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UP FROM UNDER THE RULERS

The Anarchic Phenomenological Communitarian Manifesto

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UP FROM UNDER THE RULERS

The Anarchic Phenomenological Communitarian Manifesto

392 pages

Released: January 2024

RPI Print, Inc.

There are as many different versions of anarchism as there are grains of sand on a beach.  As a result, anarchists from competing traditions can sometimes make strange bed-fellows. Though anarcho-communism and libertarian-anarchism, for instance, both might look forward to the end of the state, and both might talk about how this will bring about freedom, they have different goals in mind, completely different conceptions of freedom, and—in some ways most importantly—different underlying assumptions about the world and about what it is to be a person.

     This book is an extended argument for a different kind of social-political theory and a different kind of anarchism.  It is, for instance, not libertarian (as it calls for the end of capitalism and argues that there is no such thing as an isolated Liberal self with its own ends and own conception of the Good); neither is it a form of communism (as it offers a critique of Marx’s conception of property as inherited from Locke and his narrow focus on class and class-division).  Instead, APC—anarchic phenomenological communitarianism—begins with phenomenology, shows how communitarian ethics is a necessary outcome of our fundamental ontological nature (i.e., our being, our being the sorts of subjects we are), and concludes that anarchic politics (or an anarchic rejection of “the political”) is the only way to create truly communitarian communities. 

       Along the way, questions such as white supremacy and race, the patriarchy and feminism, child liberation, trans liberation, Native liberation, ableism, environmentalism, various abolitionist agendas (e.g., prisons, police, schools, families, work, capitalism, money, voting, etc.), the intricacies of veganism and animal ethics, plant and rock ethics, religion and spirituality, and the question of violence (within a revolution and after a revolution) are also addressed.  Written for a general audience but without sacrificing philosophic rigor, Up From Under the Rulers is well-founded on theory but also gives practical answers to worries that will likely arise in the minds of readers first encountering these ideas-—ideas that call on them not merely to take this as an interesting work of theory, but ideas that demand immediate action and change in our lives.

Table of Contents

Press Release

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Phenomenological Method

1.1  Why Theory?

1.2  The Basic Problems of Western Thought

1.3  The Phenomenological Reduction

1.4  Twelve Things We Immediately Learn as Phenomenologists

     1.4.1  Intentionality

     1.4.2  Presence and Absence

     1.4.3  Horizons

          1.4.3.1  Mistakes and Humility

     1.4.4  Perspective (“The Dative Case”)

     1.4.5  What a Thing Is: How to Do Ontology

     1.4.6  Intersubjectivity

     1.4.7  Modes of Consciousness

     1.4.8  Embodiment

     1.4.9  Values and Categoriality

     1.4.10  The Common Good

     1.4.11  Objectivity

     1.4.12  The Transcendental Ego

1.5  Summary

     1.5.1  The Rejection of Idealism

     1.5.2  Risk-Taking

Chapter 2: Truth and Reason

2.1  Opinion v. Truth: Intersubjectivity Without Relativism

     2.1.1  Rescuing Logos

     2.1.2  Radical Openness and Contradictions

2.2  The Correspondence Theory of Truth

2.3  Science Is Not the Only Way

2.4  Truth as an Ethical Project; “Truth” as a Verb Rather than a Noun

2.5  Non-binary Truth

Chapter 3: Language, Concepts, and Technologies

3.1  Words and the Presencing of Things

3.2  Ethics Before Ontology

     3.2.1  Etiquette

     3.2.2  Context and the Language of the Revolution

3.3  The World Can be Carved Up in Infinite Ways

3.4  Shall We Not Champion Literacy?

3.5  Telling Stories

3.6  The Question of Technology

     3.6.1  The Hammer

     3.6.2  Example: Smartphones

     3.6.3  Conclusion: Tools and the APC Community

Chapter 4: The Ethics and Politics of APC

4.1  What Structures APC Demands

     4.1.1  Communitarianism

     4.1.2  Anarchy

          4.1.2.1  The Political Spectrum

          4.1.2.2  Anarchism Outside of Liberalism

4.2  The Rejection of Laws, Rights, and Equality

     4.2.1  The Problems with Rights

     4.2.2  The Rejection of Equality

4.2.3  Life without Laws, Police, and Prisons

     4.2.3.1  Lawlessness

     4.2.3.2  Protection

     4.2.3.3  Some Examples: Drugs, Abortion, Sex Work, and Pornography

4.3  The Abolition of Economics

     4.3.1  Interaction without Money and Markets

     4.3.2  On Property and Not Being a Jerk

     4.3.3  Abolishing Work

Chapter 5: The Life of the Polis

5.1  Why Is Size Key?

     5.1.1  The Family

     5.1.2  Degrowth, the End of Empire, and Dealing with Apparent Global Problems

          5.1.2.1  Anti-Colonial Thinking

          5.1.2.2  No Growth, No Globalism

     5.1.3  But Will We Still Have…?

          5.1.3.1  But Will We Still Have Nice Things?

          5.1.2.2  But Will We Still Have Big Things?

5.2  Decision-Making and Voting in Community

     5.2.1  Voting Is an Act of …

     5.2.2  Making Decisions Together

Chapter 6: Others and Unothers

6.1  Identity Politics and Oppression

6.2  Child Liberation

     6.2.1  Children as an Oppressed Group

     6.2.2  School Abolition and Unschooling

          6.2.2.1  The Canon

6.3  Environmentalism and Sustainability

6.4  Animals, Plants, Eating, and Sacrifice

     6.4.1  Animal and Plant Being

     6.4.2  Eating and the Sacred

6.5  Religion and Spirituality

Chapter 7: Eutopia Over Utopia

7.1  The Question of Violence and Transitions

     7.1.1  The Case for Nonviolence

     7.1.2  The Horizon of Revolution and the Possibility of Violence

7.2  Living with Strife, Accepting the Challenges

7.3  It Is Already Happening: What You Can Do Now

     7.3.1  The Bolivarian Revolution’s Communes

     7.3.2  Leading a Revolutionary Life

Appendix:  Make Your Own APC Thaumatrope

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