Seocc
12-10-2003, 19:56
The Revolution of the Looking Glass
Alexander Z. Soren
Sitting at my desk, made of old wood felled long before the Republic fell, I mistake myself for the oppressors whose overthrow I participated in. I am old, I seem out of touch with the rising generation, I am increasingly detached from the street consensus and I find myself, to my chagrin, very much a part of a bureaucratic consensus that has been established in the wake of the Revolution. I can’t help but question the sincerity or veracity of my opinions.
I remember something most in power do not, that when SeOCC won its freedom from the last vestiges of the Republic we were left essentially helpless. At the time our borders ended at the city limits of Cascade Arcology, then an experimental community in the south, and in the north by the suburbs that housed the remaining PMC laborers from the city. Our power was imported from Terronos, who spent three years hunting environmental radicals, anarchists no less, who had blown up several of the hydro plants in the chaos following the collapse. Our food was imported from various locations, as much by sea as by land, but those suppliers disappeared as Aperin fell in on itself. Our currency was worthless, the roads and railways through our neighbors unsafe, our harbors empty as foreign shipping companies refused to send goods to a nation that could not pay. As we asserted our borders we faced housing, food and electricity shortfalls; medicine was strictly rationed and gasoline, still used then, was limited to political and economic functions. We realized, as we took control of the economy, that it had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. Detached from the ties that had fueled our nations life our existence was, fundamentally, threatened by our inability to self supply.
To call the city a parasite is unfair; it is an zygote, an embryonic life that will become something truly great. Today SeOCC grows over 60% of total food consumed, produces 80% of all power requirements and imports mostly finished products and raw materials from CACE members. For some this is common knowledge, for the others I want to hold up my country as an object lesson on what planned, rational development can achieve. The planned economy worked, thanks largely to then Minister Truman and her staff, and we were able to choose our own trajectory but only, and I emphasize this, because we re-established those ties, both with our neighbors and with the CACE. Modern polities may attempt isolation but their economies cannot maintain it.
What then shall I make of the ACEPB as it faces a problem well known to the first government of SeOCC: how do you enforce new property relations? What shall I make of the governments of Tellenic Aperin and Empire, whose cities still face the critical shortages that SeOCC faced in its first years?
It is an unbelievable case of irony, it seems to me, that SeOCC’s history is being mirrored, our role now reversed. Now SeOCC plays, to some, the oppressor, and to others as a critical source of the materials needed to undertake the gestation from embryonic society into a new phase of nationhood and cultural awareness. It seems ironic that despite this not one leader has yet to apply the lessons learnt in our early years to the opening days of the ACEPB and the ACPB.
The ACPB faces one simple dilemma: how it will mitigate what will soon amount to open civil war within two of its members. The ACEPB faces one simple dilemma: how it will adjust its economic plans if Empire and Tellenic Aperin fail to regain control not just of the means of productions put of the populations in the rogue territories. The governments of Empire and Tellenic Aperin, though, face a diverse array of problems created by the simple lexicographic instructions handed down from the supernationals they joined: how to regain control both of the factories and their workers, how to provide for their cities, how to deal with war with a foreign power, how to prevent their people from rising up against what could soon be unpopular decisions. In both Empire and Tellenic Aperin over 80% of the adult population has been convicted of at least one protest or riot based charge. Unruly protests were so endemic to their unstable polities that the Supreme Court of Tellenic Aperin had to invalidate the Political Resistance of Police Forces statute, a felony, because with the law standing only 30% of adults would be eligible to vote.
The ACPB and ACEPB face only glitches, irregularities in their plans. The governments beneath these bodies face all the real problems where the glitches are cities plunged into guerilla warfare and civilian rioting.
Of course the first mistake was the failure to apply overwhelming force to the communities; I learnt this first hand when the police were not issued lethal fire arms during the Incorporation Revolution. The citizens of SeOCC, the revolutionaries, were not bound up in these black and white ethics, or rather we were held a different set of ethics that ignored these boundaries. We knew, implicitly and automatically, that our liberation was bound up in violence, in our ability to meet force not with equal force but with overwhelming force. We knew our ability to break the back of the Republic powers remaining in SeOCC depended on the catalyst of murder, on depopulating or terrorizing our oppressors until none remained. Had the police met our revolution with guns, had they gunned down the first rank of protesters, we would not dared have tried to match force with force because we could not match the force applied by the state.
