GMO Labeling and Movement Strategy and Goals

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There’s a growing ambivalence among we who oppose GMOs where it comes to GMO labeling. Most obviously, it implies the continuation of industrial agriculture and food commodification, and globalization as such. It merely seeks Better Consumerism within that framework.

 

If people saw labeling as a temporary measure within the framework of an ongoing movement to abolish industrial ag and build Food Sovereignty, that could be good. If people saw the campaign for labeling as primarily a movement-building action, an occasion for public education, for democratic participation in a grassroots action, and to help build a permanent grassroots organization, that would be good. (POE as I call it – Participation, Education, Organization.)

 

But many of the advocates seem see it as a panacea. They at least claim to expect miracles from it: Labeling = the end of Monsanto. This is highly doubtful. Just because a labeling initiative or law is passed doesn’t mean it will be enforced with any alacrity. It’s still the same old pro-Monsanto government which would be in charge of enforcement. That’s why I always said getting the California initiative passed was just the first and easiest step; then the real work of vigilance, forcing the enforcers to follow through, would begin. That, too, was a reason why the campaign needs to be, even more than just an intrinsic campaign, the building ground of a permanent grassroots organization.

 

Then there’s the fact that most if not all of these initiatives and laws are riddled with loopholes, categories of food which don’t need to be labeled. That almost always includes GMO-fed meat and dairy. Actually, labeling would apply mostly to the same corporate-manufactured processed foods we ought to be getting out of our diets and economies regardless.

 

When we combine the picayune content of these labeling proposals with the fact that their advocates do often call them a self-sufficient panacea, and with the fact that the California effort was designed like a one-off electoral campaign rather than as a process of building a permanent grassroots organization, we gather a sinister picture of what’s going on here. Namely, GMO labeling often looks like another kind of liberal fenceline patrolling, meant not so much to fence GMOs out as to fence anti-GMO activism in.

 

States like Vermont and Connecticut have previously been the scenes of a scam. Facing a groundswell of anti-GMO verve among the citizenry, the state government hijacked this groundswell by going through the motions of proposing labeling legislation (which is conceived and drafted in a lame way), then saying, Br’er Rabbit fashion, “please Monsanto don’t sue us!” When Monsanto then made this briar patch threat, the governor, crying crocodile tears all the way, rued how “we can’t pass this law because mean old Monsanto will sue us.” The legislature then quashed the law it had never intended to pass in the first place. The whole thing was just a pantomime. It was the same basic briar patch scam in both cases.

 

In reality it’s doubtful that Monsanto, 100% government-dependent, without even the slightest iota of a natural base, would actually sue a government that really intended to make life difficult for it. (Although a lawsuit the government never really intends to fight could be the occasion for a different form of the scam.) Regardless, it’s the duty of a government to fight for the public good (so the good-civics textbooks tell me), even if the going gets tough. So no matter how one looks at it, these state governments have abdicated, and intend to continue doing so.

 

So it follows that getting legislation introduced, and getting initiatives on the ballot, are just part of the time-dishonored, field-failed, disproven set of within-the-system tactics, alongside petitions, “voting” etc. The liberals will keep saying, “that doesn’t work, so let’s try it again, and again, and again, and again, forever and ever!” The goal is to ensure that nothing is done until we’re enslaved once and for all.

 

The real answer is that we need to build a true Food Sovereignty movement, which is also an abolition movement. No goal short of the total abolition of GMOs will suffice. We know that GMOs cannot be prevented from contaminating other crops and the environment at large. We know that GMO corporations and their government thugs are totalitarian in intent. It’s proven that neither organic agriculture, nor the environment, nor our political and economic freedom, can co-exist with GMOs. But labeling, in itself, is another version of the “co-existence” scam.

 

I’m not saying all this to oppose labeling activism. But I would be suspicious of anyone who’s implying that it’s a panacea. I’d say, “If we get this passed, then what’s next? How will we organize the necessary public education and government pressure work? How do we prevent ourselves from being co-opted and corrupted like the anti-tobacco groups?” If they have no coherent answer, you know it’s a scam. In that case the goal is just to go through the motions. Even if the thing passes it’s meant just to be cosmetic. In that case the corporate liberals would then say indefinitely, “we got the law passed, now you have to be patient and give it time to work.”

 

I’d be suspicious of anyone viewing, running, organizing things like an election campaign. I’d say, “First of all we need to use actions like this toward movement-building. In what ways are we building permanent organizational and publicity structures? What underlying principles dictate our support for labeling, and how are we working to propagate those principles?” If they have no coherent answer, or directly say ”this isn’t movement-building, this is a one-off campaign”, you know it’s a scam, or at any rate that they have in fact no coherent principle or strategy, just a vague feeling and a handy tactic. Needless to say, this mindset will never win the war of attrition it will take to bring down Monsanto’s tyranny.

 

Most of all, I’d want clarity on the ultimate goals. Do labeling advocates really support Community Food and Food Sovereignty? Do they really oppose food corporatism? Do they really seek to constitute an abolition movement vs. GMOs and industrial ag as such? Nothing short of this will work for humanity.

 

Does labeling have a coherent rationale at all? We mentioned how, in itself, it still rationalizes industrial ag, food commodification, unhealthy processed foods, passive consumerism, and the “co-existence” scam. In the end, it still rationalizes food corporatism and “market solutions”. These are all unsustainable evils, politically, morally, and practically. But in itself, the kind of solution labeling purports to be sees these evils as normative.

 

Once again we see how corporatist “solutions” cannot solve problems generated by corporatism, and are not intended to. If taken as a self-sufficient panacea (and as I said, the evidence is that most of its advocates and organizers see it that way), GMO labeling is part of the same instrumental, non-holistic NPK thinking which is destroying humanity.

 

The organic place of labeling activism, as part of a movement to restore the primacy of organic agriculture, would be as a movement-building opportunity. It would provide the occasion and the practice to build a permanent movement structure. It would also provide the forum for movement and public education about not just labeling, and not just the evils of GMOs, but about the evils and unsustainability of the entire corporate food sector. It would bring home the need to build Community Food as a full-scale economic and political movement.

 

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We Need the Abolition of GMOs

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1. Did the colonists Ask the British to rescind the Intolerable Acts, lift the Boston Port closure, take back the Coercive Acts? No, it only took them a few years from the mid 1760s to early 70s to comprehend that Asking the British for Better Policy doesn’t work, so they stopped doing it. They knew the only options were servitude, or to get the British OUT.

