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From Sean Swain

Originally aired on The Final Straw.

I think even the most deluded hierarch now has to admit that we’ve officially entered the era of the Failed State. Across Africa and the Middle East we see vast areas where government control has eroded, where the systems of hierarchical organization have so thoroughly collapsed that we can now call them government-less. To speak honestly, we’d refer to these spaces not by the names of the nation-state that used to exist there, but we’d instead qualify the reference in a way once used by a modern pop-star– we’d call them “The Area Formerly Known As Syria,” or “The Area Formerly Known As Yemen.”

We’re talking about growing spaces of geography that are as stateless as if a natural disaster has occurred there– but it isn’t a natural disaster; it’s more accurately an unnatural disaster. It’s been spreading across the southern hemisphere for decades, and implosions of nation-states across South America have only been delayed by economic manipulations formulated by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which have been a large part of the disaster in the first place.

Most recently, Greece has teetered on the brink of failed statehood. This is significant because Greece, the birth place of modern democracy, is located in Europe. Greece’s potential slippage into the category of “Stateless Area Formerly Known As…” signals that, very soon, white people could be living in the post-swivelization world where hierarchy has officially died.

What we also see in the case of Greece is the “super- strategy for avoiding the inevitable. That is, an effort by coalition of states to circle the wagons and join forces in the hopes of staving off this inevitable unraveling of swivelization. We see, those other members of that super-state, the European Union, struggling between two opposing inclinations– to avoid the collapse of Greece, on one hand, and to let go and save themselves, on the other.

This super-state solution is really no solution at all. It simply provides, in the long term, a forum where failing states can hold hands and sing Cumbayah as they all go down together.

It’s rather ironic that for all this time, we anarchists have been fighting and conspiring against this oppressive machinery of state control, and here we are, witnessing the beginnings of its global collapse– which seems to have occurred irrespective of whether or not anyone had thrown a single molotov cocktail. It appears that the hierarchs have done this to themselves.

So, in the face of this, I would suggest to anarchists everywhere that it’s up to us to present the strategies for how to move forward, how to thrive in these stateless areas as well as how to ensure that the state doesn’t resume.

Here in the U.S., we have a perfect proving ground for developing our anarchist models forward into a stateless future. That proving ground is called “Detroit.”

I grew up in Michigan, just north of Detroit. I can remember in the late 1970s and early Reagan years when the auto industry collapsed, the city of Detroit collapsed too.

There was mass migration of unemployed auto workers to the Texas oil drills. Property values plummeted. There was a popular bumper sticker: “Will the Last One Out of Detroit Please Turn Out the Lights?”

It was a joke then. Now, it’s a reality. Detroit is a veritable ghost town, an urban ruin– a failed state on the micro level. There is a decided absence of city government. The remaining population, too poor to leave, are now harassed by companies cutting off not just heat and electricity, but cutting off water.

It’s the perfect place for a few thousand squatters to experiment in post-capitalist living. Where others see a wasteland, I view an opportunity. Detroit, with its absence of government, is the perfect place for us to develop our skills and strategies, not just for survival but for thriving, and for resisting the efforts to resurrect swivelization where it has already died.

Like Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, and soon maybe, Greece, Detroit provides us glimpse of the near-future we all face, and it’s a place for us to begin planning for what comes after, our post-swivelization communities.

The future belongs to us, and it’s closer than you think.

Here’s to the Detroit Autonomous Zone.

This is anarchist prisoner Sean Swain from the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. If you’re listening, you ARE the resistance…