Authority.

          Well more than a year and we at Spirit of Revolt, thanks to Covid19, are still unable to gain access to our working room at the Mitchell Library. We can and do try to keep things moving as best we can, one of those things we can still do is to keep giving you our "Read of the Month". A little snapshot of what we have in our archive and on our website, https://spiritofrevolt.info
        This month it is a little known publication called Authority, issue No.2 from 1979. Have a read and perhaps it will tempt you to delve ever deeper into what we have in our archive. There is a lot to read, enjoy and learn from our comrades from the past. 

Read Online: 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info   

Our CRAP Society.

      I have posted this before, but I feel it is worth repeating from time to time.

Our C.R.A.P. society, based on 

Capitalism,
Religion,
Authority,
Patriotism.

                  CRAP for short,

       

        Any alien looking in on our society must come to the conclusion that we earthlings love CRAP. It is all they will see as we scurry about working in CRAP jobs for CRAP wages and in what little “leisure” time we have we rush around buying CRAP. We spend precious time discussing the benefits of this piece of CRAP as opposed to that piece of CRAP. We weigh up the difference between this pair of CRAP trainers and that pair of CRAP trainers, this CRAP label and that CRAP label. We consider we have choices when we select this CRAP newspaper or that CRAP magazine from the avalanche of CRAP paper pulp on offer. One CRAP supermarket after another offers us an array of CRAP food and TV vomits endless CRAP into our homes and we flick from CRAP Big-Brother to CRAP house make-overs, from CRAP lifestyle programs to CRAP celebrity chat shows.

        Move to the realms of the “serious” CRAP and we have on offer CRAP political parties throwing up an display of smiling CRAP politicians, who, come election time, prance about offering CRAP policies in the hope that they can take their place in that CRAP institution at Westminster. What we get from the CRAP government of the day is such things as the CRAP war on drugs, that doesn’t work, CRAP tough on crime, that criminalizes poverty, CRAP war on terrorism, that is counterproductive,

Capitalism,

can produce nothing but an abundance of CRAP as profit is the only motive.

Religion,

produces CRAP freedom destroying dogma, based on the supposed mutterings of some airy-fairy gods.

Authority,

gives us a CRAP life based on surveillance and strict unbending laws.

Patriotism,

the last refuge of the scoundrel gives us CRAP racism and generates canon fodder for the state’s endless CRAP wars.

      Is this the type of society that we want to bequeath to our children and their grandchildren? Should we not be taking control of our own affairs and producing to our needs based on sustainability? A world of free association, voluntary co-operation and mutual aid is possible, a world that accommodates us all as equals and prepares the world for the next generation rather than rob them of an existence. 

First we have to get rid of  C. R. A. P. Let’s start now.

ann arky's home.

JUSTICICATION FOR AUTHORITY.

      Noam Chomsky stated that onus of justification is on authority, if it can't be justified, then it has to be abolished. Of course there are others who have tried to justify the authority of the state and admitted that they can't.

This extract is from In Defence of Anarchism by Robert Paul Wolff:

Preface

     This essay on the foundations of the authority of the state marks a stage in the development of my concern with problems of political authority and moral autonomy. When I first became deeply interested in the subject, I was quite confident that I could find a satisfactory justification for the traditional democratic doctrine to which I rather unthinkingly gave my allegiance. Indeed, during my first year as a member of the Columbia University Philosophy Department, I taught a course on political philosophy in which I boldly announced that I would formulate and then solve the fundamental problem of political philosophy. I had no trouble formulating the problem- -- roughly speaking, how the moral autonomy of the individual can be made compatible with the legitimate authority of the state. I also had no trouble refuting a number of supposed solutions which had been put forward by various theorists of the democratic state. But midway through the semester, I was forced to go before my class, crestfallen and very embarrassed, to announce that I had failed to discover the grand solution.
     At first, as I struggled with this dilemma, I clung to the conviction that a solution lay just around the next con- ceptual corner. When I read papers on the subject to meetings at various universities, I was forced again and again to represent myself as searching for a theory which I simply could not find. Little by little, I began to shift the emphasis of my exposition. Finally -- whether from philosophical reflection, or simply from chagrin -- I came to the realization that I was really defending the negative rather than looking for the positive. My failure to find any theoretical justification for the authority of the state had convinced me that there was no justification. In short, I had become a philosophical anarchist.

Read the full essay HERE:

ann arky's home.

WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF CRAP.

Lifted from an old post on my sister blog Annarky1:


Society based on Capitalism,Religion,Authority and Patriotism.

             C.R.A.P.   for short.

        Any alien looking in on our society must come to the conclusion that we earthlings love CRAP. It is all they will see as we scurry about working in CRAP jobs for CRAP wages and in what little “leisure” time we have we rush around buying CRAP. We spend precious time discussing the benefits of this piece of CRAP as opposed to that piece of CRAP. We weigh up the difference between this pair of CRAP trainers and that pair of CRAP trainers, this CRAP label and that CRAP label. We consider we have choices when we select this CRAP newspaper or that CRAP magazine from the avalanche of CRAP paper pulp on offer. One CRAP supermarket after another offers us an array of CRAP food and TV vomits endless CRAP into our homes and we flick from CRAP Big-Brother to CRAP house make-overs, from CRAP lifestyle programs to CRAP celebrity chat shows.

        Move to the realms of the “serious” CRAP and we have on offer CRAP political parties throwing up a display of smiling CRAP politicians, who, come election time, prance about offering CRAP policies in the hope that they can take their place in that CRAP institution at Westminster. What we get from the CRAP government of the day is such things as the CRAP war on drugs, that doesn’t work, CRAP tough on crime, that criminalizes poverty, CRAP war on terrorism, that is counterproductive,

Capitalism,

can produce nothing but an abundance of CRAP as profit is the only motive.

Religion,

produces CRAP freedom destroying dogma, based on the supposed mutterings of some airy-fairy gods.

Authority,

gives us a CRAP life based on surveillance and strict unbending laws.

Patriotism,

the last refuge of the scoundrel gives us CRAP racism and generates canon fodder for the state’s endless CRAP wars.

      Is this the type of society that we want to bequeath to our children and our grandchildren? Should we not be taking control of our own affairs and producing to all our needs based on sustainability? A world of free association, voluntary co-operation and mutual aid is possible, a world that accommodates us all as equals and prepares the world for the next generation rather than rob them of an existence. 

First we have to get rid of  C. R. A. P. Let’s start now.

ann arky's home.

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM,

Always worth a listen, the words of Noam Chomsky.

ann arky's home.

TWO FACED MEDIA.

           Some years ago during a demonstration in London, Churchill's statue had a piece of green turf placed on its head, giving it a sort of punk hair cut look. The media here referred to it as a shameful act of vandalism. However on Wednesday 3 August The Times had a photograph of a a statute of Hosni Mubarak which had been defaced. The comments were not a reference to vandalism but how this shows the feelings of the people. When ever any protests take place in this country the media always focus on what violence they can find on the demonstrators side and portray the authorities as the victims. Shift the scene to any country we are meant to dislike and they reverse their point of view. The protesters are always the victims and the authorities the purveyors of violence. The usual double standards of the media, you simply can't believe what you read. We should know by now that authority is always the purveyor of violence when ever the people decide to show their anger or even dislike of what that authority is up to. Authority, i.e.; the state, can only remain the authority by calling on force as soon as the people wish change, more say in their affairs, or control of their own lives. Until the people have control over their own lives and remove the state, we will always have this confrontation of authority and the desire of the people to be free, with the media backing up the authority.

ann arky's home.