The upcoming selection of a new SPD chief opens up a window to a more demarchist city government.  This could be the effect if the new chief demanded more autonomy, while being advised by citizens most suffering from SPD shortfalls.

It's about time  I put something up here.

It's been a bad year for movies.  End of Watch is a welcome 

relief.

My favorite movie of last year was Another Year.  Black Swan was interesting in that  it was  a cross between Repulsion and All About Eve.  I was disappointed that True Grit bored me a little.

MORE ON ANARCHISM

A good intellectual introduction to anarchism can be gotten by reading Anarchism: A beginner's guide, by Ruth Kinna.  Kinna is editor of the journal Anarchist Studies and is a Lecturer in Politics at Loughborough University, UK.

Here is an excerpt:  "The clearest statement of anarchist suspicion of utopianism appears in Marie Louise Berneris Journey Through Utopia, an analysis of utopian thought from Plato to Huxley.  In this book she argued that the outstanding feature of most utopias is their authoritarianism.  With notable exceptions like William Morris's News From Nowhere, utopias promise material and spiritual satisfaction as well as social and economic equality at the cost of foisting on their ideal citizen a unifying moral ideal. Typically, utopias fail what Berneris called the test of art: Herbert Read's standard of individuality and social experimentation.  Some anarchists have taken the critique further, rejecting utopianism in principle.  It is not so much the contents of utopias that upsets these anarchists but the very idea of perfection--whether it applies to the social order or the framing of personality.  As Rudolph Rocker argues, anarchism 'is no patent solution for all human problems, no Utopia of a perfect social order . . . since, on principle, it rejects all absolute schemes and concepts.'   A similar view informs a recent critique of Zerzan.  Zerzan's treatment of primitive society suggests an 'idealized, hypostatized vision of the past' that is at odds with critical self-understanding of the social and natural world that informs primitivist critique.  It suggests a recommendation for preconceived ideals in a way that constrains free thought'.".

We don't hear much about McCarthyism these days.  It's a shame.  For those who may not know, the phrase refers to the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.  He would accuse presumably innocent people of being communist agents of the Soviet Union, our cold war enemy  He would hold senate hearings in which he would badger witnesses.  His accusations were usually based on scant evidence.  In a nut shell, he and his followers - who were many- simply assumed the guilt of those they considered their enemies.

Well, I see a similar mind set among certain implacable foes of the Spokane Police Department.  This seems quite obvious to me  But let me note just two recent remarks I heard or read.  First, a former attorney with the Spokane Center for justice cited the fact that the Center received many complaints against the police.  The way this was put, it was clear he expected the audience to assume these complaints were valid.  Now, I can not think of  a person more apt to have a false complaint lodged against him than a policeman.   The second incident was the citing by PJALS of the disparity between the percentage of African Americans and Native Americans in the Spokane population and the percentage of those members tasered.  These numbers prove absolutely nothing to anyone with any knowledge of statistical inference but are inflammatory to others.  The numbers result from great social injustices, but police racism is not likely one of them.  Or if it is, bring on a valid proof.

I finish by saying there are things wrong with the SPD but McCarthyism is not the way to fix them

Here are some quotes from the back cover of Freedom Press's 1998 reprint of Peter Kropotkin's 1902 work, MUTUAL AID: A Factor of Evolution.

"I would hold that Kropotkin's basic argument is correct.  Struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best path to advantage for individuals.  If Kropotkin overemphasized mutual aid, most Darwinians in Western Europe exaggerated competition just as strongly.  If Kropotkin drew . . . hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode."
                                                                         

 STEPHEN JAY GOULD

"In light of scientific investigation in the many fields upon which Mutual Aid draws since its  publication, Kropotkin's data and the discussion he based them on stand up reasonable well . . . .Mutual Aid will never be any more out of date than the Declaration of Independence.  New facts may increasingly become available, but we can already see that they will serve largely to support Kropotkin's conclusion that 'in the ethical progress of man, mutual support--not mutual struggle--has had the leading part'."

ASHLEY MONTAGU

"The earliest theorists of anarchism, such as William Godwin and Kropotkin, strikingly anticipate the findings of sociology in their estimate of human behaviour and the means of modifying conduct. . . . Kropotkin profoundly influenced biology by his theory of Mutual Aid, propounded as a counterblast to the social conclusions drawn from the Darwinian 'struggle for existence'.  He was one the first systematic students of animal communities, and may be regarded as the founder of modern social ecology."

ALEX COMFORT

 

Another anarchist I like is Jean Grave (1854-1930).  Here is a paragraph from Louis Patsouras's book, The Anarchism of Jean Grave:

For Grave, anarchism embodied free and co-operative individuals in an egalitarian environment  free of any authority associated with hierarchy in such institutions as government, private capital and religion, the antithesis of the Liberal view of legally free but economically and socially stratified individuals locked in competition.  There was a social contract, so to speak, that united the individual to the general community, the universality of mutual aid,  which anarchists would defend by arms if necessary.  In the event of civil war, would not anarchism, however, not need organisation and hierarchy in order to defend itself?  Perhaps, but one must not discount the various anarchist safeguards that would make hierarchy difficult in the long run, like absence of wage labour, general equality and participatory democracy.

Here is something from Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia on the ideas of the German anarchist and martyr, Gustav Landauer.

"It would be madness,"  Landauer writes in a letter to a woman who wanted to abolish marriage, "to dream of abolishing the few forms of union that remain to us!  We need form, not formlessness.  We need tradition."  He who builds, not arbitrarily and fruitlessly, but  legitimately and for the future, acts with inner kinship with age-old tradition, and this entrusts itself to him and gives him strength.  It will now be clear why Landauer calls the "other" relationship which man can enter into instead the ordinary State-relationship, not by nay new name but simply "People".  Such a "People" comprehend comprehend the innermost reality of "Nationhood" - what remains over after when "Statehood" and politicization have been superseded:  a community of being and  a being in manifold community.