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What does it mean to say we live in a permanent state of emergency? What are the juridical, political and social underpinnings of that framing? Has international law played a role in producing or challenging the paradigm of normalised emergency? How should we understand the relationship between imperialism, race and emergency legal regimes? In addressing such questions, this book situates emergency doctrine in historical context. It illustrates some of the particular colonial lineages that have shaped the state of emergency, and emphasises that contemporary formations of emergency governance are often better understood not as new or exceptional, but as part of an ongoing historical constellation of racialised emergency politics. The book highlights the connections between emergency law and violence, and encourages alternative approaches to security discourse. It will appeal to scholars and students of international law, colonial history, postcolonialism and human rights, as well as policymakers and social justice advocates.

https://worldecology.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/John-Reynolds-Empire-Emergency-And-International-Law-Cambridge-University-Press-2017.pdf

From the “Virgin Land” myth to weaponized pine forests, this essay exposes how greenwashing masks the systematic erasure of Palestinian life. It reminds us that the struggle for decolonization and indigenous food sovereignty is the front line of a global movement to reclaim our collective ecological future.

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>“Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé
pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré
pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté
>
>mais ils s’abandonnent, saisis, à l’essence de toute chose
ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute chose
insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde”
>
>Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
>
>(“Eia for those who never invented anything
for those who never explored anything
for those who never tamed anything
>
>but they give themselves up, captivated, to the essence of all things
ignorant of surfaces but captivated by the motion of all things
heedless of taming, but playing the game of the world”)

Areti Angeli and Ombretta Giancaspro || The zionist slogan “A land without a people for a people without a land” is not merely a historical fallacy; it is a fantasy of ecological dominance. It constructs a “Virgin Land” myth that positions the colonizer as a “saviour”, the sole creator of a green oasis, a bastion of western rights and environmental protection against a neglected, “barbarian” desert attributed to Palestinian mismanagement.

This narrative serves to greenwash occupation. Drawing on Malcom Ferdinand’s concept of the “double colonial/environmental fracture”, we argue that the zionist separation of Nature/Culture is instrumental to land theft.

Yet, colonial domination extends beyond the land to the body itself. Adopting an eco-transfeminist perspective, it is evident that the occupation operates a “war on reproduction,” enforcing a capitalist sterility on both the Palestinian indigenous landscape and body.

In this essay, we examine how ecology is weaponized as an instrument of erasure through the JNF’s afforestation projects that replace native biodiversity with European monocultures. Then, we analyze the biopolitics of the “Chosen Body,” exposing how Israel’s self-branding as an “eco-friendly” and “gay-friendly” country relies on casting the Palestinian as “savage” to justify elimination. Finally, we explore colonial control over agriculture and seeds, framing the recovery of heirloom seeds and food sovereignty by the Palestinians as acts of resistance against ecological and social erasure.

The syntax of “entangled history” proposed by Bashir and Goldberg is essential to dismantle the colonial apparatus. To fully comprehend the ecological devastation in Palestine, we must address how the historical trauma of the Holocaust is employed to justify and ethically mask the continuous Nakba.

In this framework, settler’s anxiety is projected onto the landscape: the security demanded to allegedly prevent another Shoah is translated into a need for total domination over the land and the erasure of the indigenous population. This turns Jewish trauma into a shield for settler-colonialism, where the “status of absolute victim” allows the state to reframe any Palestinian resistance as an existential and antisemitic threat.

Recognizing this connection does not mean to compare the two events but it means to refuse to allow historical Jewish suffering to be instrumentalized to justify zionist colonialism, and to render the Palestinian catastrophe invisible beneath the roots of the JNF’s pine forests.

ECOLOGY AS AN INSTRUMENT OF ERASURE

The Colonial Roots of “Ecology”

Coined in 1866 by Ernst Haeckel, “ecology” emerged from a framework of white supremacy and eugenics. Haeckel’s assertion that “politics is nothing but applied biology” was used to justify racism and Social Darwinism, turning European ecology into a tool for the colonial exploitation of Africa.

Indigenous knowledge and land stewardship were deliberately erased to make way for Eurocentric management and industrial capitalism, driving the continent’s ecological and social disaster.

To reclaim ecology for liberation, we must acknowledge its colonial roots and commit to dismantling the West’s racist storytelling. This acknowledgment is essential for moving toward a decolonial environmental justice.

The double colonial and environmental fracture

Malcolm Ferdinand argues that modernity’s “double fracture” – colonial and environmental – separates colonial history from environmental history, isolating environmental/ecologist movements from postcolonial/anti-racist ones.

The environmental fracture originates from modernity’s “great division” – a dualist opposition separating nature and culture, environment and society. This establishes a hierarchy that privileges humanity over nature justifying the “domestication” of the environment and non-human species through technical, scientific, and economic advances.

The colonial fracture divides humans and geographic spaces by separating European colonizers and non-European colonized people, whites and non-whites, masters and slaves, countries of the North and countries of the South. This fracture elevates the settler’s history and desires, subordinating the lives and lands of the colonized.

Current mainstream environmentalism, by overlooking black and racialized people from the debate and prioritizing “protection” over liberation, maintains and reinforces, rather than dismantles, the existing racist, speciesist and misogynous western social order. This leads to what scholars Malcom Ferdinand and Ghada Sasa identify as a “white elite environmentalism.”

This critique is reinforced by Andreas Malm’s exposition of the hypocrisy of western climate movements that mourn the loss of biodiversity while remaining silent on the genocide. He argues that an environmentalism that separates the protection of nature from the protection of the indigenous people living within it, is merely a “guardian of the colonial garden”: one cannot claim to defend the biosphere while ignoring the imperial war machine that is its primary destroyer.

Ferdinand proposes to make this double fracture a central problem of the ecological crisis, going beyond the lie of a universal “ecological crisis”. We are not all in the same boat, some are on the bridge of the ship, while others are in the hold, absorbing the engine’s fumes.

Still from the documentary Foragers (2022) by Jumana Manna.

The Production of race and territory, despicable living beings and dumps

Based on Malcom Ferdinand’s seminal book, “A Decolonial Ecology: Voices from the Caribbean World” (originally published in French in 2019 as Une écologie décoloniale), we argue that colonization exploits modernity’s “double fracture” by transforming these separations into instruments of domination: “to produce race and territory, to hierarchize individuals and lands, to produce respectable living beings and despicable ones, lands to be protected and dumps.”

Environmental toxicity is a physical continuation of social oppression, targeting already marginalized bodies -weakened by economic or racial discrimination- and forcing them to inhabit the spaces that the privileged abandon: the fence-lines of factories, landfills and the banks of polluted rivers.

This dynamic is deepened by Marco Armiero’s theory of the Wasteocene, an era defined by “waste relationships.” Since the colonial and capitalist state cannot function on equality, it creates a violent hierarchy in which waste is not just the physical trash we discard but a tool for organizing society. To produce value, hygiene, and purity for a select few (usually in the Global North or wealthy enclaves), it must produce contamination and waste for the many whose lives are treated as “wasted lives.”

This aligns with the colonial habitation: the “othering” of people – classifying them as poor, racialized, or “backward”- is the prerequisite for the “wasting” of their environment. The zionist project relies on these principles: by categorizing indigenous lands as wild and empty “nature”, settlers disguise land theft as “conservation” or “protection” while viewing the palestinian indigenous population as “deviant/waste”and a threat to that land.

Palestinian woman lamenting the vandalization of her olive trees in Litwane, January 6, 2006, near the Jewish settlement of Ma’on – [REUTERS/Nayef Hashlamoun, 2006].

Trees as a Weapon in Palestine

>“They cut down the tree, smash the stone, destroy the land: they fight everything that is a testimony to Palestinian history. They want to change the face of our land because they fear the truth it holds. But we have a weapon they cannot have, with which we resist all their attempts to drive us out: the ancestral love and duty to protect everything that grows on Palestinian soil. Palestine is our mother and we will never abandon her. This commitment to resistance is exactly what Israel is trying to eradicate.” — Omar, Palestinian farmer.

To understand the weaponization of ecology, we must situate it within the broader framework identified by Hanieh, Knox, and Ziadah: Palestine is not a mere conflict, but a structural and ongoing project of settler-colonialism intertwined with racial capitalism. In this context, the erasure of indigenous vegetation is the ecological parallel to the elimination of indigenous people.

Ecology is weaponized by the zionist entity in its expansionist and genocidal project to transform land from a communal means of production – supporting indigenous life and subsistence – into a controlled, militarized state asset. By systematically destroying the territories and their history, the land stewardship practices, the indigenous knowledge systems and the existing ecological relationships binding Palestinians to their land, it prevents their return.

