Economic Aspects of "Love"

by **American Dream** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 12:10 am

American Dream wrote:http://gatheringforces.org/2010/02/13/thoughts-on-politics-of-the-disability-rights-movement/

Thoughts on “Politics of the Disability Rights Movement”

2010 FEBRUARY 13
by June C

This will hopefully be the first of a two-part discussion on disability, the next to follow in several months, and to focus on mental ill-health/”psychological disability”, race, and class. This is meant to be a broad overview of themes, ideas, and movements, through comments on Ravi Malhotra’s article, “The Politics of the Disability Rights Movement.”

Here is the original article:

The Politics Of The Disability Rights Movement

July 01, 2001

By Ravi Malhotra

Over the course of the last few decades,the socialist left throughout the industrialized West has been challenged to become more inclusive by an array of activist social movements including the women's movement, the Civil Rights and anti-racist movement, and the gay and lesbian liberation movement. In each case, fundamental questions have been posited as to how the left conceives itself and its commitment to fighting for the equality and liberation of oppressed groups. While the formulations of the left may be seen by some to be seriously wanting, it can be said that at the very least the issues were openly debated and all sides were richer for having had the discussion. In the case of the disability rights movements, however, one is faced with the sad reality that few on the left have even seriously begun to consider the issues at stake, let alone develop a preliminary praxis for disability liberation politics from a socialist perspective. Yet when neo-liberal attacks to roll back the welfare state throughout the West have reached fever pitch, a counter-hegemonic politics of disability liberation is more essential than ever for the more than fifty million disabled Americans. What follows below is a modest first step towards that goal.

A Brief History of Disabled People 1
Prior to the enlightment and industrial revolution, disabled people in Western society were undoubtedly poorly treated. Often the victims of religious superstition and persecution, disabled people in medieval Europe were associated with evil, witchcraft, and even the Devil. Children born with disabilities were often perceived as the consequence of their mothers' support for satanic beliefs, illustrating both the ableist and patriarchal values of the era. However, it is also the case that under feudalism, disabled people were generally able to make a contribution, in varying degrees, to a largely rural production process. If disabled people were hospitalized, it was in relatively small medieval hospitals where the focus was on palliative care rather than a cure.2 With industrialization came the rise of the factory system and waged labor. This required workers to complete tasks in accordance with specified time standards. Those who were unable to do so as a result of an impairment were labelled deviant even though they might have in fact contributed to production under previous regimes of capital accumulation. They were therefore marginalized and excluded from the labor force. Disability accordingly developed into a crucial boundary between the deserving poor entitled to relief and the undeserving poor. Yet what is remarkable is how even in this time period, the concept of disablement was not a static category enshrined in medical science but a variable boundary category in flux that might change depending on the state of the economy, the needs of the labor market, and the state of the labor movement and level of class struggle.3

It was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that one saw the large-scale segregation of disabled people away from society into a number of institutional settings including asylums, hospitals, workhouses and prisons, frequently under conditions of intense abuse. However, again, incarceration in an institutional setting was hardly a direct function of a physical impairment but reflected trends in the political economy. Hence, the huge growth of heavy capital industries such as iron, steel and the railways in the late nineteenth century resulted in a much higher level of physical fitness and dexterity as a prerequisite for employment and a concomitant increase in the institutionalization of those deemed unable to work. Large numbers of disabled veterans of course were created as a result of the Civil War. In response to a long recession in the 1870s and 1880s, the rate of institutionalization also increased, revealing its relationship with the state of the economy.4 Such practices continued well into the twentieth century.

The rise of the Eugenics movement and social Darwinism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also played an important role in the oppression of disabled people. The seminal text in this regard is Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species, published in 1859. In his 1871 text, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin commented:

We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost to save the life of everyone to the last moment . . . Thus the weak members of society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.5 Social Darwinist rhetoric combined ableist and ignorant assumptions about the capabilities of disabled people with racist concerns about protecting the white race from the corrupting influences of immigrants. The birth of disabled children was accordingly seen as a dire threat to preserving racial purity. Tragically, this disturbing ideological framework had very real consequences. The United States Supreme Court ruled in its infamous 1927 decision of Buck v. Bell that a Virginia statute permitting the forced sterilization of disabled people was not unconstitutional. Some 33 states had sterilization laws in place by 1938. Between 1921 and 1964, more than 63,000 disabled people had been sterilized.6

The Holocaust and Disability Oppression
The dysfuntional logic of eugenics reached its nadir in the brutal oppression of disabled people in the Nazi German regime, both in the years leading up to the Holocaust and in the Holocaust itself. Yet even as there has been an abundance of literature on the Holocaust, Nazi policies on disabled people have received relatively little scrutiny. Disabled people were nonetheless a major target of the Nazi regime. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people ranging from those with intellectual disabilities to blind and deaf people to those with psychiatric disabilities were sterilized. Propaganda in schools directly attacked disabled people as economic burdens on the state. This soon evolved into a monstrous program, undertaken by physicians, to exterminate disabled babies and children in what might be seen as a precursor to the Holocaust. By 1945, some five thousand children had been murdered by lethal injection, starvation, withholding of treatment, or chemical warfare weapons. In 1939, the program was extended to disabled adults. Hundreds of thousands of disabled people were killed before pressure by the Roman Catholic Church, notwithstanding its questionable role in other aspects of the Holocaust, resulted in the ending of the program in 1941. Still, euthanasia by medical doctors continued in hospitals.7 The post-war settlement is very revealing in how it demonstrates clearly the marginalization of the sterilization and extermination of disabled people. Sterilization of disabled people in fact could not be prosecuted in the Nuremberg trials because similar legislation existed in the United States and other countries. The extermination of disabled people was largely ignored. No compensation to families of disabled people was paid and the cases were not prosecuted as a distinct group that was targeted by the state. In the United States and other countries, policies of sterilization and institutionalization would continue, albeit on a reduced scale in the wake of increased concern for individual rights, even into the postwar Keynesian conjuncture.8

The Emergence of the Disability Rights Movements
At their very root, contemporary disability rights movements have as their goal the empowerment of disabled people. This is hardly a surprise as disabled people today remain among the most marginal of citizens in the United States, as well as in other leading Western industrialized countries. By every statistical measure known to sociologists, whether it is poverty levels, unemployment rates or levels of education, disabled people score very poorly. Even after years of a boom economy, disabled people remain disproportionately unemployed and impoverished. This goal of empowerment, however, is undermined by the fact that disablement is still widely perceived, even on the left, as a personal problem fundamentally caused by the individual's medical impairment. The medical impairment is seen as the primary cause for the disabled individual's lack of success. The disability rights movements, however, are predicated on the notion that it is the structural and attitudinal barriers in capitalist society that are the fundamental cause for the discrimination and oppression faced by disabled people. In this framework, disabled people are handicapped by the systemic lack of wheelchair access to public services, the failure of educational institutions and employers to make materials available in alternative formats for blind and visually impaired people, and the intricate bureaucracy that disabled people must navigate in order to get essential services such as income support and medical services. Hence, attention needs to be redirected from the medical impairment or medical model of disablement to the social-political issues that underpin disability oppression. In other words, the first step in the liberation of disabled people is a fundamental paradigm shift.

However, just as feminist theory has splintered into myriad camps with vastly different perspectives,9 the disability rights movements contain organizations with significantly different politics, strategies and tactics. A large number of charitable organizations have been created for disabled people, sometimes by parents of disabled children, but are not actually controlled by them and do not consistently endorse the social-political model of disablement. Instead of seeking solidarity with large numbers of disabled people based on common interest, they usually define their mandate on the basis of narrow diagnostic categories derived from a medical model of disablement. Furthermore, they often receive considerable funding from the state, unlike grassroots disability organizations, and are therefore inherently compromised when their constituents want to challenge fiscal austerity measures or other government policies they find objectionable. More fundamentally, they simply do not reflect the views of disabled people but instead subscribe to the belief that technocratic experts such as physicians, social workers and occupational therapists from above are best suited to solve the problems faced by disabled people.10

In response, disabled people have begun to establish their own organizations in the quest for empowerment and self-determination. A very early example was the League for the Physically Handicapped, established by a few hundred disabled pensioners in New York who engaged in civil disobedience to protest their discriminatory exclusion from employment made available under the Works Progress Administration (WPA).11 However, disability politics only developed significant roots after the flourishing of the New Left in the 1960s. With the revitalization of the women's movement, the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, the movement against the war in Vietnam and the gay and lesbian movement, this new conjuncture provided the space for disabled people to self- organize.

In fact, it was in Berkeley, a central site of left organizing and home of the famous Free Speech Movement, where the Independent Living (IL) movement emerged. Spearheaded by the Rolling Quads, a group of disabled university students, a new political movement directly controlled by disabled people gained strength. The first Independent Living center was founded in Berkeley and sought to address the structural and attitudinal barriers in society. A vehicle was now in place to raise as political struggles issues ranging from accessing transportation to obtaining personal attendant care services that assist disabled people with activities of daily living to the high levels of physical and sexual abuse faced by disabled people that had been perceived as merely private troubles. Issues of physical access and attitudinal barriers could now be problematized in the way that the women's movement had challenged their oppression, be it violence or wages for housework, as a political issue. Within a few years, hundreds of IL centers were in operation across the United States, as well as a number of other countries including Canada, Britain and Brazil.12

The limitations of the independent living movment, however, quickly became apparent. It saw its role as promoting disabled people's equal rights as consumers within the framework of a free market society. Furthermore, it was not fully representative of the disabled community, often marginalizing the perspectives of disabled women, people of color and gays and lesbians. By limiting itself to accept the restrictions imposed by market forces, it therefore undermined its own radical potential to empower disabled people.

Among organizations of disabled people, however, there have emerged more radical activist organizations that have sought to mobilize from below to transform society. Disabled in Action was founded in 1970 and adopted the tactic of direct political protest to raise both the consciousness of disabled people and awareness of the discriminatory barriers endemic in American society. During the 1972 presidential election, militants in Disabled in Action joined with disabled and often highly politicized Vietnam veterans, clearly an influential base of support for the American disability rights movements, in the Paralyzed Veterans of America to demand an on-camera debate with President Nixon. They also organized a demonstration at the Lincoln Memorial after President Nixon vetoed a spending bill to fund disability programs.13

The high point of the 1970s resurgence of disability liberation politics was the remarkable San Francisco occupation that occurred in conjunction with protests aimed at forcing the release of regulations pursuant to s. 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The regulations were to outline how it was illegal for federal agencies, contractors, or public universities to discriminate on the basis of handicap. They had been delayed by previous Administrations but there was an expectation that the incoming Carter Administration would fulfill its promise to issue the regulations. When it became obvious that the Democrats' policy makers were stalling and wanted to substantially modify the regulations to permit continued segregation in education and other areas of public life, disability rights activists mobilized in nine cities across the United States. In Washington, three hundred demonstrators occupied the offices of the Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) Secretary for some twenty-eight hours despite the termination of the office's telephone lines by authorities and the refusal to permit food through to the protestors. While most demonstrations ended fairly quickly, in San Francisco, however, the movement took on a truly extraordinary trajectory. There, disability rights activists occupied the HEW federal building for twenty-five days culminating in total victory: the issuing of the regulations without any amendments.14

Many of the participants of the occupation, at times as many as 120, literally risked their lives, as they were without their personal care attendants or assistive devices, in order to pursue their fight for social justice and integration into mainstream society. Yet the impact in building cross-disability solidarity was remarkable in what can be seen, in retrospect, as the disability liberation movements' Stonewall. Instead of arbitrary divisions based on diagnostic categories, disabled people united around common political goals. The HEW Occupation was one of those rare events where the consciousness of the participants was dramatically transformed and their largely neglected creativity unleashed.15 Solidarity with other social movements was also built as the local branch of the Black Panthers Party prepared food supplied by civil rights organizations and unions.16 Whereas many of the participants had previously seen their oppression as personal medical problems, a real sense of disability pride was inculcated that would have lasting positive effects in building grassroots disability rights movements.

Continues at: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-politics-of-the-disability-rights-movement-by-ravi-malhotra

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by **American Dream** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 11:02 am

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... atermelon/

WATERMELON: SYMBOLIZING THE SUPPOSED SIMPLICITY OF SLAVES
by Lisa Wade

If you pay attention to racist portrayals of African Americans, you will notice the frequent appearance of watermelons. The trope has its roots in American slavery. Abagond has a nice collection that includes these:

Why watermelons? According to David Pilgrim, the curator of the Jim Crow Museum, defenders of slavery used the watermelon as a symbol of simplicity. African Americans, the argument went, were happy as slaves. They didn’t need the complicated responsibilities of freedom; they just needed some shade and a cool, delicious treat.

Just look at these benevolent White people (sarcasm):

I think this is an interesting example of the way in which supposedly random stereotypes have strategic beginnings. The association of Black people with a love of watermelon isn’t just a neutral stereotype, nor one that emerged because there is a “kernel of truth” (as people love to say about stereotypes). Instead, it was a deliberate tool with which to misportray African Americans and justify slavery.

by **American Dream** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 4:54 pm

http://www.prole.info/texts/subversiono ... ylife.html

THE SUBVERSION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

by Kolinko (1999)

1 [Work]
2 [Capital, Gender, the State]
3 [Class Struggle]
4 [Tendencies]
5 [Revolution]
6 [Revolutionary Struggle]

Who is that told you that life is yet to begin? Or are you already waiting for your pension?

Monday morning - get up, go out, call in sick, can't do anything else, don't want to do anything else, just keep going. Get up again, go out, school, work, get back, knackered, cook, wash. Time or money, stomach-ulcer-skin-inflammation, just keep going. Friday, disco, cinema, friends, Sunday family walks. It is enough! Let's not (!) just grin and bare it!

We spend out time in the smoke filled workshops and humanised factory halls, in be-palmed offices and steak-herb reeking kitchens. We sweat scrap-metal back together and magic the sick well again. For our children there is only the new-deal-work-fare-training-schemes, where they solder platinum for washing machines and anti-blockage-drainage-systems.

We get up every morning. We do it! Even if we have partied the whole night through. Even with the squeezed disc in the back, relationship stress in the head and love-sick in the heart, we just keep going. They have prepared us for this. This is real life. No one ever promised us anything else.

What the fuck is wrong with us? Whose madness is this? Who forces us? The society? The state? The media? The patriarchal nuclear family? The temptation of being able to have a part of the supposed riches? Mama? The weapons? The capitalists?

Is there not something else other that waiting-within-the-machine-rhythm-for-the-pause with the boredom of Coronation Street-romanticism, the professional-development-further-training-scheme, the now-I-discover-myself-workshop and thrill-addiction-parties. We need the challenge, the adventure, the yearning, the struggle, the will to change all that. We are searching for the subversion, the rebellion, the possibility of revolt. And we search for it in this everyday life, in the offices, the factory halls, the hospitals, in Tescos.

We need the movement that does not hesitate, that lets our collective power be visible!

We wrote and discussed drafts of this paper for almost a year and a half. It was planned as a for our friends, work mates and interested people, with whom we could see a common starting point for revolutionary organisation.

It seemed quite difficult to bring together our fundamental critique on the existing relations with our longing to have practical action and to write that all down. So we came to the point where some discussions in our group could not go further. The language that we wanted; precise, clear and analytically sharp seemed to be missing. And so it went on and on...

What you now have in your hands is a discussion paper. This paper was a process, it reflected the actual stage of our group discussions. In it we refer to revolutionary currents of Marxism, Workerism, a revolutionary critique of feminism and discussions with Wildcat.[1]

The first part is about the basis of the exploitative society: work and the division of labour.

In the second part we describe how the relations of capital, gender and the state originate from the specific practical relationships of people to each other and from their position in the capitalist production process.

In the third part we bring that together with our power to change things: class struggle. In the fourth part we try to make an approximation of the current social changes, the conditions for a revolutionary development: crisis, proletarianisaton, flexibilisation.

In the fifth and final part we sketch out our notions for revolution and communism and our tasks in the revolutionary struggle.

1 Work

It is not a natural situation, that we live in an exploitative, unjust society, with hierarchies and divisions between men and women, nationals and foreigners, rich and poor, with exploitation and oppression. This situation is created! It is not based on natural power-craziness and egoism of people. It is also only indirectly to do with bourgeois ideology, tradition, manipulative mass media or the super control of the system.

The situation is based on the concrete practice of six billion people: work. Work is not simply comparable with concrete activities like pudding making, suspension bridge building or beats sampling. We can do all these things with out working. It doesn't matter if it is paid or not, these activities become work if we cannot determine how, for how long, what for and with whom we do them.

Work is; having to slave for the banal things of life, because, although the technical means of doing our work are possible, their development promises no profits.

