Often have I written of my dreams for a stateless United Humankind, without laws and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege or police to enforce them, without borders, prisons, hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness as systemic unequal power, theft of public resources, or paradigms of masters and slaves; a future civilization which abandons the use of social force and wherein no authority exists to tell us how to live.
What would a true democracy look like, as a free society of equals?
The political and social philosophy of Anarchism attempts to answer this question, with the caveat and stipulation that such a Utopian vision progresses from its founding in the Forum of Athens through the Enlightenment to the American and French Revolutions and its subsequent forms throughout the world, especially as anti-monarchial, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial struggle and seizures of power, structures of being human together designed to embody our universal human rights and to ensure them in mutual aid with a parallel and interdependent set of rights, those of citizens.
Our humanity is evolutionary in nature as adaptive processes of change, and unfolds over time as historical forces of memory and identity. What are we becoming, we humans?
As I wrote in my post of June 8 2022, Anniversary of the Liberation of the Seattle Autonomous Zone and the Birth of a Global Autonomous Zones Movement; Two years ago today we launched the Seattle Autonomous Zone, among the greatest experiments in liberty the world has seen since the glorious utopias of our forbearers in history; the Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party and American labor movements founded in the communes of the Seattle coast over a century ago, the Paris Commune, the First International of Bakunin, Proudhon, and Marx, and the French and American Revolutions which radically transformed the possibilities of becoming human as a free society of equals. We seized and held from those who would enslave us and their police forces of tyranny and state terror six blocks of Capitol Hill.
These were days of glory and of freedom, of luminous transgressions and the exaltation of the unconquerable human spirit, of truthtelling and revelation, of the performance of unauthorized identities as guerilla theatre and of communal celebrations of our diversity and the limitless possibilities of human being, meaning, and value, of the ecstatic rapture and vision of living beyond all boundaries, in which nothing is Forbidden.
Within a fleeting moment of joy Autonomous Zones sprang up in Washington DC encircling the White House, Portland, Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, Austin, and throughout the fifty cities across America where the Black Lives Matter protests had taken control from the government through mass action, and then throughout the world as the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, all those whom Franz Fanon named the Wretched of the Earth arose in solidarity and for a glorious moment spoke to Authority with one voice, a voice that said; We refuse to submit, and we are free.
As I had printed at the time on the paper currency I distributed bearing the legend “Good for Nothing” on one side and “Good for Everything” on the reverse, with the following lines:
On the one side; “Good for Nothing; Tyranny.
Let us question, expose, mock, and challenge authority; let us incite, provoke, and disturb; let us run amok and be ungovernable.”
On the other side; “Good for Everything; Liberty.
Let us be bringers of chaos, joy, transformation, and revolution.”
So I wrote at the dawn of our Brave New World, which sought to liberate humankind from our addiction to power and our subjugation to authority and carceral states. Here I do not refer to the great novel by Aldous Huxley, dark mirror of this source, but to Miranda’s line in The Tempest; “O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!”
For it was a thing of beauty, for a time.
And can be again, anywhere one of us refuses to submit to authority and the force and control of the carceral state, for we ourselves are Living Autonomous Zones; not the public spaces we seize from those who would enslave us, but in the performance of ourselves as free and Unconquered beings, who recognize no authority beyond our own.
In the words of Nikos Kazantzakis, written on his tomb; ’I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
Memory, history, identity; are we not the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others?
At the time of their origins on this day two years ago I was thinking of our Autonomous Zones as a globalized quest of the Merry Pranksters and others who formed the tribal elders of my childhood, especially as written in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s novelization of the great trek on the bus Furthur in 1964 to enlighten humankind with Dionysian rituals of music and ecstasy through free love and LSD.
A dialectics of parallel and interdependent forces and themes is revealed in Ken Kesey’s documentary film of the iconic journey of 1964 which launched the psychedelic movement and catalyzed the whole counterculture that was to come, Magic Trip, and of the Autonomous Zones as well; the political and social mission to bring the Chaos, disrupt and destabilize order, perform change and mock authority for the purpose of delegitimation as a sacred calling in pursuit of truth, what Foucault called parrhesia in the lectures I attended in 1983 at the University of Berkeley, and the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value through poetic vision and ecstatic trance, an extension of Surrealism which appropriated its methods and iconography in the quest for transcendence through dreams and exaltation through transgression.
Here as Living Autonomous Zones and bearers of visions of liberty as seeds of change we tilt at the windmills which might be giants to break the mould of man and become free and self created beings.
We bear twin legacies of history from which we must emerge, we human beings; for we are all Ahab, Unconquered in titanic struggle against vast and malevolent systems of oppression and dehumanization to break through the mask of our falsification and become Living Autonomous Zones, and we are all Don Quixote on his mad quest to become human through the power of poetic vision to reimagine and transform ourselves and our choices about how to be human together.
Let us refuse to submit to Authority and be free; let us dream Impossible Dreams.
As I wrote in my post of June 11 2020, Utopia Now: Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone; Marvels and jubilation in the streets, a carnival of transgressions of the Forbidden and masquerades of possible identities and futures of becoming human, anarchy and chaos and joy, running amok and being ungovernable, and the frightening of the horses; come and dance with us, America. Come find your heart and be free.
