NationStates Jolt Archive


The Revolution of the Looking Glass, A. Soren, Capitol Post

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.
Svea Riga
12-10-2003, 20:04
OOC:I read it all...I actually did!
Nice post!

Would post something IC if my government wasn't in chaos and ignores much of the world business, and SFP doesn't have time to respond either as it's becoming difficult for them to find a secure transmission spot.

//Svea Riga
Xikuang
13-10-2003, 13:29
We sincerely hope that Free Outer Eugenia will give this article the consideration it deserves and rethink their position. We have always and we will continue to back the actions taken against rogue communities in Empire and Tellenic Aperin, and we here implore, as we have before, in the interests of stability and the goal of self-sufficiency, that Free Outer Eugenia renounce its claims to these lands. Food sovereignty should be upheld as a right of every nation's people, and we in the Most Serene Republic know perfectly well that in Empire, our neighbour, which shares to an extent our mountainous geophysical configuration, and in Tellenic Aperin, with its northern latitude, this simply cannot be achieved without the cooperation of the communities blessed enough to lie within productive areas.

When resource distribution is reformed, there are always protests, and these protests always come from those who hold most of the resources. That is as true in this case as any other. In the interests of social justice this conflict of interests must be brought to closure, and these rogue communities must be brought into compliance. They have wealth the rest of their nations' people need and do not have, and they cannot be suffered to declare themselves part of another federation so that they can keep it all to themselves.
Free Outer Eugenia
13-10-2003, 17:44
From the Barricades
by “Red Shadow” Rabinovitz,
of the Che Guevara Brigade

First, allow me to correct some of your misconceptions about the Federation and it’s role in the opposition to this imperialist farce. First of all, the Federation is not a State, nor is it in fact anything like a State. It is a workers’ association, a labor union if you will. It is not bound by any borders. To characterize an organization drive as an annexation is laughable, but it is certainly how the capitalist oppressor sees it. And while no one has the power over the individuals and associations that have made their way to the occupied free communities, they have the Federation’s full support and approval. This is a strike action against those who seek to subjugate the workers of the free communities. And once again: the prerogative that the productive associations hold to direct their own production has nothing to do with any bourgeois ‘property rights.’

We will for the moment assume that the former revolutionist turned inert Stalinist bureaucrat Alexander Z. Soren is being perfectly honest and forthright about the purposes behind the postures and actions taken by his government and the tyrannies which it supports. In this case he will have the indignity of receiving a lecture about proper diplomacy and statecraft from an anarchist. We are willing to assume that the belligerent bureaucracies in question have merely stumbled into this beehive in an imbecilic stupor of organizational inertia rather than with any malicious intent of making away with the honey and setting fire to the bees. We are willing to assume this for the time being because the next few days will yield definitive proof as to whether this strife is the result of somewhat well-meaning though utterly despotic bureaucratic bungling, or a ruthless assault upon a free people with no real purpose beyond installing a Stalinist regime that mirrors SeOCC’s.

The imperialist invaders first made a unilateral ultimatum to the free communities and then proceeded to roll in the tanks. Is this how one approaches folk as fiercely and famously anti-authoritarian as these? Not if one wants any sort of cooperation. This was either a cynical ploy that had more to do with power lust than with feeding the cities, or just an honest bit of stupidity. But as was stated earlier, we’ll gladly give the invading imperialists the benefit of the doubt and assume incompetence over any such malicious Machiavellian machinations.

The stated goal of this action seems to be the assertion of control over the means of agricultural production in order to feed the cities. It has also been stated that the cooperation of the free communities is desired. These goals are contradictory. The only way to assert control over the means of production if to physically run them. The ACEPB would not only have to expel the free communities, but the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of the Board would have to don overalls and take up hoes to work the land themselves. I doubt if any of these economists has ever actually seen a hoe. Speaking seriously, the free communities shall never abide by an externally imposed planned economy. SeOCC and her puppet regimes and committees would frame their opponents as the propagators of mass starvation, but this is simply not the case.

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?

The people of the Confederation are ready to fight against the imposition of despotism and the brave Outer Eugenians who even now stand ready at the barricades have participated in many a strike for liberty against tyranny and exploitation. Many of our comrades would have gladly joined them had they not fallen in previous struggles. I myself have thrown plenty of Molotovs, and I‘ll wager that I have taken more bullets for the cause then you have beanbags. But lets not compare battle scars; there is no point in it. I am not a man of war: I take no pleasure in the memories of burning flesh that haunt my nightmares, nor do I relish the deaths of uniformed workers who are set against their fellow workers by false consciousness. But I’ll be at the barricades all the same. Shall I be seeing you there on the other side? Shall I be seeing any of the pen-devils who send young men to die for their greed or the glory of their shadowy orchestrations? But I digress.

