Becoming an Anarchist ?

The American election campaign is still going on, millions are spent.

But for what ? When I speak with American citizens they still end up with the same arguments such as “Obama said [insert something here] 20 years ago, he shouldn’t be president”, “McCain made [insert a mistake here] 35 years ago ! How can I vote for him !”. It is also about who is the best christian, the best black guy, the best war veteran, the youngest, the oldest…

The ones actually looking at the programs are rare.

It was the same in France for the 2007 election. People will vote based on some factors that should not influence their decision… and the politics will spend a lot of money trying to look as good as possible.

Of course there will be some debates, but the people watching these debates have usually made up their mind. They don’t want to be convinced ! They just want to see the opponent of their guy getting beat up. And if he doesn’t, they’ll say he did anyways.

People don’t know how to pick a leader. It’s all about apparences… what’s the point ?

In the end you can be sure that a lot of people will vote for Obama because he is black and a lot for McCain because he is not. Should that kind of factors influence a vote ? Well… no !

Let’s take a look at this marketing operation :

(via marketing alternatif via bloguerrilla)

Oh yeah, that’s good politics right here. “Lol poop ahaha nao let’s vote”.

Democracy FAIL

Religious suffering is, at the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

-Karl Marx

Faith is a belief in the trustworthiness of an idea.

A religion is a set of tenets and practices, often centered upon specific supernatural and moral claims about reality, the cosmos, and human nature, and often codified as prayer, ritual, or religious law.

In my opinion, religion is bad. Like, really bad.

When I say that, please do not mix religion and faith. Faith can be a good thing since it can give people hope, make them better person and so on. I guess that some people just need faith to keep on going. So why not! They can put their faith in God or in a magical cheesecake, I couldn’t care less. I also don’t like to mix religion and buddhism which I consider to be more a phylosophy than an actual religion.

But religion is different, it is the organization and exploitation of faith. It is a set of rules and laws that you must - or at least should - follow in order to be a good person. If you don’t, you will end up in trouble. Of course all these laws are set by men that decided they were so amazing they could dictate the ways of an entire population. “Don’t use condoms”, “Women should stay hidden”, “Homosexuality is bad” and so on. If I’m a woman and I want to walk around like I want, let me be ! If I’m gay, give me a rest !

All this leads to fucked up ideas justified by texts written thousands of years ago. It might have made sense then, but not anymore. Do not eat pork ? Yeah, back then this meat carried disseases, but now? Kosher was a good way to control how meat was prepared in order to avoid people to eat tainted meat, but now it is not necessary anymore. Waste of time, waste of money.

Those who can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

-Voltaire

It also give people a legitimity they don’t deserve. How many time have you heard “in the name of God” to justify stupid actions ? Crusades ? Jihad ? Wars ? Genocides ? Persecutions ? Anyone?

On the other hand, when did a religion solved a crisis instead of starting one ? Yeah I know it’s easy to ask this question, you could answer me “alright, maybe religion didn’t solve a crisis, but a lot of good religious people actually helped!“. Ok, but to me this is faith. This is altruism. It’s not religion.

Religion is a hierarchy where a minority of people impose their views on a majority based on interpretations of old books. By keeping people in this logic they get power and money.

Alright, not all of them get that. Let’s take the priest of a small village… he will most likely be far from being rich. It is just because he is at the bottom of the hierarchy. Just like some low paid employee. He might do good things, but why should he give up on so many things in order to achieve that ? It’s just another stupid rule to go against human nature. Maybe the priest could make a better use of his time to help people than just reading scriptures on his own for a few years and then reading them to a bunch of people on Sundays.

No ?

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

-Leviticus

Religion is a way to hold back evolutions of society. Just look at who oppose social progress. Abortion, gay rights. Look at who oppose scientific progress. Look at creationism.

It’s often religious lobbyist that feel in charge of a divine mission to save other people. They base their logic on some old texts that are often irrational.

If you want to eat pork while having protected gay sex with multiple partners… It’s your choice, why should I care ?!