Israel manipulates the natural environment to support an oasis of luxurious settler compounds in the West Bank, with palestinian resources rerouted away, and uses the occupied Palestinian territory as a dumping ground for its waste – causing damage to the groundwater resources and the environment.

Primarily through the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the zionist entity has long utilized the planting of exotic pines – reminiscent of European landscapes – on Palestinian village lands to annex territory and violently displace Palestinians under the guise of environmental protection.

This is an effort to conceal Palestinian existence and remake not only the environment but also cultural memory. This process involves eradicating native, centuries-old crops like carobs and olive trees to establish monocultures of European pines. These trees have a destructive impact on biodiversity by consuming excessive groundwater, acidifying the soil and raising the risk of fires, a danger made worse by climate change.

The zionist ecological model uses non-native homogeneity as a weapon severing the connection with both the inhabitants and the environment, securing land for the colonial system.

The erasure of the Palestinian landscape is not merely a byproduct of war, but according to Amos Goldberg and Bashir Bashir, a deliberate act of “spatial purification”. They argue that the zionist project requires the physical destruction of indigenous signs: villages, ruins and native vegetation.

The planted forests of the JNF thus function as a mechanism of denial: they cover the trauma of the Nakba with a greenery that mimics the European landscape, allowing the settler to feel “at home” while physically burying the evidence of the crime beneath the roots of the pine.

Jana Boulus, Self-Portraits: ‘Miss Palestine’, a visual stab at western culture and its many trivial obsessions.

BIOPOLITICS OF THE CHOSEN

The “Chosen Body” vs. The “Primitive Body”

Meira Weiss argues that the zionist revolution sought to create a new Jewish people in a new land – “masculine, healthy, powerful and perfect” – to replace the image of the emasculated diasporic Jew. This supposed “chosen body” achieved superiority through the manipulation of nature and the conquest of both the land and the Palestinian people.

This new identity, which aimed to transform the landscape of Palestine, justified Israel’s supposed divine right to the land. As Irus Braverman notes, “labor and the transformation of nature through labor in particular was central to the development of the new halutz ivri (Hebrew Pioneer): a Jewish farmer who cultivates the land and lives off the fruits of his labor”.

Early zionist s believed that planting would transform the “rootless cosmopolitan” Jew into a physical laborer with an “intimate connection to the Land”.

While the Israeli body aligns itself with “culture” and rational management of nature and of the land, the Israeli/American/western projection of the Palestinian/Arab body is more closely aligned with nature, thought of as primitive and unable to properly master resources.

In “Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times”, Jasbir K. Puar argues: “Muslim masculinity is simultaneously pathologically excessive yet repressive, perverse yet homophobic, virile yet emasculated” defining the racialized queer paradigm.

Through a selective acceptance of queer representation, in what Puar calls “homonationalism,” other queer identities become understood as homophobic, death driven and perverse to justify xenophobic, Islamophobic, or racist policies.

Israel’s self-marketing narrative as “Eco-Friendly” and “Gay-Friendly” operates as a biopolitical tool to “naturalize” the exclusion of Palestinians, designed to justify and preserve hegemonic control.

By framing itself as the only keeper of “progressive/western” values in the region, the state weaponizes liberal rights -both environmental and sexual- against the colonized, and Palestinians become depicted as “ecological savages” and “homophobic barbarians”. The apartheid is strategically justified by elevating the settler state as a heaven of rights and framing colonial violence as a defense of modernity.

THE COLONIAL CONTROL OVER REPRODUCTIVE LIFE AND SEEDS OF RESISTANCE

Colonial power operates also through a “war on reproduction,” enforcing a capitalist sterility on both the land and the body to ensure dependency. The system demands monoculture (uniformity in crops, binary in gender) because it fears the complexity, diversity, and self-reproduction of the indigenous /queer ecosystem.

This control disrupts the connection between the people and the soil, replacing “food sovereignty” with a biopolitical “food security” – or quoting Achille Mbembe a necropolitics. Colonial systems weaponize food to enforce control, as seen on Turtle Island where replacing traditional diets with “government cheese” and “mystery meat” disconnected indigenous people from their healthy relationship with the land and caused chronic diseases.

This strategy is mirrored in Palestine through the criminalization of wild “za’atar” foraging, which uses the guise of “conservation” to dismantle self-sufficient economies and force dependency on capitalist markets. Both tactics serve to police indigenous bodies and sovereignty by systematically severing their physical and spiritual ties to the environment.

The destruction of agricultural traditions by colonialism has historically targeted women, stripping them of economic independence and social status, and increasing their vulnerability to gender-based violence.

Against this enforced sterility, the recovery of seeds and land, as well as the claim of food sovereignty, become radical collective acts of anti-capitalist, decolonial, eco-transfeminist resistance against occupation and corporate dominance.

Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, champions this by preserving threatened heirloom seeds. These are seeds that adapt to weather conditions, resist drought, water scarcity and do not require pesticides. It is an act that reclaims cultural heritage allowing farmers to recover control over their food systems and reject dependency on industrial imports.

This praxis aligns with the global movement La Via Campesina, which advocates for “peasant and popular feminism,” asserting that liberation requires access to land and the eradication of gender violence. The path towards global justice, today must be led by those resisting the intersecting oppressions of “heteropatriarchy, capitalism, racism, and colonialism”. Communities must reject the colonizer’s binary logic through mutual support, diversity and self-reproducing ecosystem.

As Laila El-Haddad’s “The Gaza Kitchen” shows, preserving indigenous cuisine and cooking native herbs (like those gathered by Palestinian women) is “Sumud” as well as protecting olives trees and heirloom seeds: steadfastness and resilience on the land, an assertion of culture, identity, and persistence against an attempted ecological and social erasure.

People march during the nationwide strike “Let’s Block Everything” in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and calling for a halt to arms shipments to Israel, in Rome on September 22, 2025 [AFP]

GLOBAL INTIFADA TOWARD HOLISTIC DECOLONIZATION

Horizontal Solidarity

The rise in global solidarity with Palestine is not a reaction to an isolated crisis: it maps the contours of a planetary colonial order.

Reading Palestine alongside Turtle Island, as Tabar and Desai suggest, reveals a shared logic of erasure: just as U.S. and Canadian “wilderness” parks were carved out of indigenous expulsion, the Jewish National Fund’s forests serve as green camouflage for displacement.

This is the essence of green colonialism. As Hamza Hamouchene defines it “is the extension of colonial relations of plunder and dispossession to the green transition era, as well as the displacement of the socio-environmental costs of this transition to the Global South.”

It replaces communal, multispecies ecologies with landscapes engineered for accumulation of capital – tourism, real estate, and extractive monocultures. When western environmentalism ignores this dynamic, it stops being a movement for protection and becomes an accomplice to dispossession.

Andreas Malm provides the historical anchor for this horizontal solidarity, arguing that the colonization of Palestine and the destruction of the planetary climate are fuelled by the same source. Malm identifies Israel not just as a settler-state, but as a strategic outpost of the US-led “Fossil Empire”.

Inevitably, the Palestinian resistance intersects directly with the global climate struggle. If the zionist entity serves to secure the flow of fossil capital in the region, then a Global Intifada is not merely a political necessity for human rights, but a planetary imperative: dismantling the colonial machine in Palestine is a prerequisite for halting the engine of ecological collapse.

Beyond Statism Toward Holistic Decolonization

Environmental justice cannot be achieved within the confines of capitalist nation-states. A post-statist framework, as the one proposed by Smessaert and Feola, rethinks democracy as the collective generation of autonomy rather than a fixed institutional design.

This requires acknowledging that non-deliberative political forms -insurrection, refusal, ritual practices, and multispecies modes of care- are not irrational disruptions but democratic expressions. Further research should explore how autonomous human and multispecies communities form, persist, and resist within capitalist and colonial infrastructures, and how they destabilize state-centered ideas of agency and governance.

Indigenous Palestinian principles such as “a’wna” (collaboration) and “tawhid” (unity) offer potential alternatives to the domination-ecology of capitalism, gesturing toward non-binary, non-extractive relationships with the earth that honors interdependence.

Daniel Boyarin offers a radical Jewish manifesto that argues for a decoupling of “nation” from “state”, proposing that the true essence of Jewish existence is diasporic, defined by coexistence and study rather than sovereignty and borders.

By rejecting the “chosen zionist body” that necessitates fences and monocultures, Boyarin envisions a future where Jewish safety is not built on domination but on a “diasporic solidarity” with all oppressed people. This challenges the very logic of the ethno-state, suggesting that the dismantling of the colonial apparatus is not an erasure of Jewish life, but a return to a more ethical, non-hegemonic mode of existence.

In this framework, the healing of the double colonial/environmental fracture reveals that true collective liberation of the oppressed requires a global Intifada -understood as a collective refusal of the borders and walls that facilitate extraction.

