Zelaya Agonistes

My latest at the Center for a Stateless Society. Teaser:

From an anarchist perspective, there’s a lesson in the Honduras story which may not be obvious. It’s the same lesson emanating from Iran, the same lesson to be found in Al Gore’s decision to concede the 2000 US presidential election even though he could be reasonably sure that he had won it (as was subsequently proven to a high degree of probability to be the case).

That lesson is this: The state, regardless of whether its apparatus is controlled by “left-wing” or “right-wing” actors at a given moment, is organically conservative. Its pieces and parts have evolved, through a sort of natural selection process, toward the object of maintaining the status quo at all costs.

While an individual state actor may press for change (good change or bad), or articulate a desire for change (honestly or dishonestly), the machinery of an established state is big enough, it’s heavy enough, and it has enough momentum that it’s usually going to roll right over that actor unless that actor has hitched his wagon to forces that have amassed considerable weight and momentum of their own — in other words, revolutionary forces external to and in competition with the status quo.