Project Ideas

Generally, I do not think much of people with nothing to offer but ideas. I find it an unacceptable division of labor, and the ideas are often spurious.

Having said that, here are a few unfertilized ova, some chicken-scratched proposals which I feel I do not presently have the time or knowledge to actually pull off. If you have feedback for me which would make these project ideas easier to work with and find takers for, or additional practical projects that you want to see listed, please tell me, especially if something is being done already. Give links if possible.

• Think tank

  Lately I have become involved with a listserv exploring interest in an "anarchist think tank". The list is meant to be an embryonic working collective and not a lurkstation. If you are interested or want to know more, please get in touch with me or the list moderator. These are some of my own thoughts on the subject:

  My impression of anarchist academic circles is that too much brainpower is spent chewing over past events and figuring out cosmic big-pictures while not enough goes toward making lessons and insights available to activists or organizers in the field. What I have in mind is basically a policy research and advisement group serving the information and planning needs of those engaged in more day-to-day struggle. (I am dichotomizing to make a point, not to promote a division per se.) It should be a place where scholars and ground-pounders can meet and bounce theory/praxis issues around. Potential conflicts between long-range movement-level action and immediate grass-roots level action could be recognized and discussed.
  
  Some topics that come to mind are:
  
  

  • Technical matters, aka the Administration of Things. How can land, food, healthcare, housing, manufacturing be successfully organized along anarchist lines?
    
    
  • Social matters, ie political struggle as such. This would cover such things as criminal theory and prisoner support, labor struggles, planning and decision-making in political units of varying scale, education, and so forth.
    
    
  • Applied Political Analysis or, What are the conditions governing when, whether, and how we should work with non-anarchists? What makes these interactions successful, what makes them blow up in our faces? How do we mix principle and practicality? Coalition and autonomy?
    
    
  • Conversely, what are the issues around individual agency and group dynamics? How do we manage in-group conflicts? What is an anarchist dialectic of leadership and participation?
    
    
  • What are the psychological, philosophical, and dare we say, religious needs of people engaged in oppositional struggle? How do people keep their spirits in fighting trim over the long haul? What leads to burnout and cynicism? What counseling or other correctives can return people to action?
    
    
  • People talk about "selling out" or co-optation as if it is either a mortal sin or a law of nature. Formally, what does it mean to sell out and how does it proceed? How can it be forseen and avoided? Relationships of groups to funding or other support sources could be considered here, as could the perennial tensions between lifestylism and class struggle.

  Theories abound for all these already. What I think would be useful for people in the middle of a project and trying to solve problems is some history of what these issues have meant to anarchists, some general rules which seem to govern the issues, and some real-world examples or solutions that could be tried. Also, what characteristic blunders are anarchists especially prone to?

• the Revolution Needs Software
  
  • Mapping-
    

    If you had any doubt that the State of Indiana exists, you could get out a road atlas and see that it probably does. I had an idea several years ago of producing road maps of the Lakota Nation according to the 1868 Fort Laramie treaty, which Indians could then sell all along the treaty borders to travelers entering the area.

    Just as ideology serves as a map, so to speak, maps can be insidiously ideological. Watching the news in Germany one night in 1988, I was dumbstruck that the weather map showed the country's borders as of 1937. Maps of any contested or notional territorial holding, such as EZLN territory, bioregions, or "Anarchist Spain", would be great propaganda.

    What mapping programs are there? I know of one called Geographic Resource Analysis Support System (GRASS) developed by the military for environmental impact modeling. I also know of urban mapping software used by social service agencies, which brings up another point...

  • Modeling-
    
    Modeling presents a philosophical problem- how to make the model accurately represent reality without being an apology for reality. Any of us who have played SimCity or Civilization have probably been infuriated by the fact that the games reward decisions which reproduce the system we see around us already. The SimCity manual itself contains statements like, "It would be interesting to design cities around such parameters as quality of life," and "Cut social services if you must, but always keep your police well funded."

    Does anyone have games or models which grant real latitude in policy or social decisions? What tools do the elites use in their planning and decision-testing activities? What exactly are the philosophical or epistemological issues surrounding modeling?

  • Pattern Recognition-

    Alta Analytic's Netmap is a database that relates and displays information in graphic form. I saw a demonstration where it was used to produce a 2-dimensional representation of Dutch organized crime networks from individual criminal files. Such capability might be useful for activist or union campaigns having a need to make complex information viewable and discussable.

  • Resources and software in general-
    
    

    11 Megs of free web space. Hie thou yon.
    
    Someday GNU/LINUX shall rule the world, and we shall all be free. Or at least compute for free.
    enough said.

• Journals

  What I am thinking is not "journals about anarchism," but journals about something-or-other informed by an anarchist world view- anthropology, planning, etc. About a year ago, some friends and I were considering one on the politics and practice of development work. I think our talent pool was not sufficiently dense and I at that point had been out of the writing game for too long to be useful. But I'm still interested.

• Development NGO
  
  I saw the journal partly as a rudimentary nervous system for an organization. This is dearest to my heart, and what I feel most like doing myself. It might be best for you to just work through my page and figure it out.

  Briefly, I propose a technology-transfer/community development organization based around building dual power for class struggle and emphasizing democratic political participation and definition of the development process. One explicit goal would be to combine reformist tacticalism and revolutionary strategizing in some way that will overcome the traditional weaknesses of both.

• Full-time Revolutionaries

  This is just a weird one. I am imagining something like a democratic Jesuit order, with independent finances, that would support members in-kind and direct them in various organizing or activist tasks. Perhaps a neo-Dolcinite order would be appropriate.

  Less drastically, there could be an Old Revolutionaries' Retirement Home for those who were too busy fighting the power to plan for old age.