be the protector of the individuals freedom. Today the state is what I call the corporate world's minder and hit squad, its main function being to protect and further the markets and resources of the various corporate groupings around the world. Invariably that is what wars are all about. The desire for freedom by the individual is a grasp at anarchism, though few recognise it as such, but the states ever tightening grip on our freedom of movement and expression drives us ever further along that path. Has our time come??
The following is a short extract from WHAT PISSED ME OFF!! It might provoke a little bit of debate, and that can't be a bad thing.
Democracy today consists in the invention or
reinvention of spaces, movements, ways of life, economic exchanges
and political practices that resist the imprint of the state and
which foster relations of equal liberty. The struggles that take
place today against capitalism and the state are democratic
struggles. At the same time, however, we might sound a certain note
of dissatisfaction with the term “democracy.” We can echo
Bakunin, who finds the term democracy “not sufficient.” As
Derrida himself said of democracy: “[A]s a term it’s not sacred.
I can some day or other, say, ‘No, it’s not the right term. The
situation allows or demands that we use another term …’” The
situation is changing, and the new forms of autonomous politics that
are currently emerging demand the use of another term: anarchism.
Shipwrecked on the craggy shores of state power,
anarchism is now moving to the forefront of our political
imagination. There has been a certain paradigm shift in politics away
from the state and formal representative institutions, which still
exist but increasingly as empty vessels without life, and toward
movements. Here new political challenges and questions emerge –
concerning freedom beyond securities, democracy beyond the state,
politics beyond the party, economic organization beyond capitalism,
globalization beyond borders, life beyond biopolitics – challenges
and questions that anarchism is best equipped to respond to with the
originality and innovation that our new situation demands. Read the article in full.
