#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #CANADA #ANARCHISM #LIBRARY #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Canada, Collectif Emma Goldman - MEPACQ conference: "The myths of capitalism" (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 We share here a document that we produced (notes) as part of the colloquium

organized by the Mouvement d'éducation populaire et action communautaire
(MEPACQ), "To put an end to inequalities, let's get out of capitalism", in
November 2022 and more specifically for the participation of a member of the Emma
Goldman Collective in the panel entitled "The Myths of Capitalism". ---- You have
probably already noticed the way the media presents economic news. In a news
bulletin, we move from traffic to weather via the TSX or Nasdaq indices. The
economy is presented as a natural fact in the same way as the weather. In the
same program, we can talk about greenhouse gases and the climate crisis and in a
subsequent segment, we can talk about tips and tricks for doing a flip (purchase
and resale of real estate that drives up prices), the best investment
opportunities or "wealth creation" without ever making a link between capitalism
and the climate emergency.

On Earth, people are dying of hunger while there is an overproduction of food.
They simply die because they cannot afford to buy food. The planet is warming,
land is burning, natural disasters are increasing and there is a risk of
ecosystem collapse due to human activity. Capitalism, a system that seeks to
maximize profits for a small elite, is a disaster, which appears obvious to most
people. But it seems there is no alternative. After all, we have seen in the last
century what "communism" (read state capitalism) gave us here. At least, that's
what we keep being told.

But the capitalist economy is far from being a natural fact and above all not a
fatality or an unsurpassable system. No offense to Francis Fukuyama, this is not
the end of the story. What has been built by humans can just as easily be undone.
Examples of contemporary struggles and resistance are there to demonstrate this.

However, capitalism will not crumble under the weight of its own contradictions.
Recent history shows us the formidable ability of this operating system to adapt,
even to recover criticism (eg green capitalism, so-called sharing economy,
participatory management in business, etc.). One thing is certain, there will be
no great night, no saviour... It is here and now that we must create cracks in
the system, through our resistance and our rebellions, rehabilitate the common,
create as the writer and philosopher John Holloway of the breaches.

  Freedom from dispossession/dependency

For the orthodox Marxists of the last century, writes the philosopher Pierre
Madelin, "the emancipation of the proletariat passed through the appropriation
and socialization of the means of production, without calling into question
either the nature of its means of production, nor the ideal productivist that
they had to serve, nor even the need to centralize their management[MADELIN 2017,
p.55]". If we denounce the development of a large useless project such as GNL
Quebec, it should be specified that, for us, its start-up under workers'
self-management would hardly make more sense. No more than an open-pit mine
operated in the middle of a village by a self-managed miners' cooperative. It is
on this subject that the sociologist John Holloway wrote: "revolution is not
about destroying capitalism, but about refusing to manufacture it[HOLLOWAY 2016]".

Getting out of the ecological crisis and freeing ourselves from capitalism also
implies freeing ourselves from the dispossession (of our power, our faculties,
our capacities) which it afflicts us and from the subordination of the smallest
aspect of our lives to its market logic.

The French essayist Michel Bounan, etc. writes in The Crazy History of the World:
"The market system[...]develops, maintains itself and strengthens itself where
human communities cannot be self-sufficient. Who would buy food where everyone
could pick, gather and hunt as they pleased? Who would employ himself in
forbidding activities in exchange for the goods he possesses in abundance? The
market system has as its fundamental enemy the capacity to satisfy, in a free and
autonomous way, basic needs[BOUNAN 2006]".

"If it were easy, we would know" or the obstacles to individual and collective
emancipation

"Religion, property, and government, which govern the human mind, needs, and
behaviors, are the bastion of man's enslavement and all the horrors that entails"
wrote Emma Goldman[GOLDMAN 1911].

1) Private property

"From its origins, capitalism has been a movement of closure reminds us of
Holloway. Any form of ownership involves enclosure, appropriation, separation of
something from its enjoyment or use in common[HOLLOWAY 2016, p.67]".

"The market system is based on desire and deprivation[HOLLOWAY 2016, p.37]".

A landowner can leave his land abandoned regardless of the needs of the
community. A building owner may prefer to rent out his apartments to tourists
despite an acute housing crisis. He can speculate on the market value of his
properties, etc.