 

2. Today we’ve had far more than a few years to comprehend the same fact, that Asking the British doesn’t work. (It’s a sad fact of history that no one learns lessons from history, but must learn the same lesson from experience, over and over. So be it – our own experiential evidence is conclusive.) We’ve had over a century of experience with the elemental viciousness of the corporate domination imperative, which is totalitarian in the most basic and literal sense of the term - the corporations will NEVER stop short of total enclosure and total domination. This was common sense from the beginning, and it’s been proven by the evidence. The evidence of our own lifetimes is the most decisive of all.

 

3. We know that Asking the British doesn’t work. Those who tout modern versions like “writing your congressman”, “petitioning your president”, and of course “voting” (I mean those who tout these as the only, or primary, courses of action*), we must classify as modern versions of loyalists. Corporate Loyalists. These include all system NGOs, liberals in general, and conservatives too.

 

4. GMO labeling, where it’s seen as the goal rather than a step toward the goal, toward the total abolition of GMOs, falls into this begging-for-Better-Policy category.

 

5. In response to the lousy campaign and stolen vote in California, and belated analysis of the inherent flaw of the Labeling idea (as the end goal), some people have moved on to calling for a ban on GMOs. This is a step forward, but is still mired in system consciousness. Even if a legalistic ban were possible (which it’s not, at the central or at any state level, not right now), it would still be operating within the same corporatized framework where Monsanto operates. By making a fetish of “the law” and considering it magically endowed with active power, it implicitly concedes the legitimacy of existing law (for example the very intellectual property regime which props up Monsanto) and the central government itself. But we must, as an element of our political education, reject all such alleged legitimacy, in principle.

 

Here’s some typical examples of how the law really works: CAFOs, fracking, and mountaintop removal mining are exempt from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Safe Drinking Water Act. And of course the just-passed (by a bipartisan consensus, as all these examples of corporate lawlessness are held) Monsanto Rider to a typical corporate welfare law would exempt GMOs from all regulatory control or judicial review. That’s the way “the law” works. Remember that the next time you see anyone blabbering about “the law” and “petitions” and ”voting”.

 

6. Food Sovereignty rejects the notion that an alien central government can ever play any legitimate or constructive role in food production and distribution. The sector is naturally local/regional. The only thing centralized hierarchy can do is use massive top-down power to force agriculture into the commodification strait-jacket. This command economy, and the massive corporate welfare and thug apparatus which props it up, is the basic activity of the US government. It will never do anything significant which runs counter to this corporate commodification imperative. Therefore, the people’s only constructive course of action is to build a grassroots political movement to meld with the Community Food sector which is already surging as a vibrant economic movement.

 

7. Therefore, the basic nature of the anti-GMO movement, as with the entire liberation movement, has to be direct action, self-management, civil disobedience – in our minds, in our words, and as much as possible in our actions.

 

8. That’s not to say legalistic actions, where immediately possible, aren’t worth doing. Any town council with the votes to ban GMOs, ban fracking, ban corporate personhood, declare local food sovereignty, should do so. But no such votes exist at the central government level. So those who propose a “ban” on GMOs are really proposing that we build a political campaign centered on this kind of legalistic advocacy (and without even building an underlying movement structure and culture first). This is as quixotic and utopian as an idea gets.

 

9. History and today’s evidence prove that nothing will work but to relocalize our economies and particularly our food; to build the consciousness of our economic need to do this; to build a cultural and intellectual movement around this new way of life; to build upon this a new democracy consciousness; throughout all these actions to learn from the enemy’s assaults upon us, the true nature of the corporate tyranny we struggle against; and from there to politically organize to resist, reject and abolish this enemy, through rejecting its legitimacy, refusing to cooperate with it, refusing to participate in its systems, and wherever possible to take local direct action against it. Combined, this movement can preserve itself through the trials ahead, maintain the health and happiness of its people, help bring down the corporate tyranny, and lead humanity through to a new freedom and prosperity.

 

10. As with every other anti-corporate struggle, the struggle vs. GMOs is an abolition movement.

 

[*The title of an upcoming food book by a leading system liberal: Eat,Drink,Vote. Yes, that sums up passive consumerism in its most profound form. A real citizen's book, meanwhile, would be entitled: Eat, Drink, Grow, Organize, Fight. But the job of system reformists is to fence in dissent, keep it domesticated and system-coordinated, and fence out the real time-tested ideas of action.]

 
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Movement Focus – Community Food

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I’ve made the strategic decision to focus, for however long the doldrum lasts, on the Community Food movement, “inducing” broader anti-corporate and Food Sovereignty ideas from that, rather than going into every situation calling for the immediate and full Food Sovereignty revolution. This movement has to be built, has to confederate, and has to directly fight the growing government/liberal attempt to repress it through the escalating “Food Safety” assault. (“Food Safety”, as I’ve written many times for years now, has the same character and serves the same purpose as the ”War on Terror”. Indeed the two are increasingly intermingled, as in the way the Food Control Act provides for massive shifting over power over the food supply to DHS. More clear evidence for how the military-industrial complex is increasingly a Monsanto adjunct, just like the FDA and USDA already are. We see how liberal fascists are on board with the whole program.)

 

So the basic activity:

 

1. Build the Community Food movement, as a viable economic sector and a political/community manifestation.

 

2. Counterattack industrial ag and the “Food Safety” assault. I think the fights against food corporatism in general and GMOs in particular are not just true and necessary, but are good political wedges, ideological sweet spots. Everyone except the most dedicated liberals fears and loathes these things, even if they passively accept them because they currently see no alternative. Our job is to present the alternative.

 

3. Elaborate Food Sovereignty philosophy, but not as part of the primary publicity campaign (which must focus on community food, food relocalization). This part is for within the movement.

 

4. In the course of these build the movement framework so that when the terminal crash is triggered the movement will be ready to aggressively propagate a philosophical solution and course of action, and be ready organizationally to receive the disintegrating masses.

 

I want to create an Internet forum dedicated to this project. In the meantime I’ll do the best I can with this solo blog, but it’s not the right vehicle, and I can’t do all the jobs myself. (Especially since I’m going to try to become a “professional” farmer in 2013.)

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The Temporary Resumption of Petty Middle Class Faith

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1. Despite a brief surge of proto-revolutionary feeling in 2009-10, the “early adopters” have gone back to their idiocy. In spite of all they saw and all they supposedly learned, in the end they followed Bernanke, Geithner, and Obomney and learned to love and believe in the Bailout.