To achieve holistic decolonization demands the total dismantling of the “Virgin Land” myth, exposing colonial “green” narratives as necropolitical weapons of erasure and apartheid. By recognizing that the forced sterility of the landscape mirrors the systemic control over Palestinian bodies, we see that the struggle for the land is inseparable from the struggle for the flesh.

Considering a Global Intifada that targets the core of the “fossil empire” – a system that treats indigenous lands and lives as throwaway fuel for accumulation – we must reject the empty promises of liberal environmentalism.

True ecological restoration is not a mere conservation project; it is an act of radical return, where the healing of the planet is contingent upon the liberation of Palestine and the unconditional restoration of its indigenous human and non-human kin to their rightful home.

Authors’ Note

This article arises from a personal need of the authors to explain how western conceptions of ecology  have been used as a “green” weapon for indigenous  erasure around the globe, serving capitalist and colonial interests. Concerning the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, for 77 years now, it is inevitable to confront the ways in which the state of Israel leverages European ideas about ecology to justify its genocidal and ecocidal crimes in Palestine.

It is important for us to develop a political analysis that fully recognizes the patriarchally structured ideology supporting  the creation of colonial systems. For this reason, we attempted an eco-transfeminist analysis from below, to explain  the environmental and colonial crisis as deeply connected with the marginalization of the bodies, and extend it to all humans and non-human bodies that are not-white-middle/upper class-males. It is a choice of terminology that has a long history and therefore  we took great care in writing the article.

As writers, we would like to express our undivided respect to all people who have been actively fighting for so many years for the creation of a society that is just, horizontal, and respectful of all the beings and ecosystems. We thus send our unwavering support to the struggle of the transfem movement and of all oppressed people of this world. From Palestine to Yemen, Sudan, Congo, Myanmar and every oppressed population of this world, till the complete decolonization and freedom of all.

In even attempting to enter discussion around global warming, we are immediately confronted with multiple challenges – firstly, to identify the root causes, and secondly, to find solutions that, in addressing the root causes of global warming, reflect the truism articulated by Albert Einstein that ‘we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them.’ This article contends that many contemporary analyses of global warming reflect the thinking that created it, both in terms of failing to adequately address its root causes, and in terms of failing to formulate minimally adequate responses based on such an analysis. With a view to expediting minimally adequate responses, this article critiques prevailing responses in the context of the truism of Einstein’s, focusing on the extent to which it speaks to the tendency to perpetuate climate crisis through quick fixes that treat symptoms rather than causes in defense of privilege from change. To that end, this article examines libertarian socialism as a set of ideas and principles that does manage a critique of the historical and social forces that give rise to the climate crisis, taking up at the same moment arguments made by World Ecologist Jason W. Moore, whose work examines the underlying social relations responsible for global warming by way of a critique of the ‘society vs. nature’ binary as an enabling ideological pretext. As this essay will argue, Moore’s concept of the oikeios provides an opportunity to expand on revolutionary praxis given its commonalities with traditional libertarian socialist notions of workers’ self-management of production, providing a strong basis upon which to meaningfully and effectively address the tendency to reproduce the thinking behind the climate crisis in responding to it. 

https://worldecology.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Rising_above_the_Thinking_behind_Climate.pdf

Classic tune

The phrase “The Empire Never Ended” is a quote from Valis, a very strange science fiction novel written by Philip K Dick in the 1970s. It was published in 1981. I’ve written about it a couple of times: here and here. It’s one of those books that wriggles its way into your imagination, despite it being frustrating and annoying at times.

Dick posits a sort of time leak, in which the 1st Century AD and the current time meld into each other. They overlap each other, like two transparencies in a light box, so that you can’t tell one from the other.

The Empire he’s talking about is the Roman Empire. Somehow it has continued into the present day. We’re living in apostolic times, the time of Christ’s return. A lot of people are saying similar things. What makes Dick’s book interesting is that he’s not using the traditional New Testament gospels as his source. Unlike Christian fundamentalists, he’s using the Gnostic gospels. These are the suppressed books of the many sects that existed before the New Testament was edited down to manageable proportions; before it was co-opted by the Roman Empire as a control mechanism. Dick’s apocalyptic vision has a different tone, much stranger and more psychedelic than the people who harangue you on the streets waving the Bible at you. Dick’s version involves some form of symbiosis between human beings and God in the form of “Living Information.”

According to Dick’s idea, the Roman Empire lives again. It’s in the form of the American Empire now, but it’s the same entity. It uses the same techniques. It manifests as the Black Iron Prison. This is a kind of psychological state, not unlike what William Blake was referring to when he spoke of the “mind-forg’d manacles.” It’s our programming, the way we’ve been trained to think. Whether you believe this or not, there’s something compelling in the argument. As Dick says, over and over again throughout the book, The Empire Never Ended (always like that, with capitals). The Empire Never Ended.

You can picture the Empire as a machine. It’s a mechanism for extracting wealth using the army. The armed forces are publicly funded but supplied by the private sector. It’s a money-laundering operation. Technically it’s known as Military Keynesianism. Traditional Keynesianism, recognizing that capitalism needs a constant flow of public money to keep it stable, opts for large scale infrastructure and welfare spending. That was the New Deal in the 1930s: putting public money into the public’s hands. In post-war Europe the mechanism was the welfare state. Old Age pensions. Free health services. Social security. Child benefit. Free education up to University level. Infrastructure, road and rail networks. Recreational spaces, public buildings, opera houses, art galleries, libraries, museums, theatres and music venues. In the United States a different approach was taken. This is Military Keynesianism, using the Military-Industrial Complex as the conduit for public wealth, funnelling it off into private hands through the arms industry.

So the Empire is a war machine, grinding on, ravenous for blood, for human sacrifice. It’s immeasurably profitable. It maintains its existence by promoting wars. You blow things up, you build them again, using the corporations, through which you siphon off the proceeds into off-shore accounts. There’s always a new war, a new enemy to stand up to, a new barbarism to oppose.

Here’s an account of the social mechanism behind the Roman war machine, as told by Joseph Schumpeter in The Sociology of Imperialisms (1919). He says: “There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honour that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours, always fighting for a breathing-space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.”

Does that remind you of anything? How many wars have there been, just in my lifetime? I was born in 1953, so it started with the Korean War, which was part of the Cold War. The Cold War got dangerous once or twice, and almost exploded in a nuclear confrontation over Cuba. After that it was the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, the War in Yugoslavia. Then the “Clash of Civilizations”: Kuwait, Iraq (the first time), the War on Terror (the first war in history to be declared on an abstract noun) which included Afghanistan and then Iraq again. Then came the Libyan War, when Gaddafi got sodomized with a bayonet and Hilary Clinton laughed. “We came, we saw, he died,” she quipped, in an amusing, light-hearted manner, like Oscar Wilde at a dinner party. Then the War in Syria, in which the Empire managed to simultaneously support the jihadists, while opposing them, pitting one faction against another, while fighting the Syrian government and claiming control of the best of the oilfields at the same time. And during all of this, the War in Afghanistan, which ground on, the longest bloody conflict in post-war history: a medieval tribal people taking on the might of the most powerful Empire the world has ever known. Then what happened? Well blow me down if the troops didn’t withdraw just in time to prepare for a new war, this one in the more strategically important Ukraine.

Now we’re involved in yet another war: one of the most terrible you can imagine. We’re not even fighting an army. We’re fighting a trapped population, caught like rats in a cage, in a concentration camp, a place where a whole population is imprisoned extra-judicially, concentrated in a controlled space without recourse to the law, walled in, fenced in, ringed by weaponry and surveillance equipment. Drones hovering in the air. Spies and informants. Occasional incursions to “mow the lawn,” Israel’s recipe for permanent war. It’s like a vast human experiment: what will people do when trapped in a cage for long enough, while you control their food, medicine, water and electricity supplies? Maybe some of them—the young hotheads, the ones we know from our own streets—will take the violent way out. Maybe when they’re asked to choose between dying quickly or dying slowly, they’ll choose the former, deliberately “pricking the beast” as they fly to their doom, waking the sleeping dragon that lives next door.

The Empire is a war machine that needs a never-ending supply of blood to keep it churning. And while it feeds the profits from other people’s labor into the private bank accounts of the very rich, it also needs to control the narrative. It needs to make sure that the population is thinking the right thoughts. To do this it occupies the imagination. It enters the mind in the same way an occupying army crosses the border into a foreign land. Propaganda’s the tool for the propagation of ideas into other people’s heads. The narrative’s the story line. It’s a clever manipulation of our natural human feelings, keeping us only half-informed, while playing upon our deepest fears, feeding the dark parts of our imagination, rage and revenge. It manipulates our perception of the events as they emerge from the war zone to keep the narrative on-track. Opposition stories are suppressed. The pro-war narrative is repeated: amplified a thousand times using a compliant media, paid-off politicians, and the latest technology.