Work is; not deciding collectively and thereby being productive, but slaving away in our own households where we cook-clean-comfort or inside the walls of factories and offices.

Work is; to be restricted to defined activities: Brick laying, dispensing soul comfort, day-in day-out washing other people's floors...

Work is; division of labour. We are not allowed to do everything, live out the variety of activities - acting in theatres, attic building, philosophy etc. - that the constitutes the whole of society.

Through the division of work, it seems that society consists of lots of single producers slaving away independently of each other in different companies, departments, households, schools and potato plantations. Everyone seems to be responsible for their own fate and to be independent from others. In order to live in capitalism we are dependant on the work of the majority of the workers of this planet: from miners in South Africa, HGV drivers in Spain, car manufacturers in Korea, textile workers in China, programmers in India to farmers in France.

All together, the way that we produce this society is the basis of the divisions between people and creates the total splintering of our lives that makes us so sick: The national borders that fence us in, the prisons of genders, the roles of citizen, workers or consumer, the separation of young and old, trainee and qualified, the stress of free time and everyday work... The division of labour produces these divisions between us and thereby creates the basis for exploitation and oppression. Whoever can determine the work and work products of other, whoever can use for themselves the dependence of people on the work of others, has social power.

2 Capital, Gender, the State

In the following chapter we will describe how a fixed specific practice of people creates a relationship that then governs them. How relations or connections to one another, to the means of production and the work products face them as something that controls them.

We concentrate here on capital, state and gender, which are not, however, structures that stand side by side that can be fought against singly. If we talk about Capitalism, we mean the entire relationship. If we talk about class struggle, we mean the struggle that directs itself against that relationship.

Capital, Exploitation and Crisis

We produce this world together, be we do not decide in what way we do it. We don't have contact to the people who make our clothes, whose CNC machines we build etc. The connections come about mostly through the capitalist forms of the market, money, companies etc. Through this, these forms achieve a seemingly independent existence, that defines our days: "Money rules the world", "the state does this, VW does that". Through our separated co-operation our products seem to take on a power over us: we turn into dependants of machine-time or victims of inflation...
Capital describes the relationship within which we co-operate in a world-wide division of labour.[2] We seem dependant on capital,because it brings together our divided work under it's command. That is the basis of capitalist power, the basis therefor, of a small class holding the means of production in their hands, being able to force us to work and exploit us.

We don't stand up for eight hours in stuffy factories and punch out small parts for Smarts or Playstations because we think that society has a need for this crap. We go into the factories or offices and sell our labour power, because we don't have any other way of sustaining ourselves. We need the wage because we don't posses anything other than our labour power. We have no riches, no means of production and, through the capitalist organisation of work, no possibilities of coming together with the world wide producers independently of capital. We have to graft away in isolated households, because otherwise other people wouldn't be able to work or would have to spend so much on snack-fodder, laundrettes and touchy-feely workshops, that the money would not be enough to live on.

However, not only are we robbed of our means of production, but we don't end up getting the products that we produce every day. We don't determine what we produce and the ways and means that we do it. The means of production and means of subsistence that we produce stay in the hands of the owners of the means of production. By this separation of us from our products they are thus always able to force us to work for them.[3] Through this process, we daily (re)produce the pre-condition of having to work, the basis of our exploitation.

The bosses want to present the theft of the products of our work as 'free and fair exchange' - wages for work. The exploitation is hidden behind the wage, being forced to work hidden behind the 'free exchange'. The capitalists only gives us the wages, because otherwise we would starve and couldn't work for them any more. In a much shorter time than our working day, we produce the equivalent of our wages, the equivalent of the things that are necessary for the subsistence of us and our families. Most of the time in the day we are working solely for the profit of the small class of capitalists. This profit, and not our needs, is the determining factor of capitalism.

However just a small part of the profits go on the luxury hampers of whichever fat-cat. The capitalists themselves are forced to turn a large part of the profit back into capital, i.e. to invest in yet more machines, office blocks and labour power. They don't do this because they can't stuff their faces full enough, but because otherwise they would go bankrupt and wouldn't be capitalists any more. What presents itself as the law of competition for the individual capitalist, is the law of capitalist accumulation: Capital has to become more capital through the exploitation of labour power.[4]

The fact that we stay separated from the means of production and from the products of our work, has to be enforced over and over again. This happens through the production process itself that isolates us, the relentless rhythm of the machine that wears us down, the boss that stands behind us and controls us. And where the violence of work is not sufficient, a 'direct' form of violence is used: foremen, company security guards, shift bosses and department heads drive us to work harder and threaten rebels with dismissal. The capitalists try to divide us along the lines of the work divisions using different working conditions, wage levels etc between foreigners/ nationals, educated / uneducated, men / women. The hierarchy between the exploited is supposed to make joint struggle against the exploitation seem impossible.

A social mode of production that does not arise from the need and collectivity of billions of producers, but has as its only sense and purpose the increase of capital; that for this purpose reduces the daily lives of most people to (wage) slaves and thereby produces rage a-billion-fold; such a mode of production also produces inevitable crises. These crises are not accidents of capitalism, they are part of its contradictory organisation of production, its need for accumulation, for the expansion of exploitation.[5]

Gender[6]

Gender roles are a practical relation that both 'genders' produce, but it is also a relation of violence and dependence, the daily experience of women. Is someone tries to break out of this relationship, and doesn't act like a 'real man' on the building site, will often become isolated, or worse.

If the idyllic little family turns out to be an isolation chamber, if women refuse to let their little worker be the 'little boss' at home, concentrate only on him, protect him from the loneliness of masculinity, she often finds herself confronted with violence. Out of fear of not being able to have close human relationships without female assistance, and the fear of being bottom of the heap without being able to have dominance over the house worker, many men try to keep women being functional through restrictions and the threat or practice of violence. In order to get rid of these relationships of need and violence, we need to get rid of gender itself.[7]

Ones gender determines which tasks we carry out in the social division of labour. It does that from fixed 'gender specific' wage work in production up to practical characteristics and activities for example 'men' having to, or wanting to, protect. Gender arises as a relation within the social mode of production of capitalism, in the association and the acting out of fixed activities, roles and identities. The development of the forces of production - the expansion of social co-operation and the development of technical means to lighten physical work - determines the character of the gender division of labour.

Capitalism found the existing gender division of labour, turned it into the basis of isolating the form of reproduction of labour power and thereby used it to bring down the capital expenditure. Giving birth and the rearing of children was from then on synonymous with the production and reproduction of labour power. The gender division of labour and the reduction of women to the reproduction of labour power makes the divisions between men and women fixed. That did not appear for the first time with capitalism, but the shift in production from houses (farming or handicraft) into families in factories and offices has fundamentally changed the social position of men and women and created new patriarchal relationships.

Feminine and masculine proletariats became separated from each other and women increasingly become stuck into the isolated - unpaid - housework in the nuclear family.[8] Men played a central role, due to wage work and the associated control over the income, and the fact that places of production became the centres of social change in capitalism. The exclusion of women from organising and struggling meant their social degradation.

The dependence of women on the income of men, ensured through marriage and violence, built a framework within which women were supposed to perform particular work for the capitalist accumulation: to produce the commodity of labour power; take care of the reproduction, ideological disciplining and initial training. Housework is part of the social co-operation, without which the capitalist machinery won't function. In families and in the disciplining state institutions girls and boys are introduced to the skills that needed to be developed for later exploitation in house and wage work.

Proletarian women as wage workers always play the role of the industrial reserve army: where they can be exploited for the capitalist valorisation process they are sent to the assembly lines - whether in the development zones of South China, the Maquiladora sweatshops on the US-Mexican border or the electronic hell-holes in central Europe.[9] Where struggle and the revolution of the social modes of production demands dismissals, they are supposed to just back to the kitchen, e.g. in the ex-DDR (East Germany) and other former eastern block states.[10]

The gender divisions will always be used for this, to change the composition of wage workers - to weaken struggle, to put pressure on wages and to divide the workers. In wage work the particular capabilities of women are exploited - communication, emotional sympathy, skilled finger work, due to women having to learn this during their particular upbringing and disciplining. And then the wage work is often just the continuation of their house work: the caring for the sick in hospitals, the work as child minders or in nurseries, as cleaning women or secretary in service to their boss.

As a rule, this work is paid worse than equivalent work by men. In Germany alone millions of women work in insecure working situations like 320 Euro jobs (under the tax and national insurance level), part time work etc. All in all the situation for most women is characterised by insecurity, low wages, poverty and a 16 hour day for the boss, the husband and the children.

Women are fighting against exploitation at work, refusing to do housework and children rearing and telling their husbands to fuck off. The mechanisation of households and the conversion unpaid housework into paid work (fast food, caring...) was a reaction to this refusal. For many women paid work is the first chance they get to overcome the isolation of the family and take part in social life. On the other hand they only end up in a different form of exploitative relationships.

The relationship between the genders has changed considerably in the last few years due to the rebellion of women against their subordination - the images of typical roles are changing, same gender love is almost accepted, the new jobs break down the gender divisions and many women have become self-reliant in their relationships, at work, in their organisational efforts, refusing to accept everything and are choosing a single life over nuclear family stress.

Where women and men attack the gender divisions, they have to be re-enforced again. Women have to be forced into the fulfilment of their 'duties' with violence, men get drilled in the conscripted army and other 'men schools'. With child benefits, marriage laws and personnel management strategies, men and women are further forced into defined jobs, defined roles and learned behaviours. But at the same time the division only works, because we reproduce it over and over again as men and women - amongst ourselves and in relation to the 'other gender'. Where new identities are created, as gay and lesbian, as part of the women's or men's movements, there is an attempt to reintegrate these forms into the capitalist process: equalities officers, funds for subcultures, gay insurance policies, lesbian politicians.

The liberation from gender, the struggle against oppression based on physical characteristics, is part of the class struggle. Only the class of exploited producers is able to destroy the gender roles. Not because the 'women' don't have power without the 'workers', but because gender is a part of the entire social practice.

Almost everything that we need to live, we produce in ways, in which we face our co-operation and the means of work as capital, as a force outside of ourselves. But not all the work in capitalism can be organised along the lines of a 'factory', not all the labour necessary for the reproduction of labour power can be exploited within a capitalist relation.[11] Through the capitalist ways and means of producing this society, we don't only create the production units of factory, the office and the hospital, but also of the household.

House and wage work are both dependant on one another as existing parts of the relations of production, within which we (re)produce our life in the forms of class and gender. From this point, class struggle is the struggle against work, against social modes of production, that create the exploitative relations of capital as well as creating gender.

The State

The state presents itself as a 'neutral political institution' that exists independently from the 'economic' sphere. This has the following results: Union people request that the state regulates the undemocratic businesses; socialists lament that the state is just for the rich parties and not the 'little people'; anarchists present the state as all-encompassing power, without which the society would be free. Whether as a an operational partner or as the main enemy, the state offers itself as the focal point for our struggle, in order to integrate and diss-empower it. The state is part of the capitalist exploitative relations. It is the political and violent form of enforcing and preserving capitalist exploitation.

Fundamental for the exploitation in capitalism is a mass of labour power, that can only live by selling its labour power, or, does not have access to its own means of production. The state makes sure that people stay divided from their means of production on a daily basis, through wars and expulsion from the countryside. Development aid, migration and population politics are used to be able to control the new proletarians.

The separation from the means of production has to permanently maintained through threats and the use of violence: soldiers against autonomous actions by landless people, police against factory occupations. State protection of private property is protection of the owners of the capitalist class, protection from the appropriation of the means of production by the producers and thereby the preservation of the condition of exploitation.

What is sold to us daily as the 'achievements of the welfare state' are actually the states means of keeping us all as wage slaves, of controlling our working lives and getting us ready for exploitation. Social aid and unemployment benefits keep us being exploitable labour power, during the times when our wage work can't be valorised. We get the money, but only if we show willingness to work and give the state the chance to have insight and intervention into our living situation. In school we learn the things that are required from a labour force, particular qualifications, arse licking and obedience. When working life finishes us off, the hospitals and nut houses make us able to cope with life again. In conflicts between workers and capitalists the state appears as a mediator: it offers the workers state-approved unions or its employment laws for isolated conflicts and so ensures 'orderly relationships'.

Apart from that it tries everything to get the conflicts to take place within the working class: its 'migration and family policies' are always creating new divisions and hierarchies amongst the exploited, the existence of individual 'nations' offers the possibility of diverting the workers struggles down nationalistic tracks.

However, the state is not merely a 'service' for capital. Its existence is simply materially tied to profitable exploitation and work: without profit, without the valorisation of capital there would also be no money for the state.[12]

The struggle with the exploitation changes the form of the state and how the state tries to maintain the conditions of exploitation. Whether as military dictatorship, workers and peasants state or a parliamentary democracy - neither our demands, nor 'politics' changes the state, but rather our struggle against the capitalist everyday life.[13]

The state is also not a 'thing' that exists unchanging and independently from humans. In our everyday material practice we have to face and deal with the state and capital in the forms of 'politics' and 'economics'. We seem dependant on the state and on the 'politics', because we are dependant on particular social activities that the 'state' carries out.[14] Due to the separation into isolated 'owners' labour power, small families, in companies, in the town and country etc, we don't organise these activities together and don't create unmediated connections between ourselves.[15] state planning, laws to regulate social conflict etc seem to be necessary.

The of social activities in the form of the state has to be re-enforced daily: the police and teachers have to become accepted as such, the state has to get its own material apparatus produced etc. In times of heavier struggle or crisis it becomes apparent that the state is not necessarily a given. Particular tasks that are not organised by the state any more, the people have to, or can, carry out communally again. E.g. in parts of Russia, where due to the crisis, the state stopped undertaking particular social care duties, or during the struggles in Albania, that reduced the state to its role as military power.[16]

3 Class Struggle

This is our starting point: out of specific practical relations of people between themselves and to the production conditions, capital, the state and gender arises as oppressive relations. Now to the deciding question: how can we destroy these relations and create a different way to live together? We look for the possibilities of change, for liberation from the power and find it in everyday exploitation itself.

Our Power to Make Changes

The isolation within the capitalist society gives us the daily experiences of facing powerlessness in the relationships: we stand alone in front of the boss and colleagues looking either like big girls blouses or as macho: the police catch our foreign girlfriend in a raid and deport her; our dole money gets cut and cut because the state supposedly has no more money; the bosses close down the companies, because they can allegedly get more work for less wages somewhere else etc.

The possibility of liberation from this powerlessness is in our daily social practice. It is the world-wide co-operation of work, that create capital, the state, the gender relations every day a-new. In struggles we can break out of those relations and get to know that we are not isolated individuals, but that, together with all the exploited in the world, we form cohesion of divided labour. This can turn into the material power of a movement, within which we liberate ourselves from these relations:

We can destroy capital, because money will become old paper and machines become scrap metal, if we don't use them or they are not used. The power of capital over living labour has an end, if the struggle overcomes the apparent divisions of social production in house holds, companies, nations etc.

We can seize and destroy the state, because it does not produce its own apparatus, but rather is dependant on capitalist exploitation, from 'orderly' relations in its schools, universities, prisons and offices. The state would disintegrate, if the movement of the exploited jumped over the school walls and liberated knowledge; if we take our conflicts out of the courts and rule ourselves; if take a break from the job centre waiting rooms because we are no longer a permanently available labour force; if we tear down the border fences, because without exploitation there would also be no need for 'national labour market' or 'locations'.

We can destroy gender, because it is a practical social relation that changes through class confrontation and in capitalist development. Within the struggle we can develop desires that no longer have to be in the form of gender divisions. In the struggle we can break out of our isolation and together hit back at the sexist attacks. In revolutionary struggle we can destroy the material basis of gender division, the isolation of households, the different forms of house and wage work, the private ownership of knowledge about our own bodies.

That is the struggle against work. The struggle against a social activity that is the basis for exploitation and oppression. It is the revolutionary critique and the power to make changes. This critique is not born on a desk or in a lefty seminar, but where we come together every day, where through our work, we create the power of capital over the producers. in dingy backyard workshops, in kitchens and canteens, at the assembly line and street corners, behind fast-food counters, in hi-tech offices, university lecture halls and in coffee plantations, the confrontations take place that embody the possibility of a movement that can change everything. The rage expresses itself in conflicts large or small, in the refusal to put up with the drudgery and disciplining. Calling in sick, working slowly, taking longer breaks, nicking stuff and annoying the 'little boss' are forms of the daily little wars by individual workers. These conflicts are permanent. There is no consensus over the exploitation. It stays a part of the capitalist development, or could be diffused in biannual balloted union-lead half-day work-to-rule actions, if the isolation of the conflicts does not break out into common struggle.