There is another solution:

The inert Stalinist bureaucrat Alexander Z. Soren has stated that free cooperation cannot feed the cities. This is patently false. Who works harder under the whip then out of a humanitarian will and a social responsibility? If SeOCC provides modern agricultural equipment, the free communities will increase output as is necessary to feed the cities. Workers’ associations from Free Outer Eugenia, Wartfordshire, and the Commonwealth of Bread and Honey will assist with the labor, and the neighboring land of Bread and Honey will gladly share some of it's bountiful harvest with the cities. The free communities though will remain independent. All of your committees will serve as advisory councils: other bodies, such as the Collective for the Study of Economical Science at the University at Port Bakunin, will also be consulted.

Up until now the actions and declarations of SeOCC and her puppet regimes have stood contrary to their stated goals. Will you choose strife, starvation and slavery for the sake of Stalinism, or will you settle for compromise and cooperation for the cause of peace, freedom and prosperity? The choice is yours but the line has been drawn.
Xikuang
15-10-2003, 17:32
From the Xikuangese Associated Press Editorials:
Whence responsibility?
by Zhe Xexin

The representative from Free Outer Eugenia says:



the Federation is not a State, nor is it in fact anything like a State. It is a workers’ association, a labor union if you will. It is not bound by any borders.


While that is admirable, we ask them to recognise that the nations Tellenic Aperin and Empire are states and they are bound by borders, borders within which lie the means of production upon which the people living within those borders depend for their lives and livelihoods. Currently, they face a very real problem of shortfall for people living in urban and less fertile areas. While it is a certainty that should this situation drag out as the belligerency of the opposition seems to suggest it might and the people in these communities face the risk of starvation, the CACE nations would not allow it to come to that, but this is not a situation it would be desirable, or even possible, to maintain. Mr. Soren has already outlined why-- the need would be tremendous, and free aid would not cover it; the cost of transport, given that the nations immediately surrounding the affected areas have no surplus to spare, would be vast. Instead of allowing the CACE member nations to shoulder the responsibility of keeping their urban areas from dying out, the governments of Tellenic Aperin and Empire have opted to implement a planned economy based on a model they have already seen to work, and which will, if everybody co-operates, result in self-sufficiency and sovereignty over food production in an estimated ten years-- just ten years, a very short space of time.

Change such as this, especially given the time scale, requires work. It will not naturally fall into place of its own. It will not emerge from the collective activities of communities in effective isolation. It will come about as a consequence of humanitarian brotherly love. It requires dedicated, hard work, it requires that some make sacrifices for the benefit of others, and it requires co-operation of all parties involved. With all of those things, the project will succeed. Lacking any one of them, it is doomed to failure and degeneration.

The project critically lacks the co-operation of certain communities. This is only to be anticipated: whenever radical redistribution of wealth is undertaken, there are protests, and these protests invariably, without exception, come from those who hold the wealth. The rogue communities in question refuse to participate, claiming that since they alone work the land they occupy, they alone shall reap the benefits; they alone shall control production. They declare this in the name of liberty and autonomy, and in the name of the principle we all hold dear that the workers shall own the means of production.

There is another principle many of us hold dear. It will no doubt be familiar, so mantra-like is its recitation: From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. This applies to communities as well as it does to individuals. Tellenic Aperin and Empire are states made up of communities, some of which have the ability to produce the food that the people need, and some of which do not. Some of these communities could be self-sufficient, were they to be isolated from the rest of the society. But they are not. They are part of the larger society which is the state, and they, in asserting their sovereign right to what they produce, are in violation both of the laws of the state and in contravention of the principle of equanimity.

Now, they have the support of the Federation, under whose auspices they place themselves to justify their solitary right to their production. My colleague from Free Outer Eugenia states that "if SeOCC provides modern agricultural equipment, the free communities will increase output as is necessary to feed the cities." Yet may I remind them that this is precisely what these communities have stated that they would not do. This is precisely the measure the ACPB and the AECPB wish to implement, and precisely what they are resisting, because they do not want to make the sacrifices they will have to make now for the sake of future stability, because they somehow think they are free to withdraw from society on the basis that their society upholds freedom.

The Federated Communes of Free Outer Eugenia claim these communities as their own, but in fact, they are physically far removed from the main body of communes comprising Free Outer Eugenia, and will make no meaningful contribution to that organisation. These rogue communes claim for themselves to fall within the Federation's auspices at the direct expense of the people of the states in which they are physically located and the distant states able to overproduce which will have to ship enormous quantities to the production-poor areas in Empire and Tellenic Aperin while the people of the rogue communities grow fat, secure in their ownership of the fertile lands. This is a situation which is both untenable in the extreme and nonsensical in light of socialist stated aims for equal rights of all people to basic necessities. How on earth could I, could anyone, stand in favour of it? I am thunderstruck at the very notion.

I support the principles of liberty. I stand in favour of worker's rights to their own production. I have never thrown a molotov, but I have stolen food and smuggled it to areas starving for want of a sensible resource distribution policy. I regularly use a hoe. And I am ever mindful that freedom and responsibility are two edges of the same plough.

With benedictions,

Zhe Xexin, Elected General Councillor and Chair of the Elected General Committee for Economic Affairs, the Most Serene Republic of Xikuang
Seocc
16-10-2003, 07:50
ooc: war of the free press! bump for robust debate!