Jefferson and America's Lost Liberties

Portrait of Jefferson by  

Charles Wilson Peale, 1791

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

- Thomas Jefferson in a letter to James Madison,  30 January 1787

For all his failings, not least his slave holding and his views of the First Nations peoples whose lands he coveted for the American Republic, Thomas Jefferson was nonetheless the architect of America's now lost conception of liberty. Deeply formed by both the philosophers of an earlier generation called Humanists, and even more by his European philosophical contemporaries, the early advocates of the Enlightenment, Jefferson taught without hesitation that the rights of humankind to liberty, to strive for happiness, to speak freely without fear of reprisal, to believe or not believe in divinity, and to equal justice before the law are all apparent as the natural product of reason. He taught that the moral obligation of a fearless conscience is the defence of these rights. The famous quote that appears above is part of a larger argument, that it is the nature of government to seek power, to gather power and to exert power at the expense of natural human liberty. 

Rebellions, said Jefferson, are the people’s way of putting governments in their place as servants to the people, not their masters. In the generations since the Second World War we have seen rebellions in America: both the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement were precisely the kinds of correctives Jefferson envisioned. But at the same time and since, aided by changes in technology and communications, as well as a spirit of fear fostered by our government -- first the 1950’s Red Scares, secondly the fear of annihilation that pervaded the Cold War with the USSR, and today, the government’s drumbeat of fear and economic loss that blend the image of terror with the faces of ethnic and religious difference.

American government has become a tyranny all but unrestrained by the freedoms Jefferson saw as unalienable rights, our rights to free speech, to unfettered communication and thought, to travel where and how we please, to champion the causes that appeal to our hearts, and to command equal protection under the law, all have been scoured away by technologies of surveillance, by legal acts that deprive of an unfettered right to habeas corpus, that permit secret courts, secret warrants and secret trials, even secret detention and torture, all in the name of “Homeland Security.” 

Never has tyranny had a better friend than the tiny minorities of religious fanatics, both Muslim and Christian that have engaged in acts of terror, save one, those who have taken advantage of terror to establish their own power by trampling ours. Today we suffer under an administration that trades on fear, that asks us to hate that we might fear all the more. What should our response to such tyrants be? I know the answer Jefferson offered. I’m not sure that Americans have the stomach for liberty today. I know what Jefferson the revolutionary taught, but it’s so much easier to live behind walls of hate, to trade the depth of conscience liberty demands for these superficial protections from our fears. 

DHH

Here is the complete text of Jefferson’s letter, written 232 years ago:

Dear Sir,

My last to you was of the 16th of December; since which, I have received yours of November 25 and December 4, which afforded me, as your letters always do, a treat on matters public, individual, and economical. I am impatient to learn your sentiments on the late troubles in the Eastern states. So far as I have yet seen, they do not appear to threaten serious consequences. Those states have suffered by the stoppage of the channels of their commerce, which have not yet found other issues. This must render money scarce and make the people uneasy. This uneasiness has produced acts absolutely unjustifiable; but I hope they will provoke no severities from their governments. A consciousness of those in power that their administration of the public affairs has been honest may, perhaps, produce too great a degree of indignation; and those characters, wherein fear predominates over hope, may apprehend too much from these instances of irregularity. They may conclude too hastily that nature has formed man insusceptible of any other government than that of force, a conclusion not founded in truth or experience. Societies exist under three forms, sufficiently distinguishable: (1) without government, as among our Indians; (2) under governments, wherein the will of everyone has a just influence, as is the case in England, in a slight degree, and in our states, in a great one; (3) under governments of force, as is the case in all other monarchies, and in most of the other republics.