Revolutionary situations arise, if the exploited turn their daily divided co-operation around, and into organising their struggle: if the office workers don't work away to the rhythm of some other workers PC-inputs, but rather use the intranet to co-ordinate the strike; if the assembly line workers don't have to try to catch up with the assembler before her, but rather use the co-operation to bring the whole assembly to a stand still; if the struggle in the schools ruins the a whole coming generation of workers; if joint proletarian rent strikes or mass-shoplifting was organised in the play-groups and parent and toddler groups.

The struggle develops a material power, because it suspends the capitalist accumulation and undermines the state.

The self-organisation of the struggle by the strugglers is only possible in those conflicts that result from the daily structures of forced co-operation.

In these conflicts the relationships and needs change. In this way we get to know, the means and possibilities are there to create an-other non-capitalist community. In these struggles there is the chance to 'out' as paper tigers, the supposed supremacy of capital, the seeming independence of the state and naturalness of gender relations. Because the practical relations to each other and to the means of production change and because in struggle they can be developed and created without capitalist mediation. This real movement within capitalist exploitation we call

Class Struggle

If we talk about class, we are coming from the view that, the work of people creates the private property of the means of production - and thereby the basis of themselves as property-less and exploited proletariat. The class is not a club that people belong to or not. It is also not a category, in which people can be ordered in 'objective attributes'. Class originates as a movement, if the exploited use their productive relations against the exploitation.

This process is class.

The material conditions of production and the form of how the class fight against these conditions, are directly interrelated and always changes through the confrontations. Every collective activity, every struggle impels the capitalists and their 'little bosses' to appoint or dismiss new people (with different 'qualifications'), to introduce new technology, different 'teaching methods', wage systems or work organisation, to invite or deport immigrants. These changes within capitalist production also change the ways we can fight and gives a new face to the class struggle. Self employed long distance lorry drivers will find other ways to struggle than call-centre workers or care workers. New immigrants bring different experiences to the struggle from workers who have worked for the same company for years. The revolt will hit the capitalist accumulation more directly in a Maquiladoras factory tied in the world wide production chain as in a backyard workshop in Haywards Heath that is only locally economically active.

Revolutionary initiative has to be based on these concrete material conditions and the already existing organisational endeavours of the class, if we intervene in struggle. The usual organisational suggestions, valid for all sectors, points in time and situations of struggle, like those made by parties, workers councils or syndicalist unions can only hinder the self-movement of the class.

Class struggle is in very few cases a 'attack on capitalism', but rather struggle against concrete exploitative situations. It does not require the unity of the exploited, but rather in itself, tackles the hierarchy between the workers. The divisions and splits within the proletariat is re-created daily through the ways and means of capitalist production. It often comes to confrontation between workers, if the varying positions of workers in the production process is attacked along with the attack on the organisation of work. The possibility of breaking out of the divisions, the chance of real change can only be found in these struggles.

In confrontations most unions use the slogan "unity of all the exploited" in order to get the conflict under control or to stifle it: "We can only fight, if everybody joins in, but not everyone is joining in... There are so many differences between the workers, so we need a strong union organisation here... You can't beat up the headmaster, he is also just a wage dependant..." Those parts of the proletariat who are fundamentally attacking the work and the resulting hierarchies and divisions are at the forefront of driving the process forward.

We have to support even those struggles that are against another part of the proletariat: The struggle of school kids, if it has to be enforced against the orderly parents and teachers; the revolt of black factory workers, if their foreman stands against them; the strike of skilled workers, if they can't stop unskilled workers from strike breaking; the self-organised women in the factory, if they would be sabotaged by the male union.

Within these daily confrontations we look for the tendencies that do not let themselves be absorbed by capitalist development, but that burst open and go beyond it. These tendencies can seldom be clearly recognised by their 'external form' of struggle: the stated demands, the 'official' leaders, the questions of whether a conflict is peaceful or violent, initially says very little about the 'revolutionary content' of the struggle. The strugglers may experience less collective power and liberation in a union institutionalised general strike for 15 percent more wages, than in a wildcat strike for 2 percent.

Whether revolutionary tendencies of self liberation from the existing relations of production/learning/living arise in the struggles depends upon whether the strugglers

* find forms of self organisation, that bring forth new collective relationships, and within the struggle undermine the hierarchical divisions of labour.
* take possession of the means of production in such a way that they can no longer be used as a means of enforcing work, but rather become means of abolishing work.
* break out of the divisions of everyday work such as professional and language groups, department, housing estates and company walls etc.
* hit capital and the state through the struggle and so can be an example of workers power for other proletariats.

4 Tendencies

The chance of overthrowing capitalism can not be explained through isolated struggles or movements. Historical changes of the ways that we produce this society, i.e. how we are exploited in capitalism, does not result automatically, or through a plan of the exploited class, but through the class struggle and the contradictions of capital. The development of capital has limits: the struggle of the class does not only change the social mode of production, through that it also creates the conditions for a world wide revolution. We have to reveal these conditions in the current social changes make them the starting point of struggle. Here is a rough example:

Crisis

Asia, until 1996 the promised land of capital, that dreamed of everlasting boom on the backs of a compliant proletariat, has had it's bubble burst in the last few years. In Indonesia the rage of the proletariat broke out in flames. In Russia, where the new businessmen and old 'soviet' company chairmen are making big money, while many workers are not getting any wage at all, and so are continually going on strike, bankruptcy threatens. In the 80s the IMF and the World Bank let Central and Latin America off their debt, in order to improve the exploitation conditions. Today millions of dollars have to be pumped into the region, just to make sure the currency does not totally crash.

The basis of this crisis does not lie, as defenders of capitalism often maintain, in adventure capital speculation, faulty management or corrupt governments. These explanations are only there to raise the hope that the crisis can be overcome through a 'better policy'. The causes of crisis is not reformable. It is caused by the reactions of the workers against the exploitation and the consequential sharpening of the contradictions of capitalist relations of production.

The crisis of capital is the crisis of valorisation: that for the exploitation of the workers, the invested capital does not bring enough profit, that is needed for the exploitation process.[17] Strikes, working slowly, refusing new work models and enforcement of better living standards, without consideration for the internal deficit or company benchmarks, leads to sinking profits.

If capital can not break these workers (re)actions and impose increased exploitation, it increasingly goes looking for other regions with better valorisation conditions - which is increasingly difficult, as there almost no regions left today where the people don't know what capitalism means. Or else the ruling class try to buy time needed for the enforcement of new exploitation conditions, but taking out more credit, or with financial speculation.

This does not succeed for them - when the profit from the increased production doesn't cover the credit - it ends in a crash, like we have seem recently in Asia, Russia and Latin America. That shows that today's 'Globalisation' is not a sign of the power of capital, but primarily that it globalises its crisis.

Struggles and Confrontations

Uprisings in the last few years like the Chiapas-Mexico after 1994 and in Indonesia 1998, daily strikes in the (newly-) industrialised Asian states like China, South Korea etc and protest movements in the boom countries of Latin America: that are struggles by workers in the new development centres, whose increasing demands come up against the results of the worldwide capitalist exploitation.

The question is whether these class movements widen out and radicalise or whether they let themselves, due to the crisis, be bound up into a new development-focused dictatorship. After the exploitation model of the east block toppled, we find ourselves facing a fairly open situation.

The strikes of the miners in Russia and Romania and the uprising in Albania in 1997 are just the strongest examples of confrontation by workers, who don't want to let themselves be a cheep labour force for a new elite or western investors.

The strikes in UPS and General Motors in the USA and of the Spanish and French transport workers are examples of more openly led class confrontation in the capitalist metropolises. Apart from that, the situation seems to be one of a blockade: there are almost no struggles against the increasing stress of work, but also that capitalism, is not able to implement any new profitable exploitation regimes by its attacks.[18]

There can't really be any talk of a global struggle. Many struggles start from a position of weakness: company closures, defending against deteriorations etc.. Many confrontations take on nationalist or of other forms of violence within the working class.

The New Crisis Regime

The ruling class tries to use sharper state measures against the proletariat to solve the situation of crisis and blockade. In the European Metropolises these attacks are mediated by the 'socialist' and social democrat governments. These governments try to solve the blockade in the direction of 'more work - less money' by increased pressure on both working and unemployed proletariat. By doing this the 'labour parties' play on their having good relations with the union apparatus and pull together for the implementation of 'more work'.

The instrument of the state against the class struggle has also been modernised on a worldwide level: In the face of the crisis, the IMF has to make even clearer to the credit dependant governments, that they can only get more credit, if they enforce intensified exploitation against the local workers. In the EU, member states no longer have the possibility, with the new unified currency, the Euro, to avoid the struggles in their lands by currency manipulation.[19] So the ruling class is having to challenge the struggles to a greater extent than before, and seize hold of the workers and their work conditions in order to lower the cost of wages, extend the work time etc. The immigration conditions for workers from non-EU countries are further intensified. Workers are supposed to immigrate as cheep labour in the wished for amounts, but otherwise should be available for exploitation in the various regions of investment from the Ukraine to Morocco.

Besides some 'welfare state measures', the ruling class [20] have recently had only the most brutal of all state deeds left, to solve the class confrontation. The was in Yugoslavia in 1999 shows a new quality of the crisis regimes: The left governments sold the bombing as a humanitarian action and, NATO wanted to demonstrate, with this ideological motivation, their ability to reduce every spot on this earth to rubble.

Above all the war had an enormous effect on the class situation in the Balkans:

* The bombs on the Serbian big industrial plants managed to push through what the Serbian regime had not managed after years of attacks: The fastest mass redundancies since the Treuhand.[21] The 600,000 workers whose firms were flattened by the bombing, will probably never now come together again in their old work groups, in which they fought for such a long time against wage reductions and redundancies. The war created a dispersed labour force, the basis for the intensification of exploitation, as we can see, for example, from the new work from VW or the Italian outsourced textile fleapits in Bosnia.

* The struggle of students and workers against the repression and 'welfare state politics' of the Serbian state, has for the time, being, become side-tracked down democratic-nationalistic lines, as a result of the war.

* In Kosovo millions became separated from their land and occupations and had to flee. Many of them, whether 'Albanian' or 'Serbian' have to work somewhere else, often as low paid competitors to the indigenous workers.

* The new 'ethnic' borders and the selective EU policies of 'rebuilding' the profitable regions like Croatia, Slovenia, and now maybe Montenegro separate and favour certain regions, thereby creating the basis for new nationalistic violence within the working class.

* The Balkans are under military occupation. In this region, characterised by the mobility of the workers, is now controlled by NATO troops and UN organisations, who are the ones who now do the moving around. When the Albanian population armed themselves in 1997 and brought vast areas of land out of state control, the 'Blue-helmets'[22] didn't venture into the country. Today Albania is a NATO base.

The Yugoslavian war was a sign for the proletariat world wide: if we can't solve the crisis through rationalisation measures and work discipline, we still have a few bombing arguments for you. The exploited class have to get into the offensive in the coming struggle, otherwise the ruling class, in their desperate search for a way out of the crisis, will use the conflicts such as between North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan etc at a reason for a war against the workers.

Proletarianisation [23]

In recent years, Capital had got stronger in the 'three continents' (Africa, Asia and Latin America) and has really gone after Asia and Latin America, because it has the hopes of realising higher profits there. The construction of industry is only possible because there - especially in Asia - millions of people leave the country for the city, leave their piece of land and have to sell their labour force to the factory boss or corporation boss. They have had enough of the traditional land based forms of exploitation and expect betterment for themselves from the wage work and live in the city - information, consumer goods, chances of more mobility...

This proletarianisation means that the experiences of workers in Kuala Lumpur, Kapstadt, Gaza, Sao Paulo, Lyon and Gelsenkirchen increasingly run in parallel: factory work, computer entry, measures to combat rebellions, democratic rule - we have to put up with similar conditions. Moreover, millions of workers migrate in the oil regions, the industrial zones, in the construction sites and in the households of this earth, fleeing from the situation in there regions of decline and/or on the search for a better life. They are part of the global co-operation and offer us the possibility of exchanging experiences and learning from the struggles in other regions of the world.

In Asia and Latin America the increase of paid work for women has provide many women with their own income. Moreover the refusal of women to refuse to graft away as unpaid and isolated housewives, drives forward the socialisation of housework. It is doubtful as to whether the work at a McJob is actually more pleasant than the home and hearth, however it takes them out of the isolation of the house or the farm plot and creates better conditions to fight together against exploitation and sexist laws. The crisis of housework undermines the old gender division of labour, for without female house work, you're gonna get pretty crap miners. The gender relations are in flux, because the new jobs do not prop up and reproduce the fixed roles and rigid divisions that have existed up to now. In many of the new jobs the old gender divisions tend to be superseded and that changes the gender relations entirely. Similar experiences simplify - together with the new technological possibilities of worldwide communication - the exchange and co-ordination of struggle.

And: The defence of individual handicrafts or small pieces of land in view of the proletarianisation tendency often means nothing more than then defence of poverty and hardship. Proletarianistaion means, more and more being dependant on the work of millions of others, in order to be able to set the means of production going. Through the increased introduction of machines, work is often no longer individual skill or ability.

Through this we see other producers less and less as a mere 'function', who stands in contrast to ourselves by being able shoe our horse, or find the right herbs against our illnesses (so represent that function that we need), but rather simply a person, with similar skilled or unskilled abilities, like ourselves.

That is not only the prerequisite for increased capitalist exploitation and competition, but also for a global revolution, not to liberate the work, but to destroy it - for a class free society of free individuals.

Flexibilisation

After the world wide factory struggles of the 60s and 70s the relations in production have changed enormously. In order to break up of the core of militant workers in the industrial countries and intensify the exploitation, new computer based technologies and new forms of work organisation (e.g. group work) were introduced in the factories. Whole sectors e.g. in administration, maintenance and cleaning have been outsourced by large companies. Thought the attacks on the power of the workers, the companies can lower the wages, i.e. the labour costs. From the same reason subcontractors are given whole branches of production and so the number of workers in factories is driven down. Using temporary agency workers, temporary contracts etc new hierarchies of wages and contract terms are introduced, to further divide the workers. That has been made possible, because at the same time more people were trying to escape from the 40-hour-normal-working-week. From then on they keep themselves above water by working hear and there, or by using the state benefits and cash in hand work.

One the one hand this means that we have much more varying experiences today. Lots of workers have worked in a few different sectors and can be 'flexible' in how they organised their work and entertainment. They have worked in other countries, learned languages, built up contacts and got to know different forms of struggles. Many have tried out the beginnings of self organisation far away from the family, state benefits and unions. This could be the basis for a new struggle, that is characterised by mobility, stores of experiences for different exploitation situations and little respect for a career for life.

On the other side we need to put up with the insecurity, the so-called precarious work conditions - part time, temp-agency, fixed term contracts... many of us are forced to always hunt around for whatever jobs, that further shrink our control over our own lives. And, the pressure to work was increased: by wage cuts, by raising social contributions such as health insurance[24] etc. that always leads to more "working poor", and by direct pressure from the Benefits Agency or the Job Centre, who use the threat of cutting, or totally stopping, benefits if you don't take a shit job or 'training scheme'.

Here in Germany the red-green government has seriously taken on the reconstructing the welfare state: Compulsory training schemes for young people are already running, other plans are still in the wings: further cuts to benefits and other outcomes through the introduction of a guaranteed income, the tying of unemployment money to neediness - so no longer as insurance, where you supposedly get back the cash you have paid in at some point, the introduction of forced labour for those who refuse work etc..[25] All these developments have contributed to a weakening of workers struggles in the core industrial sectors in the last few years.[26]

The outsourcing has also lead to increased significance of the communication and transport sectors. Especially through the Just-in-time production, where the suppliers have to supply their components in an exact time to the assembly line, the production chain has become extremely susceptible to malfunctioning. The strikes of HGV drivers in France and Spain, the car suppliers Johnson Controls and the parcel deliverers UPS in the USA very quickly brought the lines in the factories to a stand still, because the parts were missing. The new production relations has made capitalism more vulnerable!

5 Revolution

In the last two years is has become clear in all corners and ends of the world: capitalism has not triumphed, it is in crisis. The current crisis shows that capitalism is not a superior social form, that the free market is a liberal fantasy and that the political class only seem be have the possibility to be able to predict and determine social developments.

Times of crisis are times of radical social change, of changes within a exploitative society. In these times the searching and questioning after a different social perspective becomes louder from all sides, struggles and confrontations take place with a new intensity. Therein lies the possibility of the class finding a common ,liberating answer within the struggle.

If the revolutionary perspective fails, the crisis will be the beginning of a new exploitation regime. The ruling class has to enforce an increased expansion of capital by squeezing the workers, until the pips squeak. Our role is to emphasis, in the discussion within the coming class confrontations, that capitalism and crisis are inseparably connected to one another, that the effects of the ever intensifying crisis cannot be overcome through 'scrimping and saving', but through the destruction of this absurd system.