 

2. Meanwhile, in a spectacular example of cognitive dissonance and pseudo-religious fundamentalism, liberals have responded to the overwhelming evidence record by doubling down on their faith in the Obama cult. “I believe because it’s absurd.” They’ve also had second thoughts about their own dependency on organized crime. They still have their crumb for the moment. They have a cowardly, cringing mindset. Do they really want to gamble that crumb right now?

 

3. After a brief period of progress, truth-tellers like me are back in the position Hoffer described – “they won’t listen to him”.

 

4. Instead, as we see all over the blogosphere, presented with a clear structural critic and a troll, your aspiring do-gooder ignores the critic and tries to reason with the troll. Of course, this is ingrained in the do-gooder’s temperament. But for a little while there the do-gooders were starting to overcome that temperament. Now they’ve gratefully gone back to it. This is reinforced by how they’ve reaffirmed their psychological comfort in living off the fruits of crime.

 

5. This is part of why there’s no good Food Freedom discussions online. (Besides, the food movement never reached the consciousness of the anti-bank movement. Just like political blogs almost all suck, so food blogs almost all suck, while the only real action was at the econoblogs.)

 

6. For now it seems to me it’ll have more inflammatory than probative value to participate on sites like that. I’ll try to just read the posts but ignore the “discussions”. If I find this impossible, then I’ll drop those sites completely. I’ll continue looking for discussions, but be ready to abandon them as soon as I see how lame they are. For the time being a critic can’t, with any good return on investment, guide a basically conformist conversation onto a critical path.

 

7. So we have to head back to Geneva for now. The 1905 blossom has withered. It’s time to start over from the beginning and build, first a nucleus and then a movement, from scratch. My own blog is senescent. A blog’s not a great forum anyway. Just use the blog to advertise the forum. Start a real discussion, and moderate it just as relentlessly as these liberal petty bourgeois idiots do. (They’re especially idiots because, on account of their own SQ brainwashing, they don’t even realize their own aggressive ideology, nor how their selection of discussion emphasis comprises a vicious pro-system bias.)

 

8. It seems that philosophically it’s time for slow fermentation. We need to build the full basis for somnambulistic counterattack. We can start in the sweet spot, the good wedges of Community Food, anti-GMO and anti-corporatism, without primarily insisting on Food Sovereignty. (It’ll be better to do this where we can choose our own battlefield. It’s harder to stick with it at places where the liberal and petty bourgeois idiocy is jabbering right there in front of us.)

 

9. Part of this sweet spot is relentless counterattack on the government food police and how they’re preventing America’s economic resurgence. (But this too is for a core audience? In the period of system retrenchment, won’t most people including system NGO types disregard the real need for Food Relocalization? Their actions show that they do.) But every attack on the government has to include at least some anti-corporate element, and some teaching that government and corporation are the same thing, the same enemy.

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Notes for Community Food Movement

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In recent months persecuted raw milk farmers Vernon Hershberger and Alvin Schlangen have enjoyed courtroom victories which are in part the result of massive community support. That customers and friends are willing to give real support and engage in defiance of the system is key to a farmer’s being able to engage in civil disobedience and put up a fight in the first place.

 

But we can’t rely on the ad hoc flowering of such community cohesion. If such groups are going to spread and become exemplary of a broad Food Freedom movement, then such willingness to resist top-down attacks has to be placed within an affirmative Community Food context.

 

This movement must do all it can to spread the ideas:

 

To farmers – The switch away from commodity agriculture and toward local food is physically necessary (Peak Oil, soil exhaustion, general environmental exhaustion), and they’ll be economically and politically better off that way, and as part of such a movement.

 

To customers – Buying local food, learning cooking and food preservation, becoming food growers themselves, is necessary for our health, the key to rebuilding our local economies and redeeming our local self-rule, and necessary in light of the looming collapse of industrial ag.

 

To the public in general – Community Food is the core of rebuilding our local economies and regaining control of our politics and thereby our self-determination.

 

This affirmative basis will then be the strongest foundation for the civil disobedience of farmers and customers, and for communities to come together to support beleaguered farmers, in whatever way the system assaults them, from direct food police attacks to bank foreclosures to economic policies that harm local agriculture in general.

Some Draft Precepts

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1. All sovereignty lies with the people, so it must rightfully stay at the ground level.

 

2. All power therefore can only be legitimately dispersed at the ground level.

 

3. The only legitimate governmental form can be local councils. (Which can federate upward, but with all real power and control remaining at the local/regional level.)

 

4. The natural boundaries are watersheds/foodsheds and similar geographical features.

 

5. By definition, wherever power has been concentrated up a hierarchy, we have tyranny. This is regardless of alleged benevolence (though such allegations are always lies in practice) or alleged electoral validation (the inertia of an already atomized and massified electorate doesn’t count as validation; and where did intact communities ever vote in a free, transparent election to surrender their sovereignty? and even if they did, this wouldn’t legitimize the power concentration but merely mean, as Rousseau said, that the people dissolve themselves as a people, leaving a legitimacy vacuum).

 

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These are not only self-evidently true (the only alternative is straight might-makes-right), they’re also the implicit and sometimes explicit basis of all modern mass society and hierarchical power. These all claim ultimately to be based on the sovereignty of the people. I’m merely analyzing this proclaimed basis, which of course they don’t want anyone to analyze. I’m pointing out the fact that according to their proclaimed basis all these forms have zero legitimacy.

 

That’s in addition to their proven malevolence in practice.

 

And in addition to the fact that they don’t work at doing the things they claim they’ll do.

 

And in addition to the fact that they’re all 100% dependent on fossil fuels and shall collapse without them, leaving mass devastation and famine in their aftermath.

 

All this is toward the proposition that we need to organize for this ahead of time, that our organization needs to be on a basis in accord with nature, and that the political forms in accord with nature are the same which, according to existing political philosophy, are the only legitimate ones.

 

Politics, like everything else, is ultimately organic and must always return to this mean.

 
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Draft Notes for A Raw Milk Presentation

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[This is a first draft, and will use tinkering, maybe some shuffling, and a source list for the evidence.]

 

[[1. Introduction and Plan - Raw Milk as an Economic and Health Imperative.]] 

 

*[Open with one's personal story], and it’s very important to me that I feed my family healthy, nutritious food. I also want as much as possible to buy and eat locally, because this helps me really know my food, my farmer, and helps rebuild the local economy and community.

