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Getting Free: Creating an Association of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods
Getting Free is a study of anarchist revolutionary strategy. Herod begins with a basic sketch of a free society based on direct democracy. He considers obstacles to be overcome, reviews strategies that have failed so far, and finally maps out a new anarchist revolutionary strategy that shifts the focus away from seizing the state or the means of production and towards seizing decision-making. The author identifies three strategic sites for fighting -- neighborhoods, workplaces, and households -- that he believes will not only enable us to defeat capitalism but also to build a new society in the process.
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First published July 10, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 20, 2007
There's lots of different theories on how to change the world, or to make a world that's a better place. Many times, there aren’t many real road maps of how to get to those places except "organize" or "be allies" or "raise awareness" and other vague terms. Too often, you have to wade through what people are saying, or ask others to translate it into speak able terms for you, like a professor or a group of peers. In "Getting Free: Creating an Association of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods" in very plain English terms, proposes a plan of action for people who want that better world.
The book is a very nice read, and some parts where he outlines how this future society might work, Getting Free almost reads like Peter Kropotkin's classic "Conquest of Bread". There's no abstract stuff here, only thoughts on how to achieve this world. The book is broken down into sections. He lays out what he's against, something that's always easy. He says what he's for, a direct democratic society where people run their own neighborhoods and their own work. After this, he explores what hasn't worked (which is most things, according to him, though they have brought changes, they haven't brought the whole enchilada down.) He then goes into his main thesis, which is that radical organizers and politically active people should take their fight into building new democratic organizations in neighborhoods, workplaces, and households (by which he means the places where many families will live).
Herod suggests that people set up employee associations, involving no larger unions, in the fight in the workplace. In the fight for the neighborhood, neighborhood associations should be formed to bring control back to the neighbors away from the government. In the household, several families should pool their resources together to get a larger place that they can all share. Herod then goes into many suggestions in basic things people can do to make this better world, like setting a meeting hall, organizing worker-owned businesses, try to get jobs in the neighborhoods, set up local currency, growing food locally, setting up neighborhood warehouse for goods, slowing down work at jobs, turning off television, recovering language away from academia, ending cooperation with the police, putting your money in local cooperative banks, breaking away from the school system, as well as rejecting a host of other things like recycling, marriage by church or state, suits, and voting, and saying not to be come a boss, bureaucrat, or a cop.
All of these steps sound pretty good, and the author argues them pretty well. I like most of the stuff in here and I defiantly like how he avoids abstractions whenever possible like "capitalism, the state, etc" and in general you don't need a dictionary to get exactly what he means. I do have a few small problems with the theory though. He's against involving unions in workplace struggles, instead going for just worker organizations, which sounds nice and pure because it avoids the union buearacracy that often chokes the labor movement, however, I would be concerned about what exactly to do when facing inevitable backlash from the bosses. Sometimes you really can't beat the resources a larger union offers, in fighting the union-busting law-firms, government forces, and intimidation from management. I'm also a little hazy on what he wants to do in general once government or right-wing thugs try to roll back the gains he's talking about. You also do have to look at stuff like race and gender and sexuality in dealing with all this because it's such a deep part of our culture. Capitalists are very resourceful and do not hesitate to adapt to situations, with "speak softly and carry a big stick" tactics.
read the rest at www.woodenshoebooks.com/reviews.html
The book is a very nice read, and some parts where he outlines how this future society might work, Getting Free almost reads like Peter Kropotkin's classic "Conquest of Bread". There's no abstract stuff here, only thoughts on how to achieve this world. The book is broken down into sections. He lays out what he's against, something that's always easy. He says what he's for, a direct democratic society where people run their own neighborhoods and their own work. After this, he explores what hasn't worked (which is most things, according to him, though they have brought changes, they haven't brought the whole enchilada down.) He then goes into his main thesis, which is that radical organizers and politically active people should take their fight into building new democratic organizations in neighborhoods, workplaces, and households (by which he means the places where many families will live).
Herod suggests that people set up employee associations, involving no larger unions, in the fight in the workplace. In the fight for the neighborhood, neighborhood associations should be formed to bring control back to the neighbors away from the government. In the household, several families should pool their resources together to get a larger place that they can all share. Herod then goes into many suggestions in basic things people can do to make this better world, like setting a meeting hall, organizing worker-owned businesses, try to get jobs in the neighborhoods, set up local currency, growing food locally, setting up neighborhood warehouse for goods, slowing down work at jobs, turning off television, recovering language away from academia, ending cooperation with the police, putting your money in local cooperative banks, breaking away from the school system, as well as rejecting a host of other things like recycling, marriage by church or state, suits, and voting, and saying not to be come a boss, bureaucrat, or a cop.
