Rude Reds

Union alternatives

2012-01-27T12:14:00.000-06:00

Outside of dedicated leftist groups like this one, every single person without exception that I talk to who is not in a union, and some of the people who are, say that unions are not needed anymore, that it's an idea whose time has come and gone, that there's this problem or that problem with unions, and the ones who have been in unions typically have no end of examples they can use to support this. When you point out that the Owners are worse, that they've taken more, ripped off more, and so on, it falls on deaf ears because the programming and indoctrination is simply that strong. I know someone who stays as a nurse at a hospital she hates with management she hates chiefly because the other nearby hospital network has unionized nurses. I know others who've worked in grocery and retail unions and has nothing good to say about them.

If you want unions to be accepted, you need one that will be a shining example, one that will get people to sign on to the idea of unions, one that isn't afraid to snub the political bosses and not be a pawn, one that treats its workers fairly, where anybody has a voice, and one that isn't afraid to fire shitty workers. Without that, give the fuck up now because it's never going to get any traction.

I think we'd get a lot further by encouraging more ownership of companies by the workers therein, like cooperatives, where it's more of a syndicate. Then you don't need a union to protect the workers from the owners because they are the owners of the company, and the workers are not chattel slaves. There are numerous examples of modern functioning cooperative companies, we need to be publicizing these and doing everything we can to support them and participate in them.

For companies too large for cooperative ownership to work (at which point I personally tend to think a company has gotten too large period), we need to fight for higher wages for workers and a cap on executive salaries. I think fighting for higher taxes is a red herring because the wealthy will always find ways out of paying higher taxes on their bracket, and if you pay the working class more, then they move up in brackets and they also spend more (so that's sales taxes as well), save more, and pay off more debts. Additionally, it's hard to argue for higher taxes for the wealthy simply because they use their media outlets to paint it as higher taxes for everyone; compare that to arguing for higher pay for the workers. Bring down the income disparity by bringing the bottom up.

The New Man, Capitalist Version

2012-01-20T14:16:00.005-06:00

"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness." George Orwell, 1984

One of the great jokes of the Cold War was the way the Stalinist state of the Soviet Union portrayed its people versus the reality of their appearance. The Soviet citizen, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the October revolution, was portrayed as a proletarian superman, with bulging muscles clenching his work tools ( easily exchanged for a bayoneted rifle or submachinegun on a Red Army poster) and his chiseled chin jutting with confidence in the direction of the future. Oftentimes he was accompanied by his female helpmate, beautiful but chaste ( wearing the inevitable babushka), and wielding agricultural implements.
The reality was somewhat different. Civil Wars brought famine and the average Soviet citizen in the 1920s was malnourished and painfully thin. Even in the Great Patriotic War against Hitler's legions the Red Army rifleman was still usually shorter and lighter than his Western counterparts. The broad chested, seven foot tall warrior of the victory monuments simply did not exist. During the Cold War the combination of bureaucratic ineptitude, gross military spending, and the lasting damage of the war against fascism produced quite a different Soviet citizen than conceived in the propaganda of the Politburo. The Soviet citizen, after years of hardship and unkept promises, developed into a shrewd businessman who traded on the black market, a cynic who doubted the Party line, and a fatalist whose black humor was usually directed at those who claimed to be serving him.
Throw in rampant alcoholism and this guy was pretty fucking far from the square- jawed working class hero ready to exceed his quota of washers or catch a reactionary bullet in defense of the revolution.
The New Man was one of the cherished myths of early 20th century socialist eggheads. These cranks envisioned a new version of humanity, one that would rise above petty emotional ties to possessions and family to serve the collective good, to sacrifice anything for progress, and to stride boldly into a future bright with Utopian promise ( this is the image that George Orwell mocked so effectively in his novels Animal Farm and 1984 ).
But before you supporters of capitalism pat yourselves on your backs, I can inform you that the elites you worship have made their version of the New Man. Only they were quite a bit more clever than their commie counterparts.
The capitalist ideal of the New Man is all together more intoxicating to the average asshole in the street because it is it is so easy to obtain. Think of how the common man is portrayed in the media, particularly television. Our working class hero looks like us. He is likely to be overweight, lacking in intellectual curiosity, and obsessed with the trivial ( sports, junk food, pornography, etc. ). In fact he is effectively an adolescent, his mind forever frozen in the 8th grade by a consumer culture fixated with youth. The only significant break with reality is that this slob is usually married to an incredibly hot wife, but therein lies the genius of this marketing campaign- you can be a fat shiftless moron and still shack up with an awesome babe.
For the Soviet elite, the purpose of their propaganda was to give their people something to aspire to, to spur them on to greater action. The capitalists who run the United States have a completely different agenda on their minds. The last thing they want is to have working people actively engaged in politics or working for a new future. Our ruling class is quite happy with the way things are now. Their goal is to create a complacent and apathetic class of consumers. The vast majority of the citizens of the U.S.A. do not participate politically in their supposed democracy, not even to get up off their big asses to vote for who will become the most powerful person in the world every four years. This could be excusable if this was the same type of cynicism displayed by the Soviet citizens of the last century but cynicism it is not. It is sheer laziness brought on by years of polluting the airwaves with mindless crap designed to appeal to the basest instincts a human being possesses. Unconscious and disengaged, The New Man of the American Century is not so much a conquering hero as a grazing cow.

