The necessary anarcho-communist International

[Last edited on Saturday, 27 January 2024]

TL;DR (AKA: an abstract)

It is necessary now more than ever before in history to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in the context of an anarcho-communist International, like Pëtr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and so many other anarchists advocated and fought to make happen, because today we not only need to finally end it with the domination of exploitation, violence and death that patriarcapitalism is in the whole world, and with any other domination of man on man and of man on the other species, but we also need to save ourselves, our children and the future generations of our species, and so many others, from the decimation or, more probably, the extinction that otherwise would happen in some decades, or even before, by spreading and growing wars and by ecosystemic catastrophes like the escalating reduction of biodiversity, the escalating frequency of pandemics, and global warming driven disasters like the droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, sea level rise, unlivable temperatures in the summer, and more and more cold winters, which are already happening and causing so much pain and death everywhere, but especially in areas of the planet that have less temperate climate conditions than ours, less financial and material resources to mitigate the effects of these disasters, and, in many cases, even more pollution than our countries.

Moreover: tomorrow it would be much easier than ever before to make a global, federated community of many little communities that would self-manage themselves with open-to-all, consensus driven assemblies (i.e. real, direct democracy, that is a necessary condition for achieving and maintaining good or very good levels of equality and social justice, along with periodic redistribution of wealth accumulation, to be culturally ritualized in the context of festivities), because when the huge advancements in technology that humanity has done since the ancient times when big self-managing communities existed before, particularly those in the many-to-many communications and in the increasingly immersive fiction production and fruition fields, would grant paritary confrontation and creative sublimation and cathartic release of our dark sides (competitiveness, aggressiveness, and so on) to all, when they actually were, hardware and software, in the hands of everybody.

Also: the anarcho-communist International could and would much better start from rich countries, where conscience of the huge inequalities of patriarcapitalism is more widespread and material and cultural conditions are still better than in those many countries where the vast majority of the people of the world lives: by putting an end to the domination of the masters and rulers in our countries we would directly and greatly alleviate the near-slavery conditions of  the populations of the poorest countries, where the local rulers and masters would then no longer receive the more or less overt or covert support and the weapons they receive today from our governments and masters, who are interested only in securing for themselves the possibility to obtain at very low prices the raw materials to be used in the production of tools which are so often overpowered, or even useless or damaging, and also designed, with planned obsolescence, to last much shorter than they could.

Finally: although it would still require being armed, if we managed to be many enough to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in our rich countries, maybe not even a single drop of blood, neither ours nor of our adversaries, would be shed; but time is running fast and it’s very improbable that we will be that many soon enough, so, and in any case, we’d better start or continue with more conviction to organize ourselves secretly, in groups, on an operational level, while continuing to spread our knowledge and ideas publicly.

Like Pëtr Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Emma Goldman and so many other anarchists said, we have to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in order to finally end it with this domination of exploitation, violence and death that patriarcapitalism is, and with every other domination and exploitation and violence; and, nowadays, also to save ourselves, our children and the future generations: because in addition to the “usual” exploitation and violence, there’s the immense ecological problem of the average temperature of the world rising, that no one “from above” has even put a curb on (globally, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, instead of decreasing), despite more than two decades of peaceful pressures which we acted in every sauce from below; and there is covid with its variants, this never-ending tragic affair which is predominantly and by far yet another consequence of the material and cultural misery that patriarcapitalism produces, also in its state version (see [1], [2], and [3], or just mind that if it was not because of these miseries, in that Chinese market people would not have sold animals at the risk of causing that virus to jump to humans), and to date has already painfully killed almost 7 million persons worldwide, and would otherwise continue; because yes, the anti-covid vaccines which are currently disposable in the richest countries do work: they are statistically very effective in preserving from getting ill those who accept to get vaccinated, although they provide a rather brief cover; but, despite the fact their development was financed to a great extent by rich states with money from tax payers, these same states buy them at a price per dose that is up to 24 times its cost of production, while the states where the large majority of the people of the world lives can’t afford to buy them and the bosses of pharmaceutical multinationals producing them don’t remise, not even temporarily, to the related patents, and don’t publish the know-how that’s necessary to build the machines to produce them, nor are they disposable to help in building these machines and to train the people who could use them within less rich and poor countries; thus, covid and its variants would otherwise continue spreading, and new viruses would otherwise born and spread – see [1], [2], and [3] again – even in rich countries: viruses, in fact, know no borders, as covid and its variants proved.