Whosoever remains unconquered is free. For each of us who defies injustice and tyranny, who resists subjugation, dehumanization, and enslavement, who questions, mocks, and challenges authority, becomes an agent of Liberty who cannot be silenced, and who passes the torch of freedom as an uncontrollable catalyst of change to everyone with whom we interact, and thereby can never be truly defeated.
Each of us who in resistance become Unconquered and a bearer of Liberty is a Living Autonomous Zone, a seed of change and a bringer of chaos and liberation, and this is the key to our inevitable victory. We ourselves are the power which state terror and tyranny cannot conquer.
Such beautiful resistance by those who will not go quietly to their deaths. To all those who tilt at windmills; I salute you.
Let us take back our government from our betrayers, and our democracy from the fascist tyranny of blood, faith, and soil which has attempted to steal our liberty and enslave us with divisions of exclusionary otherness.
Let us join together in solidarity and restore America as a free society of equals, and liberate all the nations of the world now held captive by fascist tyrannies and systems of unequal power.
There can be but one reply to fascism and state terror; Never Again.
As I wrote in my post of June 11 2022, Remembering the Glorious Seattle Autonomous Zone; Strange and unknown remains the Undiscovered Country, as Shakespeare called the future, for it is a thing of relative and ambiguous truths, ephemeral and in constant motion and processes of change, and limitless possibilities of becoming. “An undiscovered country whose bourne no travelers return—puzzles the will”, as the line in Hamlet goes, in reference to death and what may lie beyond the limits of human being and knowing.
But it applies equally to the myriads of futures from which we must choose, shaped by our histories and systems of being human together as imposed conditions of revolutionary struggle and by our poetic vision in the reimagination and transformation of human being, meaning, and value.
The emergence of the Autonomous Zones as a spontaneous adaptation to universal conditions of unequal power and brutal repression by carceral states was in part an echo and reflection of the Occupy Movement which began in New York’s Zuccotti Park on September 17 2011; by October nearly a thousand cities in 82 nations and in 600 American communities has ongoing and sustained sister protests and Occupy movements. The Black Lives Matter movement began in July of 2013 in protest against the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, and in 2020 with the death of George Floyd ignited the Summer of Fire; some 26 million Americans joined protests in 200 cities, joined by sister protests in two thousand cities in sixty nations. The Autonomous Zones were a prodigy of the harmonic convergence of these two global movements of social justice, as shaped by influences of the #metoo antipatriarchal movement and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike and other global ecological movements.
In the Autonomous Zones global protest movements against white supremacist terror, patriarchal sexual terror, tyranny and state terror both as democracy movements and as the police abolition movement, recombined and integrated as an agenda of revolutionary struggle against systems of unequal power.
And as we brought a Reckoning for systemic evils, epigenetic trauma, and the legacies of our histories, we also sought to launch humankind on a total revisioning of our being, meaning, and value, and the reimagination and transformation of the limitless possibilities of becoming human.
Man of La Manch 1979 film; Don Quixote’s speech on life not as it is, but as it should be
The Impossible Dream, Josh Groban
Brian Stokes Mitchell sings The Impossible Dream
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Edith Grossman (Translator), Harold Bloom (Introduction)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe
Anarchy, a reading list
On Anarchism, by Noam Chomsky
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22558046-on-anarchism
We Do Not Fear Anarchy—We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement, by Robert Graham
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23282125-we-do-not-fear-anarchy-we-invoke-it
Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism
by Michael Schmidt (Goodreads Author), Lucien Van Der Walt
Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism, by Michael Schmidt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16057170-cartography-of-revolutionary-anarchism
Anarchism, by Daniel Guérin, Noam Chomsky (Introduction)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51624.Anarchism
Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, by Peter H. Marshall
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/880355.Demanding_the_Impossible
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, by Kristin Ross
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22716641-communal-luxury
On Anarchism, by Mikhail Bakunin, Sam Dolgoff (Editor/Translator)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203890.On_Anarchism
The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader
by Errico Malatesta (Editor), Paul Sharkey (Translation), Davide Turcato (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17675098-the-method-of-freedom
Property is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology
by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Iain Mckay (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9482965-property-is-theft
Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology
by Pyotr Kropotkin, Iain Mckay (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17675240-direct-struggle-against-capital
Mutual Aid, by Pyotr Kropotkin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51306.Mutual_Aid
An Anarchist FAQ, Vol. 1, by Iain Mckay
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2626552-an-anarchist-faq-vol-1
An Anarchist FAQ: Volume 2, by Iain Mckay (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13592232-an-anarchist-faq
The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936, by Murray Bookchin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/312964.The_Spanish_Anarchists
The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy
by Murray Bookchin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/312960.The_Ecology_of_Freedom
Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization Series, by Abdullah Öcalan
https://www.goodreads.com/series/246784-manifesto-of-the-democratic-civilization
Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/978934.Possibilities
Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination,
by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13048162-revolutions-in-reverse
The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement, by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330433-the-democracy-project
Direct Action: An Ethnography, by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2543048.Direct_Action
Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination,
by David Graeber
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13048162-revolutions-in-reverse
Anarchism and Its Aspirations, by Cindy Milstein
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6919727-anarchism-and-its-aspirations
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939), by Robert Graham (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168902.Anarchism
The Emergence of the New Anarchism (1939-1977) (Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume Two), by Robert Graham (Editor)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6548316-the-emergence-of-the-new-anarchism-1939-1977
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 3: The New Anarchism (1974-2012), by Robert Graham (Editor)
Torch of Liberty 
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