To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the first condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing.  [loosely Better the evils of liberty than the quiescence of servitude -- Jefferson is quoting from Rousseau's Social Contract of 1762 - ed.]. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. If these transactions give me no uneasiness, I feel very differently at another piece of intelligence, to wit, the possibility that the navigation of the Mississippi may be abandoned to Spain. I never had any interest westward of the Allegheny; and I will never have any. But I have had great opportunities of knowing the character of the people who inhabit that country; and I will venture to say that the act which abandons the navigation of the Mississippi is an act of separation between the Eastern and Western country. It is a relinquishment of five parts out of eight of the territory of the United States; an abandonment of the fairest subject for the payment of our public debts, and the chaining those debts on our own necks, in perpetuum. I have the utmost confidence in the honest intentions of those who concur in this measure; but I lament their want of acquaintance with the character and physical advantages of the people, who, right or wrong, will suppose their interests sacrificed on this occasion to the contrary interests of that part of the confederacy in possession of present power. If they declare themselves a separate people, we are incapable of a single effort to retain them. Our citizens can never be induced, either as militia or as soldiers, to go there to cut the throats of their own brothers and sons, or rather, to be themselves the subjects instead of the perpetrators of the parricide. Nor would that country quit the cost of being retained against the will of its inhabitants, could it be done. But it cannot be done. They are able already to rescue the navigation of the Mississippi out of the hands of Spain, and to add New Orleans to their own territory. They will be joined by the inhabitants of Louisiana. This will bring on a war between them and Spain; and that will produce the question with us, whether it will not be worth our while to become parties with them in the war in order to reunite them with us and thus correct our error. And were I to permit my forebodings to go one step further, I should predict that the inhabitants of the United States would force their rulers to take the affirmative of that question. I wish I may be mistaken in all these opinions.

Yours affectionately, Th. Jefferson

Hope and Revolution

An Anarchist comrade from Brazil, a visual artist, recently wrote in a long essay concerning elections:

I have a philosophy, I like to learn from whatever life brings me. What did I learn from all this? That independent of all this is just a scare, or not, 4 years from now, we’ll be right here, exactly in this place of fear, despair, disagreement, people drooling hate on both sides and people ignoring everything we’re talking about.

Note, the names change, the captions change, the scenario looks different, but deep down, the essence is exactly the same! There’s a pattern here! Can I just see that? And it’s about that pattern that I’ve been trying to talk about, whether it’s in the videos that I made, or the cartoons I drew.

My despair does not have to do with the current scenario (that is, in itself desperate), it has to do with the fact that we are so immersed in the scenario (just as we were in so many others), that we lost sight that the thing will repeat, again, and again and again… Just like those nightmares when we wake up to find ourselves inside another nightmare to wake up in another and another and never have peace…

The system is making us a people without peace, without soul… it is not Bolsonaro, or Lula, or the cup, or fear… the system has been my nightmare. Civilisation has been my nightmare. And I don’t want it anymore, I think we deserve freedom.
—————

Here's my reply:

Please forgive me that I lack the skills to respond in Portuguese. I am writing in response to your last four paragraphs, for they touched me deeply.

I think you are very much right to say that the problem is greater than any particular crisis, any single election or crisis. The problem we face is that of a mouse in the field of wheat as a great machine comes to harvest. Does the mouse hide behind this stalk or that? Does the mouse run for a shallow burrow? The mouse might miss the cutters yet still be crushed by the weight of the machine.

The advent of neo-liberalism has changed the world situation in ways that the great writers and organisers of socialism and anarchism’s past could hardly imagine. I think that even the language of “capital vs. labour” only faintly captures the world situation today. Nor does the notion of the USA as a “great capitalist power” cover the restructuring of nations and peoples that has occurred since World War II.

It is not a handful of capitalists that we must overcome, but the conception of the social universe that neo-liberalism imposes, where peoples, nations, and individual societies are simply replaceable commodities.

I’ve spent most of my adult life organising and working among the poorest communities in my country, only to realise after more than 40 years, that the structures of life among the poor simply replicate the larger system in which we all live.

Among the urban poor in America, in a neighbourhood filled with wretched housing, where unemployment is universal, where the accents of language, the clothes worn, and even the food we eat marks us as permanently poor, we watch in fear as one group of drug profiteers seizes power from the previous group of profiteers, using tactics of violence and intimidation. If the police disrupt such a group by raids and mass arrests, another takes their place within hours or days.

The children on the streets admire the men with guns and fancy cars, the women with nice clothes and who with their men, sit in the back corner of the club, drinking “the good stuff” and eating meals no one else can afford.

It is not this profiteer or that whom we need to be overcome, but a system that leads people to fear real change, the change that would make the role of the profiteer an ethical outrage, an unthinkable monster that no child would admire.