Rotting Empire: Failure of Mass Parties

2012-01-20T06:50:00.001-06:00

The Electoral College Motto: "No Good Can Come of This"

When I was involved with the American arm of the CWI, every other newspaper article that was published would end with some variation of "... and this is why we need to build a mass party in the interests of the working class."

It was the kind of thing people made jokes about, sounding like a goddamn broken record every issue. It was also the sort of thing that caused me endless writerly exasperation. I'm sure it eventually bored the few readers who were not already members.

But hey, on its own, a "mass party" sounds well and good, right? After all, as the activist group (rightly) points out: Wall Street has two parties of its own - Democrats and Republicans. Two variations of the same general practices. A center-right party and a conservative party. They keep America good and profitable. It sure would be nice if there was a great big party for working folks to defend their own interests, wouldn't it? Fight fire with fire?

No. Wrong.

Hence:

RULES FOR RESISTANCE, #1: NO ONE WHO USES THE WORD "MASS" OR "MASSES" IN A POSITIVE WAY IS YOUR ALLY.

People who don't use those words aren't necessarily your allies, either. But folks who use this kind of terminology tend, in my experience, to either be psychopathic schemers or the boot-licking lackeys for psychopathic schemers. They will also, at some point, refer to you as "unwashed."

"The masses." If people referred to me by my density, I wouldn't wash, either.

Let's face it: when you join a "mass party," ie, a party made up of lots of people united for a common interest, you're compromising your individual positions for a party platform. That has its uses, sure. Legalizing gay marriage. Legalizing hemp. Banning the death penalty. We live in a pretty big country and pretty big decisions "have" to get made.

But your voice gets drowned out. There's lots of people shrieking for the ears of just a few representatives. Having a new political party doesn't change that. And it's always the political people shrieking the loudest, the ones who think they know best for everybody else.

We don't need another party that whitewashes personal and regional differences.

Also big parties are targets for big interests. The Democrats are constantly co-opted by business, and they're constantly co-opting social movements in turn. Big institutions, whether it be corrupt labor bureaucracies or planet-poisoning industries or corrupt financial powerhouses, use big political parties to cover their asses. That's how the Republican party can house both working-class conservatives ("I don't want my money going to anyone else!") and rich conservatives ("I don't want my money going to anyone else!").

We can't get what we want out of national parties. We can't build a "mass party" that we won't eventually lose to other "mass" institutions. Look at the Labour Party in Britain!