 

*I want to include cow’s milk in their diet, but I was suspicious of pasteurized industrial milk. I’d heard that pasteurization destroys many of the beneficial parts of the milk and may have bad health effects. I was also suspicious of the fact that raw milk has been criminalized in many states like New Jersey and is the subject of federal persecution, even though almost all food outbreaks are caused by the very same corporate Big Agriculture system the government does all it can to force upon us. I decided that as a citizen I needed to research this for myself. This presentation sums up what I learned.

 

*I learned a lot about the economics of the food system, about food safety, and how the government and the corporate media turn ideas about food safety upside down, in order to further the brutal economics of corporate food system, and to suppress our attempts to learn about our food and to find healthy alternatives to the unhealthy system. There are many ways to analyze this subject. Today I’ll discuss as it relates to raw milk.

 

*Under pressure from the industrial dairy system and systematic government policy, tens of thousands of small dairies have been destroyed since the mid 20th century. New Jersey used to have thousands of dairies which marketed locally, such as the renowned Walker-Gordon Dairy Farm in Plainsboro. Now only a handful remain, none of them marketing to the community. They’re all just cogs in the globalized corporate dairy system. This is one example of how the corporate assault has gutted our local economies, rendering us dependent upon an alien system, degrading our quality of life, driving up our cost of living, and making us and our children sick. In light of energy supply crunches, the escalating price of energy and food, the way the industrial system poisons us, and all the evils of our dependency upon the corporate system, we need to rebuild our local and regional economies.

 

*The most important part of this is restoring the food economy to its natural local and regional character. A revived network of small dairies serving local and regional markets is a key part of the economic rebuilding. Reviving the traditional raw milk economy can be the road to rebuilding our own dairies.

 

*This is also a key battleground, in substance and symbol, in our fight for Food Freedom, for freedom against corporate domination and government tyranny in general.

 

*Raw milk is legal to buy from farms in 26 states. Various kinds of retail sales are legal in 10 states. The result is that a few states have regular legal sales, others allow sales from the farm, others explicitly or implicitly allow cow shares. This is where the customers are part-owners of the cow, and the farmer is just a manager. There’s never any significant safety issue with raw milk in these states. The record proves that raw milk is wholesome and safe. Since it’s legal to buy in many states, it should be legal to buy in all states.

 

*Although there’s no safety reason why milk should be criminalized, for economic and political reasons it’s currently illegal in New Jersey. In 2011 a bill to partially decriminalize it had majority support and was voted out of the Assembly with a huge majority. That’s why a Senate committee let it die on the vine without bringing it up for a vote. The same bill was reintroduced in 2012*************************

 

*Why was raw milk outlawed in New Jersey and many other states, and why is it the target of a federal government assault? In spite of government and media lies, it’s not a food safety issue. As we’ll see, the evidence proves this to be a lie. I just gave the real reason – the goal of government pasteurization mandates and its attacks on alternative milk economies is the same as its goal for Big Ag in general and its general attack on all alternative food economies. It’s to enforce total corporate domination of the food supply and destroy all Food Freedom, which means crushing all human freedom.

 

*In New Jersey, this artificial barrier is why more and more people are traveling to New York and Pennsylvania to get milk, instead of buying it at our choice of New Jersey dairies, thereby helping to rebuild our farming economy and keeping our dollars in our local economies. They’re doing it because they know that raw milk is a safe, nutritious whole food, that it contains a natural mix of nutrients and beneficial bacteria, and that pasteurized milk is nutritionally sterile, causes or exacerbates many illnesses, and is likely to contain harmful bacteria.

 

[[2. Raw Milk vs. Pasteurized - Health Facts.]]

 

*Raw milk is a wholesome, beneficial, nutritious, safe food. Like any whole food, it has the right natural balance of proteins, fats, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and micro-organic communities.

 

*Raw milk has the perfect balance of protein to fat, by natural design. It’s rich in healthful Omega-3 fats and in the fatty acid CLA, or conjugated linoleic acid, which is a potent cancer fighter.

 

*Raw milk has more nutrients than pasteurized. It has high levels of whole vitamin A, the B-complex, D, and E. These are all degraded or destroyed in pasteurization. Today’s factory farm cows are crammed full of hormones and drugs to maximize production, which dilutes the milk’s nutritional content. Pasteurization then further destroys what’s there. That’s why pasteurized milk has to be ”enriched” with synthetic versions of these vitamins. These synthetics are potentially harmful, as in the case of synthetic vitamin D which has been linked to heart disease.

 

*Raw milk is great for the digestive tract. Its proteins, fats, and lactose are easily digested. Beneficial micro-organisms help with this. Meanwhile, pasteurization kills these micro-organisms and changes the molecular structure of many proteins, fats, enzymes, and nutrients in the milk, rendering many indigestible, others digested in potentially harmful forms. Its lactose is indigestible to more and more people.

 

*Raw milk is also has its vitamins and minerals in an easily digestible form. Calcium and phosphorus absorption are highest with raw milk. The whole vitamins A and D in butterfat are needed for the assimilation of calcium and protein. Milk’s beneficial bacteria help with the uptake.

 

*These beneficial bacteria also help to enhance the immune system, as a recent study demonstrated. [AMISH] Beneficial micro-organisms contribute over 70% or our protective immunity. By natural design, raw milk is one of the main sources of those natural immunofactors.

 

*Another new study [CALIFORNIA] provides further reinforcement for the fact that the control of harmful bacteria is a function of natural balances of micro-organisms. In a symbiotic microbial environment, as with raw milk, beneficial micro-organisms compete with potentially harmful ones and secrete antimicrobial factors against them. By natural design, raw milk contains antibodies against potentially harmful bacteria.

 

*Raw milk is a key part of the diet that’s best for dental health. In the 1930s, studies by Dr. Weston Price established that where tribes had cuisines based on raw milk, the people were healthy and had near-perfect teeth. Meanwhile cavities and other dental problems are associated with processed foods including pasteurized milk.

 

*The nutritional, molecular, and microbial distortion and destruction caused by pasteurization creates a kind of food which is hard to digest and contains many potentially harmful adulterants. This is why pasteurized milk is associated with causing or aggravating a long list of diseases and other ailments, while switching to raw milk leads to the alleviation or complete cessation of these illnesses. Such studies as [********], as well as the testimony of millions of raw milk drinkers, attests to this. In general, most diseases are directly or indirectly associated with the industrial food system, and their cure or alleviation is associated with switching to a traditional diet of healthy whole foods. The case is especially clear with natural raw milk vs. pasteurized industrial milk.

