We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, January 20, 2013

In Greece, the criminals live in other Villas

Click here to access article by Leonidas Oikonomakis from Reflections on a Revolution
Claiming to fight lawlessness and chaos, the Greek state is cracking down on one of the last bulwarks against fascism: the anarchist squats of Athens.
The author notes that many people see the squats as...
 “free spaces”, “temporary autonomous zones”, “cracks in capitalism”, where a different way of life can be practiced and experimented with — a non-capitalistic and non-hierarchical space, in which direct democracy and social solidarity thrive, proving that another world is possible. 
That is precisely why the proto-fascist Greek state is attacking them. They are an example of a way of organizing life than is totally antithetical to a capitalist organization of society where hierarchy, exclusive rights to economic property, and selfishness reigns. They are a major threat to the self-serving, parasitic One Percent, and therefore must be crushed.