Communism and Revolution

Some of the world wide tendencies described give hope to these changing times and are signs that the exploited class can, through their struggles, change the world and create a different one. The class struggle does not only intensify the capitalist contradictions, it also changes the conditions under which we produce our lives: we work more and more closely together; we are less and less directly dependant on ploughing our fields or selling our products; productive technologies are no longer concentrated in the metropolis; ever more wealth is created (disregarding which sort), while ever less labour time is necessary for the production of particular goods,[27] production is ever more dependant on common knowledge, the communication and co-operation of millions of workers worldwide.

The coming movement of the working class will be situated within these conditions. It will decide whether in the future, the increasing social productivity will be directed against us in the form of capitalist machinery. Or whether we use our productive collectivity as weapons in the struggles and as the basis of communism, a society without exploitation and drudgery.

Communism is neither some far-off utopia or a planned out society, but is part of the struggle, in which the existing mode of production is changed, new relations and new needs arise and the means are appropriated for the fulfilment of those needs. The process will get violent if those who profit from the existing relations, fight back against those who have had enough. The revolution won't be some power coup, no taking over the power of the state.

The existing organ of state violence will be destroyed, but the deciding question of the struggle is whether the producers appropriate in this process the conditions of production in a way, that makes the survival of a state or capitalist control un-necessary and impossible. Whether they lead the struggles through self-organisation and thereby create the basis for a society in which our needs are placed in the centre and decide for ourselves how we meet those needs.

In the revolutionary process the basis of the divisions of labour, company, gender and 'international', must be demolished and the knowledge of the production and the means to make it automatic must be socialised. Only then can the struggles create being together without mediation through institutions, identities, money and machinery to become in practice a society of free individuals.

... or the Wretchedness of Reformism?

When the crisis and confrontation comes to a head and the search for a revolutionary movement becomes ever more pressing, the reformists from the left try everything to diffuse the situation. Many fighters against neo-liberalism want to sell us the old welfare state as a benevolent papa and they want to take action against the evil world market together with the state and the unions. In the fight against fascism, the violence of the state is happily overlooked, the schools or universities are accepted, so long as there are not fascists running around there.

Instead of making an end to the misery of work, much of the left calls for fair distribution of work or even demand more of it. Guaranteed income and other 'give-us-crumbs' demands turn us into solitary victims, who are supposed to beg the nation state for higher benefits or whatever other 'rights'.
The red-green government builds on the fact that the left controlled protests give them fitting ideas for their crisis management: guaranteed income, kombilohn[28] etc. protects the workers in times of short McJobs, the 'work for all' wailing creates the atmosphere for various work programmes. The youth should look for their future perspectives in the sweat shops, the unemployed be thankful for their new low-wage-daily-life... The 'Autonome' in times of crisis unpack an Leninism that already smells of decay: the victims of the social 'exclusion' should unite behind easily understandable demands and little by little become accustomed to a supposed revolutionary consciousness. Along the lines of the slogan 'follow us, we know the way to fight'.

6 Revolutionary struggle - organisation of the revolutionaries

Clearly - the movement, the offensive struggles are missing in our region. So we have to ask all the more, how can we bring forward revolution? If the revolutionary movement is weak, it is not because there is no political organization, strong union or communist party. The origins of the weakness lie in the actual conditions within the sphere of exploitation. We have to ask why the exploited do not find a militant, liberating expression of their productive power in this current situation. We have to find those situations where this defensive position can be broken up. Therefore, we need revolutionary organizing.

Revolutionary organizing has to support the self-liberation of the exploited. It cannot take the form of mass organizations which go out on demonstrations pretending to represent the demands of workers, students, etc. There cannot be a "revolutionary policy" within union and political frameworks because it is not the "issues" or "leadership" of unions or political organizations that makes them reformist. The whole character of these representing bodies makes them reformist from the start. The attempt to overcome the divisions within capitalist production through "grassroots organizing of other workers" in "all-encompassing" structures (neighborhood-centers, rank-and-file-groups, etc.) or under generalised demands, will also, sooner or later, end up in the politics of representation. The organizing of the class can only be the result of the struggles within the capitalist organization of work, in firms, universities and schools. Only in these attacks on the actual divisions the organizing can be all-encompassing. The organizing of the class struggle only takes place through and within the actual collective struggles. All attempts to maintain it beyond that, end up as institutions.

Revolutionary organising is not "organising of other workers" but of revolutionaries who know their way in the sphere of exploitation and together look for tendencies of a revolutionary movement. Their relation to other exploited workers is neither "tactical" - as between functionaries and a revolutionary subject - nor "enlightening". We know that we can only liberate ourselves in those struggles where the exploited destroy everyday-capitalism and capitalist relations between people. We cannot instigate struggles but we can summarize the most advanced discussions, the weak points of capitalist control and the critique the workers. And we can generalise these experiences and circulate them within the sphere of exploitation. The relation between revolutionaries and workers is that of a collective process: where is the possibility of workers' power and self- liberation in the daily experience of exploitation?

What we have to do

Firstly, we need to take the actual conditions of class struggle, the current changes in the world as the starting point.

* Where does a changing organization of the exploitation, of the organization of work, technology, etc. lead to the weakening of workers' power and where can we see weak points in the capitalist command?

* Which effects do these changes have on the qualification, the migration and mobility of workers and the labour-market? What is the role of the state in this context?

* What do the workers, students, etc. do about this situation, what do they discuss? Where do forms of organizing and chances already exist that they can use in the struggle?[29]

This means to analyse the restructuring of capital and the new composition of the working class. In our region (Ruhrgebiet, Germany) we need to look at what happened to the leftovers of the heavy- and metal-industry and which new sectors and production chains have arisen.

We need to find out, whether the skilled worker in the coal- and steel-industry or the home- and part time-worker will loose their central position and whether a new typical worker, highly mobile, working in the electronics sweatshops, outside-suppliers and "service companies" will develop. This investigation is necessary in order to understand the material basis for the upcoming class struggles.

Secondly, in actual struggles there is neither need for cheerleading nor for moralizing and patronizing but for information on self-organizing:

* Where could a struggle have the most material power, where could it interrupt the capitalist production and co-operation most effectively?

* What kind of experiences are there around certain management strategies (flexibilisation of working hours, teamwork, etc.)?

* What forms of organizing were developed by workers in similar situations?

* Where on the world are similar confrontations taking place?

In order to contribute to the workers' discussions and struggles we need to understand the issues of conflict in the different places of exploitation and listen to the workers there. In our region there were strikes by assembly workers at Opel Bochum, Turkish cleaners of railway cars and call centre-workers, which we could have responded to.

Thirdly, it is not enough to supply the right information for class struggle and apart from that stay passive observers. When we have an analysis of the situation we need to actively intervene in the struggles, offer a critique of them and support their revolutionary tendencies:

* How can a struggle be self-organized, how can the means of production be appropriated as means of struggle?

* How can a struggle widen out over the firm- or branch-limits without ending up in the hands of unions or other institutions?

* Where are hierarchies and divisions of the process of production being kept up? Where does the everyday division of work along gender, racism and qualification stay untouched?

* Where does the state ideology of war, racism, etc. catch on and how can that be substantially attacked?

For all this we need to get an inside view into the different relations of exploitation, and it is necessary be able to react immediately to worldwide changes. The relative silence in face of the war in Yugoslavia shows our weakness. We need to be able to circulate information on struggles in Korea and against social democratic/green party wars faster within the sphere of exploitation and to organize actions.

We will prepare for the upcoming struggles and build contacts outside of "our sectors of exploitation" in order to get away from the dependency on 'their' information apparatus.

In theoretical discussions we have to gain the ability to criticise the conditions radically and profoundly. We need to teach each other the practical abilities, from lay-outs to sit-downs, everything we need to take part in and intervene into the class struggles around us.

Notes

1 You can get a list of the texts from us - [email-]address at the end of the paper.
2 Capital is not merely a collection of "production circumstances" - of machines, work materials, labour force - that economics so often bores us with.
3 This work often only exists because capitalist exploitation exists - in order to make this possible: millions of car workers produce millions of cars, so millions of workers can drive to work, in order to produce entertaining articles, medicaments, holiday complexes in Majorca and soap operas, that draw us in during our 'free time', in order to forget the work i.e. to be fit for work again.
Thousands of job centre workers, hospital dogs bodies, research and administration workers also come along on the ride, to provide us with even more jobs, to inject us healthy or to research into new work. Millions of unemployed work at finding a new job - i.e. at avoiding it. Prison wardens, cops, soldiers and foremen carry out the disciplining of the worker themselves.
The 'organisation' of production is also absurd: the social production arranges itself over thousands of separately producing companies, through the division of production and circulation, mediated by money.
That also makes any amount of additional work: Various commodities are shipped twice round the globe, not because otherwise it would not get to a particular place, but because through the sale, despite a hundred times more transport workers, more profit is realised. In house building, most of the work arises because the workers of the different firms only have to do their own specific assignments. What do I care about co-ordinating with those working after me etc. (i.e. avoiding that they don't have any annoying extra problems created because I was not working with them in mind) if the boss is on my back to get to the next construction site.
4 The separation of the producers from the means of production can only be maintained, if the producers are confronted with ever more capital - in the form of machinery and co-operation with other workers. Earlier making twenty workers graft away with hand tools was sufficient, so today CNC-Machines and world wide production chains have to be implemented, in order to make proletarians to work 'efficiency' enough. See more in the section on Crisis.
5 For more detail on crisis see under 'tendencies'.
6 This is an attempt. We noticed in our discussion that we still have to go a bit further in order to be able to really explain: the changes within the classes, and the gender relations in the context of the development of, and the confrontations around, the social mode of production. Only if we know these developments as interrelations, can we point out the revolutionary tendencies that lie within them.
7 Gender also means limitations. Much work is still done in purely female or male departments. Only rarely does work allow for real and intensive relations, and moreover we can't really live out and enjoy our desires for closeness, openness etc, because we hide those desires behind the 'I'm a lad's lad and not gay' wall, or they get lost in the competition amongst women. In our 'free time' the other gender - normally one person - is supposed to remove our experienced absence of feeling and sensuality.
8 This was not an clear process: In the first factories in the 18th century, initially the women and children were exploited...
9 If, as in north Mexico or the development centres of China, mostly women are going into the factories and doing wage work, while men don't have a job, or do 'housework', then accordingly the gender relations change entirely.
10 Here the contradictory situation of women is particularly clear: After decades of being bound to both wage and house work, many women wan

by **American Dream** » Tue Feb 28, 2012 5:27 pm

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/20 ... sts-redux/

A TALE OF TWO TERRORISTS REDUX

by Guest Blogger Michael Kimmel from Sociological Images, Jul 27, 2011

Anders Behring Breivik has now joined the pantheon of homegrown domestic terrorists who have unleashed horror on their own countrymen. Sixteen years ago, Timothy McVeigh and other members of the Aryan Republican Army blew up the Murrah Office Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 of their own countrymen and women. It was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, and, indeed, until 9-11, the worst terrorist attack of any kind in our history. We know what Norwegians are going through; as Bill Clinton said, we “feel your pain.”

As pundits and policymakers search for clues that will help us understand that which cannot be understood, it may be useful to compare a few common elements between McVeigh and Breivik.

Both men saw themselves as motivated by what they viewed as the disastrous consequences of globalization and immigration on their own countries. Breivik’s massive tome, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, paints a bleak picture of intolerant Islamic immigrants engaged in a well-planned takeover of European countries in the fulfillment of their divine mission. His well-planned and coldly executed massacre of 94 of his countrymen was, as he saw it, a blow against the policies promoting social inclusion and a recognition of a diverse multicultural society promoted by the labor-leaning government.

McVeigh also inveighed against both multinational corporate greed and a society that had become too mired in multiculturalism to provide for its entitled native-born “true” Americans. In a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper, McVeigh, then a returning veteran of the first Gulf War, complained that the birthright of the American middle class had been stolen, handed over by an indifferent government to a bunch of ungrateful immigrants and welfare cheats. “The American dream,” he wrote “has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week’s groceries.”

McVeigh and Breivik both sought to inspire their fellow Aryan countrymen to action. After blowing up the federal building – home of the oppressive and unrepresentative government that had capitulated to the rapacious corporations and banks — McVeigh hoped that others would soon follow suit and return the government to the people. Breivik cared less about government and more about the ruination of the pure Norwegian culture, deliberately diluted in a brackish multiculti sea.

For the past five years, I’ve been researching and writing about the extreme right in both the United States and Scandinavia. I’ve interviewed 45 contemporary American neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Aryan youth, Patriots, Minutemen, and members of rural militias. I also read documentary materials in the major archival collections at various libraries on the extreme right. I then interviewed 25 ex-neo-Nazis in Sweden. All were participants in a government-funded program called EXIT, which provides support and training for people seeking to leave the movement. (This included twice interviewing “the most hated man in Sweden,” Jackie Arklof, who murdered two police officers during a botched bank robbery. Arklof is currently serving a life sentence at Kumla High Security prison in Orebro. To my knowledge, I’m the only researcher to date to have interviewed him as well as members of EXIT.)

I’ve learned a lot about how the extreme right understands what is happening to their countries, and why they feel called to try and stop it. And one of the key things I’ve found is that the way they believe that global economic changes and immigration patterns have affected them can be understood by looking at gender, especially masculinity. (Don’t misunderstand: it’s not that understanding masculinity and gender replaces the political economy of globalization, the financial crisis, or the perceived corruption of a previously pristine national culture. Not at all. But I do believe that you can’t understand the extreme right without also understanding gender.)

First, they feel that current political and economic conditions have emasculated them, taken away the masculinity to which they feel they are entitled by birth. In the U.S., they feel they’ve been emasculated by the “Nanny State” through taxation, economic policies and political initiatives that demand civil rights and legal protection for everyone. They feel deprived of their entitlement (their ability to make a living, free and independent) by a government that now doles it out to everyone else – non-whites, women, and immigrants. The emasculation of the native-born white man has turned a nation of warriors into a nation of lemmings, or “sheeple” as they often call other white men. In The Turner Diaries, the movement’s most celebrated text, author William Pierce sneers at “the whimpering collapse of the blond male,” as if White men have surrendered, and have thus lost the right to be free. As one of their magazines puts it:

As Northern males have continued to become more wimpish, the result of the media-created image of the ‘new male’ – more pacifist, less authoritarian, more ‘sensitive’, less competitive, more androgynous, less possessive – the controlled media, the homosexual lobby and the feminist movement have cheered… the number of effeminate males has increased greatly…legions of sissies and weaklings, of flabby, limp-wristed, non-aggressive, non-physical, indecisive, slack-jawed, fearful males who, while still heterosexual in theory and practice, have not even a vestige of the old macho spirit, so deprecated today, left in them.

Second, they use gender to problematize the “other” against whom they are fighting. Consistently, the masculinity of native-born white Protestants is set off against the problematized masculinity of various “others” – blacks, Jews, gay men, other non-white immigrants – who are variously depicted as either “too” masculine (rapacious beasts, avariciously cunning, voracious) or not masculine “enough” (feminine, dependent, effeminate). Racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, and homophobia all are expressed through denunciations of the others’ masculinity.

Third, they use it as a recruiting device, promising the restoration of manhood through joining their groups. Real men who join up will simultaneously protect white women from these marauding rapacious beasts, earn those women’s admiration and love, and reclaim their manhood.

American White Supremacists thus offer American men the restoration of their masculinity – a manhood in which individual white men control the fruits of their own labor and are not subject to the emasculation of Jewish-owned finance capital, a black- and feminist-controlled welfare state.

At present, I am working my way through 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, the 1,518 page manifesto written in London by Anders Behring Breivik (under the Anglicized name Andrew Berwick) in the months leading up to his attack. These same themes are immediately evident. (Quotes are from the document.)

(1) Breivik associates feminism with liberal, multicultural societies. He claims that feminism has been responsible for a gender inversion in which, whether in the media or the military, we see the “inferiority of the male and the superiority of the female.” As a result of this widespread inversion, the “man of today” is “expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.”

(2) Breivik spends the bulk of the document playing off two gendered stereotypes of Muslim immigrants in Europe. On the one hand, they are hyper-rational, methodically taking over European societies; on the other hand, they are rapacious religious fanatics, who, with wide-eyed fervor, are utterly out of control. In one moment in the video, he shows a little boy (blond hair indicating his Nordic origins), poised between a thin, bearded hippie, who is dancing with flowers all around him, and a bearded, Muslim terrorist fanatic – two utterly problematized images of masculinity. 3:58 in the video:

(3) In his final “call to arms” and the accompanying video, he offers photos of big-breasted women, in very tight T-shirts, holding assault weapons with the word “infidel” on it and some Arabic writing, a declaration that his Crusader army members are the infidels to the Muslim invaders. 9:02 in the video:

This initial, if sketchy, report from Oslo, and Breivik’s own documents, indicate that in this case, also, it will be impossible to fully understand this horrific act without understanding how gender operates as a rhetorical and political device for domestic terrorists.