What makes the machine so scary now is how advanced it has become. The internet is the most sophisticated surveillance and control engine ever devised. It manipulates the human mind. It’s a hypnosis machine, a dissociation engine. It separates you into your own narrative groups and feeds you what you want to hear. Everyone thinks they are “researchers″ when they are trawling the internet. In reality the narratives are seeded around the airwaves for us to find. AI can mimic anything. It can create a conversation between two Hamas operatives incriminating their allies, thus encouraging dissent, while exonerating the actual perpetrators. It’s clever. It can manipulate a film of a crowd in Sydney to make it sound like they’re chanting, “Gas the Jews! Gas the Jews!”—as if there’s an existential threat to all Jews around the world—frightening the Jewish population while confusing the issue in people’s minds. This isn’t about Jews, it’s about Israel as a settler-colonial state, stealing and occupying other people’s land. We’re being gaslit on a grand scale.

Some of those old war stories should remind us how futile all this is, how war never resolves anything. There’s always negotiations in the end, followed by a necessary peace. Remember Vietnam. The Empire took on a small nation and wrecked it. It was using a different narrative in those days. Then it was anti-communism. It suppressed people in their own land, committed atrocities (Mai Lai) but that only made the people more resilient, more canny, more clever. In the end the Empire saw that it couldn’t win. It was facing opposition at home, as well as throughout the world, so it withdrew. And then it had to make peace with the Vietnamese. It was the Vietnamese who were the aggrieved party. They were the ones invaded, slaughtered, carpet-bombed in their own villages, and Napalm and Agent-Orange rained down upon them, so the population is still riddled with birth defects. And yet they decided to forgive. Isn’t this true? Vietnam now welcomes Americans to visit the places where they were once stationed in the war. The Vietnamese are gracious as a nation, despite the atrocities committed upon them by the Empire on their own soil. They’ve chosen to forgive.

I’ve always had this feeling, since I was a young adult: as if we’re living in the “End Times.” I think it’s a hippie thing. We were always talking ourselves into apocalyptic scenarios, early morning after a night consuming drugs. Lots of people on the Christian Right will agree and concur with Philip Dick’s premonition about Christ’s return, although probably not in the same terms. They’re wishing for the apocalypse. Watch out for wishes, they can sometimes come true.

But I refuse to be despondent. I’m optimistic. Right now the people of the world are looking to Palestine. The majority, who live outside our Western propaganda bubble, have made up their minds. They see this as the war of the rich on the poor, of the strong on the weak, and they know who the guilty parties are. Maybe all the madness will resolve itself. Maybe we’re not really living in the “End Times,” but in the beginning times. End of the old times, beginning of the new. As Antonio Gramsci put it: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

**—**Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone

Cornelius Castoriadis || This article was first published as an introduction to Alexandra Kollontai’s The Workers Opposition, but it can stand alone as a refutation of the standard Leninist/Trotskyist claim that the Soviet Union only degenerated post 1924, i.e. after Lenin’s death, and as such has been published in pamphlet form by a number of groups.

[1. The Significance of the Russian Revolution]

We are happy to present to our readers the first translation into French of Alexandra Kollontai’s pamphlet The Workers’ Opposition in Russia. This pamphlet was published in Moscow at the beginning of 1921, during the violent controversy that preceded the Tenth Congress of the Bolshevik party. This Congress was to close discussion forever on this controversy as well as on all the others.{1}

People have not finished talking about the Russian Revolution, its problems, its degeneration, and about the regime it ultimately produced. And how could one? Of all the revolts of the working class, the Russian Revolution was the only victorious one. And of all the working class’s failures, it was the most thoroughgoing and the most revealing.

The crushing of the Paris Commune in 1871 and of the Budapest uprising in 1956 teach us that insurgent workers encounter immensely difficult organisational and political problems, that an insurrection can find itself isolated, that the ruling classes will not hesitate to employ any kind of violence or barbarian savagery when their power is at stake. The Russian Revolution, however, obliges us to reflect not only on the conditions for a proletarian victory but also on the content and the possible fate of such a victory, on its consolidation and development, on the seeds of a failure whose import infinitely surpasses the victory of the troops of the Versailles, of Franco’s army, or of Khrushchev’s tanks.

Since it crushed the White armies and yet succumbed to a bureaucracy it had itself generated, the Russian Revolution puts us face to face with problems of a different order from those involving a study of the tactics and methods of an armed insurrection or a correct analysis of the relation of forces at a given moment. It obliges us to reflect on the nature of the power of labouring people and on what we mean by socialism. Culminating in a regime in which economic concentration, the totalitarian power of the rulers, and the exploitation of the labouring population have been pushed to the limit, and producing to an extreme degree the centralisation of capital and its fusion with the State, in its outcome this revolution presents us with what has been and in certain respects still remains the most highly developed and the “purest” form of a modern exploitative society.

Embodying Marxism for the first time in history — only to make us see immediately in this incarnation a monstrous disfiguration of it — the Russian Revolution allows us to understand more about Marxism than what Marxism itself has been able to help us to understand about the Revolution. The regime the Revolution produced has become the touchstone for all current ideas, not only those of classical Marxism, of course, but just as much those of the bourgeois ideologies. This regime has proved the ruination of Marxism through its very realisation and has proved the triumph of the deepest layers of these other ideologies through its very refutations of them. Even as this regime has expanded to embrace a third of the globe, has been challenged by workers’ revolts against it over the past ten years, has attempted to reform itself, and has now split into two opposing poles, the Russian and the Chinese, it has not ceased to raise questions of the most pressing importance and to act as the clearest as well as the most enigmatic indicator of world history. The world we live in, reflect in, and act in was launched on its present course by the workers and Bolsheviks of Petrograd in October 1917.

[2. The Main Questions]

Among the innumerable questions raised by the fate of the Russian Revolution, two form the poles around which we may organise all the others.

The first question is: What kind of society was produced by the degeneration of the revolution? (What is the nature and the dynamic of this regime? What is the Russian bureaucracy? What is its relation to capitalism and to the proletariat? What is its place in history? What are its present problems?) This question has already been discussed on several occasions in S. ou B.[1] and will be again.[2]

The second question is, How can a workers’ revolution give birth to a bureaucracy, and how did this occur in Russia? We have examined this question in its theoretical form,[3] but so far we have said little from the concrete historical point of view. Indeed, there is an almost insurmountable obstacle to a close study of this particularly obscure period extending from October 1917 to March 1921, during which the fate of the revolution was played out. The question of most concern to us is, in effect, the following: To what extent did the Russian workers try to take upon themselves the direction of society, the management of production, the regulation of the economy, and the orientation of political life? What was their conscious awareness of these problems, the character of their autonomous activity? What was their attitude toward the Bolshevik party, toward the nascent bureaucracy? Now, we should point out that it is not workers who write history. It is always the others. And these others, whoever they may be, have a historical existence only insofar as the masses are passive, or active simply to support them, and this is precisely what “the others” will tell us at every opportunity. Most of the time these others will not even possess eyes to see and ears to hear the gestures and utterances that express people’s autonomous activity. In the best of instances, they will sing the praises of this activity so long as it miraculously coincides with their own line, but they will radically condemn it, and impute to it the basest motives, as soon as it strays there from. Thus Trotsky describes in grandiose terms the anonymous workers of Petrograd moving ahead of the Bolshevik party or mobilising themselves during the Civil War, but later on he was to characterise the Kronstadt rebels as “stool pigeons” and “hirelings of the French High Command.” They lack the categories of thought — the brain cells, we might dare say — necessary to understand, or even to record, this activity as it really occurs: to them, an activity that is not instituted, that has neither boss nor program, has no status; it is not even clearly perceivable, except perhaps in the mode of “disorder” and “troubles.” The autonomous activity of the masses belongs by definition to what is repressed in history.