All of these steps sound pretty good, and the author argues them pretty well. I like most of the stuff in here and I defiantly like how he avoids abstractions whenever possible like "capitalism, the state, etc" and in general you don't need a dictionary to get exactly what he means. I do have a few small problems with the theory though. He's against involving unions in workplace struggles, instead going for just worker organizations, which sounds nice and pure because it avoids the union buearacracy that often chokes the labor movement, however, I would be concerned about what exactly to do when facing inevitable backlash from the bosses. Sometimes you really can't beat the resources a larger union offers, in fighting the union-busting law-firms, government forces, and intimidation from management. I'm also a little hazy on what he wants to do in general once government or right-wing thugs try to roll back the gains he's talking about. You also do have to look at stuff like race and gender and sexuality in dealing with all this because it's such a deep part of our culture. Capitalists are very resourceful and do not hesitate to adapt to situations, with "speak softly and carry a big stick" tactics.
read the rest at www.woodenshoebooks.com/reviews.html
August 7, 2022
I liked this book. Down to earth and practical even while being perhaps overly optimistic about the possibility of changing people enough to enact his ideas of free associations instead of hierarchal governments. His observations on why protests have been unsuccessful to stop the hegemony of the elite is absolutely on point.
And I love that one of the most important behaviours required by we the people to begin the process of change is to stop watching TV, listening to radios and reading corporate newspapers. Why? Because they are the effective brainwashing tools of the corporatists. In this time of flu insanity, that brainwashing power has been shown to be awesome and deadly.
He also recommends avoiding sending our children to 'public' schools because the school system is built and designed to create good consumers, not good citizens. His argument is sound and supported by the anti-human behaviours and tyrannical demands of the well-educated woke, for example.
Solid 4 stars.
And I love that one of the most important behaviours required by we the people to begin the process of change is to stop watching TV, listening to radios and reading corporate newspapers. Why? Because they are the effective brainwashing tools of the corporatists. In this time of flu insanity, that brainwashing power has been shown to be awesome and deadly.
He also recommends avoiding sending our children to 'public' schools because the school system is built and designed to create good consumers, not good citizens. His argument is sound and supported by the anti-human behaviours and tyrannical demands of the well-educated woke, for example.
Solid 4 stars.
October 27, 2018
This important book undertakes a task too little attempted in leftist politics: how to concretely move past mere electoral politics, "organizing," street protests, and generalities. His proposals are by no means without flaws or fully comprehensive, but we need many more attempts like this to flesh this out in theory and in reality. In short, he argues that so many of our usual tactics leave the system essentially intact and unchallenged. For instance, we can take over the streets for a day with a rowdy protest, but the politicians and police know that we'll go home at the end of the day, with their power intact. He argues that we need to take back power from capitalism not so much in the streets as in our neighborhoods and workplaces.
What is helpful is that he offers a way to try to start doing that *now*, which means we can start living the politics we want to see now (the means matching the ends), and everything is not predicated on some mythical "revolution" that we wait upon in millennarian fervor. There can be a process by which we build our power and develop and get used to the processes of horizontal decision-making.
Some of the strategies are a little trite or moralistic ("Don't watch television") or a little beyond our immediate implementation ("Abolish War"; the one about negotiating international trade treaties), but again, at least he's daring to be specific. Some of the later chapters include his responses to critics, which can be a bit testy at times but illuminating at others. The book ends with interesting responses to some of the relevant literature of the day (which is now a little dated), as well as an extensive bibliography).
As others have said, the book is light on defending our movements and being aware of white supremacy and intersectionality. The book is far from perfect, but dammit, we need a lot more efforts like this!
What is helpful is that he offers a way to try to start doing that *now*, which means we can start living the politics we want to see now (the means matching the ends), and everything is not predicated on some mythical "revolution" that we wait upon in millennarian fervor. There can be a process by which we build our power and develop and get used to the processes of horizontal decision-making.
Some of the strategies are a little trite or moralistic ("Don't watch television") or a little beyond our immediate implementation ("Abolish War"; the one about negotiating international trade treaties), but again, at least he's daring to be specific. Some of the later chapters include his responses to critics, which can be a bit testy at times but illuminating at others. The book ends with interesting responses to some of the relevant literature of the day (which is now a little dated), as well as an extensive bibliography).
As others have said, the book is light on defending our movements and being aware of white supremacy and intersectionality. The book is far from perfect, but dammit, we need a lot more efforts like this!
May 11, 2010
A fascinating thought experiment, Getting Free is one anarchist's vision for "gutting capitalism" while building new directly democratic infrastructure by means of "an association of democratic neighborhood associations." A rare attempt to flesh out what a non-hierarchical, collective society could look like, with concrete strategy offered to get there. I need to read more of these kinds of books.