 

*Food allergies are a clear-cut disease of industrial food. They’ve especially skyrocketed in recent decades. Pasteurized milk is the #1 most allergenic food in America. Studies have documented how milk allergies cause nasal congestion, asthma and other chest infections, skin rashes, vomiting and diarrhea, and many other digestive and other problems. For many of these sufferers who would otherwise have to give up milk completely, switching to raw milk cures the illness.

 

*Pasteurized milk is the cause of lactose intolerance, an ailment so common as to be practically endemic to our society. The reason for lactose intolerance is that pasteurization destroys lactase, an enzyme necessary for the digestion of lactose.

 

*Pasteurized milk is associated with arthritis, while raw milk is associated with its remission[, especially rheumatoid arthritis in children].

 

*Rates of autism have also skyrocketed, and here too there’s a clear link with diet, and with pasteurized milk in particular. Pasteurization destroys many enyzmes in the milk necessary for its proper digestion and renders the key protein casein indigestible. The milk is then digested in such a way that naturally occurring opiods and other factors which would normally be broken down are instead directly assimilated. This aggravates autism symptoms. But many parents of autistic children testify that switching to raw milk has greatly alleviated their children’s symptoms.

 

*Infants show reduced growth and health on pasteurized milk vs. raw breast milk.

 

*Those are some of the most important examples. A partial list of the ailments where the same pasteurized vs. raw milk dynamic has been observed includes multiple sclerosis, Attention Deficit Disorder, prostate and urinary tract problems, obesity, diabetes, thyroid conditions, osteoperosis, and kidney disease. 

 

[[3. Food Safety and CAFOs.]]

 

*What about the safety issue? The government and the mainstream media claim that raw milk is unsafe. But the numbers don’t bear this out. In fact, the numbers show the opposite. Dairy products in general are responsible for far fewer acute outbreaks than meats or salad greens. And pasteurized milk has caused far more outbreaks than raw milk.

 

*There have been few illnesses attributed to raw milk. Those which have been are often attributed through a fraudulent epidemiology which performs extensive tests only where the patient has ingested raw milk, and which assumes the raw milk as the cause, but which doesn’t bother with the tests or with further inquiry into the cause where the patient did not drink raw milk. It’s easy to see how under such a procedure raw milk’s outbreak record will be falsely inflated and will be inflated relative to all other foods. 

 

*The Centers for Disease Control itself counts 422,000 cases of illness from pasteurized milk since 1973, including 20 deaths (80 counting miscarriages). in the most recent fatal case, in 2007 three people died in Massachusetts from listeria-contaminated pasteurized milk. This is compared to 1100 cases and zero deaths from raw milk. All salmonella outbreaks from milk in recent decades were from pasteurized milk. Both in absolute numbers and compared to the proportion of people drinking pasteurized vs. raw milk, these data demonstrate that industrial pasteurized milk is not the “safe food” the government claims it to be, and is far less safe than raw milk.

 

 

*These numbers involve acute outbreaks of food-related illness. When we get to chronic illness we get into a whole new realm of difference between harmful industrial foods like pasteurized milk and healthful whole foods like raw milk.

 

*Industrial milk is produced in factory farms, or CAFOs, which stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. That name’s more honest than “farms”, hmm? Thousands of animals are packed into small enclosures under horrific and filthy conditions where they can be most “efficiently” fed synthetic food, pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, and have their products harvested.

 

*CAFOs are cesspools of germs and filth. The animals are permanently sick. The system requires massive injections of antibiotics and other drugs just to keep the animals alive and producing. Dairy cows also receive antibiotics and hormones to boost their milk production. This use of antibiotics is reckless and against medical science. The milk is produced under such filthy and germ-infested conditions that it’s badly contaminated. It’s laden with the residues of all the chemicals injected and force-fed into the animal. On account of the stress on the animal’s system, as much as 30% of CAFO milk is pus. That’s what an open sore a factory-farmed dairy cow is.

 

*The residues of the antibiotics are in the milk, and this reckless and unmedical use of antibiotics generates antibiotic resistant bacteria which are also in the milk. Pasteurization doesn’t always kill all of these harmful CAFO bacteria. We then drink these antibiotic-resistant microbes, which can transfer their resistance to other microbes in our bodies. This makes it less likely that antibiotics will work if we get sick from bacteria. That’s how CAFOs are a public health ticking time bomb for all of us. Drinking pasteurized milk may render us more vulnerable on the level of our individual health.

 

*CAFOs are cesspools, where animal products including milk are produced in a filthy manner. The milk is full of CAFO germs, fecal particles, drug residues, pus, and other pollutants. The industrial system then uses pasteurization as a panacea.

 

*Raw milk dairies are by their very nature small and for local and regional distribution. In spite of government and media lies, raw milk dairies are far more clean and safe than those for pasteurized milk. Proper inspection can confirm this. (Incidentally, the government makes almost no effort to inspect CAFOs. What would there by to inspect anyway? It’s government policy to allow industrial milk to be produced under cesspool conditions.) 

 

*Pasteurization as a practice is part of the false ideology that proper sanitation and safety measures means total sterilization. In truth sterilization of food is impossible, unnatural, and unhealthy. In truth natural whole foods include communities of micro-organisms where beneficial and neutral microbes tend to keep naturally harmful ones in check. [CALIFORNIA study] But quasi-sterility, as is temporarily generated by pasteurization, is a monoculture, and monocultures are always bad for biodiversity and favorable to vermin and pathogens. Pasteurized milk, even if the pasteurization does initially kill all the bacteria, becomes over time a favorable environment for harmful bacteria to return and proliferate, while the organic bacteria communities in raw milk tend to maintain their bacterial balance over time. That’s why raw milk sours over time, while pasteurized milk rots.

 

*The facts, contrary to the sterilization ideology and pasteurization practice, are that we depend upon beneficial bacteria and that it’s not possible to destroy only harmful bacteria. The fact is that imbalances of harmful bacteria are rare in nature but common in CAFOs, and that an imbalance can infect an entire commingled industrial batch. Pasteurization was a response to this need of industrial milk production and corporate distribution systems. It has nothing to do with the inherent safety of natural milk or of local production and distribution.

 

*Pasteurization is a scorched earth tactic in the form of scorched milk. It’s the equivalent of wiping out a whole ecosystem to get rid of one intermittent pest, which wouldn’t be a pest if you worked in harmony with that ecosystem instead of against it.  