I am not advocating the gunning down of protesters or even rioters, part of what makes the state weak is that its monopoly on the use of violence cannot ever be used. However, the governments of Empire and Tellenic Aperin, if their goal was to reestablish control, should not have halted their advance. Negotiation should not have been attempted until their position was undeniably one of victory, until the reality of overwhelming force was established. At that time the now occupied communities would not have seen resistance as an option and would have agreed to the ACEPB’s Ten Year Plan. As it occurred, though, the advance halted with a no man’s land created, creating with it the illusion of hope, and in doing so the respective governments have made otherwise avoidable violence inevitable. Today’s news reports confirm this simple fact.
When the Republic was forced out of SeOCC it constituted what was already a dwindling force, and not two months later was officially dissolved. Not so with Tellenic Aperin or Empire, whose governments are gaining strength and stability with the ACEPB’s economic aid. The rogue territories within them face not a waning enemy but one of waxing power. As urban areas stabilize more forces will be diverted into the hinterlands until a partial police state has been established simply because the police will outnumber civilians in those areas. The illusion of hope, though, remains, and will tempt malcontents into murder and what amounts to suicide. This illusion must be immediately dispelled.
Key to dispelling this illusion is the political and rhetorical retreat of anarchist CACE members giving physical, material, logistic and ideological support to the rogue territories. Speaking now as a private citizen, Free Outer Eugenia is only a marginal CACE power and their importance in the CACE body is to serve as Bakunin’s speaker in a congregation of Marxists. It is incredibly hypocritical of them to call SeOCC, as the mythical power behind the ACEPB, an imperialist colonial power when it is Free Outer Eugenia, not SeOCC or the ACEPB, who claims territory outside their borders as their own.
Their actions defy classification: is it warfare, moving citizens into a foreign nation to hinder its government, or is it annexation, claiming territory seeking to secede as their own? On both counts it is futile: the Federation has no troops to assert its claim and both Empire and Tellenic Aperin have police and militaries with thirty years of experience in putting down riots. Without organized resistance, a problem endemic to an anarchist uprising, military force will not be needed; a police presence will achieve basic control without aid.
What it will not achieve, though, is integration of the economic powers of the rogue territories. No scenario can force the people force the citizens of these communities to go back to work and the ACPB forbids, even under martial law or war powers, the suspension of stipend benefits. Lawyers will argue that the war power clause, which allows for the stipend to be awarded in exchange for work during times of shortfall, could be used to justify its suspension in these communities but this will never be upheld by the ACPB. The basic difference between SeOCC and a capitalist nation is that we have no wage labor market because no one needs to work to live; suspension of this, even during war, would return us to a Soviet ‘capitalistless capitalism’ scheme which rewards obedience with wealth and punishes dissent with poverty. Such a decision would dissolve the ACEPB as SeOCC and Terronos, its two central economic powers, departed in protest.
Leaving, of course, the issue of how to motivate an unwilling workforce to work. The ACEPB’s plan requires 72% productivity, a number markedly lower than the requirements set in SeOCC specifically to accommodate for thumb sitting protests. Even this figure will be impossible to reach if the protesters and rioters, once subdued, refuse to work, a very real situation given the resistance met. Again, the illusion of hope remains a crucial psychological factor, and again the solution lies in the retreat of Free Outer Eugenia. The Federation must not only call back its people, must not only rescind its support for forceful resistance, it must endorse the functioning of these community’s economies within the ACEPB.
More than this, it must be made clear that further violence will stain the hands not just of Empire and Tellenic Aperin but also the hands of Free Outer Eugenia. There is no possible scenario where these communities are not brought back into the political and economic structures of their respective countries, even if only temporarily. This must be accepted as a fact and Free Outer Eugenia must learn to work within those parameters rather than continue a naïve and futile struggle to stop the tide from rising.