It'd be much wiser to form smaller parties that we can hold on a short leash. Keep em accountable. Keep em close to the people they represent. It'd do us far more good in the long run to start paying more attention to our local political scene, instead of fixating on a cabal of a few hundred limp-dicked old fossils in Washington whose geriatric minds we will never change.

Political parties love their Dicks (this one is Cheney).

Mass parties emerged from mass communications: the telegraph, the radio, telephones and television. Look at where our technology is heading, what it's doing to our lives and our society, and ask yourself what it will and could do to the political parties of the future. And to you socialist activists, nostalgic for the myths of the mighty Bolsheviks, you need to get yourselves in shape. This is far, far away from the Russia of the first World War. This ... is reality. And the old models cannot engage it.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

2012-01-16T06:16:00.006-06:00

It's the time of year where The Man pauses to pay tribute to its favorite appropriated revolutionary, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior. So it's a good for us to remember that he wasn't just an outspoken black man who stood up for civil rights, but a perpetrator of "direct action" and, in the eyes of the oppressive institutions of his time, a criminal.

It was criminal in the 1960s to defy racial segregation. It was criminal to have marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and strikes. Standing alongside the everyday men and women involved in the struggle for equality, MLK was repeatedly arrested - according to the King Center, 30 times.

Sort of flies in the face of what we think of as "criminal," doesn't it?

Like many great thinkers, some of his best words were written from prison. Good lord, that letter finds a whole new realm of relevance with the rise of Occupy Wall Street!

Don't let the LCD flag-waving media turn King into another talking head with a sound-bite dream. 150 years after slavery, racism is still alive and well in America; OWS has taught white and privileged Americans the truths of police brutality which the black community has known for decades. And not everyone the State would like to paint a criminal is in fact our enemy - some are trying to help us face the brutal force we accept all too easily.

The Urban Homestead

2012-01-05T10:33:00.003-06:00

It was my fiancee's birthday recently, and as a gift to the home she bought The Urban Homestead. 65 pages deep, it's a wonderful book so far.

And sure, you can find reviews of it anywhere - and also tons of news about the legal debate over the book's title and the term "urban homesteading" (is there anything dumber than arguing over who "owns" words? guh). I'm not going to contribute to the wealth (clutter?) of that criticism. But I do want to use it to launch more refined points about politics, economics, and the failure of mass institutionality. By which I mean the slow collapse of mass culture and mass politics via their decomposing institutions.

I'm looking forward to that. Meanwhile, I suggest getting ahold of this book!

The Fowley, MN security debate

2011-12-30T10:33:00.003-06:00

Two good Strib editorial pieces will fill you in here (contra) and here (pro).

I'm approaching from the perspective of a political radical, a heretical marxist, and a security officer when I consider this controversial issue. That's part of my disclaimer.

And part of how my marxism has deviated from all those endlessly arguing, worthless factions is that I don't think "The State" should control everything. And I don't think the market is perfect, either. So there's that.

Personally, I applaud experimentation. Fowley is brave in examining new models of public safety. The finance sector-sponsored recession is making unique demands on our traditional institutions and until we as communities can reclaim our losses (ha! right....), we've got an opportunity to find new ways to operate. I think that's great.

It bugs me when people put their ideology before the well-being of society. It's putting the cart before the horse. Some radical lefties might say, "Worker's patrols can secure the streets." Sure, they could, like they did in the early Soviet Union and Minneapolis 1933 and plenty of other revolutionary situations. But they don't just spring up out of the ground.

I like the security industry. Security professionals can do a lot of things the regular cops just don't have time to do. Why pull out the big guns before you know if a situation warrants it? Traffic stops, parking or curfew violations, barking dogs or loud radios ... let public security handle it, save your cops for the domestic abuses and armed robberies that they're qualified for.

Any number of OWS protesters would probably agree that they'd rather have been monitored by security folks than arbitrarily brutalized by the NYPD or other baton-happy riot goons. You don't need cops at a protest until things get hairy.