On a national level we have the same dilemma: politicians like Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi are passing infatuations, representing only further ensnarements into a system that inverts the human ability to love into the admiration of greed and power seeking. Some are more dangerous than others, as Trump is more dangerous than Pelosi, but they are both only aspects of this ugly, dark mirror, a mirror that show us only our worst.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, show me what I can be?
And the mirror says, You can be rich and powerful.
Or perhaps it says You can change things if you are strong enough or rich enough.

Both answers are false.

Until we can break the mirror, realising that the power for change comes not from you or me, but from a greater more loving and caring “us,” then there is no battle to be won. We will just watch as one gang of profiteers takes power from another.

What I hope to see, is that someday soon we begin to take power apart, raising up genuinely different structures. They will perhaps be tiny at first, but they will grow to replace the tumorous growth of neo-liberalism that has stricken us all. What will come will be the healthy tissues of cooperation, trustworthiness and what the religious call “mutual regard,” that important change that comes when we look at a stranger and see not the face of an enemy or rival, but another mind and body that can be involved in the work of creating.

The revolutionaries of France, in the 1790’s called it “Fraternité.” By creating, I do not mean replicating the system of entitled greed which enslaves us, but the reply to that system: a loving creativity, that will to address the real issues that faces us all, and threaten us all: climate change, our poisoned environment, resource deficits, rampant population growth, etc. etc.

More than armed revolutionaries, running in the hills, or hiding in cities, we need to create the very language of revolution and begin injecting it into our communities. Today in America this is still just barely possible. The vast weight of government, the media, and nearly every social institution fights us, but it is still possible to encourage and cajole, and provide a framework for revolutionary speech and thought.

When I speak to young, self-proclaimed “anarchists” here, I ask “What have you built? How have you made your revolutionary impulses into something concrete? How have you shown friends and neighbours that revolution is not just possible, but above all desirable, a fact that must be revealed, a truth more important than greed?

I do not presume to give advice to a comrade who has faced such fear and danger as you. The USA, for all its oppressions has, until recently, served neo-liberalism at home with a velvet fist. We are surveilled and catalogued by the alphabet of Government agencies, the FBI, NSA, DHS, ICE, etc., and then largely ignored. But when they throw a few dozen in prison, thousands cower. When they throw hundreds of thousands in prison, it’s defined as a nebulous, impenetrable social problem: “racism,” or “drugs” or “poverty.”

 Yet here we are, with by far the greatest proportion of our people in prison of any nation in the world. Among them, we are told, there are “no political prisoners.” You may draw your own conclusions.

Comrade, I share many of your hesitancies, fears and concerns. I have a son in his early twenties, and I am sure that the future he faces is much, much darker and more threatening than I can even imagine. Yet for his sake, and the sake of others like him, I think we must continue. We must build the very possibility of change.

From An Anarchist Bible. 1.

This may be freely copied and distributed.

For those of us raised within the Christian tradition, the words of Saul of Tarsus, AKA St. Paul, are familiar and often remembered - his passage from the 13th Chapter of his 1st letter to the church at Corinth is considered a masterpiece, both in literary terms, and also for its appeal to our better nature, that we above all must love. :

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ”

For those of us who have come to embrace the Anarchist movement as a politics of the future, as a means of resistance to the tyranny of this generation's self-serving political leadership, their use of technology as a means to enthral the human spirit, and perhaps more importantly against that invisible hand, that almost irresistible structuring of our lives in service to an economy that no longer serves us, but calls us to be replaceable servants to that inhuman master named profit, religion is often thought a mere corruption of the innate human desire to understand and master the choices we face under the burning sun and the emptiness of  the night time sky and its faint stars. There can  be little doubt that with its easy assurances and history of violence, religions, all religions have functioned in this way, but whether we take love or justice at the centre of our endeavours, we can not be far from what is needed in these days.                                     

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - Part 1

PART 1

Extinctions are happening at an accelerated rate because of human activity. We are altering the biosphere so quickly that many species have neither the ability to flourish nor adapt. Examples range from deforestation by burning so that we can plant palm oil plantations across formerly virgin rainforest in Indonesia, to the burning of dirty coal in the U.S., Russia and China which leads to acid rain which in turn has killed off freshwater fish. In America, even where we have brought back the fish, as in the 25,667 km²  Lake Erie, the waters and bottom sediments remain so contaminated that governments suggest it's fish not be eaten, or if ingested, only in severely limited amounts. The single factor that distinguishes humans from the rest of life on earth is our ability to collectively alter the environment on a vast scale. Fish can’t change the acidity of lakes, and orangutans can’t burn forests to replant the land as a mono-culture, No other species alters the environment on such a scale or so capriciously.