Free Outer Eugenia must also learn the subtleties that come from existing within a statist society. Law and justice as ethical concepts create unique dilemmas: if you swore obedience to a just king who, later in life, went mad and became unjust would you still be bound by your oath to obey him? If you say yes then you have become Hitler’s executioners, blindly obedient. If you say no you surrender the government to the rule of the mob, or worse, the mob of politicians as power elites pick and choose which laws to enforce. Regardless of the ‘just’ qualities of a law, or its lack thereof, until those laws pose a critical threat to basic tenets of humanity change must be achieved through recognized means. To simply ignore laws, as the Municipal Confederation and Free Outer Eugenia have, creates an untenable situation where democratic principles are surrendered to a might makes right tautology. Those laws which can be enforced are enforced, all other laws are unjust because they are and therefore are not enforce. Please recall that the Republic declared martial law in SeOCC when the duly elected legislature voted to expropriate all privately owned capital.
Here the opposite is occurring, small communities are taking up arms to preserve liberal, exclusive, rights based property relations. And for what, their liberty? In real terms the ACEPB presents no threat to liberty save that it will, for a period of time, require overproduction to supply the development of the urban centers. The Ten Year Plan was not created at random; anyone with the time to look up the plan will note that the eight year mark, the second to the last review under the ACEPB’s proposed compromise with the rogue communities, is the projected time it will take to lay the first material and economic foundations of converting the urban centers of Tellenic Aperin and Empire to arcology living. Ten years, the final mark, is the estimated time it will take Terronos and SeOCC to reactivate the economic structures we used to develop our own super dense/arcology living structures. At the end of those eight years urban centers in Tellenic Aperin and Empire will be food self sufficient, and by the end of ten years construction of arcologies will begin.
Two issues here present themselves: first, why didn’t the urban centers agree to the free mutual aid relations proposed by the Municipal Confedartion, and second, why are these areas required when the ACEPB could request food and materials from CACE members. The answer lies in the documents noted above.
To answer the first, free aid would not meet the quotas required to prevent shortfall; the communities of the Municipal Confederation have an average population of 14000, while all rogue communities total not even a million people. Tellenic Aperin has almost three hundred million urban inhabitants meaning that, even if 50% of total food consumed is imported, each working citizen in the Municipal Confederation would have to produce almost 300 as much food as they currently produce. Free aid would not cover this rather giant need.
To answer the second, priced in SeOCC Credits, the transportation costs to import the food and raw materials needed would total close to 400B each year; SeOCC, Terronos and Heliotis have no food to spare, meaning it would come from nations flung far from Aperin. In addition, the infrastructure costs, not only to maintain but to increase to the capacity required to handle the huge orders that would arrive daily, would total 3.3T by the end of the Ten Year Plan. The ACEPB’s plan saves over 7T over ten years, making it clearly the most rational plan between the two options.
On balance, it seems to a bureaucrat tyrant who, they say, never met a Stalinist he didn’t like, that the rogue territories have only bankrupt political arguments to justify their non-compliance. They were offered a guarantee of independence after ten years and they turned it down either out of spite, because their principles would not allow it, or because ten years was too long to wait for a return to normalcy. As an old man ten years does not seen so long to me but perhaps in the weeks to come the citizens in these communities will change their minds. I remember, though, that one day seemed to long to wait when I stood on the barricades and demanded not just action but immediate action. Do not consider me unsympathetic for I see the same looks in the eyes fighting the police incursion as I saw in the eyes of my friends and comrades as we marched against the Republic. Do not mistake, though, the liberation we sought with the blind principilist position struck by the Municipal Confederation. My friends died during those marches but which speaker from Free Outer Eugenia is brave enough to be shot with a lead shot filled bean bag in the chest? Which speaker for the Municipal Confederation is brave enough to throw the Molotov cocktail that killed two police officers, roasted them alive in their car?
There is glory and guilt enough to go around but peace is no where in this process. Beyond all else the violence must end, be it by force or capitulation. I implore the Municipal Confederation, if you do not accept the terms given by the ACEPB give them a counter proposal that yields ground. I implore the governments of Tellenic Aperin and Empire, do not flinch; hesitation will only prolong the conflict. As an old, detached utilitarian, seek not your own goals but a greater good when you consider how this war will end.
