Federalism.

Colin Ward. 

      Trying to make sense of what is going on, and what is possible in Brexit Europe and elsewhere, is difficult. Our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, pours out a spew-river of one directional doom, nonsense and exaggeration, from the pundits of the opposing camps, the Brexiters and the Remainers. producing confusion, disillusionment and boredom, among the general public.

 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

        Perhaps to get a grasp of what is happening and what is possible we should go back to 1992 and Colin Ward's "The Anarchist Sociology of Federalism".

 Peter Kropotkin.

       Needless to say, in efforts for unification promoted by politicians we have a multitude of administrators in Bruxelles issuing edicts about which varieties of vegetable seeds or what constituents of beefburgers or ice cream may be sold in the shops of the member-nations. The newspapers joyfully report all this trivia. The press gives far less attention to another undercurrent of pan-European opinion, evolving from the views expressed in Strasbourg from people with every kind of opinion on the political spectrum, claiming the existence of a Europe of the Regions, and daring to argue that the Nation State was a phenomenon of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, which will not have any useful future in the twenty-first century. The forthcoming history of administration in the federated Europe they are struggling to discover is a link between, let us say, Calabria, Wales, Andalusia, Aquitaine, Galicia or Saxony, as regions rather than as nations, seeking their regional identity, economically and culturally, which had been lost in their incorporation in nation states, where the centre of gravity is elsewhere.

In the great tide of nationalism in the nineteenth century, there was a handful of prophetic and dissenting voices, urging a different style of federalism. It is interesting, at the least, that the ones whose names survive were the three best known anarchist thinkers of that century: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. The actual evolution of the political left in the twentieth century has dismissed their legacy as irrelevant. So much the worse for the left, since the road has been emptied in favour of the political right, which has been able to set out its own agenda for both federalism and regionalism. Let us listen, just for a few minutes, to these anarchist precursors.

 

"Liberal today under a liberal government, it will tomorrow become the formidable engine of a usurping despot It is a perpetual temptation to the executive power, a perpetual threat to the people's liberties. No rights, individual or collective, can be sure of a future. Centralisation might, then, be called the disarming of a nation for the profit of its government ..."

Proudhon

First there was Proudhon, who devoted two of his voluminous works-------

Continue reading:

Mikhail Bakunin. 

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Oil And Religion, A Bad Mix.

      What is really happening in Iraq and Syria, where does Turkey stand in this bloodshed, where does IS get all their hard wear. Turkey has a vested interest in seeing the Kurds defeated, but as usual, it is all sold as good verses evil, when in fact it is all political manoeuvring for power and territory, by the power mongers. The blood of the people will be shed at the dictate of imperial ideology and religious fundamentalism. Under the veil of a battle between good and evil will lie rich oilfields.

     The corporate imperial West is very reluctant to arm the Kurds as they are building a form of federalism and people's assemblies, not the sort of thing the West wants to see in an oil rich area. No where in this can we say that the West is there for the benefit of the people of that area, the West can quite easily turn its back on brutal repression if the benefits are not rich enough for them. Brutal regimes can be our allies, friendly trading partners, as long as they play ball with their resources. It's when those resources are under threat that those same nations become evil empires and have to be destroyed.

This from Roar Mag:

       Moreover, the earlier defeat of IS by the Syrian Kurdish forces both in Kobanê and Sinjar has been interpreted as a slap in the face of the jihadists. Especially the fact that almost a third of the Kurdish militias are made up of women has served to shame the radical Islamists who prefer to see women covered in black robes from head to toe, rather than unveiled, independent and empowered with a AK-47 in their hands.

       The last important fact that has put Kobanê high on the agenda of the Islamic State is that this is the place where the Rojava revolution started on July 19, 2012, when the town was liberated from Assad’s forces and became home to the Democratic People’s Revolution. In this struggle, Syria’s Kurds have declared their autonomy from the state and have since been working to implement democratic confederalism and people’s assemblies as a means to govern themselves.

Read the full article HERE:

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