In Alabama, prisoners are filming each other on smuggled cell phones to tell their stories and express grievances about human rights abuses in Alabama prisons. These videos are then posted on a YouTube channel affiliated with the Free Alabama Movement. As Bay Area Intifada explains, “the prisoners speak of deplorable conditions, slave labor, prisons being a continuation of slavery and many candid stories from their lives inside and outside the cement walls of Alabama’s prisons.” The very nature of the prisoners’ non-violent disobedience tells us something about Alabama prisons. The communication mechanism they use to engage in political speech, the cell phone, is prohibited by prison officials. Only by disobeying the prison’s institutional rules can the truth about prisons be revealed. Prisons are designed to suppress communication, dissent, and the accountability that might result from openness. The Free Alabama Movement deserves the support of all who care about freedom and justice, and I’ll continue posting on their story in the coming weeks.

Outside of prison walls, I’ve been seeing prison abolitionist ideas in various media sources. Anarchist journalist Charles Davis published an excellent article at Vice that discusses prison abolition and interviews Isaac Ontiveros of Critical Resistance. The interview covers a lot of important questions about prison abolition, including what to do about violent criminals, what tactics to use right now, and the risks of reform. Critical Resistance is one of the most significant prison abolitionist groups in the world today, and it’s always excellent to see their work highlighted at a popular website like Vice.

My friend Cory Massimo also recently published a guest post at The Stag Blog offering a libertarian case for prison abolition. He argues for a system based purely on restitution rather than punishment, and contends that prisons are the wrong response even to those who have violated the rights of others. I’m glad to see prison abolitionist ideas gaining traction in libertarian circles, and I hope they will continue to gain traction.

Shining light on the prison state doesn’t just mean talking about prisons themselves. Prisons are closely related to a variety of other political issues. For example, the prison industrial complex includes immigration detention centers th tat lock up migrants for deportation. Issues like border militarization should thus be core issues for those of us concerned about the prison industrial complex. Lucy Steigerwald has a great new column at AntiWar.com called “The War at Home,” which examines how issues like immigration restrictions, policing, prisons, and surveillance interact with militarism and the warfare state. Her first column, released this week, deals with border militarization. Border militarization tramples civil liberties while lining the pockets of both war profiteers and prison profiteers. I’m glad to see the issue being addressed at AntiWar.com.

The way borders operate as part of militarism, empire, capitalism, and the prison-industrial complex is also explored in Harsha Walia’s book Undoing Border Imperialism, which I recently started reading. The book develops a theoretical framework for seeing immigration restrictions not just as a domestic policy decision, but as a structural feature of empire. Moreover, the book discusses the tactics used by a network of anti-colonial and anti-state migrant justice organizations called No One Is Illegal, which operates throughout Canada. I haven’t finished reading the book yet, but so far it’s excellent and I highly recommend it.

Today’s a good day to mention border imperialism and the framework of criminalization that sustains it, because a major act of civil disobedience against the state’s borders happened today. Over 100 families attempted border crossings today at the Otay Mesa point of entry, demanding asylum so they could reunite with their families. These sorts of actions highlight the way the state’s borders, imposed through conquest and enforced through militarized violence, break apart the families, communities, and other peaceful forms of voluntary association that build a truly robust society.

These are just a few examples of the ongoing action, thought, and media happening lately to challenge the prison-industrial complex, the empire, and other mutually reinforcing systems of state violence. Let’s keep up these fights for freedom, until the state’s violence ends.

Right now in Canada, thousands of indigenous people and their supporters are rising in protest against a long train of government abuses. The latest insult is a new federal law that many see as being designed to help crony capitalists rob the indigenous people of their remaining land.

The protest movement is called Idle No More, and it reflects longstanding aboriginal traditions of limiting centralized authority, and relying instead on voluntaryism and polycentrism as organizing principles.