Alexander Z. Soren
Sitting at my desk, made of old wood felled long before the Republic fell, I mistake myself for the oppressors whose overthrow I participated in. I am old, I seem out of touch with the rising generation, I am increasingly detached from the street consensus and I find myself, to my chagrin, very much a part of a bureaucratic consensus that has been established in the wake of the Revolution. I can’t help but question the sincerity or veracity of my opinions.
I remember something most in power do not, that when SeOCC won its freedom from the last vestiges of the Republic we were left essentially helpless. At the time our borders ended at the city limits of Cascade Arcology, then an experimental community in the south, and in the north by the suburbs that housed the remaining PMC laborers from the city. Our power was imported from Terronos, who spent three years hunting environmental radicals, anarchists no less, who had blown up several of the hydro plants in the chaos following the collapse. Our food was imported from various locations, as much by sea as by land, but those suppliers disappeared as Aperin fell in on itself. Our currency was worthless, the roads and railways through our neighbors unsafe, our harbors empty as foreign shipping companies refused to send goods to a nation that could not pay. As we asserted our borders we faced housing, food and electricity shortfalls; medicine was strictly rationed and gasoline, still used then, was limited to political and economic functions. We realized, as we took control of the economy, that it had ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. Detached from the ties that had fueled our nations life our existence was, fundamentally, threatened by our inability to self supply.
To call the city a parasite is unfair; it is an zygote, an embryonic life that will become something truly great. Today SeOCC grows over 60% of total food consumed, produces 80% of all power requirements and imports mostly finished products and raw materials from CACE members. For some this is common knowledge, for the others I want to hold up my country as an object lesson on what planned, rational development can achieve. The planned economy worked, thanks largely to then Minister Truman and her staff, and we were able to choose our own trajectory but only, and I emphasize this, because we re-established those ties, both with our neighbors and with the CACE. Modern polities may attempt isolation but their economies cannot maintain it.
What then shall I make of the ACEPB as it faces a problem well known to the first government of SeOCC: how do you enforce new property relations? What shall I make of the governments of Tellenic Aperin and Empire, whose cities still face the critical shortages that SeOCC faced in its first years?
It is an unbelievable case of irony, it seems to me, that SeOCC’s history is being mirrored, our role now reversed. Now SeOCC plays, to some, the oppressor, and to others as a critical source of the materials needed to undertake the gestation from embryonic society into a new phase of nationhood and cultural awareness. It seems ironic that despite this not one leader has yet to apply the lessons learnt in our early years to the opening days of the ACEPB and the ACPB.
The ACPB faces one simple dilemma: how it will mitigate what will soon amount to open civil war within two of its members. The ACEPB faces one simple dilemma: how it will adjust its economic plans if Empire and Tellenic Aperin fail to regain control not just of the means of productions put of the populations in the rogue territories. The governments of Empire and Tellenic Aperin, though, face a diverse array of problems created by the simple lexicographic instructions handed down from the supernationals they joined: how to regain control both of the factories and their workers, how to provide for their cities, how to deal with war with a foreign power, how to prevent their people from rising up against what could soon be unpopular decisions. In both Empire and Tellenic Aperin over 80% of the adult population has been convicted of at least one protest or riot based charge. Unruly protests were so endemic to their unstable polities that the Supreme Court of Tellenic Aperin had to invalidate the Political Resistance of Police Forces statute, a felony, because with the law standing only 30% of adults would be eligible to vote.
The ACPB and ACEPB face only glitches, irregularities in their plans. The governments beneath these bodies face all the real problems where the glitches are cities plunged into guerilla warfare and civilian rioting.
Of course the first mistake was the failure to apply overwhelming force to the communities; I learnt this first hand when the police were not issued lethal fire arms during the Incorporation Revolution. The citizens of SeOCC, the revolutionaries, were not bound up in these black and white ethics, or rather we were held a different set of ethics that ignored these boundaries. We knew, implicitly and automatically, that our liberation was bound up in violence, in our ability to meet force not with equal force but with overwhelming force. We knew our ability to break the back of the Republic powers remaining in SeOCC depended on the catalyst of murder, on depopulating or terrorizing our oppressors until none remained. Had the police met our revolution with guns, had they gunned down the first rank of protesters, we would not dared have tried to match force with force because we could not match the force applied by the state.