 

*The CAFO system incubates the MAP bacteria, Mycobacterium avium paratuberculosis, which causes Johnes’ disease in cattle and Crohn’s disease in humans. In addition to its faulty record in eradicating other harmful bacteria, pasteurization often does not kill the MAP bacteria, according to [European studies] which found that 5-20% of pasteurized milk contains this potentially harmful bacteria. The surge in Crohn’s disease has occurred in the age of filthy factory farm production and the pasteurization necessary to make this filthy milk consumable by humans.

 

*We already discussed the vast array of chronic diseases which are caused or aggravated by consumption of pasteurized milk, but which are alleviated or not affected by consuming raw milk.

 

*The CDC counts 5000 deaths per year from food-borne disease. This does not include deaths from MRSA, Crohn’s, cancer linked to pesticides, diabetes or asthma linked to diet, Mad Cow disease, all the chronic diseases caused by the factory farm cesspool and GMOs. Then we must add the chronic diseases and acute afflictions of the industrial food system in general – heart disease, stroke, type-2 diabetes, many cancers, high blood pressure, obesity and its related maladies.

 

*All this proves once and for all that the government lies when it claims to care about food safety at all. No one who cares about food safety would build a planned economy around commodity grains and “food” processed from them. No one who cares about food safety would have commercialized GMOs with zero safety testing. No one who cares about food safety would allow the practice of nonmedical antibiotic use. No one who cares about food safety would be doing anything but fighting to abolish all these. Anyone who’s involved in these policies, or supports them, has zero credibility to then turn around and claim to be concerned about raw milk.

 

*And then we see the government’s overwhelming record of neglect, lassitude, cover-ups, and obstruction where it comes to outbreaks caused by big corporations like Wright Eggs, or Cargill, or Taco Bell, or Westco Peanuts.

 

[[4. The Real Political Import and Conclusion.]]

 

*The government’s real interest is not food safety, or serving the public in any way. The government’s real interest is Big Dairy’s interest. That’s why the government imposed industrial pasteurization in the first place, and why it wants to outlaw raw milk. As I mentioned earlier, pasteurization was never a response to a naturally occurring safety problem, but a special response to the special problems generated by the industrialization of milk. It has nothing to do with the needs or issues of natural milk production or the natural economy of milk.

 

*This is a microcosm of how all government policy has the solitary goal of further centralizing, further consolidating, further concentrating the corporate food system, increasing corporate profits, and maximizing corporate enclosure and domination of food and of everything else.

 

*In response to this joint corporate-government onslaught, the people are rising with a new movement to take back our Food Freedom and rebuild our local economies. The raw milk movement is part of this. As with every other aspect of the local food movement, its dual goal is healthy food instead of the toxic food of the industrial system, and healthy local economies instead of the toxic and tyrannical corporate economy.

 

*This is the real reason for the government’s assault on raw milk. This is a microcosm of and template for the government’s assault on all alternative food production. As we speak, the so-called Food Safety Modernization Act is planned to be the centerpiece coordinating legislation for the total domination of food. It’s meant to use the “food safety” scam we’ve been highlighting here to impose upon the produce sector the same level of corporate concentration and government control as already exists in the meat sector. As we’ve seen with meats, the government policy does not make the food more safe, instead makes it less safe, but does serve to bring it more firmly under the control of a handful of big corporations. This is the federal government’s one and only imperative where it comes to all food policy.

 

*Raw milk isn’t an isolated food issue, but is in many ways the most typical food issue of all. It perfectly crystallizes all the aspects of Food Freedom against corporate totalitarianism; and real nutrition, health, and safety against the toxic opposites of these being forced upon us by the industrial food system. On the broader level Food Freedom crystallizes all the aspects of nature vs. corporate industrialism, individual and community freedom vs. tyrannical government, prosperity based on productive local economies vs. the stagnation, sterility, dependency, and despair of the corporate global economy being imposed upon us by government policy.

 

*Raw milk is a wonderful food. It’s good for us. It’s a delicious, nutritious whole food. It helps build our immune system. It helps cure or alleviate many of the diseases caused by industrial food. It’s economically and politically beneficial. It’s part of the social movement toward getting to know farmers and real food, and becoming producers of such food ourselves. It’s good for us, body and soul.

 

*So the fight for raw milk freedom is the fight for our individual liberty and health. It’s the fight for Food Freedom. Beyond this it’s part of the fight for human freedom itself. 

 

 

—————————

 

*STUFF ON RM OUTBREAKS, RECALLS, SLANDERS – FOR SUPPLEMENT – The government does not publicize these systemic figures. It does try to turn each alleged raw milk incident into a three ring circus. But alleged raw milk outbreaks are seldom well documented, often simply invented by the fraudulent epidemiology we discussed earlier. And in many cases the government retracts its initial allegations, as in the case of some illnesses in California in 2006 which were initially blamed on Organic Pastures Dairy, but which turned out to have nothing to do with raw milk.

 

*(insert somewhere?) They’re literal cesspools when you include the vast manure lagoons which spread out from any big CAFO, toxifying the entire landscape and atmosphere. 

 

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Storm

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I’m back online after five days being knocked off. Two of them without power. Many of my friends are doing far worse. Just a few miles away, the latest company estimates that they’ll get power back by the 11th are improvements on previous estimates.

 

I didn’t miss being online much. As with a previous forced break, I quickly got used to no internet and found it relaxing and productive. The exception was having no e-mail. Ironically, I came back on to find few messages and no one to whom to write, since everyone I know is still offline.

 

Nevertheless, on the whole we did OK. I was at my friend’s farm yesterday (where I grew corn and edamame this year) to help clean up (my third attempt to get through; my attempt on Tuesday was especially interesting and, in hindsight, dangerous). Except for a belfry knocked off the barn, things are in pretty good shape there. No flooding, unlike after Irene a year ago. The community garden looks great, like nothing happened.

 

The gas lines are extraordinary, but a foretaste of what will become more ordinary. The whole thing’s a microcosm of Peak Oil in general. The increasing complexity of the system renders its temporary crippling in the case of each new blow ever more devastating and prolonged. I’m reminded forcefully of how just a year ago the fleeting blizzard wreaked similar havoc. Today’s havoc is far worse. But I think of how in the decades I’ve lived here stuff like this never happened. It’s now getting to be a regular event. I wrote last year how the Olduvai Theory of Peak Oil predicts exactly these phenomena. I think I’ll repost it today.