A minority monopolizes resources and wealth to the detriment of the greatest
number, of the common good.

2) Wage labor and labor discipline

  "Labor creates capital and it creates capitalism, a world structured by labor

[HOLLOWAY 2016, p.186]».

  "Work as it is established and generalized with capitalism is based on the
organization of material dependence through the deprivation of the means of
production and the commerce of subsistence[...]One must first have been
dispossessed of all means of existence to be forced to sell his labor power to a
boss in order to receive a salary and then buy goods in order to
survive[COLLECTIF MUR PAR MUR 2021, p.176]".

It will be understood that the place occupied by the capitalist/bourgeois has
nothing to do with the merit or the efforts made. The proletariat is filled with
people who work very hard. It is more related to our status due to our birth (in
the same way as the aristocrat of old), to the opportunities that we have or do
not have because of our gender, our skin color, our contact networks (capital
social), etc

To a large extent, revolutionary thought and movement did not radically challenge
work.

Once the forms and rhythms of work in the factory have been accepted, the
struggle against capital continues, but takes place mainly within the rules
established by capitalism itself. Once the idea of work is internalized, the
horizon of possibilities is considerably reduced. So just running the shop
without a boss isn't enough to bring down capitalism - although that's already
better. There will always remain the economic constraints linked to productivity
and competition. In short, it is not because there is no boss that work becomes
less alienating, that we leave the logic of quantification, rationalization, or
even exploitation. The example of the factory recovery movement in Argentina in
2001, including the FaSinPat factory, Fábrica sin patrón,

3) An airplane (the State) cannot be transformed into a boat

"The modern state is not neutral, it is structurally linked to the accumulation
of capital and the destruction of the earth[MADELIN 2017, p.137]".

To this statement you can retort that there have indeed been advances on the
social level. Yet even the welfare state only superficially opposes capitalism.
Moreover, most of the regulations regarding the environment or the rights granted
to workers, women and the LGBTQIA2+ community were not adopted by referendum
consultation, but as a result of the struggles led by these groups.

The author of Changing the world without taking power (Lux Éditeur) affirms as
much as he does in Crack Capitalism that: "The State is characterized by its
separation from society. It does not establish social cohesion, but acts as a
necessary complement to the establishment of this cohesion through the process of
exchanges[...]". And ultimately for Holloway: "The state, and therefore politics
understood as a distinct domain, is a suppression, a displacement, a diversion
from our struggle for a different world[HOLLOWAY 2016, p.227]".

"The imperative is therefore not to build the party with a view to seizing power,
but to recreate autonomy where it has been destroyed by the deadly intermediary
generated by the globalized market[HOLLOWAY 2016, p .100]". It is necessary to
maintain diversity, decentralization and redundancy (as opposed to the production
and distribution system which promotes centralization and specialization) here
embodied in the proverb "you should not put all your eggs in one basket" to
develop communities that are more resilient and able to control at the local
level a production and distribution system developed to meet the needs of all. It
is from below that we must do it and not from the summit of political power, the
State.

Yes, but...

We live in an increasingly complex, integrated and digital world. We live in such
a complex society that it would be impossible for us to do without the state.

"Today, the satisfaction of the least of our basic needs - water, electricity,
housing, food, heating - is dependent on complex and fragile political,
industrial and economic systems (crises and the present pandemic remind us) over
which we have no control[MADELIN 2017, p.19]".

Worse, individuals would be unable to organize themselves by themselves, because
they would form a chaotic and more often conflicting whole. We just have to think
about all these post-apocalyptic movies and series and analyze how stateless and
post-capitalist societies are presented. But a stateless society is not
necessarily virtuous (eg so-called failed states) nor is it necessarily a jungle.

The First Peoples in North America were not organized into states when the
Europeans arrived. They formed complex societies and communities that had a
strong culture and maintained links with other peoples.

Despite this, the state is no guarantee for the maintenance of peace. Already,
peace is a relative concept depending on the place you occupy in society, your
skin color, your religious beliefs, etc. Without forgetting that history is
strewn with deaths and filled with violence committed in the name of reason of
state. Also, we cannot say that the state or the supra-state structures that we
know have proven to be the most competent to eradicate inequalities on the planet
and to fight effectively against pandemics and global warming.