These are some of the reasons why we need to take the industrial infrastructures and turn off those that produce the bulk of the global warming that threatens to drive us to extinction, and why we need to take and close the industrial “meat factories”, and why we need to take the cultivated lands, whose cultivation today produces the second most important part of the greenhouse effect, to cultivate them without resorting to fossil fuels burning,  which today is mostly used to produce synthetic nitrogen, letting instead work the good old little mushrooms that have taken billions of years to learn how to make nitrogen for good and without polluting, in synergy with the roots of the plants, and thus also letting the lands rest by turning the cultivated plants from year to year, etc., and soon build lots of wind, photovoltaic and photothermal, hydroelectric infrastructures, and produce the necessary batteries without polluting and exploiting people, and start anew everywhere as a world of small federated communities, more or less on the model of Kurdish democratic confederalism, which in the cities could be neighborhoods, and in smaller towns the town itself, where decisions and rules will be defined and refined in assemblies that will be open to all, and which will commercially relate one another by public assemblies as well, through the internet, basing their commercial relations on the answer to the question “which is the closest among other communities that can exchange that resource or that product or that service?”, that will be publicly available information, and socializing through the internet the knowledge they will develop so that, for example, with respect to viral pandemics – that would be then much more seldom anyway –, they would be globally stopped for real and also in a much shorter time; and because we should be clear, by now, also due to the historical experiences of “real communisms,” with their marxist nonsense of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which by the way has never been real and produced some of the worst nefariousness in history, that social justice and good levels of social equality require to be backed, along with periodic redistribution of wealth accumulation, that would be culturally ritualized and much more real than today in the context of festivities, by the constant possibility of openly and publicly, verbally confronting in open-to-all assemblies, in every community, about what to do with common goods and common spaces, and about which rules to give ourselves, as this happened already in history, and would happen much better tomorrow due to global free access for all to lay, egalitarian education and knowledge of horrors of the past, that would be widespread everywhere in the world also thanks to the technologies we have developed in the meantime, which should be common heritage of everybody, and due to the abolition of licenses, patents and trade or industrial secrets, and to the possibility that then everyone in the world would have to sublimate their “dark sides” in creativity and lash them out in almost or totally harmless ways, to an extent and with an immersivity that we, as a whole, never had before: the possibility for all to build fictional worlds, with or without fictional stories, using open hardware and software produced by the communities, and to virtually live some time there, and to play and fight and love and build there too, with or without other avatars of others’ selves. This is what arts have always been about, and tomorrow it would be just freely accessible for all, and it would be a great contribution to sublimation and catharsis of our “dark sides”, along with frugal sports and more usual arts and free, respectful love.

And we need to do the anarcho-communist International because it’s our interest not only to save ourselves and the future generations, but also to make the world a much better place for us and our children and everyone else.

There’s no alternative, and time is crucial at this historical stage, and it’s running out not least with respect to the risk of extinction by climate change, that otherwise would happen in this very century, but especially with respect to the increasingly less remote possibility that this umpteenth crisis “of capitalism” will end up again, through the spread of worse and worse nationalisms and wars in which access to those fossil fuels we should have stopped burning yesterday is still one of the main justifications, in an unfolded third world war with a decimation of the global population that would be much heavier than in the previous two (or perhaps, even in this case, with the total extinction of the human species, and so many others): because, in short, this crisis “of capitalism” that we are living today is not only the umpteenth of a series of crises which, on average, have been increasingly damaging, but it’s also totally unprecedented, with its enormous ecological implications which are now, already tragic, with the amount of death and pain they have already caused and are causing now in the world, and which will get much more tragic with the worsening of the already and since long ongoing crisis in the ability of the living to reproduce, even in order to feed us, and with the worsening of water scarcity and drought that is already ongoing, and with so many other problems that patriarcapitalism has caused and is causing, which will certainly worsen and will form a whole that, as if one or a few of its “pieces” wasn’t enough, will be totally fatal for our species and so many others, unless we actually organize and do the anarcho-communist International we need to do, quickly, to transform what otherwise would certainly be a bitter and very painful end for most or all of us, into the foundation and the beginning of a new and much more peaceful, and much more just, and much more happy world for all to live in, and, quite soon, also out of, when anyone who will so desire will have the ability to peacefully live with anyone else, members of terrestrial and non terrestrial species as well, on other planets too, to bring life to those planets were life is not already present and to protect it on those where it is. Because that which is holy and sacred is not much our individual lives, but life itself, that just can’t be stopped, and in order to be a living and healthy part of it, and to peacefully live our individual lives in it, we still have to understand that it is the only “god”, and we have so much more to learn from and about it.

