A Green State of Mind

Despite its negative connotations, anarchism can provide a non-anarchist political movement with many ideas based upon its practices and theoretical speculations throughout the decades.

The twentieth century has been the manifestation of various lines of thought that began in the nineteenth century. Before the sudden event of the Bolshevik Revolution, there was, to a limited degree, a public discussion of socialism, communism, and anarchism. It would be very common for socialists, communists, and anarchists to have meetings and public speaking venues. They were viewed as real alternatives. As a point of clarification, the difference between socialism and communism can be defined in a specific way. Socialists are Marxists that enter into power through elections while communists are Marxists who enter into power through revolution. Socialism made some electoral gains in the United States in the early twentieth century and in Europe as well later on. Communism became relegated to one side of an ideological warfare during the Cold War, and was easily caricatured. However, socialism became limited as only reformers within a democratic structure and communism reconstituted the centralization of power that was supposedly overthrown by revolution. In both cases, real systematic change was restricted. The anarchist tradition used a different approach which emphasized creating the new world in the shell of the old. In other words, real change was enacted through immanent structures that expressed both freedom and equality in a substantial way that was also local and voluntary. Unfortunately, anarchism as a movement that could effectively achieve the overall goals of socialism and communism was strongly misinterpreted as rooted in violence and a push to create absolute chaos. It can be very helpful, and very productive, for any political movement committed to social, economic, and ecological justice to understand the anarchist vision as a template. This process may need to ignore the term anarchism itself in order to look at its traits clearly and impartially.

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The following is part two of a series that explores various current economic aspects in a way that illustrates the possibility for new alternatives rather than mapping out detailed new plans.

A binary opposition is the subsumption of reality between contradictions. The world is defined by two terms set against each other which excludes other perspectives. There is also the appearance of these two terms in a direct relationship with each other. This appearance reinforces the exclusion. It is important to realize that these two terms are perspectives on reality and these perspectives can not contain all of reality. There is always a surplus of reality. Therefore, instead of a binary opposition there needs to be a parallax. A parallax originally comes from astronomy, where a change in the perspective on a heavenly body looks like a change in the heavenly body itself. A parallax can be a more accurate way to understand contradictions. It can be applied toward the various contradictions that emerge in economics and other areas. The use of the parallax can also further the understanding of the political and the economic.

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The 20th century saw the point where those in authority no longer appeared to be in a natural position of leadership, despite its vast accumulation of power, and the result was a more personal exercise of force.

The sovereign position of authority begins as an immanent reflection of the social, but will become transcendent as a way to organize and determine the social. In other words, this position is a creation of the social group that takes on the appearance of being the creator of the social group. Those in authority are at the core of a completion of power to such a degree as to be a comprehensive organization of not only the social but reality as well. The development and completion of power has occurred over many centuries, from a personal exercise of one individual having power over another to a system of power that regulates all of human life. The sovereign position of authority is embedded in this system of power and goes beyond any personal motivation or interest. It is a machine that operates independently of human action or need. However, when the overall system is disrupted and its contradictions are amplified, the personal beginning of power is revealed and a reactionary stance to deny this disruption is enacted.

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