When I was thinking about anarchism, I only thought about the black flag. But I later discovered that there was a whole set of flags depending on the “school” of anarchism of the people waving it.

Wikipedia has a good article and the subject, I’ll come back on it later. But now here are the flags :

There is different views on capitalism depending on which anarchist will speak about it. The most common idea would be that an anarchist would be against capitalism and therefore tending more toward communism. But after reading some articles, I see that you might be able to conciliate both.

Therefore we can see that some anarchist advocate free market and laissez-faire. What are those ? Let’s see wikipedia :

A free market is a market in which property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers.

Laissez-faire : From the French dictum first used by the eighteenth century physiocrats as an injunction against government interference with trade, it became used as an economic ideology which advocates minimal state intervention on the economy.

In that case, it would basically be “as long as people want to exchange, let them be”. No government intervention, no tariff, no taxes. This would lead to free global exchange and extreme capitalism, I guess.

The problem with that is that it create a new form of exploitation (the boss versus the employees) and we go back to Marx’s theory of surplus value, or something like that. The main problem is centered around profit : if there is profit, it means that the wages are not high enough. If a company is able to gain more than it needs, why not giving this to the employees ? If all the profits is not splitted, then we get into some kind of exploitation of the workers, meaning that they don’t get paid fully for what they accumplished. It also means that the owner of the company keeps the product of the employees’ work for himself.

To me this can be kind of right, but in the end in a free market everyone is free to choose to work for a specific company or even free to create one ! So is there really exploitation when someone is willing to work ?

And to me, I always have this problem with “everyone is 100% equal”. It is just not possible. We can (we should) get the same rights, the same duties, but in the end two person will be different, even if only by their choices. Someone may want to get a nice quiet job and the other may want to create a huge company to take over the world.

So why not letting people do what they want? If I want to create a company and if people are willing to join me by working for me or partnering up, why not let all that be? I want to have total liberty over what I do of my time and what I own.

And of course, if I want to create a company, I will have to put a lot of time and work into that process. I will have to find investors, find partners… why can’t I be rewarded for that ? And if I’m not, why should I do it ? What I’m trying to say is that if people don’t see a point into creating a business, creating wealth, creating jobs, why would they do it ? Let’s be realistics here, humans are not that nice, a large majority will not kill themselves at work just to end up with the same thing as the next guy who stayed home watching TV. Some will. Most won’t.

So what to do with capitalism in all that ? Should one be able to live without doing nothing because people are working for him ? I’ll quote Bakunin :

“What is property, what is capital in their present form? For the capitalist and the property owner they mean the power and the right, guaranteed by the State, to live without working…[and so] the power and right to live by exploiting the work of someone else…those…[who are] forced to sell their productive power to the lucky owners of both.” The Political Philosophy of Bakunin

Hum. Good point… but it looks like something is missing. He’s not talking about self-made men and so on. So is that way of thinking really valid ?

Right now I am reading “Power and Market - Government and the Economy” by Murray N. Rothbard. This book try to explain how in a totally free market people will be able to live and consume safely. The author also talk about why taxes and tariffs are not legitimate and could be avoided without no consequences but positive ones.

Welcome to this new blog of mine.

First of all you have to know that I’m not a native english speaker, so I’m sorry if I do some mistakes, you can correct me in the comments I don’t mind.

So let’s get to the point : during the past months I felt 3 things :

• My government (French) is a joke. So is the USA’s and pretty much all governments.
• The concept of democracy is a faillure
• Frontiers is a ridiculous concept

After a life of believing blindly in democracy, it was kind of anoying to discover that all what I was standing for was to throw away. Well, I’m not that old, so I guess that’s alright…

Anyways, after realizing that I had to find an alternative to my previous way of thinking about the whole “political scene”. After a while I found articles about anarchism and it shocked me that I agreed with a lot of theories and that the anarchist really had a good point.

So the idea behind this blog is to tell you about the process of me learning more about anarchism. I’m not sure if I will end up proclaiming myself as “an anarchist” or if I will just go back to voting hoping that someday people will be less stupids. Or something else. Let’s just see how that goes, ok?