Thousands of protestors are holding drum circles and round dances in the streets, a few have blockaded rail lines and highways, and one is now in her seventh week of fasting and holding political meetings.[1]

Establishment outlets like the National Post have frequently decried the protestors’ unwillingness to come up with a unified leadership who can control all this rabble and issue some unified demands to the federal government.

But the mainstream expectation that the protestors ought to coalesce into a single body with one authority making decisions for all totally misses the point. The protestors’ key demand is the right to make one’s own decisions.

Idle No More and the Refusal to Centralize

Aboriginal people are the most regulated, the most impoverished, and the most frequently imprisoned group of humans in Canada. You can see all the economic and social horrors of welfare totalitarianism playing out in aboriginal communities across the country, complete with oil companies gaming the system for fun and profit.

A great deal of the urgency and passion of Idle No More comes from these ongoing economic and social crises, and a great deal of the desultory mass-media chatter about it concerns proposals for various schemes of redistribution. But the refusal of protestors to unite around a single banner, tactic, or leader points to a much more fundamental challenge and a much more radical goal.

There are at least three important sources of Idle No More’s refusal to submit to any single vision.

The first is an important background fact that many non-aboriginal observers simply fail to comprehend: the sheer diversity of indigenous communities in Canada. There are 50-some languages [2], more than 600 legally defined reserve communities, and three quasi-racial government categories of indigenous persons (“Indians,” “Inuit,” and “Metis”), each subjected to a slightly different flavor of genocidal oppression and paternalistic welfare. Furthermore, many thousands of aboriginal persons live outside the government definitions.

It’s impossible to describe this enormous variety of cultures, regulations, and aspirations in any quick way, let alone create some simple, unified list of demands or grievances shared by all peoples.

Idle No More is not an orchestrated demonstration by a formal organization somehow representing everyone at once. It is a spontaneous uprising of many different peoples with many different visions and tactics, who nonetheless sense a shared opportunity to challenge the colonial statist quo.

Second is the influential tradition of nonviolent, distributed leadership in many indigenous communities.

Most radically, many hunter-gatherer people like the Dene and the Ojibwa simply had no tradition of coercive authority before Europeans imposed it on them. There were, of course, respected leaders and elders, but they didn’t have the power to force anyone to obey them.

Every day, each individual was free to listen to whatever person seemed to know most about that day’s challenges. And if you thought you had a better idea, nobody could stop you from setting out on your own and trying it.

These traditions of nonviolent authority extended even to child-raising. Children in such cultures learned discipline from example, hard work, and philosophical study, not from the back of a father’s hand. Of course, that all changed with the rise of compulsory Indian schools.

Now, precontact North America was not a libertarian utopia. The native peoples occasionally killed, robbed, and enslaved each other just as humans always have.

But the solutions they found to the universal challenge of how to organize society were usually a lot closer to the ideas of Western voluntaryists than they were to those of Western statists. Indeed, north of the militaristic Aztec empire, there were no states in the Americas before Columbus first planted his cross and declared the land for Spain. [3]

A few months after Idle No More began, the federal government made a great show of meeting with democratically elected native chiefs in order to find out what “the aboriginals” want. But the government fails to understand that the modern institution of the elected chief with coercive powers over his people is merely a European fantasy written into colonial law.

Indeed, my old Cree teacher once explained to me that, in her dialect, the word for an important leader is “okimaw,” and the word for a chief is “okimakan,” with that “kan” suffix meaning roughly “a thing made in imitation of.”

Politicians, in that sense, are imitations of leaders.

Now, sometimes modern chiefs have the support of their constituents, and sometimes they don’t. But as aboriginal activists call on their various traditions for inspiration, they don’t see much reason to obey any singular, permanent leadership issuing demands and negotiating with the feds on their behalf. If the chiefs go in a direction the activists don’t want to go in, the activists will feel perfectly within their rights to go on without them.

Third, regardless of what form of organization they prefer for themselves, most people in aboriginal communities believe they retain the right of self-determination vis-à-vis the colonial state. That is, they don’t think the central government has the right to decide where or if their kids go to school, how the laws will be enforced, and what people can do with their own land.

