999 Page Boulevard

Springfield, Massachusetts - 1939

This is what Google captured the address as looking like in October 2016.

View out the back window of Northampton's Starbucks.

Abandoned protest sign at a Hamp bus stop.

Vehicle parked at Amherst Town Hall asks a question everyone should be able to answer.

Here's an unusually sophisticated political graffiti I came across recently.

Sadly, one sometimes comes across evidence of anarcho-communist activism online, despite the fact that it is a political dead end due to its own internal contradictions. Anarchy is the abolition of all order, where no one controls the government and it is characterized by chaos, confusion and often violence. Communists have often favored the creation of anarchy in order to create conditions where the chaos becomes so disruptive, disorienting and dangerous that the public soon begs for a return to order by any means, at which point the communists step in with an iron fist and take over.

Some people, typically young idealists, are drawn to anarchy by an understandable disgust over the stale customs, traditions, regulations and laws of the current system. It seems wonderfully liberating to just trash the whole corrupt and incompetent system and replace it with....? Because of the poor quality of our public school system, many young people today have no clear understanding of what communism is. In fact they may have been given the false impression by their left-leaning educators that communism is somehow practical, moral and consistent with human liberty.

The truth is that communism is by its very nature a system of rigid controls designed to strictly regulate the economy and society in general. It's primary feature is the low level of freedom communism allows and its domination of all major areas of life. Claiming to support both anarchy and communism is self-contradictory, you cannot have total freedom and total control at the same time. Anarchy is always unsustainable in the long run because a productive and safe society must have at least some degree of order. Therefore, despite its radical, freedom loving rhetoric, anarchy always ultimately leads to some form of dictatorship. Although it is counter-intuitive, anarchy is actually a form of authoritarianism, since by its very nature anarchy creates the circumstances where repression of freedom is the inevitable long term result, especially when combined with communist ideals. No true lover of liberty is an anarchist.

Update - June 13, 2000

Today I noted that new graffiti has been added to denounce Anarcho-Communism as "childish." It also appears as though someone tried to cover part of the original message, but someone then rewrote it:

Only in the Pioneer Valley can you have a debate on sociopolitical concepts via scrawlings on a wall.