It's up to all of us to both recognise the gravity of the issues we face and press our governments to cooperate and move forward to address these concerns, for they ultimately affect us all. The potential for catastrophe is growing year by year, such that an increasing number of reputable climatologists believe that we may be too late to avert mass extinctions. They call the present time the anthropocene, an era when the Earth's biosphere came to be dominated by a wildly reproducing species that so fouled its environment, that survival became impossible for most life. This crazy self-destructive species is us. The boldest of these scientists suggest that the anthropocene is ending, and that our end as the dominant species will be its closing act.

Since the advent of the modern era, humans again and again have developed technologies that enhanced our ability to survive. We are living longer and have much lower infant and child mortality than ever in history. As a result, our populations has exploded. Beneath the advances in food production, sanitation, medicine and housing that have led to this population bomb, is a vast infrastructure of finance, commerce, and governments. Of these governments, which once ruled, have become agents of finance and commerce with the militaries and policing functioning to direct, control and defend these structures and their raw materials.

All three of these areas are currently contributing to rapid climate change, and to date are resistant to solutions to the problems that population growth and associated infrastructures are creating. Finance benefits from agile and rapid distribution of money, and identifies as a "good" a continuous increase in consumption (a growing market), commerce identify increases in productivity  and adaptation to the needs and desires of a growing population as a primary “good.” Governments, by and large, identify the security of each of these elements, and a peaceable, growing population, steady growth in both finance and commerce, as well as the survival of its own institutions as primary “goods.”

To date, all three of these stakeholder of modern life have been resistant to change in response to ecological and climatological concerns. In the U.S., for example, the last wide ranging ecology protection legislation were passed in the 1970’s. Over time, the three most important acts, concerning clean air, clean water and toxic substances have come under continuous attack by finance and commerce, and have all suffered at the hands of de-regulators, especially after the propagandistic association of these laws and regulations with a set of false economic claims put forward during the Reagan administration (1981-1989).

Some pressure or force needs to develop for this slowly growing troika of forces to change, but barring a large scale catastrophe that will force the issue, it's likely that change will occur too late  to avoid large scale collapses of the biosphere. The only alternative agent of change is us, the citizens of the nation to act in defense of the biosphere.  But for this to happen, a decades long process of pacification needs to be upended, and a swift, decisive new definition of individual prerogatives and responsibilities needs to be quickly developed. Part of the issue preventing effective change  is that so many of us have been effectively disenfranchised, becoming consumers, rather than a responsible citizenry. A decades long decline in voting, the repeal of equal time regulations for broadcast media, journalistic acceptance of patently false and misleading electioneering claims, the programmatic diminution of news gathering abilities and resources by corporate owners,  has been coupled to legal and propaganda attacks on the Fourth Estate as a whole, just as its vulnerability to digital media was coming to the fore.

Cont. in Pt II.

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - Part II

Part II


So how do we accelerate change, not in the global environment, but within the human community?
Here's how we might begin:

First: In democracies there should be an absolute litmus test in electoral politics. Politicians in the hands of commerce or finance be driven from office, regardless of the stance on other issues. Commerce and finance should lose the growing franchise they have been granted in most Western democracies. Corporations must lose the the legal fiction that defines them as persons, with rights to engage in politics and debate, and which, to the ultimate detriment of all, allows them to sway, influence or even buy our democracy.

Second: Individuals citizens need education in the basics of the sciences, as well as logic, in order to understand the gravity of the situation, and perhaps more importantly, to be secure in participating in a meaningful debate as to the best paths forward. It also means a thorough revaluation of the right of ownership.