Thus, it is not only that the documentary records most interesting to us during this period are fragmentary, or even that they were and continue to be systematically suppressed by the triumphant bureaucracy. It is that this record of events is infinitely more selective and slanted than any other historical testimony. The reactionary rage of bourgeois witnesses and the almost equally vicious hostility of the social democrats; the delirious ravings of the anarchists; the official historiography, periodically rewritten to suit the needs of the bureaucracy, and that of the Trotskyist tendency concerned exclusively with justifying itself after the fact and with hiding its role during the first stages of degeneration — all this “historical evidence” converges on one point: it ignores the signs of the autonomous activity of the masses during this period, or, if necessary, “proves” the a priori impossibility of its very existence. In this regard, the information contained in Alexandra Kollontai’s text is of priceless value. First, because of the direct indications it supplies concerning the attitudes and reactions of Russian workers toward the policy of the Bolshevik party; second and more important, because it shows that a large portion of the working-class base of the Party was aware of the process of bureaucratization that was taking place, and was taking a stand against it. It is no longer possible, after reading this text, to continue to describe the Russia of 1920 as “just chaos,” “a pile of ruins,” where the thought of Lenin and the “iron will” of the Bolsheviks were the only elements of order in a country whose proletariat had been pulverised. The workers wanted something, and they showed what they wanted through the Workers’ Opposition within the Party and the Petrograd strikes and the Kronstadt revolt outside the Party. Both the intraparty and the extraparty challenges had to be crushed by Lenin and Trotsky for Stalin later to emerge triumphant.

read the rest on classautonomy.info

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so. “ – Mark Twain.

The wisdom of Mark Twain has only tended to magnify in force in the years since his passing. Arguably one of his most adroit insights points to the perils of groupthink. What, after all, is the difference between being in a state of ignorance with an open mind, and being in a state of ignorance with a closed one? Does it even matter?

Wikipedia:

>Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs.^([1]) This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation.^([2])^([3])

Might it be the difference between being able to do something about being a state of ignorance, versus becoming hostage to a state of ignorance, and in so doing being condemned to act out on being hostage to a state of ignorance? This seems the classic conundrum of the bounded rationalities of ideologies, of closed systems of instrumentalist, power-driven thinking and their authoritarian psychologies; the ability of the group to defend consensus against causality. Its groupthink claims: the truth of an idea is determined by the number of people who believe it, not by any demonstrable foundation in casual reality.

Or, in other words, what I know for sure to be true is more important than my capacity to asesss and know truth where it fails to conform with my preconceived assumptions about what actually constitutes reality.

On this count, a great deal of European ideological history back to Ancient Greece reflects what Hofstadter called a “Paranoid Style” in reference to North American politics. That this was a statement of the utter banal in no sense diminished its power; the parallels between Washington and Rome have only ever become harder to ignore from the days the United States declared itself an Empire with the Monroe Doctrine.

>a style of mind, not always right wing in its affiliations … [characterised by] heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy’. 8 This made the persecution complex a key facet of political discourse, Hofstadter argued, systematising grandiose conspiracy theories after the style of the ‘clinical paranoiac’, who exhibits a ‘chronic mental disorder characterized by systematic delusions of persecution and of one’s own greatness’. 9 While both he and the demagogue are ‘overheated, over-suspicious, overaggressive, grandiose and apocalyptic in expression’, however, only the clinical paranoiac feels the ‘hostile and conspiratorial’ world to be ‘directed specifically against him’. 10 The spokesman for the paranoid style, on the other hand, finds it directed ‘against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not him alone, but millions of others’. 11
https://classautonomy.info/the-oldest-trick-in-the-book-panic-driven-scapegoating-in-history-and-recurring-patterns-of-persecution/

>This is a significant difference, in that Insofar as he does not usually see himself singled out as the individual victim of a personal conspiracy, he is somewhat more rational and much more disinterested. His sense that his political passions are unselfish and patriotic, in fact, goes far [as] to intensify his feeling of righteousness and his moral indignation. 12

He can appeal not to self-interest but the national ingroup and its national security blankets; using the two interchangably, the national ingroup and his privilege become one and the same. Selfishness is recast as virtue, predation as tough love, fear as strength of the pack. Schumpeter famously points to what today we know as conspiratorialism in Rome by noting

>There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honour that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbours, always fighting for a breathing-space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs.

So, as Philip K Dick came to realise,

>The empire never ended.

It was not a lie then for Hofstadter to argue then that

“The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time,” Hofstadter wrote; “it is an international phenomenon.”

>Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies . . . systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

“The megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph” turns up not least in the invention of the Barbarian in the self-pity party tragedies the Ancient Greeks threw themselves after losing a war they started.

From this, Norman Cohn drew the link, for his part, between the “Paranoid Style” and the ideological history of Europe by outlining what he called an “Ancient Fantasy.’ I have argued elsewhere that this is ‘what we might all a trope or archetype in the Jungian sense.’ The Paranoid Style of the Ancient Fantasy alleged that

>there existed, somewhere in the midst of the great society, another society, small and clandestine, which not only threatened the existence of the great society but was also addicted to practices which were felt to be wholly abominable, in the literal sense of anti-human . . .

This was as characteristic a feature of the Paranoid Style of the Ancient Greeks as it is of the Paranoid Style of Zionist ethnofascism today. Cohn goes on to note that

>The fantasy changed, became more complex, down through the centuries. It played an important part in some major persecutions; and the way in which it did also varied. Sometimes it was used merely to legitimate persecutions that would have occurred anyway; sometimes it served to widen persecutions that would otherwise have remained far more limited. In the case of the great [European] witch-hunt it generated massive persecution, which would have been inconceivable without it. In pursuing its history, one is led far beyond the confines of the history of ideas and deep into the sociology and social psychology of persecution.

Here Twain’s pointing to the role of subjective intellectual prejudices of the authoritarian variety starts to make itself felt. We have seen that the groupthink-driven mentality behind, for example, the European Witch Hunts, appears as what I know for sure to be true is more important than my capacity to assess and know truth where it fails to conform with my preconceived assumptions about what actually constitutes reality. Arthur Koestler has noted how pervasively this mentality appears historically:

>I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapists, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls. Tribal warfare was waged in the purported interest of the tribe, not of the individual. Wars of religion were fought to decide some fine point in theology or semantics. Wars of succession dynastic wars, national wars, civil wars, were fought to decide issues equally remote from the personal self-interest of the combatants . . . Let me repeat: the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?”
― Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine

Or to sacrifice the intellect to one. As the credo quia absurdum of St Ignatius de Loyola tells, the preconceived assumptions of witchcraft conspiracism and tall tales of Brides of Lucifer sold to sensual permissiveness became more important than causality insofar as they were necessary to the terror required to instil,

>besides entire outward submission to command, also the complete identification of the inferior’s will with that of the superior. [Loyola] lays down that the superior is to be obeyed simply as such and as standing in the place of God, without reference to his personal wisdom, piety or discretion; that any obedience which falls short of making the superior’s will one’s own, in inward affection as well as in outward effect, is lax and imperfect; that going beyond the letter of command, even in things abstractly good and praise-worthy, is disobedience, and that the “sacrifice of the intellect” is the third and highest grade of obedience, well pleasing to God, when the inferior not only wills what the superior wills, but thinks what he thinks, submitting his judgment, so far as it is possible for the will to influence and lead the judgment [of the individual].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_of_the_intellect

This is a desirable feature of workers and creators of value under world capitalism also, where the Almighty Dollar substitutes for God and Might Makes Right in the economy as well as imperial politics. It is most certainly a desirable trait of the intellectual classes in a world-system rooted in the profit motive, and in need of infinite planet to expand into to maintain a modality based on endless-growth.

This is some ways is the rub. The capitalist mode of production is not only based on endless-growth, needing endless planet to exploit in a one-way system of resource extraction. It is also entirely dependent on lands and peoples it enslaves and exploits—a dependency it dare not name, lest it know itself as a comprehensive set of lies.

Perhaps, dare it be said, this has something to do with all that wacky conspiracism that comes to be flying thick and fast in increasingly regular cycles; if you think for yourself, the terorrists win. If you think for yourself, the communists win. If you think for yourself. the enemies of communism win. If you think for yourself, you give comfort to the sensual permissiveness of the Deceiver. The Ancient Fantasy lives in the sterile (and fragile) void of the Paranoid Style; if you challenge the consensus, you’re hurting us.

What we know for sure to be true (the consensus) thus becomes more important than objective reality (say, for example, that our maladaptive attitude is creating conflict, and that we are avoiding fixing our attitude by trying to reconstruct ourselves as solutions to problems of our own making by playing the victim, and exploiting the conspiracist paranoid style of the Ancient Fantasy to explain why.

In light of their inadmissable dependency on the subjugated mass of humanity, who do all the work, the imperial capitalist class need everyone to know that anyone other than them is a parasite bleeding good people to wreck and ruin (we can still join elitist cults run by elites and have scraps from the elite banquet table though, just put your brain in a jar and join the collective fascist tantrum over the wheels falling off the bandwagon of endless upward mobility I mean heathens not respecting God).

Consensus rooted in paranoia and moral panic directed against outsiders and Others is critical to controlling the thoughts of the mass—upon whom, the big knobs running the imperial asylum are, as we have seen, characteristically dependent. For this apparent reason, we know for sure that the Ancient Fantasy remains a clear and present threat to Western Civilisation; for sure there is a tyranny of woke that isn’t the mentality that saying bad things about crimes against humanity means you hate Jews.

