The Definition of Insanity

Abandon politics.

Since they’re not going to change, they’re always going to be insane. Let’s turn down the perennial invitation to be insane with them.

When longshoremen refuse to move war materiel, when workers in Argentina take control of the factories, when high-school students in Israel refuse to serve in the military, when women in Britain block the entrances to a Trident base, when protesters from around the world mass on the Egyptian border to lead a freedom march into Gaza, when Gandhi made salt and wool in India, when ordinary people boycotted the buses and sat in at the lunch counters, when Code Pink delivers supplies to Gaza, people are no longer recognizing the state. They are saying it is irrelevant to human freedom, that direct action is the road to democracy.

Until people organize themselves and take control, civilization will always be run by proxy, and the proxy will always let us down.

Now from some people who can say it much better than I can:

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they’re really factions of the same party, the Business Party. Both represent some range of business interests. In fact, they can change their positions 180 degrees, and nobody even notices. In the 1984 election, for example, there was actually an issue, which often there isn’t. The issue was Keynesian growth versus fiscal conservatism. The Republicans were the party of Keynesian growth: big spending, deficits, and so on. The Democrats were the party of fiscal conservatism: watch the money supply, worry about the deficits, et cetera. Now, I didn’t see a single comment pointing out that the two parties had completely reversed their traditional positions. Traditionally, the Democrats are the party of Keynesian growth, and the Republicans the party of fiscal conservatism. So doesn’t it strike you that something must have happened? Well, actually, it makes sense. Both parties are essentially the same party. The only question is how coalitions of investors have shifted around on tactical issues now and then. As they do, the parties shift to opposite positions, within a narrow spectrum.

–Noam Chomsky, Interview by Adam Jones, February 20, 1990

The consistent anarchist, then, should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. –Noam Chomsky, In Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970

I mean, what’s the elections? You know, two guys, same background, wealth, political influence, went to the same elite university, joined the same secret society where you’re trained to be a ruler – they both can run because they’re financed by the same corporate institutions. At the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama said, ‘only in this country, only in America, could someone like me appear here.’ Well, in some other countries, people much poorer than him would not only talk at the convention – they’d be elected president. Take Lula. The president of Brazil is a guy with a peasant background, a union organizer, never went to school, he’s the president of the second-biggest country in the hemisphere. Only in America? I mean, there they actually have elections where you can choose somebody from your own ranks. With different policies. That’s inconceivable in the United States.   –Noam Chomsky, Interview by Wallace Shawn, October 19, 2004

Personally I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy. –Noam Chomsky, Business Today, May 1973

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners. –Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis en Deserto): Notes from a Secret Journal, 1990)

. . . anarchism can be conceived as a kind of voluntary socialism, that is, as libertarian socialist or anarcho-syndicalist or communist anarchist, in the tradition of, say, Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin and others. They had in mind a highly organized form of society, but a society that was organized on the basis of organic units, organic communities. And generally, they meant by that the workplace and the neighborhood, and from those two basic units there could derive through federal arrangements a highly integrated kind of social organization which might be national or even international in scope. And these decisions could be made over a substantial range, but by delegates who are always part of the organic community from which they come, to which they return, and in which, in fact, they live.

Representative democracy, as in, say, the United States or Great Britain, would be criticized by an anarchist of this school on two grounds. First of all because there is a monopoly of power centralized in the state, and secondly — and critically — because the representative democracy is limited to the political sphere and in no serious way encroaches on the economic sphere. Anarchists of this tradition have always held that democratic control of one’s productive life is at the core of any serious human liberation, or, for that matter, of any significant democratic practice. That is, as long as individuals are compelled to rent themselves on the market to those who are willing to hire them, as long as their role in production is simply that of ancillary tools, then there are striking elements of coercion and oppression that make talk of democracy very limited, if even meaningful. –Noam Chomsky, The Jay Interview, July 25, 1976

The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. That State is the best governed which is governed the least. –Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in Gandhi’s Wisdom Box (1942), edited by Dewan Ram Parkash, p. 67 also in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 79 (PDF), p. 122

Laws: We know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in the hands of government. –Pierre Joseph Proudhon

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. –Emma Goldman

No longer riding on the merry-go-round

I just had to let it go.

–John Lennon