The treaties that past aboriginal leaders signed with the British crown are important to any legal discussion of their present relationship with the Canadian state. But most aboriginal persons regard these treaties as agreements between sovereign nations — not as declarations of total surrender and eternal submission to the wisdom of the colonial state.

In that sense, modern aboriginal organizations might properly wield powers analogous to the rights of nullification and secession that Tom Woods advocates for states within the USA. The smaller-level organizations aren’t perfect, but they may provide some refuge from federal tyranny.

Self-Determination and Federal Law

Among its many provisions, the new federal law, Bill C-45, makes it slightly easier for reserve politicians to lease reservation land to outside companies. [4] As laws governing indigenous people in Canada go, it’s not an especially evil one. Maybe it will make it easier for the crony capitalists to rob them, or maybe it will make it easier for indigenous people to develop real free markets for themselves. The possible economic outcomes are not the fundamental point.

The point, from the perspective of many protestors, is that the federal government wants to impose this law on all 600+ reserves “for their own good.” The point is that indigenous people, in Canada and the world at large, are sick and tired of having things done to them or done for them.

Among all the other demands in Idle No More — for the repeal of Bill C-45, for the enactment of some other law, for the return of stolen territory, or for the paying of reparations — you can hear this steady undertone: They are seeking a path back to autonomy and self-determination. They are fostering a resurgence of the principle that no authority has the right to force all people to conform to one vision of justice, economy, or culture.

Notes:

[1] There is of course no central information storehouse for this decentralized movement. You can find regular news and commentary on the leftist site Rabble.ca, but much of the discussion and organization by protestors themselves is happening on national and local Idle No More Facebook pages, and on Twitter, hashtag #IdleNoMore. Indeed, the movement name comes from the hashtag used by the original founders.

[2] Depending on where you draw the line between a language and a dialect.

[3] There may have been some states in the southern United States in the long millennia before European colonization, but those civilizations had passed away well before 1492.

[4] Bill C-45 makes it so that instead of needing a majority of all band members to lease the land, you just need a majority of all members who show up to vote.

Mike Reid teaches anthropology in Winnipeg. His libertarian anthropological perspective on current events has appeared in the Mises Daily, the Freeman, Whiskey & Gunpowder, Heartland’s FIRE Policy News, and Ontario History. He also manages, writes, edits, and creates ebooks for Invisible Order. Check out his website, SocialBulldozer.com. Follow him on Twitter. Send him mail.

В 2011 году протестное движение было настолько раздражено существующим порядком вещей, что журнал “Time” назвал его (или её) “Персоной года”. Как я писал ранее, протестующие в Китае, России, Йемене и многих других местах, кроме перечисленных – это голос народа с улиц, вставшего в оппозицию ко всем неприкрытым несправедливостям человеческой жизни, происходящим в каждом уголке земного шара.

В Йемене, по сообщениям агентства Рейтер, верные президенту страны Али Абдулла войска открыли огонь на поражение по субботней демонстрации; убито не менее девяти человек. В Китае, тем временем, началось восстание против захватчиков земель в провинции Гуандун в соответствии с так называемой “политикой либерализации, начатой в 1979 году.”

Однако, несмотря на различия ситуаций в Китае и Йемене, демонстрации представляют собой попытки мирного общества утвердить себя против агрессии государства и для её отражения – политическими средствами.

Государство – это фундаментальная основа для деятельности организованных группировок грабителей и эксплуататоров, контролирующих редкие ресурсы. Оно всегда было таким – не просто признающим свою собственную преступную суть, но драпирующим свою неизменную миссию грабежа и насилия в робу “государственных услуг”. Скупка по дешевке земель, обрабатываемых и поэтому принадлежащих их владельцам в течение поколений – к примеру, малым фермерам – выставляется как акт, одобренный принципами «свободного предпринимательства» и «либерализма». Аналогично, нападения правительственных войск на безоружных граждан защищаются и поощряются под предлогом социального спокойствия и уважения к верховенству закона.