We don't have to go far to find examples of self-organization. We only have to
think of crisis situations such as the Saguenay flood, the ice storm and even to
some extent the last health crisis where forms of large-scale mutual aid and
solidarity were put in place. This is a rather widespread trend.

Breach strategy... paving the way for something else

The market tends to extend its control over the living, but not everything is
just a market relationship. It still eats up more of our time, but many of our
social relationships or activities are outside the idea of optimizing
productivity and are not determined by money or the rules of power.

John Holloway defines the breaches thus: "The breaches are explorations in
asymmetry, explorations in the antipolitics of dignity. Dignity is the immediate
affirmation of a denied subjectivity, the taking of a stand against a world that
treats us as objects and denies us the capacity to determine our own lives, which
denies us as subjects capable and worthy of deciding for ourselves[HOLLOWAY 2016]".

By implementing autonomous practices, self-production for example, or by
reclaiming vernacular knowledge and know-how, a community can manage to free
itself from dependence on markets and state institutions. For example, if the
Zapatista movement has been able to resist the sometimes violent harassment of
paramilitaries in the pay of the Mexican federal state and the de facto absence
of the state, it is largely because their political autonomy is largely based on
food sovereignty.

Our struggles and our resistances, whether on the picket lines or on the
barricades erected on the railways, can open breaches during which another
relationship to time is possible and where the relationships of domination are
broken to create new ones. others .

This approach implies a power of direct and immediate action contrary to a
totalizing revolutionary strategy which could only inspire us with a feeling of
powerlessness.

Neither primitivist, nor desertion

We can rightly say that certain experiments have ended up withdrawing into
themselves, in a process of separation and exemplarity. "By focusing on the
defense of social spaces not yet subject to capital or of experiences seeking to
escape this submission, they neglect to confront capitalism on its own terrain,
that of domination in work, for example[MADELIN 2017 , p.108]".

However, these experiences are not fatally condemned to isolation, to being
locked in on themselves and pacified. We need only think of the mobilizations
against LNG by small organic producers and craftsmen in the fjord, the zones to
be defended (ZAD) in France or the Zapatista caracoles in Mexico. These
experiences can even nourish other struggles in the literal and figurative sense
and reinforce combativeness by allowing us to be less dependent and dependent on
the logics of consumption and wage labor.

Don't get mad...

Capitalism makes us sick. We simply have to talk to the people of Rouyn-Noranda
who have to live with high levels of toxic emissions because of the Horne smelter
or even the people who live in the Arvida district, in Jonquière near the old
aluminum smelter. It is the capitalists and their allies who cause suffering and
sow desolation behind them. Some prefer to identify scapegoats to better divide
us between workers born in the country or abroad or between workers and the
unemployed in order to maintain this system which engenders misery and threatens
all life on earth. In addition to a discourse that feeds intolerance, resentment,
even hatred the populists and the extreme right have nothing to offer the
unemployed, the workers, the poorly housed, the precarious, the homeless,
etc.[2020 EMMA GOLDMAN COLLECTIVE].

The needs in our living environments are enormous and although in general we have
few means, there are possibilities to do things differently (without mediation
and money and without asking permission from anyone (institutions, government,
etc.)). Self-organization in Saguenay took different forms such as the Marmite
autogérée, free markets and for a time the Espace social libre (a self-managed
social center). It promotes mutual aid, solidarity, collective mobilization and
popular education in the neighborhoods, in addition to catching a glimpse of
different social relationships for a moment. Sometimes these moments of exchange
can be the seed that leads to other forms of solidarity and struggles.

Bibliographic references:

Michel Bounan (2006). "In the crazy history of the world", Allia.

Emma Goldman Collective (2020). "Fighting the far right and populism. The
Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean experience". M Editor.

Wall by wall collective (2021). "For a revolutionary Anarchism", Editions L'Échappée.

Emma Goldman (1911). «Anarchism: What It Really Stands for» dans Anarchism and
Other Essays, Mother Earth.

John Holloway (2016). "Crack Capitalism: 33 theses against capital", Libertalia.

Pierre Madelin (2017). "After capitalism: Essay on political ecology", Éditions
Écosociété.

  by Collectif Emma Goldman

http://ucl-saguenay.blogspot.com/2022/11/colloque-du-mepacq-les-mythes-du.html
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