Third: We need to thoroughly reevaluate the right of ownership. In Western democracies the right of ownership has never been been absolute. We are limited from ownership of many dangerous materials, ranging from weapons to chemicals. There are plants we're not allowed to grow in our gardens, some being deemed dangerous, others because they are understood to play a role in the spread of disease to important crops or forests. Likewise, one may not construct a bomb, even though one might have a right to own all the components needed, nor are ownership right allowed which trump many dangers to the larger community. This can range from restrictions on mining and minimum height requirements and scrubbers on industrial chimneys to safety requirements for public accommodations. Thus in most western nations limits have been placed the use and ownership of real property, such that common actions which are likely damaging to others are constrained. Limitations are often placed on the types of buildings permitted, or indeed if building is allowed at all. Requirements exist as to materials and design with safety as a principle justification, though zoning laws often factor potential impact on the value of nearby properties and even community standards of decorum or aesthetics into potential uses, tied to code requirements for setbacks, exterior materials and the design of access. In recent decades large segments of construction have codes requiring consideration of the disabled in design and construction.

The pseudo-populist movements concerned with land rights, whether in the form of anti-eminent domain groups, anti-zoning groups or Western grazing rights groups have been quietly applauded and underwritten by commerce and finance, which has manipulated politics to link such concerns with their own privileges to sell and manufacture "as they like, when and how they like." The propaganda buzzword beloved of finance and commerce is “deregulation.” Its proponents ignore the fundamental fact that regulation designed to protect the populace from harm is the only means to to avert harm on massive, perhaps life denying scales.

What's missing from many of these fronts for the interests of commerce and finance is an ancient notion of the "common good."  One way to express this attitude is to redevelop a language of common ownership.  Public land is not "government land," but land which is held by all for the good of all. Vast swathes of western America currently owned by the "government," are held legally held as as if no more than trusts for the commerce. So-called "national forests" are designed to guarantee access by commerce to cheap wood supplies. Preservation of these great forests, and their integrity as complex living ecologies stands a distant second place to the interests of finance and commerce.

For several generations the American people have been force fed a paradigm that services commerce, but not the people: the notion that private home ownership is the best and most economically beneficial approach to housing for most people, when the facts, freed from the interest of commerce and finance simply do not support this proposition. The single best form of housing most people in urban and suburban areas is collective ownership. This means cooperatives, not condominiums or public housing. Condos are rapidly and often justly developing a reputation as shoddily constructed "entry level" housing that often rapidly lose value after initial sale. Co-ops, while relatively rare in American markets, offer, when reasonably regulated against abuses, a form of common ownership that inculcates both personal and collective responsibility. While condo fees are often seen as little more than taxation, co-op membership can be structured to inform and develop community. In urban areas co-ops have been developed for visual artists, dance communities, musicians and their families, and many other natural affinity groups. It takes careful regulation to prevent some co-ops from becoming bastions of the antisocial, with existing members seeking to exclude "undesirables." but this can be easily prevented by substantial transparency requirements.

More Soon...

Extinctions, The Economy and American Politics - A Reading List

These are short works that can form a basis for discussion of real change. Remember, time is
running out.  Theory is Practice:


Anti-Systemic Movements
by Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein 1989/2011

This is a thoughtful, thought provoking and action inciting analysis of how our world works. "Peerless examination of the rise of social movements against the global capitalist system, conducted by the leading exponents of the “world systems” perspective."  


Twenty years of La Fabrique
- A free reading.

Since 1998 the editor Eric Hazan has published radical-left political works including masterstrokes like the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection and controversial titles like Houria Bouteldja’s Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous. In his two decades running La Fabrique, he has maintained an undimmed ambition for editorial independence, and his subversive power. 


This Is Not a Program
By Tiqqun 


Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us... "
—from This Is Not a Program


Now
The Invisible Committee 2017

Now is the phantom chapter to the Invisible Committee's previous book, To Our Friends: a new critique from the anonymous collective that establishes their opposition to the world of capital and its law of labor, addresses current anti-terrorist rhetoric and the ferocious repression that comes with it, and clarifies the end of social democracy and the growing rumors of the need for a coming “civil war.” 


To Our Friends
The Invisible Committee 2015

A reflection on, and an extension of, the ideas laid out seven years ago in "The Coming Insurrection."

The Coming Insurrection
The Invisible Committee   2009


A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, less formal means of resistance.  Perhaps the most widely read and seminal writing of resistance to appear in the last 30 years.