Creating a Society of Peace and Acceptance

Hey Archy I just wanted to ask you about public space. What makes some public space successful and others derelict. What role does architecture play in the making of public space ? And how do people, nature and natural processes all interact to make a place magical ?

if we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides.

Tourism results from a basic binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary…we can escape the ordinary and the everyday through both time and space.

What causes the inhabitants of the world risk society an anthropological shock? This is no longer the metaphysical homelessness of a Beckett, the absent Godot, nor the nightmare visions of a Foucault, nor the mute despotism of rationality which frightened Max Weber. Like good old communism, the spectre of good old postmodernism no longer keeps people awake at night. What worries people nowadays is the premonition that the anthropological certainty of modernity is founded on quicksand. Perhaps SARS and BSE (Mad Cow Disease) have only been the beginning and climate catastrophes are becoming real. Then it is the panic-stricken fear that the fabric of our material dependencies and moral obligations could rend and the delicate functional system of world risk society collapse. Thus everything is turned on its head: what for Weber, Adorno and Foucault was a terrifying vision ― the perfected surveillance rationality of the administered world ― is a promise for those living in the present.

Slaves were better off in the early 19th Century than they were in the early 18th Century. Is that an argument for slavery?

Lying is the best and often also the most ethical way to get a job. For $150, this guy bought a fake résumé & callable references in an industry he’s never worked in. And got hired: For a small fee, CareerExcuse.com promises to not only craft an elaborate lie based on your exact job specifications but to see it through for as long as necessary. The site will provide a live HR operator and staged supervisor, along with building and hosting a virtual company website—complete with a local phone number and toll-free fax. CareerExcuse will even go so far as to make the fake business show up on Google Maps. William Schmidt started the site in 2009, after being let go from his job in a round of layoffs during the lowest depths of the recession. “While we were all unemployed, a couple of my former coworkers asked me to act as their reference for job interviews,” Schmidt recalled. “I did it for free for my friends, but then I realized that this is some there’s a pretty big demand for. It was something I could take to the public.” He was right. Within the first 24 hours of launching the CareerExcuse site, Schmidt had already received multiple order for his services. He’s quick to brush off ethical concerns, citing horror stories from his clients about being mistreated by their former employers (and thus being unable to acquire a reference) and noting that it becomes more difficult to land a job the longer someone’s been unemployed. Employment is a racket. So is college.

Among the bourgeoisie, you’ll find more forgiveness for the murderer who takes a life from the human community than for the thief who […] simply changes the place and ownership of things.

Anarchists are not opposed to leadership in the sense of individuals who guide or direct other people. What Anarchists oppose are fixed positions of hierarchical authority in organisations in which the leaders are separate from the membership and elevated above the membership in terms of power. Anarchists seek temporary positions of leadership based upon the circumstances and the abilities of members of the group. An Anarchist instance of leadership would be that when a car breaks down it seems that the mechanic in the car should lead the repair of the car and instruct other members of the group towards actions which help the car become fixed, such as instructing people to pass them tools as they work. As Bakunin puts it “I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.”

“People who dismiss the unemployed and dependent as ‘parasites’ fail to understand economics and parasitism. A successful parasite is one that is not recognized by its host, one that can make its host work for it without appearing as a burden. Such is the ruling class in a capitalist society.”

The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.

It should be noted how peculiar it is that the Western democracies should feel such indignation about a theory claiming that society can be transformed by the forceful seizure of political power. The idea of political revolution by force is not at all a Marxist idea; it has been the idea of bourgeois society during the last three hundred years. Western democracy is the daughter of the great English, French and American revolutions; the Russian revolution of February, 1917, and the German revolution of 1918 were warmly greeted by the West, despite the fact that they used force. It is clear that indignation against the use of force, as it exists in the Western world today, depends on who uses force, and against whom. Every war is based on force; even democratic government is based on the principle of force, which permits the majority to use force against a minority, if it is necessary for the continuation of the status quo. Indignation against force is authentic only from a pacifist standpoint, which holds that force is either absolutely wrong, or that aside from the case of the most immediate defense its use never leads to a change for the better.

The Repressive State Apparatus ‘functions’ primarily on repression (physical or not). The Ideological State Apparatuses function primarily on ideology. The overall unity of the system formed by all the state apparatuses is ensured by the unity of the class politics of the class holding state power and by the State Ideology corresponding to the fundamental interests of the class (or classes) in power. The object of the politics of the class in power and of the State Ideology (dominant ideology = ideology of the dominant class) is to guarantee the conditions for the exploitation of the exploited classes by the dominant classes, above all the reproduction of the relations of production in which this exploitation takes place, since these relations of production are the relations of exploitation of the class social formation under consideration. Thus everything is clearly based on the infrastructure of the relations of production, that is, the relations of class exploitation. The base or infrastructure of the class state is thus well and truly, as Lenin said, exploitation. The effect produced by the superstructure is simultaneously to ensure the conditions under which this exploitation is carried out (Repressive State Apparatus) and the reproduction of the relations of production, that is, of exploitation (Ideological State Apparatuses).