>Understanding the process of othering can help better prepare us on how to take action against discrimination. In education, shedding light on the mechanisms behind the construction of “Other” will provide a deeper understanding of the context and necessary conditions which occur at the onset of genocide. It also helps us to develop a preventive response when faced with statements or practices which appear to promote discriminatory actions.

https://museeholocauste.ca/en/resources-training/the-process-of-othering/

We are no doubting faced with existential threats to civilisation, though a radical slogan says, “the only minority we need to worry about: the rich,” or something to that effect. Quite possibly a terminal phase in human history, the present moment also features a consensus that we can have endless growth on a finite planet. We all know this for sure; we can just alchemy altrustic outcomes from selfish means thanks to the magic of the Chicago School. They for sure know their magic.

And behind all that, we know for sure we can have endless upward class mobility on a dead planet, because we know for sure we can have endless growth in finite space. What we know for sure matters more to the groupthink and bounded rationality of hegemonic neoliberal world capitalism than what our own senses tell us is a patent absurdity.

Maybe someone wants to go a round inciting suspicion of Muslims Who Hate What Western Civilisation Has Given Us and Want to Fuck Us By Sabotaging Physics So We Can’t Have AI Slop and Collective Paranoia Forever. Even if they don’t, it’s still clear that affective reasoning built around conformity to consensus of the national ingroup is what creates problems for empire-builders when consensus clashes with causality.

On the one hand, “The megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph.” On the other, the universe. Who would win?

The answer in fact appears to be Mark Twain, reminding us to keep our minds open amidst our own ignorance, amidst the gaslighting and lies of the Paranoid Style. Twain reminds us that we can become so attached to what we collectively believe we know that we stop testing those beliefs against reality, and that can lead to self-defeating behavior, like the collective paranoia rooted in the Ancient Fantasy. In remembering, we might spare ourselves the hubris and arrogance of a dying world that depends on them being closed, and controllable.

This article traces the emergence of what the author calls predation TERFism to the development of US Jewish-identified feminism and, in particular, Zionist lesbian separatism. This historical connection is reflected in the rhetorical and ideological similarities between predation TERFism and Zionism, both of which are defined by an “extinction phobia” that confuses oppressor and oppressed, presenting the subordinate party as capable of eliminating the dominant one. This extinction phobia transforms into “right-wing annihilationism” via a dehumanization of the subordinate party as innately harmful and therefore requiring elimination; hence the hallmark predation TERF abjection of trans women as rapists of cis women and the Zionist abjection of Palestinians as “savage” and/or “terrorist.” These connections can be obscured by the siloization of social justice movement work in the United States, wherein anti-colonial and anti-imperial organizing is often separated from organizing for gender and reproductive justice and sexual freedom. Recognizing the continuities, however—whether historical, material, or ideological—between predation TERFism and Zionism offers useful lessons for understanding not only the power of the contemporary global anti-trans resurgence, but also how we might build solidaristic, anti-colonial movements to defeat it.

https://classautonomy.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2023-11-15_6554e900caf48_334schotten.pdf

Degrowth advocates for a society not focused on economic growth and profit maximization but on justice, conviviality, and a good life for all within planetary boundaries. The path towards degrowth is a debate that is still vivid within the degrowth community. Both symbiotic, interstitial and ruptural strategies, as well as a diverse set of institutions (public institutions, cooperatives, the Commons, etc), have been proposed as useful for the just degrowth transition. This research aims to contribute to this debate via examining anarcho-syndicalist trade unions as actors in a just degrowth transition, analyzing their strategies using Erik Olin Wright’s framework (symbiotic, interstitial and ruptural transformations).

Results show that both anarcho-syndicalism and degrowth share common values, common views on work, and common enemies, but that anarcho-syndicalism will remain critical towards unjust degrowth transitions. The research concludes that the inherent idealist-materialist duality that characterizes anarcho-syndicalist trade unions (they aim for an utopian society, but at the same time are very grounded on day-to-day workplace struggles) compels them to proactively push for positive ecosocial transformations in society, but at the same time defend the working class whenever it is disproportionately affected by ecosocial transformations. This, along with their ability to balance efficiency the usage of symbiotic, interstitial and ruptural strategies at the same time and with a coherent goal, makes them a potential effective tool for a just degrowth transition.

Émile Pouget (1860–1931) was a French anarchist, journalist, trade unionist and one of the major theorists of revolutionary syndicalism. Born in Rodez in 1860, he developed an early interest in radical politics, influenced partly by his stepfather, a republican civil servant. As a young man he moved to Paris, where he became involved in workers’ organisation and helped establish an employees’ union in 1879. His union activism contributed to his dismissal from employment.

Pouget became an anarchist during the early 1880s and participated in the developing French anarchist movement. In 1883 he was arrested following a large unemployed workers’ demonstration and was sentenced to eight years in prison, serving three years before receiving an amnesty. After his release, he increasingly devoted himself to revolutionary journalism.

In 1889 he founded Le Père Peinard, an influential anarchist newspaper written in deliberately popular Parisian working-class language. Through it, Pouget advocated workers’ organisation, the general strike and direct action. He increasingly turned toward trade unionism, arguing that workers’ unions could simultaneously defend immediate interests and prepare for broader social transformation.

By the late 1890s Pouget had become deeply involved in the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), particularly in debates over the boycott, sabotage and the general strike. In the early twentieth century he became an important syndicalist organiser and writer, helping shape revolutionary syndicalism’s emphasis on worker self-activity, direct action and independence from parliamentary politics. He died in 1931.

>Those who assume (often unconsciously) that it is impossible to achieve their life’s desires-and, thus, that it is futile to fight for themselves — usually end up fighting for an ideal or cause instead. They may appear to engage in self-directed activity, but in reality they have accepted alienation from their desires as a way of life. All subjugations of personal desires to the dictates of a cause or ideology are reactionary no matter how “revolutionary” the actions arising from such subjugations may appear . . . Yet, one of the great secrets of our miserable, yet potentially marvellous time, is that thinking can be a pleasure. Despite the suffocating effect of the dominant religious and political ideologies, many individuals do learn to think for themselves; and by doing so — by actively, critically thinking for themselves, rather than by passively accepting pre-digested opinions — they reclaim their minds as their own.

Is PHON the new home for everyone who sees voting as a panacea for the wheels falling off the bandwagon of endless upward class mobility? There is a slight issue there with an endless-growth economy needing finite planet to expand into to expedite that endless upward mobility, after all. I met a dude at the pub once who described fascism in terms of a pack middle-class tantrum over busted class mobility bandwagons, seemed pretty on the money.

Labor do nothing else but manage the electorate and manufacture consent after the manner of inverted totalitarianism; the tail wags the dog the same way ACTU-affilliated business unions like the SDA discipline workers on behalf of capital. We want grifters who will protect us from unpalatably complex reality, but the other side of the coin is we have to suffer their rule.

The tories never had any pretences to being anything other than aristocrats; their rigid authoritarianism reflects the incapacity of the corrupt aristocracy of wealth to even adapt as far as rolling class hierarchy turds in egalitarianism glitter, rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic and putting bandaids on cancers. Between the tory stick and the laborite carrot, takers of rat race bribes are typically going to choose a carrot, until the stick-sellers can convince everyone they're in danger and they need stongmen to hide behind.

On that exact count Pauline Hanson dragged John Howard to the right by flanking the tories with xenophobic scapegoating for the systemic inability to force a planetary fit with an endless-growth economy. She obviously has no trouble with the other proto-tories of the ALP since centrists wouldn't know the meaning of standing on principle to save themselves, which is apparently why they can't.

What part of forming a national clique of the moral elect and granting yourself entitlement to define what the nation is for everyone, whether they vote for you or not, is bringing everyone together? One Nation of the Elect and then everyone who didn't vote for us can STFU and enjoy their national unity reads more like arrogance fulled by conceit fuelled by collective paranoia and the groupthinky mentality that the truth of an idea is determined by the number of cult slaves who believe it than genuine good-faith bridge-building, nurturing of understanding, spending one miserable moment in someone else's shoes, developing habits of social solidarity, or literally anything that builds social bonds. The tale of reforging national unity by associating independent thought and questions about government policy with material support for woke neobolshevikstic islamabaphobic terrorism reads more like a cult slave reading from a just-world fallacy script and live-action roleplaying national unity like everyone agreeing to conform to the make-believe and stomp anyone who asks questions the same thing as having one fucking clue as to what you're on about. It seems like you're a bit too full of the answers a lot of the time to notice you have nary a clue as to the question. One Nation of brainwashed, codependent zombies? Is that supposed to be a selling point? Why?