These members of the far right consider themselves Christian Crusaders for Aryan Manhood, vowing its rescue from a feminizing welfare state. Theirs is the militarized manhood of the heroic John Rambo – a manhood that celebrates their God-sanctioned right to band together in armed militias if anyone, or any governmental agency, tries to take it away from them. If the state and capital emasculate them, and if the masculinity of the “others” is problematic, then only “real” white men can rescue the American Eden or the bucolic Norwegian countryside from a feminized, multicultural, androgynous immigrant-inspired melting pot.

————————

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook. He pioneered the study of masculinities and is routinely featured as a keynote speaker at academic and activist events. Michael has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. You can visit his website here.

by **American Dream** » Wed Feb 29, 2012 6:43 pm

The only way to break the apparently closed circle of power is by seeing that the transformation of power-to into power-over is a process which necessarily implies the existence of its opposite: fetishisation implies anti-fetishisation.

Most discussions of alienation (fetishism, reification, discipline, identification and so on) treat it as though it were an accomplished fact. They treat the forms of capitalist social relations as though they were established at the dawn of capitalism and will continue until capitalism is replaced by another mode of social organisation. In other words, existence is separated from constitution: the constitution of capitalism is located in the historical past, its present existence is assumed to be stable. Such a view can only lead to a deep pessimism.

If, however, we see the separation of doing and done not as an accomplished fact but as a process, then the world begins to change. The very fact that we speak of alienation means that alienation cannot be complete. In the words of Ernst Bloch, “alienation could not even be seen, and condemned of robbing people of their freedom and depriving the world of its soul, if there did not exist some measure of its opposite, of that possible coming-to-oneself, being-with-oneself, against which alienation can be measured” (Bloch 1964 (2), p. 113).iIf separation, alienation (etc) is understood as a process, then this implies that its course is not pre-determined, that the transformation of power-to into power-over is always open, always at issue. A process implies a movement of becoming, implies that that which is in process (alienation) is and is not. Alienation, then, is a movement against its own negation, against anti-alienation. The existence of alienation implies the existence of anti-alienation. The existence of power-over implies the existence of anti-power-over, or, in other words, the movement of emancipation of power-to.

That which exists in the form of its negation, that which exists in the mode of being denied, really exists, in spite of its negation, as the negation of the process of denial. Capitalism is based on the denial of power-to, of humanity, of creativity, of dignity: but that does not mean that these cease to exist. As the Zapatistas have shown us, dignity exists in spite of its own negation. It does not stand on its own, but exists in the only form in which it can exist in this society, as struggle against its own negation. Power-to exists too: not as an island within a sea of power-over, but in the only form in which it can exist, as struggle against its own negation. Freedom too exists, not in the way that liberals present it, as something independent of social antagonisms, but in the only way it can exist in a society characterised by relations of domination, as struggle against that domination.

The real, material existence of that which exists in (and against) the form of its own negation, is the basis of hope.

From:

"Change the World without taking Power "

by John Holloway

http://www.johnholloway.com.mx/2011/07/ ... ing-power/

by **American Dream** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 8:59 am

KROPOTKIN - THE COMING REVOLUTION

a 23' short film compiled from different articles and books of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin.
The film tries to give an introduction to the basic concepts of anarcho-communism.
the film is made in German language including English subtitles

by **American Dream** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 9:28 am

International Business Machines, and its president Thomas J. Watson, committed genocide by any standard. It was never about the antisemitism. It was never about the National Socialism. It was always about the money. Business was their middle name.

--Edwin Black , author of IBM and the Holocaust, The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, newly released in the Expanded Edition.

http://readersupportednews.org/news-sec ... documents/

Auschwitz survivor Leon Greenman displays his number tattoo.

by **American Dream** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 2:39 pm

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/co ... peta/5791/

Coca Cola Hired Spy Firm Stratfor to Investigate PETA

by Will Potter on February 27, 2012

Wikileaks Coca Cola Stratfor spyingCoca Cola hired the “global intelligence” spy firm Stratfor to investigate People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, according to company emails released by Wikileaks.

In a reply email, Stratfor’s vice president for counterterrorism and corporate security said: “The FBI has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I’ll see what I can uncover.”

The exchange is part of the 5 million Stratfor emails that Wikileaks promises to release in coming weeks. Stratfor, an intelligence firm that works closely with corporations and the government, has verified that company emails were stolen but refuses to say anything more.

In a June 2, 2009 email, Anya Alfano of Stratfor relays the intelligence request from Coca Cola (as background, Peta has protested Coca Cola for its involvement in animal testing):

From: Anya Alfano [mailto:anya.alfano@stratfor.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:56 AM
To: Fred Burton; scott stewart
Subject: Public Policy Question for Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola just sent me a long list of questions regarding PETA/Animal
Activism and the upcoming Olympics in Vancouver–I’ve pasted the
questions below. I’m not entirely clear on how much we can task the
public policy group at this point–is there any guidance you can give me
on that front? Coke has asked for a short teleconference with one of
our analysts to discuss this issue–is that something I could ask Kathy,
Bart or Joe to do, or would that be off the table at this point? Stick,
are these questions something that you have a handle on, if we aren’t
able to get info from the policy folks?

Any thoughts or guidance would be helpful. Thanks, Anya

Questions—
– How many PETA supporters are there in Canada?
– How many of these are inclined toward activism?
– To what extent will US-based PETA supporters travel to Canada to
support activism?
– What is PETA’s methodology for planning and executing activism?
(Understanding this better would certainly help us to recognize
indicators should they appear.)
– To what extent is PETA in Canada linked to PETA in the US or
elsewhere?
– To what extent are the actions of PETA in one country controlled by
an oversight board/governing body?
– To what extent could non-PETA hangers-on (such as anarchists or ALF
supporters) get involved in any protest activity?

In response, Fred Burton, which Random House describes as “one of the world’s foremost experts on security, terrorists, and terrorist organizations,” said the FBI has a classified file on PETA.

These emails reflect an ongoing pattern of surveillance and misinformation by the FBI, Stratfor, and corporations against animal rights and environmental groups. In fact, the Justice Department warned the FBI against wasting resources investigating PETA and other activist groups (the FBI refused to alter its policies). Also, the USDA has classified PETA as a terrorist threat.

As I have reported here previously, Stratfor is one of many private intelligence firms that have profited signficantly from post-9/11 “terrorism” hysteria. Stratfor and others, such as the Inkerman Group, are paid by corporations to identify business “threats,” including special interest groups, key activists, and legislation. It is a niche industry built upon fear: the business of risk mitigation depends upon the identification of a constant stream of threats.

Let’s step back and look at how Orwellian this has become:

-Corporations created the term “eco-terrorism,” and manufactured it as a national security threat.

-The FBI and homeland security got on board, labeling animal rights and environmental groups the “number one domestic terrorism threat.”

-Corporations hire other corporations to investigate this “threat.”

-In turn, intelligence firms like Stratfor consult with the FBI about the bureau’s own classified files.

It’s a cycle of fear that flows between corporations, counter-terrorism firms, and the FBI. It’s self-replicating and self-fulfilling, and a reflection of the erasure of all lines separating corporations and the state.

by **American Dream** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 9:18 pm

http://ssy.org.uk/2010/06/shitegeist/

Shitegeist

If you’re the kind of person who knows there’s a lot of problems in our society, and you’re looking for solutions for what to do about it, there’s a good chance you’ve found yourself here on our blog.

There’s also a good chance you might have come across something called the Zeitgeist Movement. If you have, and you’re attracted to the ideas they put forward, this article is our attempt to argue that Zeitgeist offers no real solutions to the economic and ecological crises that human civilisation is facing. In fact, quite the opposite: instead of explaining to people how we can change our society for the better, many of the ideas put forward in the Zeitgeist films have their origins in the far right and racist groups, and they’re ideas which are both crazy and useless.

The reason we’re doing this is because we know that Zeitgeist has been really influential on thousands of people who’ve seen it online, and because we think that is potentially really damaging to the attempts (which we’re part of) to build a mass movement capable of bringing fundamental change to the world. It deliberately tries to pitch itself as an appeal to people who have a basically left wing outlook, but the ideas it puts forward about our world as it is just now are not left wing at all.

Zeitgeist got started when a man called Peter Joseph (this apparently isn’t his real or full name, as he conceals his real identity) released a documentary called, amazingly enough, Zeitgeist (which is German for Spirit of the Times) in 2007. This film was stuck up on Google video, and quickly got loads of views. This was then followed by a sequel, Zeitgeist Addendum, the following year.

The first film is an amalgamation of conspiracy theories: first of all, about religion, making all kinds of claims about the origins of Christianity; then a large middle section about 9/11, asserting that there were no terror attacks and they were in fact carried out by the US government. The final section is probably the most important for us to examine as socialists, because it’s about money and finance. It argues that the world is dominated by a small elite who operate through control of international finance, the media and education. This elite deliberately enslaves the rest of the world by keeping us permanently in debt to the banks by the way they operate the money system.

The second film then goes on to build on these economic themes, and argues for an alternative: eliminating the profit system, and creating what they call a ‘Resource Based Economy,’ where everyone in the world has access to what they need to survive for free by use of advanced technology. In many ways this society they describe is what socialism or communism would really be like in the future. The problem is that Zeitgeist specifically describes itself as a non-political movement, and offers no real plans for how to create the society. However, in the absence of actually describing itself as left wing or right wing, Zeitgeist has taken on a lot of ideas from some very dodgy sources.

Racism, anti-Semitism and the modern world

To understand where some of the ideas in Zeitgeist come from, we need to have a look first at their history.

From the 15-16th centuries onwards, the world began to be rapidly transformed by the technological and social advances that allowed European peoples to expand around the world and create colonies and empires. Explorers from European powers like Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and England began to move into Africa, the Americas and Asia. Through the slave trade and the exploitation of mines and plantations in these new colonies, European traders became rich.

Following this, the newly enriched classes began to use their money to kickstart the industrial revolution in Europe. They also grew tired of the fact that in European societies power was still held by people who were born into the aristocracy, when they were rich and felt they should also be powerful. This led to revolutions in France and the US, and the beginning of the modern world. Over the course of the 18th-19th centuries, the pace of change increased rapidly, with huge numbers of people leaving the land and farm work to move to massive new cities and work in the factories. Traditional sources of authority and power were undermined, and many people were left confused and angered by a world that they didn’t recognise any more.

The 19th century saw the development of a mass socialist movement, as working class people began to realise that if economic and political power was taken out of the hands of the capitalists then society could be run for the benefit of all.

But other groups, particularly middle class people who had no attraction to the ideas of socialism, began to seek other explanations for why the world had changed and what to do about it. Many of these people felt that they didn’t have a place in modern society, but they also didn’t want to go back to medieval times. Unable to see the reality that the world had been changed by huge economic and social forces beyond the control of any individual, they came to blame what was wrong in society on some kind of small secret elite who were controlling things for their own benefit.

Zeitgeist founder Peter Joseph

People talked about secret societies like the Illuminati or the Freemasons dominating politics and government from behind the scenes. Crucially, these ideas were tied into the idea, which was hugely powerful in the late 19th and early 20th century, that the world was fundamentally divided along racial lines. Many of these people believed there was a plot to undermine the power and dominance of “the white race”.

Racism is a set of ideas that takes older prejudices, and systematically makes them into a worldview. Contrary to what most folk think, it emerged specifically in the modern world, as a way of explaining and understanding what was happening as global society began to rapidly change. Most racialised views of different peoples made their victims out to be inferior, such as the claim black people are stupid and lazy for example.

But Jews had a long history in Christian thought as being thought of as demonic enemies. They were blamed for the killing of Jesus, and in the medieval world were regarded as clever and dangerous because they took part in trade and money lending. In the modern world Jews came to be understood by many people as some kind of absolutely monstrous Other, a huge evil threat. This was of course total nonsense, but it was a useful idea for those who couldn’t face the reality of what was going on in capitalist society, and for those in power who didn’t want people to see that reality.

Anti-Semitic ideas became to be encapsulated in the idea that there was a world Jewish conspiracy, which aimed to establish a global government under their control. They would do this by their international control of banks and money, as well as control of the media and education.

An anti-Semitic cartoon shows the crazy idea
of a global Jewish conspiracy

These ideas came together in a book called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This was an anti-Semitic forgery put together in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, which claimed to be documents of meetings and plans of the Jewish elite to dominate the world. These documents were circulated around the world, and became particularly important after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Many, who were fooled into thinking the Protocols were real, used them as evidence that the revolution was part of the Jewish conspiracy, and that the Bolsheviks aimed to advance it. This was a huge part of why Hitler hated socialists and communists so much. But the same ideas also had massive circulation in the leading government and powerful circles of US politics, and were argued by many right wing US Congressmen and other political figures.

If it has ever confused you why right wing conspiracy nutters say they hate banks and big business, and then go on to say they hate communists and socialists who run the world, this is why. For them, communism and socialism are part of a wider conspiracy by a tiny elite to control the world. The aim of this group, they think, is to create a one world government. Whether they talk about Jews openly, or whether they restrict what they’re saying to names like “international bankers”, the origins of this idea go back to the Protocols and the mad ideas of 19th century anti-Semites.

The Protocols are a straight up work of fiction. But the ideas they put forward have surfaced again and again. Since World War Two it’s been increasingly difficult for racist groups to openly advocate anti-Semitism, because these ideas saw their ultimate expression in the slaughter of the Holocaust. Even before this, many didn’t talk openly about Jews, but instead about “international bankers”, the “secret cabal” who ran the world.

The problem with all this for socialists is obvious: financial capitalists really do hold a huge amount of power and influence over government policies, and the international ruling class does co-ordinate its actions secretly and conspiratorially to make sure that capitalism keeps working and that profits are maximised.

However, these things aren’t the result of a plot of a small group of evil men. The fact is that capitalism is a self-sustaining economic system with a life of its own. It doesn’t really matter who is at the top as long as somebody is. People find it hard to grasp the reality of the way our economic and social system works, because it’s complex and hard to understand. Put simply, capitalists don’t want to just get rich and sit back. They want to find ways they can invest profits to create more profits and keep the economy growing. That’s the driving force, not the evil desires of a small group of men. But it’s hard to get your head round that, and many people find it much easier to blame an identifiable group they can easily conceptualise, like Jews.

The 19th century German socialist August Bebel once said that “Anti-Semitism is the Socialism of fools,” because it tried to understand the causes of real problems resulting from capitalism, and instead blamed them on Jews. Throughout the 20th century, many right wingers began to see the dominance of banks and financial capital as evidence of a Jewish conspiracy. for them, this was evidence of the traditional prejudice that Jews were evil, manipulative money lenders bent on power and control.

The real reason that finance has become more and more dominant is that it’s increasingly difficult for capitalists to invest their money in something that produces stuff (like a factory) and make their money back, because after 200 odd years of capitalism the world is full of factories and stuff -- so it’s harder and harder to make new products, like cars or furniture or tools say, and make a profit from it. So instead capitalists put more of their money into banks, financial investments etc. There’s no secret to it -- it’s just about making money, and what’s the best way to go about it.

Blaming others for your problems

Zeitgeist and anti-Semitic ideas

In a speech on youtube, Peter Joseph says that:

“If I find someone who’s in the KKK who has a great perspective on global finance, I’m not going to dismiss them just because they’re a racist and a bigot, I’m going to read what it is. I don’t dismiss anybody because of their beliefs because I understand that beliefs are a product of cultural conditioning.”

I find this particular quote very revealing, because it’s absolutely clear that many of the conspiracy ideas put forward in the first film do ultimately derive from the far right and anti-Semitism. Contrary to what Peter thinks, it’s very hard to take these ideas in isolation from the overarching worldview they’re actually part of.

Zeitgeist argues that banks create fictional money in order to keep us all in debt and to allow them to manipulate the economy for their own secretive control. This is at heart a restatement of the idea that there is a group of manipulative money lenders running the world. While Zeitgeist calls this group “international bankers”, the original understanding was, of course, that these people were the Jews.

I’m sure that defenders of the film would argue that they are not anti-Semites, and that the film at no point names “the jews” as responsible for the issues they raise, which is true. However, this defence falls down when you look at some of the people the film quotes prominently and approvingly. Several figures from the early 20th century are quoted for what they have to say about “international bankers.” These people were out and out racists, and we should have no doubt about who they mean when they talk about “international bankers.”

