Comme si nous étions déjà libres

Il se peut que vous ayez déjà entendu deux ou trois choses à propos des anarchistes et de ce en quoi ils sont supposés croire . Mais il y a aussi de fortes chances pour que tout ce que vous avez entendu soit un non sens total . beaucoup de gens semblent penser que les anarchistes sont adeptes de la violence , du chaos et de la destruction, qu'ils sont contre toute forme d'ordre ou d'organisation ou encore que ce sont des nihilistes allumés qui veulent simplement tout faire sauter . En réalité rien n'est plus éloigné de la vérité . Les anarchistes sont simplement des gens qui pensent que l'être humain est capable de se comporter de manière raisonnable sans avoir à y être forcé . C'est une notion très simple . Mais c'est aussi une notion que les riches et puissants ont toujours trouvée dangereuse .
" L'anarchie n'est pas synonyme de bain de sang ,ni de vol ni d'incendie criminel , etc ... Ces monstruosités sont au contraire , les caractéristiques inhérentes au capitalisme . L'anarchie signifie la réorganisation de la société selon des principes scientifiques et l'abolition de causes qui entraînent le vice et le crime " . ( Auguste Spies )

Question 6
Why is it that in America, challenging the role of money in politics is by definition a revolutionary act?

The principle behind buying influence is that money is power and power is, essentially, everything. It’s an idea that has come to pervade every aspect of our culture. Bribery has become, as a philosopher might put it, an ontological principle: it defines our most basic sense of reality. To challenge it is therefore to challenge everything.
I use the word "bribery" quite self-consciously--and again, the language we use is extremely important. As George Orwell long ago reminded us, you know you are in the presence of a corrupt political system when those who defend it cannot call things by their proper names. By theses standards the contemporary United States is unusually corrupt. We maintain an empire that cannot be referred to as an empire, extracting tribute that cannot be referred to as tribute, justifying it in termes of an economic ideology (neoliberalism) we cannot refer to at all. Euphemisms and code words pervade every aspect of public debate. This is not only true of the right, with military terms like "collateral damage" (the military is a vast bureaucracy, so we expect them to use obfuscatory jargon), but on the left as well. Consider the phrase "human rights abuses." On the surface this doesn’t seem like it’s covering up very much: after all, who in their right mind would be in favor of human rights abuses? Obviously nobody; but ther are degrees of disapproval here, and in this case, they become apparent the moment one begins to contemplate any other words in the English language that might be used to describe the same phenomenon normally referred to by this term.
Compare the following sentences:
- "I would argue that it is sometimes necessary to have dealings with, or even to support, regimes with unsavory human rights records in order to further our vital strategic imperatives."
- "I would argue that it is sometimes necessary to have dealings with, or even to support, regimes that commit acts of rape, torture, and murder in order to further out vital strategic imperatives."
Certainly the second is going to be a harder case to make. Anyone hearing it will be much more likely to ask, "Are these strategic imperatives really that vital?" or even, "What exactly is a ’strategic imperative’ anyway?" There is even something slightly whiny-sounding about the term "rights." It sounds almost close to "entitlements"--as if those irritating torture victims are demanding something when they complain about their treatment.
(p. 110-112)

Dans plusieurs villes de France , des "indignés " ont envahi l'espace public dans la foulée de la contestation de la " loi travail " ( voir Nuit debout ) . Habiter la place , parce qu'il y a tant à dire , à échanger , à construire pour partager , tant à ne pas laisser faire , à ne plus laisser faire ceux qui démolissent les droits sociaux , ceux de l'homme , qui piétinent nos relations , nos dignités .
A l'exemple , qui sait , de ce que furent " l'imaginaire de la commune " , les occupations de place à Madrid , celles de la place Taxim ( Turquie 2013 )
" Occupy était et est toujours un groupe de jeunes tournés vers l'avenir mais à qui on a coupé les ailes . Ils ont joué selon les règles en regardant les financiers déréglementer complètement le jeu , détruire l'économie mondiale par une spéculation débridée , se faire sauver par une intervention rapide et massive des gouvernements , puis en ressortir encore plus puissants et respectés qu'avant , alors que les jeunes se sont fait reléguer à une vie d'humiliation permanente . "