The anarcho-communist International could and would much better start from rich countries, where conscience of the huge inequalities of patriarcapitalism is more widespread and material and cultural conditions are still better than in those many countries where the vast majority of the people of the world lives: by putting an end to the domination of the masters and rulers in our countries we would directly and greatly alleviate the near-slavery conditions of  the populations of the poorest countries, where the local rulers and masters would then no longer receive the more or less overt or covert support and the weapons they receive today from our governments and masters, who are interested only in securing for themselves the possibility to obtain at very low prices the raw materials to be used in the production of tools which are so often overpowered, or even useless or damaging, and also designed, with planned obsolescence, to last much shorter than they could.

Finally: although it would still require being armed, if we managed to be many enough to take the means of production and the cultivated lands in our rich countries, maybe not even a single drop of blood, neither ours nor of our adversaries, would be shed; but time is running fast and it’s very improbable that we will be that many soon enough, so, and in any case, we’d better start or continue with more conviction to organize ourselves secretly, in groups, on an operational level, while continuing to spread our knowledge and ideas publicly.

The Christ: Jesus’ twin

I think it’s probable that “the Christ” was the unknown twin brother of Jesus, and that he was kept imprisoned in Mary’s and Joseph’s poor home basement since not long after he and his brother Jesus were born, as per this previously stipulated contract between “the Magi”, which were actually some guys working for the early and then unknown Catholic Church, and Mary and Joseph themselves, until they pulled him out all of a sudden to let the romans put him on the cross and kill him instead of Jesus, to stage Jesus’ death, and then his resurrection.

Before that, Jesus, who was educated mostly by “the Magi”, and agreed to their contract and their plan very early in his life, also because Mary and Joseph made that contract before he and his brother were assigned to them by “the Magi” themselves, was mainly reciting “in sunlight”, with the oppressed, a plot and precepts which was written by “the Magi”, who based them on many more, selected madmen’s and “saints’” beliefs and, to some extent, even on his brother’s obviously growing madness, although it was probably mostly driven, in its development, and particularly in “the Christ’s” increasingly sincere conviction of being the son of “God”, by “the Magi” themselves, who were visiting him periodically in the basement.

After his brother died as one more poor christ on the cross in his stead, Jesus acted for the oppressed that last touching “bye, see you at the end of the world” scene that “the Magi” had written for him, and then he, Mary and Joseph got the big money that “the Magi” promised to them, and a permanent vacation far away from those territories, in exchange for their good services to the early Catholic Church, that was already planning to gain complete hegemony over the whole world.

The only christ i like is the one my father, who died in 2009, imagined and sang in 1979 and still tells in his Il sogno and Il cristè songs, which are as one song. You can read its lyrics in the video description, both in the italian original and in the translation i’ve done.

“The dawn of everything”, the “always turn the other cheek” Christian commandment, the Anarchic International and immersive fiction

In their The dawn of everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow prove with archaeological evidence that, in a relatively distant past, there were big cities where people already knew and practiced agriculture, and where, in some cases for more than one millennium, decisions and rules about the commons were taken in open assemblies; thus, they also had good levels of equality in distribution of wealth and resources.