С теми социальными потрясениями и жестокостями, которые доминируют в новостях сегодня, оправдание государства, как института “закона и порядка” выглядит не то чтобы несостоятельно, а просто нелепо. Анархизм – это один из возможных вариантов будущего, единственный называющий постоянные преступления государства своими именами и стремящийся к более добровольной и более человечной организации социальных отношений.

В 1970 году, продвигая более научное понимание анархизма, Джеймс Дж. Мартин утверждал, что было “крайне мало обоснований” идеи анархизма, как “доктрины разрушения.” Мартин объяснил, что “программа тотального отрицания или обструкционизма” на самом деле “крайне слабо связана” с анархизмом, который действительно устанавливает в своей литературе позитивное видение будущего безгосударственного общества.

Индивидуалистический или рыночный анархизм, вопреки надуманным карикатурам, никогда не означал агитацию за погромы или за общество без правил и договоренностей, другими словами – словами Гоббса – за войну всех против всех. Вместо этого он утверждает, что государство втягивает общество в состояние постоянной войны – войны привилегированного меньшинства против производящего большинства.

Протесты, прорывающиеся во всем мире в настоящий момент, являются реакцией, сознательной или нет, на беспорядок, творимый политической властью. Если государство действительно служит для обеспечения закона и порядка, то мы должны задаться вопросом: почему мы живем в мире, в котором существуют такие государства, как Йемен и Китай, и где правят такие люди, как Владимир Путин?

Обычно изображаемые как утописты, одержимые идеей журавля в небе, или как бомбометатели, провоцирующие массовые беспорядки – анархисты на самом деле выступают за общество, где свобода является основополагающим принципом. Конечно, само по себе это не много значит, но не осуществляя агрессию против невинных людей государство просто не может существовать.

Без государства, у нас все равно останется много вопросов, вследствие того, что мы вынуждены иметь дело с логическими абстракциями, такими как справедливость; но мы хотим быть ближе – именно так. И, может быть, достаточно простой надежды, что в новом 2012 году мы прогоним прочь ещё больше систем власти, которые угнетают нас и оскверняют наши сообщества.

Статья впервые опубликована David S. D’Amato, 26 декабря 2011.

Перевод с английского Tau Demetrious.

In Yemen, Reuters reports, troops loyal to the country’s President Ali Abdullah fired on demonstrators on Saturday, killing at least nine. In China, meanwhile, an uprising is under way against land grabs in Guangdong province pursuant to so-called “liberalization policies begun in 1979.”

However different the situations in China and Yemen, the demonstrations represent attempts of peaceful society to assert itself against and to repel the aggression of the state — “the political means.”

The state is fundamentally a way for organized groups of robbers and exploiters to control valuable resources. It has always been thus, but rather than simply acknowledging its own criminality, the state drapes its continuing mission of deprivation and violence in the robes of “public service.” Giveaways of land, cultivated and therefore owned for generations by, for example, small farmers, are granted the imprimatur of “free enterprise” and “liberalization.” Similarly, turning the military loose on unarmed citizens is defended with the language of social tranquility and respect for the rule of law.

With the social upheaval and brutality that dominates the news today, the “law and order” justification for the state has grown ever more untenable, even preposterous. Anarchism is another possibility for the future, one that calls the methodical crime of the state what it is and seeks a more consensual, more human organization of social affairs.

In 1970, advancing a more scholarly understanding of anarchism, James J. Martin argued that there was “little justification” for the idea of anarchism as “a doctrine of destruction.” Martin explained that “a program of pure negation or obstructionism” is no “more than faintly related” to anarchism, which indeed sets forth in its literature a positive vision for a stateless future.