I am not advocating the gunning down of protesters or even rioters, part of what makes the state weak is that its monopoly on the use of violence cannot ever be used. However, the governments of Empire and Tellenic Aperin, if their goal was to reestablish control, should not have halted their advance. Negotiation should not have been attempted until their position was undeniably one of victory, until the reality of overwhelming force was established. At that time the now occupied communities would not have seen resistance as an option and would have agreed to the ACEPB’s Ten Year Plan. As it occurred, though, the advance halted with a no man’s land created, creating with it the illusion of hope, and in doing so the respective governments have made otherwise avoidable violence inevitable. Today’s news reports confirm this simple fact.
When the Republic was forced out of SeOCC it constituted what was already a dwindling force, and not two months later was officially dissolved. Not so with Tellenic Aperin or Empire, whose governments are gaining strength and stability with the ACEPB’s economic aid. The rogue territories within them face not a waning enemy but one of waxing power. As urban areas stabilize more forces will be diverted into the hinterlands until a partial police state has been established simply because the police will outnumber civilians in those areas. The illusion of hope, though, remains, and will tempt malcontents into murder and what amounts to suicide. This illusion must be immediately dispelled.
Key to dispelling this illusion is the political and rhetorical retreat of anarchist CACE members giving physical, material, logistic and ideological support to the rogue territories. Speaking now as a private citizen, Free Outer Eugenia is only a marginal CACE power and their importance in the CACE body is to serve as Bakunin’s speaker in a congregation of Marxists. It is incredibly hypocritical of them to call SeOCC, as the mythical power behind the ACEPB, an imperialist colonial power when it is Free Outer Eugenia, not SeOCC or the ACEPB, who claims territory outside their borders as their own.
Their actions defy classification: is it warfare, moving citizens into a foreign nation to hinder its government, or is it annexation, claiming territory seeking to secede as their own? On both counts it is futile: the Federation has no troops to assert its claim and both Empire and Tellenic Aperin have police and militaries with thirty years of experience in putting down riots. Without organized resistance, a problem endemic to an anarchist uprising, military force will not be needed; a police presence will achieve basic control without aid.
What it will not achieve, though, is integration of the economic powers of the rogue territories. No scenario can force the people force the citizens of these communities to go back to work and the ACPB forbids, even under martial law or war powers, the suspension of stipend benefits. Lawyers will argue that the war power clause, which allows for the stipend to be awarded in exchange for work during times of shortfall, could be used to justify its suspension in these communities but this will never be upheld by the ACPB. The basic difference between SeOCC and a capitalist nation is that we have no wage labor market because no one needs to work to live; suspension of this, even during war, would return us to a Soviet ‘capitalistless capitalism’ scheme which rewards obedience with wealth and punishes dissent with poverty. Such a decision would dissolve the ACEPB as SeOCC and Terronos, its two central economic powers, departed in protest.
Leaving, of course, the issue of how to motivate an unwilling workforce to work. The ACEPB’s plan requires 72% productivity, a number markedly lower than the requirements set in SeOCC specifically to accommodate for thumb sitting protests. Even this figure will be impossible to reach if the protesters and rioters, once subdued, refuse to work, a very real situation given the resistance met. Again, the illusion of hope remains a crucial psychological factor, and again the solution lies in the retreat of Free Outer Eugenia. The Federation must not only call back its people, must not only rescind its support for forceful resistance, it must endorse the functioning of these community’s economies within the ACEPB.
More than this, it must be made clear that further violence will stain the hands not just of Empire and Tellenic Aperin but also the hands of Free Outer Eugenia. There is no possible scenario where these communities are not brought back into the political and economic structures of their respective countries, even if only temporarily. This must be accepted as a fact and Free Outer Eugenia must learn to work within those parameters rather than continue a naïve and futile struggle to stop the tide from rising.
