Devil's Knob

Many anarchists do not even realize the importance and
interconnections between building community and attacking systems of oppression, and those of us who do rarely make use of this realization beyond our rhetoric. And, perhaps more to the point, we often make the mistake of assuming that the targets of our “attack” only lie outside ourselves. Here, attack is not understood as the near militaristic approach that relies solely on the destruction of property and physical battles, a position put forth by many anarchists. Rather, attack is the process through which we recognize the forces which oppress us and seek to destroy them.
The question of violence, of what it will take to destroy systems of Power, is largely out of our hands. Capitalism, with its standing armies and myriads of prisons, has made its own position on the matter perfectly clear. Those comrades amongst us who inevitably carry the baggage of white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism, those who find themselves in the position of the apologist, can hopefully exercise a wider range of choice. They can choose to join with us. They can choose, as we have, to attack those aspects
of themselves which recreate the old world, and to bolster the attack against those who choose otherwise. It should be this choice that defines the anarchist, which sets us apart from our enemies and guides us to our comrades. It is from this choice that all genuine struggle becomes possible.

—from Betrayal: A critical analysis of Rape culture in anarchist subcultures

Then capitalism means that there a few who have great wealth, but they did not win a prize, or find a treasure, or inherited from a parent. They obtained that wealth, rather, by exploiting the work of the many. So capitalism is based on the exploitation of the workers, which means they exploit the workers and take out all the profits they can. This is done unjustly, because they do not pay the worker what his work is worth. Instead they give him a salary that allows him to eat a little and to rest for a bit, and the next day he goes back to work in exploitation, whether in the countryside or in the city.

—EZLN (Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle)

(Source: mochicookie, via proletarianinstinct)

The notion that activity itself is pleasurable, is a utility, has sunk almost without a trace under this utilitarian vision of life. This is not surprising, since economists, and the liberal theoreticians following them, have taken as given the capitalist market society where no one works except fora reward. To see the hollowness of this vision, one need only ask what we shall do when automation, cybernation, and new sources of non-human energy, have made the system of working for material rewards quite out-of-date and useless. What then shall we do except expend our energy in truly human activities—laughing, playing, loving, learning, creating, arranging our lives in ways that give us aesthetic and emotional satisfaction?

—C.B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (via sociologic)

It is not unrealistic to regard freedom as analogous to a commodity under capitalist democracy. In principle, it is not in short supply, but one has as much as he can purchase. It is no wonder that the privileged often are numbered among the defenders of civil liberties, of which they are the primary beneficiaries. The right to free expression of ideas and free access to information is a basic human right, and in principle it is available to all, though in practice only to the extent that one has the special privilege, power, training and facilities to exercise these rights in a meaningful way. For the mass of the population, escape from the system of indoctrination is difficult. The same is true in practice with regard to legal rights. Elaborate machinery is available under the law for protection of the individual against the abuse of State or private power. The study of criminal justice reveals, however, that here too, to a very considerable extent, one has the rights that one is in a position to purchase.

—

Noam Chomsky Quotes: Buying freedom

  (via jonathan-cunningham)

(via sociologic)