A good example of this is Louis McFadden, a racist US Congressman from 1915-23. He’s quoted at length in Zeitgeist, with his claims that “A world banking system was being set up here… a superstate controlled by international bankers acting together to enslave the world for their own pleasure…” A quote of his they don’t use “in the United States today, the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.” He was absolutely a product of his time, the height of scientifically and politically accepted racism, and his economic views can’t be separated from his views about Jews.

What Zeitgeist doesn’t tell you is that money is just a representation of the value created by the people that do the work in an economy. Wealth comes originally from human labour. At your work, the work you do for a part of your day makes the boss enough money to pay your wages, and the rest becomes profits. But capitalism wants to use this money to invest and make more money. The state and its economic policy isn’t a conspiracy to make a few people richer, but instead it tries to create the conditions to allow more profit to be extracted and invested. This is a part of the system we live under, and isn’t to do with a few evil individuals running things for their own benefit. In a system like ours, there will always be people at the top administering things. The point is that the system needs to be changed.

Traditional anti-Semitic accusations are given new life, this time again blamed on “international bankers” in other parts of the film as well. A prominent claim in the Protocols is that Jews deliberately start wars for their own profit. In the film, it’s argued that throughout the 20th century the US has used faked incidents, or deliberate provocations to generate excuses to enter wars, the latest being, they claim, 9/11. Now of course, there is a grain of truth in this. Some of the incidents they talk about, like the Gulf of Tonkin which was used as a pretext for the US to enter fully into the Vietnam war, probably were faked. But the film then goes on to claim that the US never intended to win the war in Vietnam, their sole interest being in the continuation of the war for profit. While wars do of course generate a lot of profit for manufacturers of weapons and war materials, the idea that the huge effort the US put into to trying to keep their own puppets in power in Vietnam was never intended to win is a joke.

However, these views of war fit in with what Peter Joseph thinks the ultimate aim of the elite is: a one world government. This is a time honoured phantom fear of the conspiracy far right, that in fact all governments in the world are being controlled by a shadowy elite behind the scenes. The film argues that the Cold War was a distraction, and that the “international bankers” controlled both sides (reinventing the old myth that the Russian Revolution was just part of a Jewish plot for global domination.) But in a world where China and Russia have made huge steps to build their own geopolitical power throughout Asia, and where countries like Brazil, Turkey, Iran or Venezuela are all actively engaged in trying to build their own international power at the expense of the US, the idea that we are headed for a global government any time soon is laughable. It is a crazy fantasy that can only be believed if you accept false evidence.

The film also talks about control of education and the media to keep people stupid and easily manipulated. Again, there’s clearly a grain of truth in this, but when coupled with a conspiracy worldview it becomes a re-telling of one of the most powerful anti-Semitic myths: that the Jews control the media, and fill our heads with propaganda.

Jewsians in the media

The point here is that Zeitgeist deals with issues that have some substance to them. If you follow many leading conspiracy theorists, people like Alex Jones for example, it’s often the case that they identify things that have some reality to them. But because they can’t get their heads round the difficult concepts of what’s really going on in a complex, unpredictable global social and economic system, they look for individuals or groups to blame. They try to give the people responsible a face.

Peter Joseph, in making the first Zeitgeist film, has clearly used as much of his source material these kinds of people, and fails to identify the real reasons for the problems that the human race faces. But what’s worrying about this is that it’s packaged in a way to make it look left wing, to appeal to people who are looking for genuine solutions to capitalism and its problems. Instead of finding them, those attracted to Zeitgeist are actually being sold ideas that originate in racism and all the lies and myths of anti-Semitism.

The risks of this are there for all to see if you look back at the history of fascism. Mussolini, and Oswald Mosley who founded the British Union of Fascists, both started out involved with the left. However, they were later to move away from this and become fascists. Without clear understanding of what capitalism and what it does, it’s easy to fall back on simpler ideas that blame the wrong people. A case in point is US conspiracy theorist and all round nutcase Lyndon LaRouche, who also is quoted approvingly in Zeitgeist.

Scary mentalist: Lyndon LaRouche

LaRouche is a prolific writer and several times candidate for President of the US. He’s also the leader of a violent cult which has been implicated in several deaths of people who got involved with it. Like fascists before him, LaRouche started out involved with the left, but became more and more right wing as the years went by, and now peddles anti-Semitic lies, as well as approvingly quoting Saddam Hussein in his publications. One case of how dangerous his movement can be is the mysterious death of Jeremiah Duggan who got involved with them, but at a conference revealed himself to be Jewish. After a panicked phone call to his Mum, he was found dead the next morning. The LaRouchites claim he committed suicide.

Now to be clear, I’m not claiming that the Zeitgeist movement has killed people, or that Peter Joseph is a Hitler in waiting. What I’m saying is that if you’re looking to do something about changing society, starting off with folk who think quoting fascists, racists and anti-Semites as part of their case isn’t the way to go.

Zeitgeist 2: Star Trek solutions

If you try and engage Zeitgeist activists about these issues, in all likelihood they will say something along the lines of “Well, we don’t promote the first film any more, we’ve moved on to new things.” Sometime between the making of the first and second films, Peter Joseph came into contact with Jacques Fresco, a designer and engineer who has a series of plans for improving society which he calls the Venus Project. Zeitgeist now describes itself as “the activist wing of the Venus Project.” Privately, some are trying to distance themselves from some of the material in the first film, but officially it is still promoted on the main page when you google Zeitgeist, and remains most people’s introduction to the movement.

The Venus Project advocates what it calls a “resource based economy”, arguing that there are enough resources in the world to provide everyone with a decent standard of living. The problem they argue is that capitalism deliberately makes resources scarce in order to make a profit. So far this is definitely something socialists could agree with. The project goes on to present a whole series of exciting looking sci fi style drawings of what the high tech future they propose will look like, which are strangely retro and remind you of concept art for 60s sci fi shows.

Thunderbirds are Go!: the future according to the Venus Project

I absolutely support the idea of a society with no money where all your basic needs are met for free. That’s the future I’m fighting for. But the way that we go about this in SSY and the SSP is to try and build change in the here and now, trying to win people to socialist ideas by making concrete changes to peoples lives now. If I were to go out on the street today and start handing out leaflets that said “We want to abolish money and make everything free” then most people would dismiss us as crazy. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to just wish a new society into existence; it has to be built patiently by the collective co-operation and work of masses of people.

The Zeitgeist movement don’t seem to agree. They argue that all our problems can be solved by scientists, and explicitly say they reject politics or a political movement. In effect what they argue for is a technocracy, at least at first. That means that what happens in society will be determined by a scientific elite. Jacques Fresco argues that politicians now are incapable of implementing solutions because they don’t have the right expertise, and only say what they think will get them elected. But the solution to this isn’t a society run by “experts”, but the implementation of mass democracy, and the opening up of education and the media to allow people to develop themselves. I think this is probably what Zeitgeist members would eventually like to see, but the point is, to make it possible it’s necessary to struggle and win what we can.

This isn’t to say that many of the technologies advocated by the Venus Project/Zeitgeist couldn’t play a really important role in a better society. But in focusing just on technological changes, they ignore that technology is a part of society, not the root of it. If all our problems could be solved with technology, then the ancient Egyptians would have developed steam engines. They had all the knowledge necessary to do so, but they didn’t because their society was based on slavery, and as long as there were plenty of slaves and peasants to do the work, who needed steam power? More to the point, their kind of society wasn’t expanding economically in the same way capitalism does, so there was no need for a technology capable of unleashing an industrial revolution. So nobody ever followed through the theoretical knowledge into practice. Steam engines were invented when human society was ready to use them and needed them.

Similarly today, we won’t convert our energy supply to renewables or start using environmentally friendly technology exclusively, because our society is still based on economic growth and making money. For these technologies to be part of the solution, they need to be accompanied by socio-economic changes to the way the world works, and to do that we need to politically defeat the ruling class.

The politics that Zeitgeist does promote are essentially that you boycott aspects of society they don’t like: don’t open an account with the the three biggest banks in the US (but implying that an account with another bank is in some way better?) and boycott energy companies by taking your house off the grid, for example. What this ignores is that for working class people forced to work long hours for low pay, putting a wing turbine in your garden just isn’t something they can afford in time or money. Boyotts are individual actions, where as socialists argue for a collective response to social problems, where we struggle for the power to make solutions like renewable energy available for everyone.

Zeitgeist activists argue that they are just trying to “raise awareness” of the technical solutions available to our problems. But the fact is most people know on some instinctive level that things can be better than the way they are. The problem is, they have a better understanding of power and the state than most Zeitgeist activists do. They know that if you start trying to live outside the money system and move past capitalism, then the capitalists will use their real power to try and stop you. They have money, legal authority and armed force. They’ve used all these things every time people have tried to move beyond capitalism, from the Russian revolution to the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela today. That doesn’t mean we should give up, but it does mean we should be prepared for the very real fight we have on our hands with the people in power. “Raising awareness” will not be enough to win that fight.

Noam Chomsky has summed up the problems with Zeitgeist Addendum well when he says:

“I don’t regard the Zeitgeist Movement as an activist movement. Rather, it seems to me a very passive movement that is misled by documents that have a very pleasant sound, but collapse on analysis. Among them is the idea that we should ’stop supporting the system’ and ‘not fight it’, that is, seek to change and overcome it. That means we should withdraw into passivity. Nothing could be more welcome to those in power. My feeling is that however sincere the leaders and participants may be, the movement is seriously misguided. It is not leading towards change, but is undermining it by encouraging passivity and withdrawal from engagement, and offering a false sense that some real alternative is being proposed, except in terms so vague and divorced from reality as to be virtually meaningless.”

Miscellaneous problems with Zeitgeist

Horus takes Peter Joseph by the hand and points out all the hieroglyphs
that show him to be TOTALLY DIFFERENT to Jesus

Peter Joseph has expressed scepticism about the reality of climate change, arguing that Zeitgeist should not base its arguments on something that “might not be true.” If anything undermines their claim to be based on scientific ideas it’s this. But it does fit in with the relationship that Zeitgeist activists maintain with other conspiracy groups maintain like We Are Change. To most folk the idea that the entire scientific community is engaged in a gigantic fraud to lie about the climate is madness, but it seems plausible if you already believe that the government carried out 9/11, the world is run by “international bankers” etc.

The opening section of the first film, about the use of earlier myths by Christianity to create a fictional story of a historical Jesus as fact, is not that important to the political implications of the movement as a whole. But it does show up how the ideas of Zeitgeist are a mixed up mishmash of stuff from all over the place, as it’s riddled with inaccuracies about ancient religions, such as claiming the Egyptian God Horus was a Sun God, born of a Virgin on December 25th (each one of these claims is just blatantly not true.)

And if all of the above hasn’t convinved you that Zeitgeist is a load of pish, then consider this. It has attracted the endorsement of someone who has made himself a bit of a laughing stock by his increasingly outlandish public claims, and who is a damaged product of the British celebrity circuit. I’m talking of course about. . .Robbie Williams!

Bonus: For more on Zeitgeist, I highly recommend this article, which was very helpful writing it.

by **American Dream** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 10:22 pm

http://libcom.org/library/occupied-cons ... -theorists

Occupied with conspiracies? The Occupy Movement, Populist Anti-Elitism, and the Conspiracy Theorists

Spencer Sunshine discusses the infiltration of the Occupy movement by conspiracy theorists.

All progressive social movements have dark sides, but some are more prone to them than others. Occupy Wall Street and its spin-offs, with their populist, anti-elitist discourse (“We Are the 99%”) and focus on finance capital, have already attracted all kinds of unsavory friends: antisemites, David Duke and White Nationalists, Oath Keepers, Tea Partiers, and followers of David Icke, Lyndon Larouche, and the Zeitgeist movement (see glossary below).

On one hand, there is nothing particularly new about this. The anti-globalization movement was plagued with these problems as well.(1) This was sometimes confusing to radicals who saw that movement as essentially Left-wing and anti-capitalist; when the radicals said “globalization,” they really meant something like the “highest stage of capitalism,” and so from their perspective, by opposing one they were opposing the other. The radicals often saw the progressives in the movement as sharing this same vision, only in an “incomplete way” —and that they only needed a little push (usually by a cop’s baton) to see that capitalism could not be reformed, and instead had to be abolished.

But for numerous others, “globalization” did not mean capitalism. Just as for the radicals, it functioned as a codeword: for some it meant finance capital (as opposed to industrial capital), while for others it meant the regime of a global elite constructing their “New World Order.” And either or both might also have meant the traditional Jewish conspiracy’s supposed global domination and control of the banking system. Whether they realized it or not, the many anti-authoritarians who praised this “movement of movements” as being based solely on organizational structure, with no litmus test for political inclusion, put out a big welcome sign for these dodgy folks. And in that door came all kinds of things, from Pat Buchanan to Troy Southgate.

But still, the anti-globalization movement in the United States was initiated by an anarchist / progressive coalition that in many ways controlled the content and discourse of it, giving it a classic Popular Front feel—the same way the old Communist Parties controlled large progressive coalitions for many decades. In contrast to this, Occupy Wall Street immediately took on a purely populist approach.

There are different ways to understand and oppose capitalism. There is a structural critique, usually associated with Marxism but often shared by anarchism, which seeks to understand the internal dynamics of capital and sees it as a system, beyond the control of any particular person or group. There is also an ethical critique, popular among religious groups and pacifists, which focuses less on the “whys” of capital and instead concentrates on its effects, looking at how it produces vast differences in wealth while creating misery, scarcity, and unemployment for most of the world. Last, there is a populist vision, which can transcend Left and Right. Populists have a narrative in which the “elites” are opposed to the “people.”

On one hand, this can be seem as a vague kind of socialism which counterposes the everyday worker against the truly rich. But it also lacks any kind of specific analysis of class or other social differences—the 99% are treated as one homogenous body. Usually the “people” are seen as the “nation,” and these 1% elites are perceived to be acting against the nation’s interests. From a radical, anti-capitalist viewpoint, this narrative may be wrong and “incomplete,” but by itself is not dangerous. In fact, many progressive and even socialist political movements have been based on it.

But the populist narrative is also an integral part of the political views of conspiracy theorists, far Right activists, and antisemites. For antisemites, the elites are the Jews; for David Icke, the elites are the reptilians; for nationalists, they are members of minority ethnic, racial, or religious groups; for others, they are the “globalists,” the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Federal Reserve, etc. All of these various conspiracy theories also tend to blend in and borrow from each other. Additionally, the focus on “Wall Street” also has specific appeal to those who see the elite as represented by finance capital, a particular obsession of the antisemites, Larouchites, followers of David Icke, etc. “The Rothschilds” are the favorite stand-in codeword of choice to refer to the supposed Jewish control of the banking system.

Much has already been said about the Occupy movement’s refusal to elucidate its demands. On one hand, this has been useful in mobilizing a diverse group of people who can project what they want to see in this movement—anarchists, Marxists, liberals, Greens, progressive religious practitioners, etc. On the other hand, this has been useful in mobilizing a diverse group of people who can project what they want to see in this movement—Ron Paulists, libertarians, antisemites, followers of David Icke, Zeitgeist movement folks, Larouchites, Tea Partiers, White Nationalists, and others. The discourse about the “99%” (after all, these Right-wingers and conspiracy mongers are probably a far greater proportion of the actual 99% than are anarchists and Marxists), along with the Occupy movement’s refusal to set itself on a firm political footing and correspondingly to place limitations on involvement by certain political actors, has created a welcoming situation for these noxious political elements to join.

So far, the overwhelmingly progressive nature of many of these Occupations has kept this element at bay. But it is only the weight of the numbers of the progressive participants that has done this. There are neither organizational structures within the Occupy movement, nor are there conceptual approaches that it is based on, that act to ensure this remains the case. So it is not unreasonable to expect that, especially as participation declines, some of the Occupations will be taken over by folks from these far Right and conspiratorial perspectives. All participants might rightly see themselves as part of the 99%. The real divisive question will then be, who do they think the 1% are?

Notes

(1) At least one Left group had quit the anti-globalization movement in 1998 because of antisemitism and far Right affiliations; a prominent deep-pocketed funder had close links to a neo-fascist think tank; and neo-Nazi figures both praised the Seattle demonstrations and attempted to glean off the anti-globalization movement after words. Things got so out of hand that a whole new brand of decentralized crypto-fascism crystallized and attempted an entryist maneuver. See my “Re-branding Fascism: National-Anarchism” for more background on this.

Spencer Sunshine is researcher, journalist, and activist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His writings on the far Right include “Re-branding Fascism: National-Anarchists”. He is currently writing a book about the theoretical implications of the transition from classical to contemporary anarchism.

POLITICAL GLOSSARY:

Buchanan, Pat (US): Paleconservative politician who has run several high-profile campaigns for President. A Christian nationalist, he opposes globalization and relies on racist, antisemitic, and homophobic worldviews.