 

So far I’ve been lucky with the gas. I filled up on Thursday with only a short line to wait. Since then the backups at the handful of stations open have become mind-boggling. (Thursday the radio said only 20% of NJ stations were open. The proportion around here is far less.) A big part of the tension and anguish is how few people understand what’s happening with fossil fuels and the limits to complexity. In a crisis people need a way to understand what’s happening. I’ve heard some wild stuff, and of course the standard government-will-save-us (“Obama-will-save-us”, depending on the speaker) nonsense about strategic oil reserves and buying oil from more “countries”. The truth would serve people better. Part of the movement’s job is to spread the truth.

 

Speaking of which, the Food Freedom movement needs a new Internet profile. The existing sites and blogs are insufficient, ad hoc, and have mostly a reformist pro-government tone. Don’t get me started on the NGO-Monsanto complex who want the Food Control Act to become aggressively effective. I feel combined despair and contempt when I see how supporters of the Right to Know initiative in California have let themselves be thrown onto the defensive. (One of the few e-mails I had was from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, parroting the craven defensive line.)

 

The right response to corporate lies is to redouble the offensive, repeat and escalate the aggressive charges, and throw the lies back in their face, blaming them for everything that happens. This the only thing that works, and it’s also the truth.

 

So the Community Food/Food Relocalization movement, and the broader Food Sovereignty movement, need a new forum dedicated to vigorous discussion of true principles and the strategy, tactics, and operational goals that follow from these. 

 
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Olduvai One Year Later

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(Reposted from one year ago. Links are in the original.)

 

I haven’t read Richard Duncan’s Olduvai theory in a long time, but over the last few days I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s a Peak Oil theory which forecasts a pretty rapid collapse of civilization. One of its novel features is the prediction that blackouts of increasing frequency and length will plague technological societies. When we see these occurring, that should be taken as a milestone along the road to collapse. The proximate cause of this or that blackout isn’t what’s important according to the theory. The point is that as fossil fuels becomes harder and more expensive to extract, energy harder and more expensive to deliver, the likelihood of any particular event causing a blackout will increase, and the likelihood of that blackout being severe in range and duration will increase.

 

This is an anecdotal post along the lines of my previous one on Hurricane Irene. Last weekend the region experienced a snowstorm. I’ll grant that it was unseasonal and unexpected until a few days before, and the snow was pretty thick, but there wasn’t that much of it, and rapidly warming temperatures quickly melted most of it in most places. Yet it’s left many places without power entering the sixth day now. It’s simply astounding how the “greatest civilization on earth” looks utterly incompetent to even keep its lights on the moment a few flakes fall and a little wind blows. Based on what I’m told by people I know who lost power, they can’t get accurate information when they talk to the utilities, only optimistic timetables whose deadlines come and go. One town seems able to restore electricity by the street, seemingly at random, but has a long way to go to get everyone up. The main impression one gets of the “authorities” is of desperate, confused struggle. I say again, we got one snowfall over c. 12 hours, with nothing but beautiful weather since then.

 

Nor should repair efforts be much hindered by traffic, since the roads ought to be less traveled considering how many other systems were shut down. Many corporate schools remained closed, mostly on account of lack of power, for days. My nephew only finally went back to school on Wednesday, and with a delayed opening on that day. (Meanwhile, my friend’s home-schooled children didn’t miss a single day, even though they too still have no electricity. They’ve also endured the electricity loss with little trouble, while others I know, corporatized types, had to flee their houses as refugees to sleep on couches.)

 

Meanwhile I saw several towns which looked like disaster zones. Traffic lights out, clearly insufficient police to direct traffic at major intersections, traffic snarling at those intersections, the back roads filled with cars trying to avoid these snarls, and topping it all, major emergency roadwork, detours, and “Local Traffic Only” signs everywhere you looked. We couldn’t figure out what it was all about, but it must have had something to do with the storm. A little snow, and everything looks like an anthill kicked over.

 

I know this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. I recall sneers and complaints about how people were becoming prone to panic over a little snow as early as the 90s. But as I recall, that was mostly just the psychological aspect. As my friend commented the other day, they jam the stores to stock up on bottled water, and not because they think the taps will run dry, but because they can’t conceive drinking tap water for a few days. We’ve long seen this psychological decadence.

 

But this menagerie of blackouts and incipient infrastructure collapse does look more recent to me. I grew up used to big snowstorms in suburban areas, and it doesn’t seem like it used to be this way, that a lesser storm has such crippling effects.

 

So it was while surveying all this that I thought of Olduvai again. It does seem like more and more this extremely top-heavy tower is unstable, tottering, and finding it harder and harder to right itself given the slightest breeze.

 

Of course, we’re talking mostly about the infrastructure and neighborhoods of the 99%. No doubt anything the “public authorities” needed to do for the 1% was done crisply, well ahead of time. Looking at my friend’s generator, it occurred to me for the first time that for someone from a suburb to feel the need to buy a generator is a form of covert privatization. One is implicitly conceding that one has to go to a private market to actually obtain a service one’s public taxes already paid for. The list, of course, could be multiplied forever, starting with her needing to home school in the first place. Here again we see what I’ve written about many times before, how the taxes on the 99 are merely extortions by the 1.

 

I’m not saying I’ve changed my mind and become a believer in the fast crash scenario. I still think it’ll be a tortured process taking decades. But this confirms my existing prediction of a weaker form of the thesis, that degradation will be much faster in some areas than others, and that lumpensuburbia and its desperate corporatism-hangers-on will be especially vulnerable.

 

Meanwhile, as I’ve alluded to here, those of us who are already trying to build lives outside the system are already giving some proof of principle, that we’re better off physically and psychologically.

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The Citizens’ Guide to Voting and Votism

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These are distilled from previous posts and comments and presented in the form of a list with some explanations. Use any or all of them, whatever applies to your situation and the argument of the antagonist. I’ll repeat that local elections and ballot questions sometimes do present real choices. For example, if I were a California resident I’d register and go to the polls just to vote Yes on the Right to Know initiative. Of course I’d also have actively participated in the campaign for it.

 

1. Voting and citizenship, like all other things, must always be organic to one’s humanity and the community. An election could possibly be benevolent if organized and voted by an active, educated, fully participating and vigilant citizenry. (Though in this case it would be superfluous and therefore would never happen.) But system votism wants to quash all participatory citizenship and relegate political participation to a passive consumerist category, with the ballot box a kind of toy store aisle which periodically opens (but with only one broken toy on display, painted two different colors).

