"I wouldn't want my anarchist friends to be in charge of a nuclear power station": David Harvey, anarchism, and tightly-coupled systems
An industry-specific response to David Harvey's popular claim that anarchists can neither run nor combat 'tightly-coupled systems', specifically nuclear power plants and air-traffic control. This paper is examines the the former and critiques Harvey's understanding of how such systems meet anarchist theory and practice, arguing that hierarchy does not make such systems safer or more efficient - quite the contrary.
Its happening all across America - rural landowners waking up to find a lucrative offer from an energy company wanting to lease their property. The reason? The company hopes to tap into a reservoir dubbed the ""Saudi Arabia of natural gas."" Halliburton developed a way to get the gas out of the ground - a hydraulic drilling process called ""fracking""- and suddenly America finds itself on the precipice of becoming an energy superpower.
In this bitterly sardonic “imaginary interview” written in 1986 at the crest of the anti-nuclear protest movement in Germany, Günther Anders—best known in the United States for his 1961 book about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima (Burning Conscience)—explains his rejection of pacifism and dogmatic non-violence under the permanent “State of Emergency” of the nuclear age, ridiculing the theatrical protest tactics (“happenings”) of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s, evoking the right to self-defense as enshrined in international and ecclesiastical law and comparing today’s political and military leaders to those whose crimes led to the 60 million dead of WW2.
In this text written in 1986 in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, Jean-Pierre Baudet defines nuclear power as “the logical result of the theoretical-practical aberration based on the dispossession of men...reduced to the status of mere economic subjects”, and discusses certain features it has in common with commodity society, such as its basis in separation and secrecy, its “blind indifference” regarding the survival of its protagonists and its “hostility towards man” as it decrees “a permanent state of emergency” and wages “the real total war about which the madmen of the past could only dream” against its “inadequate” human “prop”.
Address to those who would rather abolish harmful phenomena than manage them - Encyclopedie des Nuisances
An essay proclaiming the pivotal role of "harmful phenomena"--broadly defined to include everything from nuclear meltdowns to the construction of a superhighway--in the resurgence of a movement of "anti-economic and anti-statist emancipation", and warning against reformist "ecologism" as "the principle agent of censorship of the social critique latent in the struggle against harmful phenomena".