I guess if you're too numb to tell the difference it's a sort of like freedom *shrugs, goes back to work* is it though

You Can’t Blow up a Social Relationship remains as timely and important today as when it was written. Events in recent years have amply demonstrated the correctness of its main points:

That means determine ends—the use of horrifying means guarantees horrifying ends;

That urban guerillaism almost always leads to repression and little else—which makes it very difficult to engage in constructive political work such as organizing and education;

That “successful” urban guerillaism inevitably leads to authoritarian solutions;

That these results are determined by the nature of guerillaism.

Guerillaism relies upon the capitalist media for much of its impact, presenting political acts as spectacles divorced from the day-to-day lives of ordinary people (reducing them to passive spectators) while providing the corporate-controlled media with a perfect opportunity to frighten the public into the “protective’ arms of the State. To put it another way, guerillas attempt to act for the people—attempting to substitute individual acts for mass actions-thus perpetuating the division between leaders and followers (in this case, spectators).

While the authors of this pamphlet reject terrorism, it should be emphasized that they are not arguing for political passivity. They are not arguing against the many forms of Direct Action which form an essential part of any mass movement for fundamental social change; examples of such Direct Action include wildcat strikes, factory occupations and civil disobedience. Neither do they discount the quieter but equally essential efforts of those doing educational work. Finally, it should be noted that the authors are not passivists; they believe that situations may arise in which armed self-defense becomes necessary.

Chaz Bufe,
See Sharp Press, 1989

A recent exchange in the Industrial Worker attempts to come to grips with the internal sterilty and general ossification of the IWW. Really tiresome bromides like ‘lacking roots in the class’ and ‘we need to get out more’ avoid self-criticism in avoiding addressing root causes–in avoiding addressing, in other words, what the IWW has actually done in the first place to find itself in a position of marginality amidst historic levels of discontent with majestic capitalist class hierarchy. Indeed, the discussion seems avoidant of clues as to root causes, even as they appear repeatedly.

In ‘Rebuilding the IWW,’ x423752 writes:

>When we talk about workplace organizing, we often refer to the “organizing pyramid” which places “understanding the workplace” at the bottom because understanding the workplace is the most fundamental step of any organizing campaign. The same is true of the task at hand, namely rebuilding an IWW that has the power to transform society. We must first begin by understanding the current position of our class and also the relationship of the IWW to the broader working class. This is one question that I think Weakening the Dam fails to discuss.

The relationship of union and class is certainly fundamental to syndicalism. Living values and learning to relate to one another in ways other than those we have been conditioned to by a culture of competitive, selfish individualism is key to the syndicalist strategy of developing, per Bakunin’s classic formulation, the ‘facts of the future’ in the present. It is hardly a new debate:

>“The organization of the trade sections and their representation in the Chambers of Labor creates a great academy in which all the workers can and must study economic science; these sections also bear in themselves the living seeds of the new society which is to replace the old world. They are creating not only the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself.”

This as we know became the basis for French Syndicalism and its pioneering strategy of using the unions as a ‘school of revolutionary gymnastics,’ based on the understanding that workers did not need lecturing on the alienating and exploitative facets of capitalism, but rather an ear to hear their grievances on those counts and support in developing confidence to act on our own account as a class. This strategy worked to a “T” in Spain and accounts in no small part for the spectacular organising success of the CNT up to 1936, even if Durruti didn’t expropriate the gold reserves of the Bank of Spain, and anarchists joined the government, and whatever the hell else went wrong in that moment.

When someone tells you they got rich through hard work, ask them “Whose”?

Any teacher worth their salt will tell you an educator’s first skill is listening, so we can understand those we are trying to help. So too arguably for a syndicalist organiser. The working class is neither stupid nor unaware of its misery; it has only been gaslighted out of awareness of its power while being taught to identify with the prerogatives of moneyed big knobs, and is untutored in acting on its own behalf. What it doesn’t need is ideologues talking down to it like the working class is only capable of a ‘trade union consciousness.’ Political Marxist microcults, for their part, are nothing if not visible on the left, and yet somehow are generally avoided by workers they consider too stupid to be able to function without a vanguardist nanny. Being ‘out there and visible’ is not a good in and of itself.

As educators, the Angry Education Workers have plenty to say on organising revolutionary unions, but for whatever reason the IWW doesn’t care enough to listen to listen to the Angry Education workers:

>Prefiguration is an excellent framework for understanding how social structures shape individual and collective actions—which helps take the focus off of an individual’s personal character and intentions. Revolutionary unions recognize that all individuals and groups are flawed, and take steps to develop egalitarian systems that facilitate working class self-leadership. . . .
>
>. . . If someone is a worker and willing to respect members of all backgrounds, they should be welcome. Forty percent of the teachers who walked out for the Red for Ed strikes of 2018 voted for Trump in the 2016 election. The revolutionary union movement encourages plurality of thought while engaging in collective education. Our present choices about how to handle disagreement and conflict—both internally and between organizations—will determine the type of society we replace capitalism with. We must use internal political education and persuasion to help workers begin to overcome the baggage we all carry under capitalism. “Beyond ‘Fuck You: An organizer’s approach to confronting hateful language at work” provides a model of what this looks like in one-on-one and small group settings. As we grow, we have to incorporate this model into all of our organizational infrastructure. Whatever our other disagreements about politics are, we must all commit to structuring our unions directly democratically.

Rasmus Hästbacka explains the thinking behind this approach:

>The problem is that the left-wing label creates misunderstandings that are very destructive in practice. Syndicalist unions are then perceived as organizations only for those who identify with the left, i.e. for workers and bosses who call themselves left-wing but not for workers who vote center or right. But the reality is the exact opposite. Our unions are open to workers in general, including workers who vote on bourgeois parties, while the unions exclude all leftists who are bosses or employers.

We can see some clues here as to why syndicalist unions might become separated from the working class in the first place, all the more so to the extent that libertarian socialist political groupings ape Leninist contempt for the working class by assuming workers to be blank slates in need of education regarding the horrors of wage-slavery and the troubles capitalism creates for their own lives. Yet ‘Rebuilding the IWW’ has nothing to say on this count. Hästbacka elaborates:

>Syndicalists emphasize the economic and social interests that unite workers, rather than the religious, political and national affiliations that divide people. We build unions because we have a common interest in improving everyday life for everyone. We do not organize and come together because we have the same opinion on every issue. Union organizing has the potential to unite workers in every workplace, within and across industries.

Therefore,

>The crucial differences between syndicalist unions and the political left can be summed up as follows. A syndicalist union is an interest organization for sellers of labor power. It is open to all employees except bosses. The union also welcomes those parts of the working class who are not wage earners (unemployed, people on sick leave, pensioners, self-employed entrepreneurs with no hired staff, etc.). The condition for becoming a member is not that you identify with the left or hold a set of leftist opinions.

x423752 is not reading Weakening the Dam carefully if they are not seeing where it speaks to these issues:

>. . . . many self-identified radicals have little real-world organizing experience. This is okay. Like anything else, organizing takes practice. What we do have, however, is a wealth of grand arguments supporting class struggle and a vision for a post-capitalist future. Because of this there’s a temptation to ‘intellectualize’ the organizing process. Speaking from personal experience, I know what it’s like to feel unsure about doing something new, especially when it comes to organizing. It’s tempting to fall back on something we’re more comfortable with—like making the argument for why we need a revolutionary union.
>
>Reality, however, is much more complicated than a well-phrased argument. Instead of trying to ‘win the organizing argument’ we’re much better off building relationships of trust with our co-workers. Through this relationship, we engage our co-workers in small scale winnable actions. These actions, in turn, lay the groundwork for larger struggles and deeper conversations.
>
>To put it another way, workers—conscious of it or not—undertake individual anti-capitalist acts all the time. Workmates, however, often need to see collective activity in action before they’re willing to join a union. From there, it’s involvement in collective struggle that opens a space for us, as radicals, to begin having discussion about class, capitalism, and the labor movement.

In other words then, we don’t need to ‘intellectualise’ the organising process because organising revolutionary unions isn’t about drawing workers into groupings of correct ideology (anarchism), but listening to them, understanding them and helping them to help develop class consciousness and individual and collective self-efficacy as participants in the class struggle. Indeed, counterhegemonic antiauthoritarians have historically employed dual organising structures to enable workers self-activity while protecting it from manipulative entryist scum like Tristan Bunner and his various bystanders and enablers. This is not the same thing as

>We must first begin by understanding the current position of our class and also the relationship of the IWW to the broader working class.