At some point in the book they ask themselves, and obviously their readers too, why, at least now, there is no archaeological evidence of later examples of such big societies which worked that way, and they make an hypothesis: that when three issues or “traits” of centralized accumulation of power and wealth and resources, which i won’t summarize here (read the book! 🙂), intertwine in a given society (like our present societies, since very long time), it’s very difficult to get back, or forward, to equality in distribution of power, work, wealth and resources.

They also emphasize that it is an hypothesis, and that more studies should be done to prove it more, or modify it, or extend it.

Anyway, i have an hypothesis about something that has probably worsened the situation: the Christian commandment to “always turn the other cheek” when anyone treats you bad: although i guess nobody can sincerely tell to really always behave like that, i think it’s a commandment which worked and still works a lot as a moral condemnation of some of the most effective actions any oppressed people can implement against their oppressors, and as a self-justification of fear of implementing it or, sometimes, even of thinking about it.

This bugs me a lot, also because i think that today it would be much easier to build equal societies, after an Anarchic International like this, i.e. after taking the lands to cultivate them without polluting, and the industrial facilities to shut down the polluting ones and build the sustainable alternatives while consuming less and better, which would also save our species and many others from the already ongoing decimation and the otherwise very probable future extinction caused by the current ecological catastrophe and-or the equally severe risks of the ongoing and future wars that the ecological catastrophe itself is very intertwined with: after an Anarchic International like this, in the liberated context it could foster (i.e. a global context of many federated little-to-medium sized communities where decisions and rules about the commons would be defined and refined in open assemblies, and thus we would have very good levels of equality in distribution of work, wealth and resources too, and where two or more communities would settle about exchanges of resources and products with inter-communal assemblies which could be made through the internet), tomorrow we would also have a hugely wider possibility to access and share all knowledge, and to build fictional worlds, with or without fictional stories, using open hardware and software produced by the communities, and to virtually live some time there, and to play and fight and love and build there, with or without other avatars of others’ selves, thus sublimating our dark sides in creativity and lashing them out in almost or totally harmless ways to an extent and with an immersivity that we, as a whole, never had before.

This is what arts have always been about, and tomorrow it would be just freely accessible for all.

Azoto di sintesi

Da Il dilemma dell’onnivoro, di Michael Pollan

La scoperta dell’azoto di sintesi ha rivoluzionato molte cose: non solo nella coltivazione del mais, non solo nella catena alimentare, ma nel modo stesso in cui si svolge la vita sulla terra. L’azoto è fondamentale nei cicli biologici, perché è il mattone con cui in natura si costruiscono aminoacidi, proteine e acidi nucleici: l’informazione genetica che dirige e fa replicare i viventi è scritta con questo elemento (ecco perché si dice che l’azoto rappresenta la qualità della vita e il carbonio la quantità). Ma le riserve di azoto disponibili sul nostro pianeta sono limitate. Anche se costituisce circa l’ottanta per cento dell’atmosfera, l’azoto allo stato naturale si trova in forma di molecola inerte, costituita da due atomi strettamente legati tra loro, e dunque inutilizzabile. Nelle parole del celebre chimico ottocentesco Justus von Liebig, l’azoto atmosferico è «indifferente a tutte le altre sostanze». Per essere di una qualche utilità a piante e animali, questi atomi egocentrici devono essere separati e uniti all’idrogeno, in modo da poter formare molecole sfruttabili dagli esseri viventi: in chimica, questo processo si definisce «fissazione». Fino al 1909, quando Fritz Haber, un chimico tedesco di origine ebraica, scoprì il trucco giusto, tutto l’azoto sfruttabile sulla terra era stato sicuramente fissato da certi batteri che vivono sulle radici delle leguminose (come ad esempio i piselli, l’erba medica o la soia), o più raramente da un fulmine, la cui corrente è in grado di spezzare gli atomi di azoto nell’aria, facendoli ricadere al suolo come una fertile pioggia.

