Individual secession is another way of marginalizing the state and the entire capitalist machine that is both its benefactor and its primary beneficiary. Since anarchism and socialism rejects all compulsory associations, the anarchist and socialist is morally justified to secede from the state and refuse participation.
Justification for state power rests on a tenuous thread and it is therefore essential to project the illusion of power through a finely tuned propaganda machine which includes the media, the myth of justice for all, and the public maligning of all who attempt to expose this illusion. State power is based on the social contract theory developed and advocated by Hobbes Locke, and Rousseau. But this theory while idealistically positive has a fatal flaw in actual implementation. All contracts in order to be legally binding require the expressed written consent of all parties involved as well as a compete understanding of the terms and conditions. Additionally, though perhaps not necessarily, the terms should be mutually beneficial to all parties involved. As it stands, few of us have given expressed consent to be governed by the state. Perhaps naturalized citizens, military personnel, civil servants and ironically politicians are an exception as they swore an oath. However, an oath is hardly a written contract. Additionally, contracts generally have a temporal effectiveness. In other words, when the terms of the contract are satisfied, it is voided. The social con
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OBJECTIVE:


The objective is to avoid being completely robbed by the arbitrary, obscene and oppressive interest rates that credit card companies charge while still paying the principle thus keeping your moral high ground while doing severe damage to the credit card companies, the financial institutions and the entire debt disempowerment machine that is keeping so many of us in a perpetual prison of dept. This system puts you in the driver's seat of both the method and timing of the debt repayment. It empowers you by keeping your creditors with their harassment tactics away from you.


Before presenting the plan I do want to explain a few of the drawbacks and possible disqualifiers. Perhaps these problems will be the impetus to developing solutions or tailoring the plan to fit each person's need.

1. Real property ownership will make this plan very difficult if not impossible to work successfully. If you own your home or any real property, it is registered with the county where the property is located and that is one of the first things the credit card companies or collection agencies will look for if you default. They will almost certainly get a court order to put a lien on your property. One way to avoid this is to have the property put in another person's name. But obviously this must be a person you trust and I would advise caution. Of course if you prefer not to put the property in someone else's name and you have no intention of selling the house, a lien is pre
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I believe that we are taught to give way too much deference to law. Law is treated like it is the end all and be all of human morality and interaction. Law is held up to be a god and it is not to be questioned by the layman, only obeyed with all reverence. Law has many similarities to the church. In the church, you must have a minister or a priest to interpret and explain the Bible or the nature of God to you. You can read the Bible, but the true interpretation is reserved for the priestly caste. Granted, Luther and the Reformation did create the conditions whereby everyone can read and interpret scripture, but as we all know the acceptable parameters of interpretation are quite stringent and if a personal interpretation is too extreme one is ostracized until their theology comes back in line with the accepted ideology. This is all so that power and control stays within the hierarchy of the church while the layperson has the illusion of being empowered. But ultimately the "official" theology is upheld; a theology that has not come down from God, if God exists or even cares about theology. The official theology is what was adopted by the church about seventeen-hundred years ago, not by consensus, not by divine decree, but by political expediency and coercion.

[COLOR=black][FONT=Times New Roman]Law has been established and interpreted in much the same way that "official" churc
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Participatory Democracy and the Direct Democracy Question

"Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people […]" (Karl Marx)

Inspired by Marx’s musings on the Paris Commune, awhile back I was fortunate to have found A Space for Participatory Democracy?, a blog by sociologist Mark Frezzo of the Florida Atlantic University. Notwithstanding elements of what could be perceived as an overemphasis on decentralization and stikhiinost, he noted the following:

[i]For the moment, it is sufficient to not that participatory democracy attempts to move beyond the most significant debate in the history of the left – the debate between advocates of “reform” (social democrats favoring the parliamentary path to power) and proponents of “revolution” (communists favoring the seizure of the state apparatus). Notwithstanding profound differences in organization and doctrine, these two approaches – often termed “evolutionary” and “revolutionary” socialism respectively – share an emphasis on party politics and a vision of the state as the primary agent of social transformation.

