: :
: : "Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong, beautiful bodies and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,--too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They do not want to know that centralization is not only the death-knell of liberty, but also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clock-like, mechanical atmosphere.": : (http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/goldman/aando/anarchism.html)
: : Cheers to that!
: Resounding cheers to that, although I'm on the strong black coffee because after one to many political meetings I've developed a type of not so social drinking habit!!
: Piper you said earlier that you wherent a socialist, Socialism is synominous with Anarchism is it not?
: The position of democratic socialists like myself is a real vindication of non-sectarian anarchist political ethics, that is, trial and error in determining an administration that approximates toward government by local committees, militant civil libertarianism and self-government in non-economic affairs tempered with militant intolerance of criminality and workers control of industry.
: I'd even defend NJ's posts, in general not specifically since his support for things like the death penalty construe an unhealthy trust of authority and the ability of human beings to dispense justice, about third world state socialism because I can detect a faint assumed libertarianism.
: As I've said elsewhere troubling yourself with 'insurrection or election' debates is a waste of time, lets leave that up to the political sectarians, it's a tactical thing, either can be futile or progressive.
Piper:
I think Chomsky got it more or less right:
"One might, however, argue... that at every stage of history our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but that now contribute to---rather than alleviate---material and cultural deficit. If so, there will be no doctrine of social change fixed for the present and future, nor even, necessarily, a specific and unchanging concept of the goals towards which social change should tend. Surely our understanding of the nature of man or of the range of viable social forms is so rudimentary that any far-reaching doctrine must be treated with great skepticism, just as skepticism is in order when we hear that "human nature" or "the demands of efficiency" or "the complexity of modern life" requires this or that form of oppression and autocratic rule."
(From notes on anarchism)
I hesitate to call myself socialist in the sense that i do not consider myself a marxist socialist. I prefer, at least in the short term, softer forms of socialism. I abhor the idea of violent revolution, just as i abhor the idea of a communist government forcing dogma upon its citizens.