Continetti concludes:
"An intellectual, financial, technological, and social infrastructure to undermine global capitalism has been developing for more than two decades, and we are in the middle of its latest manifestation… The occupiers’ tent cities are self-governing, communal, egalitarian, and networked. They reject everyday politics. They foster bohemianism and confrontation with the civil authorities. They are the Phalanx and New Harmony, updated for postmodern times and plopped in the middle of our cities.
There may not be that many activists in the camps. They may appear silly, even grotesque. They may resist "agendas" and "policies." They may not agree on what they want or when they want it. And they may disappear as winter arrives and the liberals whose parks they are occupying lose patience with them. But the utopians and anarchists will reappear… The occupation will persist as long as individuals believe that inequalities of property are unjust and that the brotherhood of man can be established on earth."

You can see why anarchists might find this sort of thing refreshingly honest. The author makes no secret of his desire to see us all in prison, but at least he’s willing to make an honest assessment of what the stakes are.
Still, there is one screamingly dishonest theme that runs throughout the Weekly Standard piece: the intentional conflation of "democracy" with "everyday politics," that is, lobbying, fund-raising, working for electoral campaigns, and otherwise participating in the current American political system. The premise is that the author stands in favor of democracy, and that occupiers, in rejecting the existing system, are against it. In fact, the conservative tradition that produced and sustains journals like The Weekly Stand is profoundly antidemocratic. Its heroes, from Plato to Edmund Burke, are, almost uniformly, men who opposed democracy on principle, and its readers are still fond of statements like "America is not a democracy, it’s a republic." What’s more, the sort of arguments Continetti breaks out here--that anarchist-inspire movements are unstable, confused, threaten established orders of property, and must necessarily lead to violence--are precisely the arguments that have, for centuries. been leveled by conservatives against democracy itself.
In reality, OWS is anarchist-inspired, but for precisely that reason it stands squarely in the very tradition of American popular democracy that conservatives like Continetti have always staunchly opposed. Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy--or at least, any of the aspects of democracy that most American have historically liked. Rather, anarchism is a matter of taking those core democratic principles to their logical conclusions. The reason it’s difficult to see this is because the word "democracy" has had such an endlessly contested history: so much so that most American pundits and politicians, for instance, now use the term to refer to a form of government established with the explicit purpose of ensuring what John Adams once called "the horrors of democracy" would never come about. (p. 153-154)

For those who lack the classical education of New York’s early butchers and bakers, Xanthippe was Socrates’ wife, and has gone down in history as an atrocious nag. Socrates’ equanimity in enduring (ignoring) her is regularly held out as a proof of his nobility of character. Graves begins by pointing out: why is it that for two thousand years, no one seems to have asked what it might have actually been like to be married to Socrates? Imagine you were saddled with a husband who did next to nothing to support a family, spent all his time trying to prove everyone he met was wrong about everything, and felt true love was only possible between men and underage boys? You wouldn’t express some opinions about this? Socrates has been held out ever since as the paragon of a certain unrelenting notions of pure consistency, an unflinching determination to follow arguments to their logical conclusions, which is surely useful in its way--but he was not a very reasonable person, and those who celebrate him have ended up producing a "mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality" that has done the world enormous harm. Graves writes that as a poet, he feels no choice but to identify himself more with those frozen out of the "rational" space of Greek city, starting with women like Xanthippe, for whom reasonableness doesn’t exclude logic (no one is actually *against* logic) but combines it with a sense of humor, practicality, and simple human decency.
With that in mind, it only makes sense that so much of the initiative for creating new forms of democratic process--like consensus--has emerged from the tradition of feminism, which means (among other things) the intellectual tradition of those who have, historically, tended not to be vested with the power of command. Consensus is an attempt to create a politics founded on the principle of reasonableness--one that, as feminist philosopher Deborah Heikes has pointed out, requires not only logical consistency, but "a measure of good judgment, self-criticism, a capacity for social interaction, and a willingness to give and consider reasons." Genuine deliberation, in short. As a facilitation trainer would likely put it, it requires the ability to listen well enough to understand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one’s own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to convert one’s interlocutors completely to one’s won perspective. It means viewing democracy as common problem solving among those who respect the fact they will always have, like all humans, somewhat incommensurable points of view.
(p. 201-203)