Duke, David (US): Media-savvy founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives as a Republican in 1990 but lost his bid for US Congress. Duke stresses antisemitic theories about Jewish control of the Federal Reserve and the banking system, and has endorsed the Occupy movement.

finance capital vs industrial capital: Populism often depends on the producerist narrative, which pits “unproductive capital” against “productive” capital. Unproductive capital refers to industries which are based on the manipulation of abstractions (banking), versus the production of physical objects (factory work). The Nazis relied on this distinction for their “National Socialism.”

Icke, David (UK): A former Green Party-leader-turned-conspiracy theorist who blends numerous different conspiratorial ideas together, including antisemitic ideas. He claims that world leaders are Reptilian aliens who appear to be humans, and feed off negative human energy. He has followers on both the Left and Right.

Larouche, Lyndon (US): A former Trotskyist who founded a Left-wing cult around himself and then quickly transformed it into a far Right political organization with a focus on intelligence gathering. He is an antisemitic nationalist who attacks finance capital and globalization.

Oath Keepers (US): Right-wing organization of current and former military and law enforcement members. Descended from the Militia movement, they pledge to disobey certain federal orders that are perceived to violate the Constitution.

Paul, Ron (US): Republican Congressman from Texas who is currently seeking to be his party’s 2012 presidential candidate. He has libertarian economics and isolationist politics; he opposed the US invasion of Iraq but also wants to withdraw from the UN. Favors drug legalization and dismantling the Federal Reserve. Has support from some White Nationalists as well as some progressives.

Southgate, Troy (UK): Former National Front activist who founded National-Anarchism, a form of decentralized crypto-fascism which attempted to infiltrate the anti-globalization movement.

Tea Party (US): A Right-wing populist movement that has affected the US political landscape. It has no clear focus but a mass base and deep funding from wealthy Rightists. Islamophobes, ‘Birthers’ (who claim that President Obama was born in Kenya and is a secret Muslim), and White Nationalists can be found in these circles.

White Nationalists: A catch-all term for various far Right politics whose central concern is the “preservation” of people of European descent (excluding Jews), who are seen as comprising a “nation.” This includes white supremacists, white separatists, and those who work inside parliamentary systems but advocate for “white rights.”

Zeitgeist movement: Technocratic movement which also transcends the traditional Left / Right divide. Founded by Peter Joseph, it originates in a series of movies which blended various conspiracy theories together. Chapters exist around the world.

Originally published in Shift Magazine

by **American Dream** » Fri Mar 02, 2012 3:11 pm

Commodifying Bodies

Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant (eds.)
Sage Publications, 2003

Reviewed by Margot Weiss, Ph.D. Candidate in Cultural
Anthropology at Duke University

Commodifying Bodies is a slim collection of nine essays, originally published as volume seven of the journal Body & Society (2001). Most of the contributors are medical anthropologists; two are sociologists. Offered as a corrective to academic work that treats the body as (only) a text, trope, or metaphor, the contributors to this volume treat the body as a material and symbolic object. Taking up Arjun Appadurai’s (1986: 3) statement that “commodities, like persons, have social lives,” the contributors to this collection ask: what happens when the commodities in question are persons, bodies, or body parts? Scheper-Hughes defines body commodification as “encompassing all capitalized economic relations between humans in which human bodies are the token of economic exchanges” (p. 2). Although the body has a prior history of commodification (in, for example, marriage arrangements), contemporary global capitalism and new biotechnologies have increased desire for, availability of, and access to bodies and body parts across space and place.

The chapters chart the direct capitalization of body parts and the more general commodification of subjectivities themselves as the body increasingly becomes an object alienated from the self, its whole or parts available for exchange on the (often global) market. The essays cover two broad themes: 1) marketing, merchandising, and exchange of body parts (e.g. Cohen’s and Scheper-Hughes’s essays on transnational organ transplantation, Lock’s chapter on the global Human Genome Diversity Project, and Tober’s analysis of California sperm banks), and 2) alienation, objectification, or thingification of the body/subject (e.g. Weiss’s chapter on the “Yemenite Children Affair” in Israel, Brandes’s analysis of the accidental cremation of a Guatemalan worker in the U.S., Klinenberg’s chapter on heat wave deaths in Chicago, Epele’s piece on San Francisco sex workers, and Wacquant’s essay on Chicago boxers). Several authors link these two domains; for example, Epele documents both subjective alienation and bodily fragmentation experienced by drug-addicted street prostitutes. Both Cohen and Scheper-Hughes, in their chapters on the kidney transplantation trade, describe the symbolic de-humanization of organ donors (vis-à-vis organ recipients) at the moment the donor’s kidneys enter the transnational market.

The text offers an ethnographic exploration of the political economy of the body under contemporary global capitalism. I found its ethnographic focus particularly useful in exploring what can be rather abstract characterizations of this global form: flexible, transnational, cannibalistic/vampiric, symbolic, and mobile. For example, Cohen’s analysis of kidney transplantation in India understands global transplantation as a “flexible biopolitics of suppression” where the suppression of difference between tissues, bodies, and peoples leads to the growth of ever-larger flexible donor populations. In the face of these forms of sacrificial global capitalisms, agency becomes the ability to harvest oneself, to attempt to control the grounds, terms, or stakes of one’s own bodily commodification (see also Lock’s discussion of indigenous activism around human DNA collection, Wacquant’s analysis of the narratives of self-alienation and exploitation told by boxers in Chicago, and Epele’s account of prostitutes’ use of their bodies as objects of exchange). These essays provided concrete, embodied, and embedded accounts of the global refiguring of the body, a key contribution in this theoretical literature.

Continues at: http://www.aaanet.org/sections/afa/?boo ... ing-bodies

by **American Dream** » Fri Mar 02, 2012 3:20 pm

http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/ ... e-mean-by-“works”-anarchist-economics-and-the-occupy-x-movement/

Deric Shannon: What Do We Mean By “Works”? Anarchist Economics and the Occupy X Movement
October 26th, 2011
Source: AK Press

“If you have a lot of money, I feel bad for you son. I got 99 problems, being rich ain’t one.”
—A dynamic FB duo

There’s a lot of folks taking to the streets (and a Park) in the capitol of capital right now—Wall Street—and all over the world in response. The general sentiment seems to be that folks are fed up with a tiny elite controlling the lives of the rest of us—now on an unprecedented scale. This is made possible, in part, by a system of economics and government designed to enrich a few folks at the expense of the majority of us. That is, the social systems we’ve collectively built, and that we collectively maintain and reproduce, allow for this state of affairs.

Anarchists, however, typically suggest that structural inequalities of all kinds are unnecessary impediments to human freedom and social organization. These inequalities and hierarchies exist on an institutional level—we live under institutions such as capitalism and the state that divvy up access to power and resources based on any number of factors, but centralize control in the hands of elites. And these inequalities show up in, indeed create much of, our everyday lives.

Most of us spend our lives working for someone else—either directly or indirectly. Some of us have bosses where we work to enrich a few owners and have to rent ourselves out for a wage or salary so we can have access to the things everyone needs in order to live decent and dignified lives. Some of us can afford a few gadgets on top of that, but it doesn’t change the nature of the social relationship. Some work in co-ops and have a bit more say-so in the workplace, but they’re still slaves to capital and the pressures of living in a market economy. Still others work behind the scenes and are (typically, though not always) wageless, helping to reproduce those social relations. I’m talking here of child-rearing, housekeeping, emotional care, and other tasks that allow a workforce to exist and without which our social world would simply not function. Yet others are on the dole/welfare/social assistance—many are desperately trying to find work and a few others are avoiding work (because, let’s be honest here, work sucks).

And these problems intersect with other hierarchies and structural inequalities. That is, our economic system and our work lives are also intimately tied together with sexism; creating and maintaining a social world designed for the “able” bodied; racism and colonialism; strictly policed and confining notions of sexuality and gender; and so on. We also experience these hierarchies in our everyday lives and they are felt, as individuals, in vastly different ways depending on the constellations of identity that we’ve been assigned, historical and cultural context, etc.

Again, anarchists typically reject these things as necessary for human social organization. Rather, humans would flourish in a world without structured inequalities, such as those that arise from racism, capitalism, the state, sexism, heteronormativity, and so on.

To speak to some of the immediate concerns of the Occupy movement, where crisis, austerity, and poverty are prime motivating factors, anarchism offers some alternatives. Since we are the ones who reproduce this world in our everyday lives, we are also capable of refusing to do so anymore. And we could organize our social world in vastly different ways. We could create a world that isn’t designed for work, boredom, and banality—exploitation, oppression, and control. Rather, we could make a world predicated on our active participation in creating our lives, rather than that content being decided for us by a tiny, elite group.

Ironically, one of the near-constant criticisms of these sorts of ideas goes something like this:

“That kind of system would never work because of human nature. We’re just wired to be greedy. It’s evolution, survival of the fittest, and all that.”

There are two components of these (sometimes exasperating) arguments. The “human nature” part should be fairly easy to dispense with. Clearly humans are capable of all sorts of behaviors. If we were “wired” to be greedy, there wouldn’t be human moments of compassion, cooperation, and mutual aid (something one famous anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, wrote a bit about in his studies of evolutionary theory). However, when we live under institutions founded on the accumulation of wealth—of things—we tend to make judgments about “human nature” that reflect those institutions. What might we say about “human nature” in a society founded on cooperation instead of survival-of-the-fittest; mutual aid instead of an ethic of competition; the organic needs and desires of people instead of the production of so much useless shit that we are conditioned to want by a multi-billion dollar advertising industry? We would likely have an entirely different view of “human nature” and the ways we organize to meet our desires wouldn’t resemble the sick society we have inherited and currently (allow ourselves to) live in.

But the other component really troubles me. When people raise these objections, what do they mean by a “system” that “works”? Can we really say that the state and capitalism—the institutions that largely organize our economic life—“work”? Before this “crisis” even started, 80% of the world’s population lived on less than ten dollars a day (this is evidence that for most of the world, capitalism is always a crisis).1 Is that a system that “works”? We produce enough food to feed everyone in the world. Yet, one in seven people around the world go hungry.2 Is that a system that “works”? This crisis in capitalism certainly isn’t new either—indeed, capitalism is prone to periodic crises where people are thrown into the kinds of social turmoil we’re seeing the world over regularly. This crisis isn’t a new development, it’s a part of how capitalism functions. Is that a system that “works”? Is a system where some people own four summer homes, twenty cars, home theatres, have maids, cooks, and coteries while entire countries largely live in poverty a system that is “working”? Are two world wars that killed more people in them than every war ever fought in human history up to that moment combined reflective of a system that “works”? Is the commodification—the thingification—of the entire non-human world, the destruction of landbases, the regular extinction of entire species, decreasing biodiversity, global warming—all of which are part and parcel of an economic system predicated on constant growth—is this a system that “works”? Is a world where oppression is a social norm that mixes together with economic exploitation one that “works”? Just how brainwashed has the human population become that so many of us believe we need these unequal, unethical, horrific institutional arrangements in order to get by? When mass media ownership is nearly entirely concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy corporations, when capitalism’s best friend—the state—sets the curriculum standards for our compulsory education (setting the stage for the boredom and banality of a life of work for most of us) is it any wonder we’ve swallowed these lies?

The occupiers the world over know that something is wrong and needs fixed. They know that these systems we live under aren’t eternal and must change. But not all changes are equal. And if we want them to be lasting, we might want to start valuing the accumulation of freedom instead of commodities. We might look at our social systems and realize that they don’t “work.” We can consciously create alternatives through mass refusals. And, importantly, this extends far beyond economics into all spheres of life—challenging the very separations that make social domination possible.

This, I believe, is at the heart of the anarchist project. We might advance an “economics” that looks nothing like the way the discipline is currently organized—demolishing the myths of capitalism instead of peddling them as the priests of the dominant market religion. And we might advance a form of social organization that doesn’t resemble an “economy” in the conventional sense of the term, but allows for the conscious creation of our everyday lives instead of the compulsory labor we’re told is necessary for a system that “works,” but obviously doesn’t.

Notes

1 See http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/ ... -and-stats
2 See http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/ ... -and-stats

Deric Shannon is co-editor of Contemporary Anarchist Studies: An Introductory Reader of Anarchism in the Academy (Routledge, 2009) and co-editor of the forthcoming The Accumulation of Freedom: Anarchist Writings on Anarchist Economics (AK Press, January 2012).

by **American Dream** » Sat Mar 03, 2012 8:06 pm

http://vintage-ads.livejournal.com/3245367.html

Betty Crocker Thru' The Ages

Not an ad per say, but certainly vintage, and applies to advertising.
I think this is quite fascinating, as we see Miss Crocker develop through the ages.
She looks like a pissed off School Marm in 1936,
and she looks rarin' to go in 1980,
(before simmering down 6 years later)

by **American Dream** » Sun Mar 04, 2012 9:41 am

http://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/04/14/drapetomania/

drapetomania

Mon 14 Apr 2008 by abagond

Drapetomania (1851), also called draptomania, is a sickness of the mind that makes you want to run away. It affects only black people. It was especially common in the American South in the early 1800s. It does not seem to affect whites.

Although planters and overseers noticed that blacks often got the urge to run away, the condition did not have a name till Dr Samuel Cartwright gave it one in 1851. He delivered a paper on the newly named disease before the Medical Association of Louisiana. It was later written up in “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race”.

Dr Cartwright was an American doctor who taught at the University of Louisiana. He was a widely respected expert on yellow fever, cholera and diseases that affect blacks.

Here is what he knew about drapetomania:

Causes: Masters who are too cruel or too kind to their slaves. If a master did not see to his slaves’ physical needs or, at the other extreme, he went against God’s will and tried to make blacks anything more than “the submissive knee-bender”, as they were meant to be for all time, then blacks will come down with this disease.

How to prevent it: When a master attends to his slaves’ physical needs for food, warmth and safety, then “the negro is spell-bound, and cannot run away.” Making slaves bend the knee also went a long way to preventing an outbreak.

Signs of onset: Those coming down with the disease become “sulky and dissatisfied”.

Cure: Whipping the devil out of a patient is enough for most. For more extreme cases, cut off toes.

Cartwright’s work on drapetomania has since been widely discredited.

It is now widely believed that only blacks got the disease because only they were held as slaves. Their urge to run away was not a disease at all but a very healthy and human desire for freedom.

Some say drapetomania is a piece of scientific racism: plain old racism dressed up to look like science.

Cartwright would not have seen it that way. To him blacks being slaves was part of the natural order, the way God meant it to be. It said so in the Bible. So when a black slave wanted to run away, something was wrong. It was unnatural. And, being a doctor, he saw it as a disease.

We can laugh at Dr Cartwright but that kind of blindness to racism still goes on: you know, American society is fine the way it is, it is just those blacks who have something wrong with them.

The word comes from Greek: drapeto for runaway slave and mania for madness. The madness that runaway slaves suffer from.

In the film “CSA: Confederate States of America” (2004) it appears in an ad as “draptomania”, which is easier to say. Most people who know about drapetomania these days, know it from that film, so on the Internet you will often see it written that way.

by **American Dream** » Mon Mar 05, 2012 1:12 am

http://blackorchidcollective.wordpress. ... smackdown/

Black Orchid Collective’s Responses for the Anti-Capitalist Smackdown
Posted on February 29, 2012

Earlier this month two BOC members participated in a debate between several revolutionary tendencies in the Seattle area. Other members of our group also contributed by writing the responses to the debate questions beforehand. We are publishing our answers to those questions below, as they provide some clarification on our politics. We plan to develop our answers to these questions and more into a points of unity to use as one of our bases for inviting new people to join the group.

However, readers should know that our degree of organizational unity on the statements below varies — some of these positions are based upon many hours of reading, discussion, and shared experience, while others we are less certain about. Furthermore, these are absolutely not the only questions that we think are important to understand and develop our politics around. In addition to comments about the politics we present here, we also welcome additional questions that people think are important for revolutionary organizations to consider.

Our Responses to Anti-Capitalist Smackdown Questions

The enemy: How do you define “capitalism” and “civilization”? Are there certain aspects of civilization that could and should be retained after the revolution?

Capitalism is a system of complex social relations between humans and the environment wherein the former and latter become commodities to be used for the expressed purpose of maintaining a recurring and expanding cycle of investment and returns for the capitalist class. Historically this relationship has taken on different forms depending on the particular place in the world. Regardless, the effects of capitalism have been the making of human labor power (our creative ability to transform our surroundings) into the property of the capitalist class by way of force and ideology (e.g. imperialism, the state, legal and educational institutions). A value is put onto the proletariats’ ability to labor as well as the natural world. Neither is intrinsic and by default this value placed on one form of ability (i.e. the ability to utilize labor power) outcasts those who don’t conform to the ideal worker. In this relationship, humanity’s labor power and the whole of nature are seen as commodities to be bought and sold, given a price and value for the expressed purpose of an unequal exchange between the proletariat and the capitalist class where the latter is able to gain surplus value (more capital to invest) from our labor to continue in the process of self-valorization or growth.

