Equity and Inequity

We hear an awful lot about the inequities that exist in the World and even more about the problems they create. The causes of the true inequities however, lie right under our very noses, and they, are how we live in our everyday Western World lives.

Only when we begin to confront the way we live, only when we begin eliminating the alienation, exploitation and domination of our lives, will we actually start understanding it. Until then, we'll remain the slaves of those who would have us maintain, ignorantly, the lives they wish us to lead.

'Militantly Begging' for reform, like these people on the 'Left', will not change the problems. 'True Freedom cannot be bought or begged for, it must be lived'.

The 'Left', has totally lost its way as Wolfi Landstreicher observes:

'The 'Left' is completely ignoring the totality of the present reality, choosing instead to see only its parts. Thus, the reality of alienation, domination and exploitation is broken down into categories of oppression, which are viewed separately such as racism, sexism, environmental destruction and so on. Although such categorization can indeed be useful for understanding the specifics of how the present social order functions, it usually tends instead to keep people from observing the whole, allowing the leftist project of developing specializations in specific forms of oppression to move forward, developing ideological methods for explaining these oppressions.

This ideological approach separates theory from practice leading to a further breakdown into issues upon which to act: equal wages for women, acceptance of gays into the military or the Boy Scouts, protection of a particular wetlands or patch of forest, on and on goes the endless round of demands.

Once things are broken down to this level, where any analysis of this society as a whole has disappeared, one is once again viewing things from a place within the present reality. For the activist realist, also known as the leftist, efficacy is the primary value. Whatever works is good. Thus emphasis is placed on litigation, legislation, petition to and militantly begging the authorities, negotiation with those who rule us, because these get results—at least if the result one wants is merely the amelioration of one particular problem or the assimilation of a particular group or cause into the present order.

Such methods are not effective at all, because they are grounded in acceptance of the present reality, in the perspective that this is what is and so we must use it. And that is the perspective of the logic of submission. A reversal of perspective is necessary to free ourselves from this logic.

Such a reversal of perspective requires finding a different place from which to perceive the world, a different position from which to act. Rather than starting from the world as it is, one may choose to start from the will to grasp her life as his own.

This decision immediately places one into conflict with the present reality, because here the conditions of existence and, thus, the choices of how one can live have already been determined by the ruling order. This has come about because a few people manage to take control of the conditions of everybody’s existence—precisely, in exchange for bread and circuses, survival graced with a bit of entertainment.

Thus, individual revolt needs to arm itself with an analysis of class that expands its critique, awakening a revolutionary perspective. When one also begins to understand the institutional and technological means through which the ruling class maintains, enforces and expands this control, this perspective takes on a social and luddite dimension.

The logic of submission tells us to be realistic, to limit ourselves to the ever-narrowing possibilities that the present reality offers. But when this reality is, in fact, marching toward death—toward the permanent eclipse of the human spirit and the destruction of the living environment—is it truly realistic to 'be realistic'?

If one loves life, if one wants to expand and flourish, it is absolutely necessary to free desire from the channels that constrain it, to let it flood our minds and hearts with passion that sparks the wildest dreams. Then one must grasp these dreams and from them hone a weapon with which to attack this reality, a passionate rebellious reason capable of formulating projects aimed at the destruction of that which exists and the realization of our most marvelous desires. For those of us who want to make our lives our own, anything less would be unrealistic'.

 

 

Mechanarchy is a Trading Name of : The Anarchist Savants ABN 37 950 534 427