Herod's strategy is appealing because it is meant to be applied now, from anywhere, by anyone. We can't simply overthrow or revolutionize capitalism, he explains, because it takes time to build the capacity, knowledge, defenses, and resources to fill its vacuum. Instead, we must replace capitalist institutions with decentralized, collective instead of consumptive, directly democratic infrastructure. By focusing on our households, activities, and larger neighborhoods, we can create effective communities that meet all of our needs, enabling us to both stop participating in capitalism and to actively attack ("gut")the system from a place of stability and strength.
Herod differentiates between the "economics" of capitalism and patriarchal reactionary movements, and "projects," an open term encompassing the activities people choose to engage in. This means there is no distinction between housework, industrial production, reproduction, farming, art, and fun. Communities prioritize for themselves what their needs and desires are, and work towards those ends. There is no compulsory work or predetermined values attached to specific types of labor. Cool.
Some highlights from his long list of tactics: build meeting halls so large groups can practice face to face direct democracy; form a neighborhood association, meet, and begin making decisions with your community; prioritize local health, education, and food independence; slack off at work (really-- their profit comes from undervaluing your labor); collectivize workplaces. Many of the tactics were so narrow and small they seemed out of place, like "don't play the lottery" (really?). But the list, if limited and sometimes oddly focused (short on how to build the associations, long on tired anti-politics, anti-religion rants) offered some new, practical ideas to put revolutionary energy.
The rest of Herod's book encompasses several critical chapters, in which he summarizes why he believes the methods of anti-capitalist resistance of the past hundred years (from guerrilla warfare to social democracy to Crimethinc), and the visions for dismantling capitalism and building an anarchist world in its place put forth by other philosophers, are flawed. This includes a large literature review and recommended reading list for further study.
The main problems I have with Getting Free are directly tied to the author's rejection of "identity politics" as a distraction from class struggle. Aside from just flat out disagreeing with that analysis, I think it makes for an interesting critique of the book, written as it is from the (unsituated) perspective of an older white man. Without any analysis of interpersonal power, his recommendations fall far short of actually explaining the full process needed to create a truly horizontal world.
The book also lacks an ecological basis, which I think makes any vision of a future world somewhat suspect. I mean, one of the bigger flaws with capitalist & Marxist economics is how they utterly fail to account for the ecological system within which their economic theories are to take place. Any realistic proposal for a new way of life must be firmly imbedded within an ecosystem. Just as projects that do not actively engage race, gender, and other identities are doomed to perpetuate oppressions based on them, visions that are not rooted in econsystemic processes are inevitably going to tend toward collapse. I think that's the main lesson of identity politics, and Herod has not internalized it.
You can read this book online or buy it from James Herod's website.
Herod's strategy is appealing because it is meant to be applied now, from anywhere, by anyone. We can't simply overthrow or revolutionize capitalism, he explains, because it takes time to build the capacity, knowledge, defenses, and resources to fill its vacuum. Instead, we must replace capitalist institutions with decentralized, collective instead of consumptive, directly democratic infrastructure. By focusing on our households, activities, and larger neighborhoods, we can create effective communities that meet all of our needs, enabling us to both stop participating in capitalism and to actively attack ("gut")the system from a place of stability and strength.
Herod differentiates between the "economics" of capitalism and patriarchal reactionary movements, and "projects," an open term encompassing the activities people choose to engage in. This means there is no distinction between housework, industrial production, reproduction, farming, art, and fun. Communities prioritize for themselves what their needs and desires are, and work towards those ends. There is no compulsory work or predetermined values attached to specific types of labor. Cool.
Some highlights from his long list of tactics: build meeting halls so large groups can practice face to face direct democracy; form a neighborhood association, meet, and begin making decisions with your community; prioritize local health, education, and food independence; slack off at work (really-- their profit comes from undervaluing your labor); collectivize workplaces. Many of the tactics were so narrow and small they seemed out of place, like "don't play the lottery" (really?). But the list, if limited and sometimes oddly focused (short on how to build the associations, long on tired anti-politics, anti-religion rants) offered some new, practical ideas to put revolutionary energy.
The rest of Herod's book encompasses several critical chapters, in which he summarizes why he believes the methods of anti-capitalist resistance of the past hundred years (from guerrilla warfare to social democracy to Crimethinc), and the visions for dismantling capitalism and building an anarchist world in its place put forth by other philosophers, are flawed. This includes a large literature review and recommended reading list for further study.