If we replace references to union with party, this sentences reads: “We must first begin with a political position and also the relationship of the party to the broader working class.” With this, the underlying logic becomes clearer, and with it the underlying problem. The question of union and class is generally understood; the problem of party is only one to the extent that the dumb peasants with our trade union consciousness continue to refuse to submit to the patronage of our betters. This is less syndicalism then and more vanguardism and church- or microcult-building. It does not seem so much a surprise that

>The reality today is that the IWW is largely viewed as irrelevant and/or a “thing of the past” in a lot of communities across the country.

If this is the case, the bromides of ‘lacking roots in the class’ and ‘we need to get out more’ are meaningless. If the IWW is perceived to be an ideological grouping, which it is, being of the class or being visible aren’t going to fix anything. Political marxists can be working class and they certainly have no problem being in your face, but neither does that mean they will ever be given a chance to lead another revolution, and create problems as bad or worse than everything they were supposed to be overcoming in coming to embody everything they claim to oppose.

While failing to identify these issues as problems, x423752 talks to workers and finds that the community of the pure has withdrawn into a nice safe cocoon:

>I also asked them how the IWW is perceived back in their various hometowns and many of them reported to me that their local branches are very insular and the broader organizing community doesn’t really know who they are or what they do. It’s almost like they don’t exist.

Furthermore,

>I’ve also spoken with former wobs who described their experience with the IWW as endless meetings: lots of talk, but no action. They kept showing up, but eventually left, because they didn’t feel like their local branches were up to anything that was significant or worth their time. We shouldn’t write these people or these experiences off!

But nor do we reflect on where this meeting and organisationitis is coming from. There is no question that the IWW is a top-heavy bureaucracy with stupid amounts of work for anyone dumb enough to sign up for delegate responsibilities; all the ‘no dues checkoff’ rule means is that the delegate has to chase members who don’t show up to meetings before spending hours on Microsoft Excel, built with Lucifier’s own code. There is no question either the IWW is a labour history club for a few people also. These are not the core issues though.

Other issues are not hard to uncover; take this segment of a long postmortem on the Brisbane GMB from the organiser of a branch that came to include over 100 members after a year or two. The individual concerned is a member of Aus-ROC, and an acolyte of the Trotskyist entryistsy of “Unite,” who became the Secretary following the entryist purges:

>I try to engage Tilde over the following weeks, and explain the situation in detail, explain the break in process, and she just goes on about how she needed to ‘put on her big boots’ to kick out the mysoginists. She also states she wishes she had just done this in Melbourne earlier to kick out Ben Debney. And she begins questioning my personal character as well. All this is straight up bullying.

It seems interesting to note here that the performance of ‘putting the big boots on’ and ‘kicking out the misogynists’ was so important to the vanguardist colonisers of the IWW that they wished to do it over and over again. Purging evildoers from the IWW once was clearly not enough. Are purges and personal attacks problematic for the culture of the union? Do they go any way to engendering paranoia and a close culture of hostility to outsiders if the class struggle becomes more a matter of who we are in relation to ableist ingroups and who we know, as opposed to what we’re about or what we do? What if the root cause of insularity and separation from the mass of workers is the emergence of a vanguardist cadre that wishes only for perennial purges?

Misogynists are heinous

As Call It Sleep points out of the Tidle the Purge Queens and the Unite factions of the world,

>The cadre must appear to be in the vanguard of [their] epic, [they] must be in favor of everything progressive, everything radical, everything that purports to be new and innovative and stylish. [They are] the modern consumer who hates what [they] must consume because [they] knows all of its inadequacies and yet who continues to search for the perfect commodity, the one which contains no imperfections. [They believe] that [their] educated refusal of inadequate commodities placed [them] above the obedient consumer, who believes what [they] is told. The cadre simultaneously wants to enjoy the security of submission and the thrill of refusal.

Performative purges, with endless opportunities for grandstanding, are nothing if not the combination of the security of submission and the thrill of refusal. Conform to the morality-policing bandwagon in the name of fighting misogyny while we speak truth to patriarchy.

From this perpective, the problem isn’t that we aren’t being sold a lemon, the diminished shadow of an organisation that once was, by codependents clinging to the hollowed-out shell of something that might have been. The problem it’s that we’re not applying the correct solution with enough vigor. Grace Blakeley describess this mentality in terms of a moral imperialism:

>Like the early capitalist reformers, we increasingly understand our political participation as a way of signalling our personal moral rectitude to others. We think of ourselves as consumers – not just of goods, but of political identities – expressing who we are through what we buy and the language we use. Politics becomes a performance of individual ethics, rather than a process of coalition building and consciousness raising.

This certainly seems true of the perfomative moralising of morally imperialist entryists. It appears telling that this gets a pass under tired bromides of ‘we’re not working class enough and need to double our efforts,’ not least if the ‘performative of individual ethics as a feature of weaponised, single-issue identity politics creates hierarchies of value that mirror the scapegoating logic of imperialism. The needs of the Other need not matter if they can be effectively demonised and dehumanised, after all; such is the basis of what social psychology calls moral disengagement. Indeed, as Black Lodges notes,

>If imperialism is understood as a structural relation of domination, then opposition to it cannot be conditional upon the perceived moral adequacy of its targets. Imperial power does not select objects of intervention on the basis of democratic standards but according to strategic alignment and geopolitical utility. To oppose imperialism only where the targeted state conforms to particular ideological expectations risks transforming anti-imperialism into a form of selective moralism rather than a consistent political position.

We have no trouble understanding that identitarian chauvanism is an imperialist scapegoating mechanism when we like the target and disagree with the pretext, but it doesn’t even merit a mention if the target is easy to dislike and we agree with the pretext–all the more so if the target agrees with the pretext and thus finds it doubly hard to process narcissistic ambush and the kinds of online mobbings and doxxings that would attract gaol time for violent affray if perpetrated off the internet where there are laws for that kind of thing. The rule for the ingroup is “sympathy for me if I’m a Trot (or one of their enablers), punishment for thee if you’re not.’ And we remain surprised somehow that our organisation has become insular and hostile to the unenlightened working class.

Class struggle Thom Yorke: ACAB includes karma police

Folklore tells of an old Wob who said the union should never be rebuilt if he was subject to repression, because it would no longer be that drawn together from the disparate autonomous formations that preceded it, but a church of sectarians cut off from the culture of class struggle. It doesn’t mention if he said anything about chauvanist middle class identitarians, but he might have,

Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.

The thing about that comment was that it was actually right. It probably even stands out for its perspicacity and foresight in much the same way as Bakunin’s predictions about the Red Bureaucracy favoured by Lenin’s Dad’s Army of Bootlickers. We also ignore it in much the same way as we ignored Bakunin, and clearly to our peril. Lenin’s bootlickers can’t attract interest from the working class with their arrogant vanguards, so they introduce vanguardism through the back door with entryism and moral imperialism instead. Morality-policing bandwagons recgonise the authority of the vanguard implicitly, even if they drive almost all of the IWW’s new initiates to leave. The catastrophe of IWW membership remains no cause to question moral imperialism however, apparently.

With a turnover of something in the order of 20,000 members in the last 7 years, the IWW faces an existential crisis with which it is clearly ill-equipped to deal. According to one or two of those 20,000, the empire of revolutionary morality is all “endless meetings: lots of talk, but no action . . . [and not] up to anything that was significant or worth their time.” In addition to being increasingly irrelevant as a sect of identitarian chauvanists prone to performative purges, there is also the danger of becoming a target of purges, which of course cTarries punitive penalties in terms of job and life opportunities; if you are a while cishet male and you sign a red card, you could wind up on welfare for two years and counting and be romantically unattached in middle age. The moral empire can never free its Other lest it have to account for itself.

With that being the case, that 20,000 and all the rest likely to follow in their wake might do better to refrain from joining the IWW. You may already be a Wildcat Wob, who has no more time for ableist scum as a self-appointed leadership inside a nominally revolutionary union than the bosses and labor fakirs inside the business unions whose main purpose is disciplining workers in the interests of capital. The Starbucks Workers Union is an example of the kinds of unions that could form new confederations out of grassroots struggle; it is perhaps telling that they have distanced themselves from the IWW in the name of staying relevant. The Renters and Housing Union here in Australia is a grouping of some 4000 people. In Seattle people have formed a local autonomous union. It’s not like anyone is obliged of necessity to stick with identitarian cults that have outlived their usefulness.

Character is how you treat those who can do nothing for you

In any event, and regardless of what happens next in the class struggle, it is clear that doubling efforts and self-flagellation have nothing to offer. Apathy and toxic shame are possibly even more symptoms of deeper problems with openness and true equality, such as those we have just been reviewing. We no more need the moral imperialists of the cadre class than we need the moral imperialists of the boss class; they need us, not the other way around. Where the IWW is concerned, at this point, sacking the bosses starts with sacking the ones in the union, if for no other reason than because their answer to the problems of their own making is to feel bad and work harder.