Free Outer Eugenia must also learn the subtleties that come from existing within a statist society. Law and justice as ethical concepts create unique dilemmas: if you swore obedience to a just king who, later in life, went mad and became unjust would you still be bound by your oath to obey him? If you say yes then you have become Hitler’s executioners, blindly obedient. If you say no you surrender the government to the rule of the mob, or worse, the mob of politicians as power elites pick and choose which laws to enforce. Regardless of the ‘just’ qualities of a law, or its lack thereof, until those laws pose a critical threat to basic tenets of humanity change must be achieved through recognized means. To simply ignore laws, as the Municipal Confederation and Free Outer Eugenia have, creates an untenable situation where democratic principles are surrendered to a might makes right tautology. Those laws which can be enforced are enforced, all other laws are unjust because they are and therefore are not enforce. Please recall that the Republic declared martial law in SeOCC when the duly elected legislature voted to expropriate all privately owned capital.
Here the opposite is occurring, small communities are taking up arms to preserve liberal, exclusive, rights based property relations. And for what, their liberty? In real terms the ACEPB presents no threat to liberty save that it will, for a period of time, require overproduction to supply the development of the urban centers. The Ten Year Plan was not created at random; anyone with the time to look up the plan will note that the eight year mark, the second to the last review under the ACEPB’s proposed compromise with the rogue communities, is the projected time it will take to lay the first material and economic foundations of converting the urban centers of Tellenic Aperin and Empire to arcology living. Ten years, the final mark, is the estimated time it will take Terronos and SeOCC to reactivate the economic structures we used to develop our own super dense/arcology living structures. At the end of those eight years urban centers in Tellenic Aperin and Empire will be food self sufficient, and by the end of ten years construction of arcologies will begin.
Two issues here present themselves: first, why didn’t the urban centers agree to the free mutual aid relations proposed by the Municipal Confedartion, and second, why are these areas required when the ACEPB could request food and materials from CACE members. The answer lies in the documents noted above.
To answer the first, free aid would not meet the quotas required to prevent shortfall; the communities of the Municipal Confederation have an average population of 14000, while all rogue communities total not even a million people. Tellenic Aperin has almost three hundred million urban inhabitants meaning that, even if 50% of total food consumed is imported, each working citizen in the Municipal Confederation would have to produce almost 300 as much food as they currently produce. Free aid would not cover this rather giant need.
To answer the second, priced in SeOCC Credits, the transportation costs to import the food and raw materials needed would total close to 400B each year; SeOCC, Terronos and Heliotis have no food to spare, meaning it would come from nations flung far from Aperin. In addition, the infrastructure costs, not only to maintain but to increase to the capacity required to handle the huge orders that would arrive daily, would total 3.3T by the end of the Ten Year Plan. The ACEPB’s plan saves over 7T over ten years, making it clearly the most rational plan between the two options.
On balance, it seems to a bureaucrat tyrant who, they say, never met a Stalinist he didn’t like, that the rogue territories have only bankrupt political arguments to justify their non-compliance. They were offered a guarantee of independence after ten years and they turned it down either out of spite, because their principles would not allow it, or because ten years was too long to wait for a return to normalcy. As an old man ten years does not seen so long to me but perhaps in the weeks to come the citizens in these communities will change their minds. I remember, though, that one day seemed to long to wait when I stood on the barricades and demanded not just action but immediate action. Do not consider me unsympathetic for I see the same looks in the eyes fighting the police incursion as I saw in the eyes of my friends and comrades as we marched against the Republic. Do not mistake, though, the liberation we sought with the blind principilist position struck by the Municipal Confederation. My friends died during those marches but which speaker from Free Outer Eugenia is brave enough to be shot with a lead shot filled bean bag in the chest? Which speaker for the Municipal Confederation is brave enough to throw the Molotov cocktail that killed two police officers, roasted them alive in their car?
There is glory and guilt enough to go around but peace is no where in this process. Beyond all else the violence must end, be it by force or capitulation. I implore the Municipal Confederation, if you do not accept the terms given by the ACEPB give them a counter proposal that yields ground. I implore the governments of Tellenic Aperin and Empire, do not flinch; hesitation will only prolong the conflict. As an old, detached utilitarian, seek not your own goals but a greater good when you consider how this war will end.