Present in embryonic form at the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864 and reaching their mature articulations with the Great Schism in the working-class movement in 1919-1920, these two tendencies defined the trajectory of the left through
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Have you ever wondered why some people are so on edge and downright rude these days? I mean think about it. The road rage we hear about and people going "postal" over what seems like a trivial inconvenience. It seems like there is a ticking time-bomb inside so many of us just waiting to explode at the slightest provocation. We give someone an obscene gesture because they cut us off in traffic. We fume when we have to wait in line at the grocery check out. The examples are numerous.
[FONT=Tahoma]Why are people’s tempers so incendiary lately? My theory is that it is a case of misdirected anger. Let me explain. I believe that most people focus their anger at the easiest and most accessible target. For example, if you have a complaint about, say, the rising cost of your cable bill. You call the customer service department of your cable company and let the representative at the other end of the line have it. You take your frustrations out on that person and it makes you feel a little bit better. You feel like you’ve done something. But is your cable bill going to go down? Absolutely not. Why? Because the customer service representative is not the person who controls the price of cable. They are paid to listen to our complaints and maybe even endure some of our verbal abuse. The end result after we hang up the phone is that we usually feel better because we made ourselves heard. But, have we accomplished anything other than to relieve a little pent up frustratio
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[originally: http://theactivist.org]

This apparently was a huge shock for the mainstream media. Large chunks of the Western media were irrationally expecting another clear sign that Obama’s speech had single-handedly revolutionized the Middle-East in a landside victory for Moussavi. Ahmadinejad’s victory, however, didn’t come as a surprise for anyone diligent enough to study the pre-election polling. Moussavi has cried foul, claiming, “I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin.” Given the 30 point margin of victory reported for Ahmadinejad these charges seem highly dubious.

Ahmadinejad was supported by the rural poor, the urban working class and conservative elements within Iran’s clerical elite. His opponents not only criticized his defiant foreign policy, but also his government’s state-interventionist spending of oil wealth. During the election campaign Mousavi proposed an austerity program to try to curtail inflation and reinvigorate economic growth, obviously at the expense, short-term at least, of the most economically depressed members of Iranian society.

Oil prices are on the way back up around the world and inflation is only in the high teens, which isn’t that unreasonable for a developing country that relies on the export of a commodity. It’s hard to see imminent economic collapse on the horizon like many of business elite that backed Moussavi warned of.

I&#8217
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An anticapitalist essay I wrote:



[SIZE=3][FONT=Times New Roman]Consumerism is defined as taking part in a constant indulgement of goods and services. We see consumerism everywhere, in our shopping malls, movie houses, and possibly most importantly, in the comfort of our own homes. Behind every Spongebob wrapper, Trix bunny, and Quaker Oatmeal man, there is a huge mega monopoly of business aching to get you to buy their product through any means necessary. When we see commercials, the business aspect is always there. Monopolies have even found ways to insert messages into TV sitcoms, televised sports, and even the news. And sadly, the American public buys into that. The increasingly libertarianised capitalist system America takes part in has managed to strain into our heads, whether through education, the media (something already very heavily consumer-biased), ect. The neo-liberal and libertarian economic tendencies of both Republican and Democratic parties continuously and unwaveringly support this subtle indoctrination, much as the Stalinist leadership of regimes such as the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and the Nazi Reich did in the past. Actually, the relationship between classical free-market ideologies and extreme dictatorial indoctrination are surprisingly similar. As an example of the cultural hegemon
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Why we need Fighting Unions, NOW!
by Paul Joseph Poposky


In The Transitional Program, written by socialist revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky, the first few sentences explain that the world political situation as a whole is mainly characterized by the crisis of leadership of the working class. Trotsky then goes into some detail explaining how the cowardly and opportunistic character of the many historic leaders of the labor movement has lead to one defeat or incomplete victory after another. The sit down strikes and factory occupations of the 1930's and the decades that followed may have won important concessions from business all around the developed world; yet even on the verge of these victories the leadership of the labor federations (the CIO in the United States) and the workers' parties and organizations (the social democrats, anarchists, and labor party leads) did everything possible to put the breaks on the workers' movement and dampen revolutionary pressure from below. These corrupt leaders and officials, elected and entrusted by the workers to represent and to LEAD us, have instead betrayed us in some of our greatest historic moments of struggle and potential triumph. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the betrayal of the French workers in 1968.
[FONT=Arial] However, workers need not look only to historic events for examples of the inaction - or outright betrayal! - of the labor movement leadership. Our present worldwid
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The existence of parties, i.e. organizations that bring people who hold similar beliefs together in pursuit of state power, is a universal feature of all contemporary liberal democracies, and yet the nature of party systems can vary enormously. The potential for difference is most evident if we compare the United States and the United Kingdom. This essay will investigate the differences between the two countries, both in terms of the internal functioning of party organizations, and the composition of the assembly, as these two components of party politics are necessarily interlinked. The set of features that exist in Britain are by no means exceptional but exist in many democracies, and so this essay has focused heavily on the institutional, sociological, and historical factors that are specific to the United States. It should be emphasized that in each case the current state of the party system is the product of a long and complex process of development, such that the relative importance of different factors has changed with time, and on this basis it would be foolish to assume that either