The capitalist class has historically amassed capital by force bringing the world into the capitalist system which has allowed it to further invest into buying commodities and invest in technology. This process of making the world and every aspect of it into commodities to be exchanged for the gain of surplus value is the enemy. What has been laid out here is a logical analysis of the phenomena of capital. This enemy is more complex but the underlying reality is a system which continues to grow and turn the whole of the planet into commodities utilizing varying divisions, hierarchies, and ideals which have been created, modified and adopted to allow this process to maintain itself.

The continuous search for surplus value and the unrelenting resistance of the proletariat has prompted capitalist to enlist all the knowledge of the world to create technological and scientific advances. Under capitalism the world has seen arguably some of the greatest advances in science, technology and organization. Unfortunately, much of these advances have not been used to benefit humanity. For many these advances are considered civilization. In reality this is relative. The fact that billions starve daily calls this claim into question. Of course technology that destroys the environment and runs on limited resources should be cut from use and new means of producing and creating should be created. We hope these advances, which don’t negate the disastrous effects of capitalism, can be used for helping humanity and the planet rather than making production and exploitation more efficient. This is when real civilization will begin.

Revolution: How do you define “anarchy” or “communism”? What kind of “democracy” would this involve? What would the process of transformation from capitalism/civilization to communism/anarchy have to entail?

Anarchy- the state in which there is no state, hierarchies or forms of systemic coercion, where humanity develops forms of organization which allow for freedom to utilize ones creative abilities for the collective and for personal enrichment.

Communism- the state in which the majority of humanity has taken collective control of its labor power (i.e. its ability to labor or its creative powers) creating varying forms of organization to utilize that power as the collective sees fit as well as the individual. This is in direct contrast to capitalism where this collective creative power is subject to the will of the capitalist class and the market where it is used to create capital rather than fulfill the needs of humanity.

Aside from theoretical terms Anarchy and Communism share many similarities. To be clear, these definitions simplify the fact that these processes are not static and even if achieved are subject to change and internal contradictions. In each historical vision there is an understanding that democracy can’t be had for the many in system such as capitalism which requires major usage of hierarchical institutions and oppressive social relations to persist in plundering the earth and the proletariat or the disposed. Granted there are some differences which need to be discussed especially around the conflation of communism with authoritarian statist tendencies.

For true democracy to come about there would have to be a total inversion of the global economy from one which perpetuates the cycle of capital investment, profit, and investment and the subsequent expansion of this process. Labor power must be freed from coercion of capitalist social relations. Technology, science, and other means of creating subsistence have to be evenly distributed across the world. The majority must have access to the means of reproduction. This can only be done through assaulting the legs that capitalism stands on; divisions amongst the class based on ideological and/or material (read wage) hierarchy and the institutions/ideals that assist in this division.

Light has been shed on this reality within the struggles of our predecessors. For instance, the Black struggle brought to the fore the relationship between the creations of identities based on biological/genetic differences (pseudo-science and ideology) and a groups relationship to capital in terms of wages, education, treatment by legal institutions etc. In other words the black struggle showed how fighting white supremacy exposed how race was used to separate the proletariat from unifying.

There can be no destruction of the current reality without the recognition that this struggle extends beyond economics and is not the burden of one identity. Revolution has no road map but knowing the structure of the system we fight and its history will assist in focusing our collective aim toward a goal which may take decades if not centuries to reach. We can’t foretell what that process would look like but we can be certain that it would involve the destruction of private property, the redistribution of knowledge, the dismantling of the state, and struggle within the proletariat.

Class, oppression, identity: Is the revolutionary subject “oppressed people” in general or “the proletariat”? Is there a difference between the proletariat and, say, women or POC? How can we relate to anti-colonial struggles without falling into nationalism?

We define the proletariat as the majority of humanity that has been dispossessed. In order to accumulate wealth capitalists rob us of our means of living: primarily land and access to technology but also the knowledge and community required to produce food, shelter, clothing, and everything else that we need to live. This leaves the proletariat with no means of survival except to sell our ability to work to the capitalist class that robbed us and our ancestors in the first place. Not all of us are actually able to do this though, so the proletariat also includes unemployed people, prisoners, housewives, and many elderly and disabled people who must find other means of survival besides wage labor.

All the proletariat is oppressed, but some layers are more so than others. Undocumented Latina farmworkers and white third-generation longshoremen are both proletarians, but the former are clearly more oppressed than the latter. Racism, sexism, ablism, and heterosexism amplify oppression for most proletarians. This is not a claim to moral authority, it is just a fact. Being more oppressed does not make an individual or a layer of the proletariat more (or less) militant or more likely to have the best strategy in struggle. Furthermore, there are people of color, women, and queers in the bourgeoisie.

The revolutionary subject is the proletariat as a whole, but historically and in the future different layers of the proletariat will struggle more than others. For example, after World War II, many black veterans came home and were no longer willing to tolerate the conditions of Jim Crow South and struggled militantly against them. Many white proletarians, on the other hand, were experiencing upward mobility and either ignored or fought back against black veterans’ struggle. This shows how the capitalist class uses divisions within the proletariat like white supremacy to keep the entire class down.

This example illustrates that, while more oppressed proletarians are not guaranteed to have better politics, it is essential that revolutionaries support and engage their struggles. This is because uniting solely around the struggles of more privileged layers of the proletariat makes it easy for capitalists to buy off those more privileged workers and co-opt the struggle. The struggles of the most oppressed proletarians create the greatest opportunity for authentic unity of the class as a whole.

Similarly, anti-colonial struggles offer opportunities for mass participation and important lessons to carry forward in future movements. Even struggles that involve alliances between proletarians and the bourgeoisie, as many anti-colonial movements do, can sow the seeds for more anti-capitalist struggle later by increasing proletarians’ confidence, skills, and radicalism. Rather than abstaining from such struggles, revolutionaries should actively engage with them while refusing to subordinate anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and internationalist politics. We should similarly engage with anti-patriarchal and queer liberation movements for analogous reasons. Revolutionaries should also study such struggles for their essential role in the history of capitalism and social movements and for the lessons they offer for those of us trying to destroy capitalism today.

The role of revolutionaries: What is the proper role of revolutionaries? How does this understanding influence your principles of organization, and your approach to communication and collaboration with people outside your tendency, or outside the anti-capitalist milieu? What do you say when outsiders ask “what is your program”?

The proletariat can only become free by transforming itself through struggle; communism is the real motion of the proletariat, not something imposed from the outside by a vanguard party. The role of revolutionaries is to recognize this self-activity of the proletariat in all of the forms of struggle that break from the daily functioning of capitalism.

This self-activity is not automatic, slow, or linear. Revolutionaries should focus on those historical events, or ruptures from the normal functioning of capitalist common sense– strikes, blockades, insurrections, etc. These are the moments where a revolutionary situation can start to emerge and where a process of communization can begin. However, these ruptures are not automatically communist and they don’t automatically lead to revolution. They are often contradictory and partial, and unless the vast majority of people involved in them are consciously aiming to destroy the legitimacy of capitalism then aspects of capitalism will reemerge and fragment the movement – recreating divides along race, gender, or employed vs. unemployed lines and co-opting the struggle.

For that reason, revolutionary militants should attempt to hone and develop methods of analysis to understand the functioning of the capitalist system so as to develop a program for destroying it. We should build organizations that can share these methods widely – teaching them to fellow proletarians. But any good teaching requires humility and an openness to learn and transform the content of our knowledge so the teacher becomes a student and vice versa. A revolutionary organization should learn from, and teach, the rest of the proletariat as we all struggle together.

This requires a critical mass of revolutionary activity where we can develop theory based on our practice, and vice versa. No small collective or affinity group or organization today can achieve that if we just focus on our separate organizing projects because none of our projects is deep enough, or broad enough to really push us to develop further. We need to be organizing and building deeper and stronger connections with wider layers of the proletariat so that when those moments of rupture do occur we have the trust, relationships, and capacities to help expand those ruptures, prevent co-optation, and create ungovernable situations.

That’s why different tendencies should come together in Occupy and other movements to initiate more daring projects of revolutionary organizing , direct action, education, cultural work, and agitation that can catalyze the self-revolutionization of the proletariat. Together we all form an organic, horizontally-organized (not top-down) vanguard that is porous to the rest of the class – not a party that aims for state power. Our common attempts to advance the struggle allow us to critically assess our successes and failures with an open-ended, experimental method. Debates like this are a crucial part of that.

Out of common struggle and debate a new program will emerge that will clarify the way forward. A program is crucial as an open-ended but clear trajectory of struggle based in theory. By theory we mean a weapon to change the world, not a method of interpreting it. But we need to be honest about the fact that we don’t have this weapon yet and it needs to be forged in collaborative struggle.

Unions: Two forms in which (employed and sometimes unemployed) workers have fought for their immediate interests are unions and “direct action casework” (exemplified by SeaSol). What is your position on each of these in relation to longer-term goals?

NLRB-recognized unions, shaped by the National Labor Relations Act and Taft Hartley are truces between workers and capitalists establishing labor peace. These labor laws became complex involving settling issues in the courts instead of through direct action. The truce legally left out domestic and farm workers, majority Latin@ and Black folks, solidifying and deepening white supremacist divisions within the proletariat. Millions of European immigrants who had faced racial discrimination became upwardly mobile as they built unions like the United Auto Workers and the ILWU. Meanwhile, Black and Brown workers continued to face extreme forms of exploitation. Some of them made it into the unions, but most did not. Those who made it in were constrained by the labor truce which prioritized collective bargaining around wages and benefits instead of direct action on the job against racism and sexism or for more workplace control. Unity is a goal for the U.S. proletariat, not a reality, and it will only be forged through militant struggles and transformations.

We don’t see the current U.S. unions that emerged from this process as a path to the emancipation of the oppressed from capitalism. NLRB-recognized unions have a dual nature: 1. ensuring union workers have the ability to negotiate with bosses about wages and benefits by way of collective might. 2. force adherence to laws which hinder the potential of this collective might and its ability to end capitalist social relations. Unions play a role in maintaining labor power as a commodity and in ensuring some level of discipline at the workplace. At times rank and file workers use the union structure to fight back against the bosses and secure gains; at times they go beyond this structure creating new forms of struggle. In either case, our solidarity should be with workers, not the union structure.

Today, automation, de-industrialization, unemployment and prisons are competing with industrial workplaces as the reality and experiences of proletarian life. The need for global solidarity to win against global corporations is more apparent. Revolutionaries should be attempting to create organizations with rank and file union members, non unionized workers, the homeless, the criminalized, and the unemployed which fight for immediate needs but prepares it’s participants to deepen revolutionary struggle throughout the class.

NLRB-recognized unions have insufficiently addressed these realities because none of them has been able to initiate mass, anti-capitalist, from-below campaigns to organize the unorganized, precarious working poor. The disenchantment of many proletarians toward unions is also addressed in the fact that unions, with few exceptions, have not been present in the struggles that proletarians, including their members, have faced outside the workplace. We need to experiment with organization and methods of struggle and address this reality of division.

Direct action case work is a step in this direction as well as workplace organizing/direct unionism by the IWW. Both have encountered challenges in building a mass movement from case to case or shop by shop organizing. That said, our orientation will need to move away from capturing shops/territory, to focusing on developing people and building spaces to sustain engagement. This is difficult work and likely the things we need will be created by future ruptures. We have to keep trying, but we should prepare our cadre for the context their fighting in, one in which active mass organizations with ongoing radicalization and participation still feel distant. We’ll also need to take on broader levels of strategizing and coordination.

“Occupy”: What are the pros and cons of “the Occupy movement”? How should we relate to it as revolutionaries?

Occupy has functioned as the US answer to uprisings in Egypt, China, Greece, and many other places where the proletariat and petit bourgeois are fighting austerity, police violence, and abusive workplace conditions. Like the struggles against Mubarak in Egypt, Occupy is a cross-class alliance in which unemployed, working class, and middle class folks join forces to fight the elite who hand down these austerity measures and whose wealth the police protect.

The act of occupying itself is transformative for many participants. It offers a concrete opportunity for people to realize that we have the ability to run our own lives by making and sharing what we need and deciding democratically how to implement that. Doing this side by side with political action keeps people engaged in our current context instead of turning to Occupy as means of escape. It also sharpens our understandings of capitalist contradictions as we articulate both what’s wrong with the current world and what sort of alternatives Occupy can point to. The notion of “everything for everyone” becomes very immediate.

The composition of Occupy varies over time and from place to place, but Occupy Seattle has attracted some folks from the most oppressed layers of the proletariat, namely homeless youth who kept the movement alive in the early days. Groups like the People of Color Caucus, Hip Hop Occupies, and various revolutionary tendencies have fostered a radical milieu within occupy that includes many proletarians of color. This helps Occupy Seattle at least partially overcome some of the middle class politics that dominate in many other cities.

However, Occupy Seattle certainly hasn’t overcome all of these politics. The POC Caucus and HHO have faced a lot of racism from liberal white occupiers. The liberals’ positions in Occupy are essentially populist ones: they use the language of broad alliances among the “99%” to advance the interests of the shrinking petit bourgeois and professional class. This comes into direct conflict with the militant class-struggle, anti-racist, and anti-patriarchal positions of revolutionaries and proletarians within Occupy. However, we see that people who took liberal positions a couple months ago have changed their minds through their direct experiences with police repression and authentic solidarity from proletarian Occupiers in combination with debate with revolutionaries who refuse to hide our politics.

As the first mass uprising in the US since the financial crisis and recession started, Occupy is an important movement that revolutionaries in the US should seriously engage. We can’t wait around for the perfect struggle with the right political line to spontaneously emerge. If we’re committed to advancing revolutionary struggle, we have to engage with what’s in front of us. This means clearly and honestly presenting our politics as a real alternative to the liberal line on one side and the right-wing reactions on the other. This also means being “good citizens” of Occupy, helping out with the day-to-day work where we can, and carrying ourselves in principled ways even with occupiers who we disagree with.

Prefigurative politics: Is there any value to “building the new world in the shell of the old” through experimentation with social relations and ways of living (cooperatives, communes, etc.), under present conditions? Is there any value in traditional non-capitalist arrangements, such as communal resource management in peasant societies?

We should encourage any activity that builds up the capacity and confidence of the proletariat to organize society without the state and capitalist exchange relations. Panther-style programs, communes, etc. can do this if they are organized without an entrenched top down leadership. They also help us and our communities survive pending revolution.

However these projects should not be an end in-and-of themselves. If we get bogged down in the logistical maintenance of projects like this we can end up getting sucked into a narrow political world – our neighborhood organization, farm, commune, etc. becomes the only focus and negotiating the personal conflicts between us becomes more important than the fact that proletarians are revolting all over the world.

Occupations have more promise because they offer survival pending revolution and practice building direct democratic organization but they also take shit back from the bourgeoisie. They de-commodity land, labor, buildings, etc., breaking the laws of capitalist exchange relations. In this sense they give us a taste of revolution.

All of this is a process of developing elements of a future direct democratic communism. We could call it communization. However, we should avoid two common pitfalls here. One is assuming that all of this is simply preparatory and communism is far in the future after gradual, stage-managed “phases” of development. This risks treating immediate survival programs as simply pragmatic, practical maters with no connection to revolution, and opens the door toward acting like a nonprofit or bureaucratic union. The other pitfall is calling whatever project we are doing right now communism. Refusing to pay bus fare, occupying a building, or doing guerilla gardening is anti-capitalist, and it may be part of a communization process, but it is not communism… it is not a new society growing in the shell of the old. The gas on that bus is still extracted through extreme brutality in Nigeria, the stolen electricity in the building is still generated in ways that are ecologically destructive. There is no way to solve this without proletarian revolution.

We need to avoid the danger of setting utopian goals for immediate projects then wasting massive amounts of energy fine-tuning these projects to get closer to utopia and blaming each other when they don’t work out. This creates patterns of sectarianism and cult-like behavior that turn so much of the Left into an unhealthy subculture.

We should prioritize building healthy multi-racial and multi-gender organization and community which means attempting to prefigure a society free of patriarchy, hetereosexism, sexual violence, and white supremacy in how we relate to each other. Oppressed people should not have to wait for the revolution to be treated with basic respect and equality within the movement. However we know that aspects of the fucked up system we live in will infect even the best groups, so when we find oppression in our midst we shouldn’t go into crisis and attack each other, we should just try to directly and firmly correct it and move forward.

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