The main problems I have with Getting Free are directly tied to the author's rejection of "identity politics" as a distraction from class struggle. Aside from just flat out disagreeing with that analysis, I think it makes for an interesting critique of the book, written as it is from the (unsituated) perspective of an older white man. Without any analysis of interpersonal power, his recommendations fall far short of actually explaining the full process needed to create a truly horizontal world.
The book also lacks an ecological basis, which I think makes any vision of a future world somewhat suspect. I mean, one of the bigger flaws with capitalist & Marxist economics is how they utterly fail to account for the ecological system within which their economic theories are to take place. Any realistic proposal for a new way of life must be firmly imbedded within an ecosystem. Just as projects that do not actively engage race, gender, and other identities are doomed to perpetuate oppressions based on them, visions that are not rooted in econsystemic processes are inevitably going to tend toward collapse. I think that's the main lesson of identity politics, and Herod has not internalized it.
You can read this book online or buy it from James Herod's website.
June 20, 2020
No longer using this website, but I'm leaving up old reviews. Fuck Jeff Bezos. Find me on LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/profile/...
This book outlines a strategy for gutting and shuffling off capitalism and the state and replacing them with workplace (project), communal household, and neighborhood assemblies. These assemblies will tap into the naturally anarchist power of collective decision-making and real social function. The simplicity of the model is elegant.
What I found most interesting about the book was imagining what this post-revolutionary world would look like. Will we be able, after exercising our collective decision-making muscles, to make decisions on a massive scale that emphasize direct democracy, face-to-face contact, and discussion? If meeting halls are the altars of the new era, constructed like the cathedrals of the middle ages and the banks and skyscrapers of today, they will be even more beautiful because they will have the input from an entire free community, not just the whims of some experts. They will have to be specially designed with break-out rooms, and other architectural elements that elicit the most participation out of the most amount of people.
This book fails where it doesn't bother to venture. This seems like a weird statement: of course it doesn't cover what it doesn't cover, that's idiotic. But no, I mean that it gives very superficial attention to some details that will undoubtedly need to be worked out in a systematic and thorough way: white supremacy, for example, and xenophobia. Uprooting these systems will be crucial to avoiding isolated, ghettoized neighborhoods, and the solution to this problem is the solution to white supremacy in any political/economic structure: rigorous anti-racist work and organizing across racial lines.
That said, the effects of white supremacy and xenophobia within communities will be mitigated by the lack of hierarchy within neighborhood associations. Also, neighborhood assemblies will be more likely to let the people in a community address the unique issues of that community, even (under the worst case scenario) survival in isolation, far more than capitalism, given capitalism's foundation: the theft of the commons from the working class, the genocide of a continent of Native Americans to steal raw resources, and the enslavement or execution of hundreds of millions of Africans for hundreds of years of free labor.
Further, the author doesn't do a very good job enumerating how one might defend these assemblies, other than that self defense is something we should look into.
This book outlines a strategy for gutting and shuffling off capitalism and the state and replacing them with workplace (project), communal household, and neighborhood assemblies. These assemblies will tap into the naturally anarchist power of collective decision-making and real social function. The simplicity of the model is elegant.
What I found most interesting about the book was imagining what this post-revolutionary world would look like. Will we be able, after exercising our collective decision-making muscles, to make decisions on a massive scale that emphasize direct democracy, face-to-face contact, and discussion? If meeting halls are the altars of the new era, constructed like the cathedrals of the middle ages and the banks and skyscrapers of today, they will be even more beautiful because they will have the input from an entire free community, not just the whims of some experts. They will have to be specially designed with break-out rooms, and other architectural elements that elicit the most participation out of the most amount of people.
This book fails where it doesn't bother to venture. This seems like a weird statement: of course it doesn't cover what it doesn't cover, that's idiotic. But no, I mean that it gives very superficial attention to some details that will undoubtedly need to be worked out in a systematic and thorough way: white supremacy, for example, and xenophobia. Uprooting these systems will be crucial to avoiding isolated, ghettoized neighborhoods, and the solution to this problem is the solution to white supremacy in any political/economic structure: rigorous anti-racist work and organizing across racial lines.
That said, the effects of white supremacy and xenophobia within communities will be mitigated by the lack of hierarchy within neighborhood associations. Also, neighborhood assemblies will be more likely to let the people in a community address the unique issues of that community, even (under the worst case scenario) survival in isolation, far more than capitalism, given capitalism's foundation: the theft of the commons from the working class, the genocide of a continent of Native Americans to steal raw resources, and the enslavement or execution of hundreds of millions of Africans for hundreds of years of free labor.
Further, the author doesn't do a very good job enumerating how one might defend these assemblies, other than that self defense is something we should look into.
September 6, 2008
Great criticism of failed strategies for social movements and good constructive theory. Talks about localized assemblies that build for anarchism.
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