Individualist or market anarchism, contrary to flimsy caricatures, has never meant advocacy for disorder or for a society without substantive rules for conduct, one pushed into — in Hobbes’ words — a war of all against all. It is instead the state that has made war pass for society, a war that pits the privileged few against the productive many.

The protests materializing around the world in this moment are a reaction, consciously or not, to the chaos bred by political authority. If the state is in fact meant to build the conditions of law and order, then we have to wonder why we live in a world covered by states like Yemen and China, ruled by people like Vladimir Putin.

Though depicted as utopians, obsessed with pie in the sky daydreams, or as bomb-throwing provocateurs of pandemonium, anarchists petition simply for a society in which freedom is the guiding principle. Granted, on its own, that doesn’t mean much, but without aggression against innocents, the state could not exist.

Without the state, we would still be left with lots of questions, forced to deal with the logistical requirements of abstractions like justice, but we’d be closer — significantly so. And maybe that’s enough of a hope for the new year 2012, that we gnaw away even more at the systems of authority that oppress us and defile our communities.

Translations for this article:

• Russian, Новый Год всемирного протеста.

It was not frivolous for Time Magazine to name “the protester” as person of the year. The Arab world erupted. Egyptians ousted the tyrant Mubarak and their continued protests show that they won’t easily accept the conclusion that others have written for their revolution. Tens of thousands rallied in Wisconsin, disrupting the typical government way of cutting spending — one that follows partisan lines and cuts the bottom out from under people. Following especially shady elections, Russia erupted in disgust with the Putin regime. Disorder continues in Greece while alternative economic networks grow. China has not been left out of the uprising. As I write this commentary, Wukan, a town of about 20,000, is besieged by government forces after residents expelled officials and police.

Though the United States has seen a number of protest occupations in recent years, none captured public attention or shifted discourse as much as Occupy Wall Street and the movement it inspired. Occupy means different things to different people, and varies in quality in various places, but overall it remains a promising popular mobilization. Not only have Occupiers loudly raised questions about the concentration of wealth and power and collusion between economic and political elites, they’ve also invited the public to participate in crafting solutions, including though the consensus-based general assembly. The Oakland general strike, the West Coast port shutdown, the spread of Occupations out of coastal metropolises to cities across the country, and the movement’s ability to adapt while retaining its essential character all suggest that it will be a significant factor in days ahead.

But 2011 has not been an uncomplicated march toward liberty and justice for all.

None of the movements against concentration of power are irreversible. The revolutionary tendencies within them are not guaranteed to prevail, and the powerful have resources to use in holding onto their power.

Things have not been promising in the legislative sector. The 2012 National Defense Authorization Act empowers the US government to indefinitely detain people without trial. The Stop Online Piracy Act tightens restrictions on Internet traffic, making it easier for the government to control the flow of information. Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law has brought harsh repression upon innocent workers, but will likely be profitable for prison corporations.

Let’s not forget who’s in the oppositional faction of the ruling class. Newt Gingrich, for example, in 1996 proposed the death penalty for importing more than two ounces of certain drugs, including marijuana. Last year he said “There is no reason for us to accept” the building of an Islamic cultural center in downtown Manhattan, a project which he compared to Nazis putting up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum.

Yet some things are especially difficult to pin one meaning on.

When Osama bin Laden was killed and when the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks passed, how many took the opportunity to step back from nationalist triumphalism to question the path that self-proclaimed leaders would lead us down?

What does the downgrade of the US government’s credit rating really mean?

How much popularity will Ron Paul need for the party establishment to let him get near enough to power to draw back its worst excesses, and how would his policies be mediated through layers of government?

Big things are ahead for 2012, and not the kind of cataclysm that is the stuff of bad movies. What will happen with the US election and its discontents, the spring of Occupy, the next stage of the Arab Spring, tensions in Europe, more Chinese resisting exploitation, the growth of Anonymous? The list goes on.

Whatever happens, freedom is best served by creating incentives to exit from the current system in favor of respect for the liberty and dignity of individuals, rooted in solidarity and mutuality.