 

2. System voting is decadence. The definition of decadence: One throws away what works, in this case true democracy participation, replaces it with what doesn’t work, elite political hierarchy, and then desperately seeks a substitute for what was thrown away, in this case “representative democracy” and votism.

 

3. “Representative” government and votism is the alienation of political sovereignty. It’s anti-democracy and anti-citizenship. The complacent voter is a bad citizen.

 

4. Votism always means fraud and hypocrisy on the part of its propagandists and practitioners, since all system candidates are liars about every value they claim to uphold. To vote for the system is to vote for lies, and to exalt “the vote” is to exalt lies.

 

5. Your true citizen obligation is full political participation, not the decadent “vote”.

 

6. If you want to vote for real, vote for positive democracy and human freedom. That means fighting for it. Vote with your way of life, your direct action, and your passionate advocacy, every day, all year. Any other form of “voting” is a fraud.

 

7. Votism, like its companion corporatism, is empirically proven to fail, if the definition of “to succeed” is that something maximizes equal happiness, prosperity, health, physical and psychological security, peace, rational policy, social stability and comity, community bonds, a harmonious existence with the environment, all of these at a high level. For half a century it’s been physically and technologically possible for all these to be shared by all. Instead votism has presided over the deterioration of them all.

 

8. Throughout history, only direct action has ever accomplished anything. System reformism, in legislative, executive, or judicial action, has always followed bottom-up citizen action. Name a single thing votism ever got for the people.

 

9. Votism is a version of trickle-down. No matter how badly it’s failed so far, if you just keep voting when told to and otherwise remain passive, somehow it’ll lead to Better Policy somewhere, years down the line.

 

10. Representation is an affront to human dignity. We are capable of ruling ourselves and have the right to rule ourselves. I reject representative government in principle.

 

11. Votism, by claiming we need rulers over us, and that the candidates selected for us by elite Parties are in fact such qualified Leaders, is elitist. Its advocates are elitists. (The German term for this Leadership ideology is Fuhrerprinzip. That Anglo-Saxons don’t have such a term merely indicates that the Germans are more honest about their indelible authoritarianism. But the votism ideology evinces the same elitism.)

 

12. When we ponder the irrational and counter-factual things its ideologues claim for it, we see that votism is a secular religion. Why would I join your cult?

 

13. I don’t recognize the entitlement of anyone to “represent” me at all, even if such “representatives” were demonstrably meritorious persons.

 

14. “Representatives”, i.e. system politicians, are in fact the lowest gutter scum the species produces. Intellectually, morally, aesthetically, they’re repulsive and inferior. Even if I could accept electoralism in theory, I’d have to reject all the actual “choices” on offer.

 

15. Representative pseudo-democracy, at least in its US incarnation, is bad by conscious design. The Federalist Papers, especially numbers Ten and Fifty-One, are frank about how the goal of the 1787 Constitution is to suppress true democracy on behalf of political and economic elites.

 

16. The system offers “two” corporatist parties. Even by your fraudulent terms, where’s my “representation”? I bet if we had truly proportional representation, anti-corporatism would be doing very well by now.

 

17. Meanwhile we have fraudulent anti-corporatism just like we have the fraudulent version of every other idea. For example the moronic obsession with Citizens United, which was merely a formal ratification of the inherent status quo. It’s a fact of life that to the extent you empower the dollar, it will rule your elections. That’s why electoralism is inherently pro-corporate, elects pro-corporate representatives, and brings pro-corporate policy. If you want to break the corporate tyranny, it follows that you must seek an alternative politics outside votism.

 

18. Why would I vote for an organization (either system Party) which wants to kill everything I love and enshrine everything I hate? I want to totally eradicate both Washington parties, just as I want to eradicate all organized crime.

 

19. “If you don’t vote, you have no right to complain.” On the contrary, those who persist in voting for proven criminals are voting for the crimes they commit. System voters thus, at best, forfeit all right to complain. They’re actually complicit in organized crime and crimes against humanity. Votism, by design, makes one a collaborator in history’s worst crimes.

 

20. Voting as such is a plebiscite on the criminal system.

 

21. There’s no difference between principled non-voters and the “apathetic”. This apathy is simply a less conscious response to the clear malevolence and stupidity of the representative system.

 

22. Votism’s own advocates admit it’s purely negative, never positive. One is always called upon to vote against something rather than for something. There’s a special eloquence in the fact that today’s “progressives” call upon us to vote for “the lesser evil”. If that kind of extreme conservative cowardice is progressivism, the language must lack resources to denominate those who actually seek something better in life. That’s by design, of course. The language purges our ideas because the system, including its elections and those who support them, wants to purge our existence.

 

23. There is in fact nothing to vote for except the system itself. You can vote for Monsanto or for Monsanto, for Wall Street or for Wall Street, for permanent aggressive war or for permanent aggressive war, for the police state or for the police state, for the assault on civil liberties or for the assault on civil liberties. There is no election. There is no choice. Voting is a fraud.

 

24. So if you’re going to vote negatively, it’s better to become a survivalist or something than to meekly choose at random a “lesser evil” every few years.

 

25. Even by the system’s own standards the elections are frauds. The Constitution is set up with an anti-democratic Senate and electoral system. The system in general is set up to heavily favor concentrated wealth and entrenched infrastructure. Every sort of hurdle tries to prevent alternatives from getting on the ballot. Gerrymandering tries to prevent organic voting blocs from cohering on the basis of real community interest. Even voting turnout is suppressed through ineligibility rules, the fictive “voter fraud” and related laws (which are meant to suppress minority votes), and direct voter intimidation by the police and affiliated thugs.

 

26. So “representative democracy” is a fraud in concept, intent, strategy, tactics, and outcomes. 

 

27. A basic dividing line. Do you consider the outcomes of rigged elections legitimate or not? Those who support system votism say Yes. If you say No, you must seek true politics outside the system’s anti-politics.

 

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I say all this well aware that peoples who have not experienced the so-called “bourgeois revolution” and its “elections” will often be ardent to try it for themselves, disregarding the universal bad experience history has proven them to be. But we who have undergone the full experience of representative government and its version of authoritarian hierarchy must get beyond this false enthusiasm.

 

We have to recognize that humanity’s only way forward is through building a decentralized movement seeking to relocalize all power, and the strategy and tactics of direct action on behalf of this.