«Non c’è modo di far crescere piante o uomini senza azoto» scrive il geografo Vaclav Smil nella sua affascinante biografia di Fritz Haber (intitolata Enriching the Earth). Prima del 1909, la quantità totale di vita che la terra poteva sostenere – ossia l’estensione delle aree coltivate e il numero di esseri umani – era limitata dalla quantità di azoto fissata dai batteri e dai fulmini. All’inizio del Novecento, in Europa ci si accorse che se non si fosse aumentata la disponibilità di questo elemento la crescita della popolazione umana avrebbe presto subìto una dolorosa battuta d’arresto. Qualche decennio dopo la Cina arrivò alle stesse conclusioni, ed è probabilmente per questo motivo che decise di aprirsi all’Occidente: dopo il primo viaggio di Nixon nel 1972, il governo cinese commissionò subito alle ditte americane l’apertura di tredici colossali fabbriche di fertilizzanti, senza le quali, forse, il paese si sarebbe ridotto alla fame.

Ecco perché Smil potrebbe non essere così lontano dal vero quando afferma che l’invenzione più importante del ventesimo secolo è stata il processo Haber-Bosch (Carl Bosch ebbe il merito di rendere sfruttabile commercialmente l’idea di Haber). Secondo le sue stime, senza l’invenzione del chimico tedesco due abitanti del pianeta su cinque non sarebbero vivi, oggi. È possibile, dice Smil, immaginare la terra senza computer, o energia elettrica, ma senza i concimi di sintesi miliardi di individui non sarebbero neppure venuti al mondo. Anche se, come suggeriscono questi numeri, quando Haber ci ha dato il potere di fissare l’azoto abbiamo forse stretto con la natura un patto faustiano.

Continua a leggere Azoto di sintesi

For an anarchic International (a very approximate and sketchy proposal)

This proposal, as the title says, is considerably sketchy and approximate, and deliberately and a bit ironically so (that’s why, for example, i used the 42 number throughout it), and obviously very open to discussions and modifications, should anyone like to, although i don’t think i’ll personally change my mind about that which for me is its central point: the necessity to take the cultivated lands and all the means of material production into everybody’s hands.

The pandemic of covid and its variations, that as of today directly caused more than 6 millions deaths in the world, and indirectly caused more than 15 millions, is for the most part a consequence of the environmental devastation caused by capitalist exploitation of the whole living [1] [2] [3], and of the material and cultural misery it determines and pursues.

The onset of new pandemics and their increasing frequency were foreseen by many scientists (see the previous links). Nonetheless, even in the richest countries, the pandemic stroke after a long period during which nothing was done by those who could do the most to reduce the risk that those predictions foresaw; instead, they weakened further the public health systems (the italian one, for example, had undergone massive cuts during the previous ten years, which were made by institutional right, center, left parties to almost identical extents: see [1] and [2]).

The anti-covid vaccines which are currently disposable in the richest countries do work: they are statistically very effective in preserving people who accept to get vaccinated from getting ill, although they provide a rather brief cover. But, despite the fact their development was financed to a great extent by rich states with money from tax payers, these same states in developed countries buy them at a price per dose that is up to 24 times its cost of production, while the states where the large majority of the people of the world lives can’t afford to buy them and the bosses of pharmaceutical multinationals producing them don’t remise, not even temporarily, to the related patents, and don’t publish the know-how that’s necessary to build the machines to produce them, nor are they disposable to help in building these machines and to train the people who could use them within less rich and poor countries.

This way, the covid and variants pandemic will never be defeated, and other, new pandemics will happen more and more frequently.

Continua a leggere For an anarchic International (a very approximate and sketchy proposal)

L’ultimo capitolo di “La penultima verità”

Da La penultima verità,
di Philip K. Dick

Capitolo 29

All’una di quel pomeriggio Carol Tigh effettuò con successo l’operazione di trapianto del pancreas sul corpo ancora congelato di Maury Souza; poi, grazie alle risorse mediche più sofisticate del formicaio, ripristinò la circolazione sanguigna, il battito cardiaco e la respirazione del vecchio. Il suo cuore cominciò a pompare sangue da solo, e subito, con cautela e abilità, gli stimolatori artificiali delle funzioni vennero rimossi uno dopo l’altro.

Continua a leggere L’ultimo capitolo di “La penultima verità”