Using security officers for routine, low-hazard stuff adds a layer of finesse to civilian law. If it saves over-worked cops from having to work too much overtime, and saves the city from having to pay too much overtime, that's cool. I say, let the community decide what to do about safety and security. If they get some buy-in, they're more likely to view law enforcement as a partner than an oppressor, and that's the way a community ought to run.

Blogwatch: Socialism and/or Barbarism

2011-12-29T11:03:00.001-06:00

Watch Evan Calder Williams' influential blog Socialism and/or Barbarism "mutate" over the coming months. Must-read stuff for people serious about "making sense" of the world. Or at least conceptions of the world. I look forward to what he has in mind.

Resolutions for Radicals

2011-12-26T06:58:00.017-06:00

2012: the last year on earth, or at least the last year before a major paradigm change, if you believe the New-Agey whackos, like some of my friends in California. Quackery aside, it's a good opportunity to look at all your cookie-cutter, consumerist New Year's resolutions and think, what can I try something new?

You'd better make some damn good resolutions this year.

Let's face it: we can be really reactionary creatures. A lot of what we do and think is really just a response to our environment and we don't question many of the underlying reasons for what we do. A radical is just a person who digs a little deeper, examines a little closer, looks for innovative ways to approach a rather mundane life.

Many people take on the small potatoes for New Years. They want to lose weight, exercise, quit smoking, read more, take a nice vacation, spend more time with the kids, get a promotion. The problem is, these resolutions are largely the vows of consumers, people's whose mindsets are bogged down in the work-eat-sleep routine of goddamn farm animals.

When the fuck are you going to stop just reacting?

When are you going to stop bleating like a sheep about your little resolutions?

When the fuck are you going to make New Years revolutions?

CTHULHU DEMANDS BETTER FROM YOU.

Well, the problem for most folks, I imagine, and yes even for most wanna-be radicals who are usually too caught up in "activism" to actually ever be effective, is they don't know where to start. A lot of people don't consider themselves "political" - and the people who do are almost entirely all assholes. In America being "political" just means being a dishonest opportunist. We want to get away from that.

So I'm making a list we can start looking at and, shockingly, working with right away. We can, believe it or not, start using existing alternatives to undermine the global power structures and their oppressive narratives. We don't have to waste time "building a movement" from scratch or waiting for social conditions to be "right." Social conditions aren't wrong; our narratives are wrong.

These resolutions will require a lot of unpacking, so to speak, and as you can probably tell I haven't had much internet access lately. So there isn't a lot of reasoning or defense. Fuck it. Endless agonizing and arguing is what brings us to impasses anyway. Take a look and decide for yourself.

Join a credit union. On November 4th, somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people in the US switched from a bank to a credit union as part of OWS and Bank Transfer Day. Credit unions keep consumer profits out of irresponsible financial conglomerates and help the local economy. Plus they're more accountable to their members (as opposed to customers!) and we aren't at their mercy when it comes to sneaky fees and outrageous tolls. This site should help you find one near you.

Shop at a co-op. For newby radicals, try finding a grocery co-operative near you and checking out the yummy, locally and sustainably grown foods. Most grocery co-operatives (at least here in the Twin Cities) aren't necessarily worker's co-ops but consumer co-ops (transforming shoppers from consumers to members), which is a good model for holding the institution responsible. There are other kinds of co-ops, too, if you look around; bicycle co-ops are especially valuable to cyclists and will liberate you from a dependency on cookie-cutter sports stores. The knowledge and service found in a bicycle co-op will make you better engaged with your two-wheeled tool.

Join a co-op. The real benefits come to members: profit sharing, voting rights, sharing passions with other enthusiasts. Instead of mindlessly wandering the big-box stores like a zombie, buying all your "needs" off a list like you've been programmed, roll up your sleeves and get involved in how your community institutions run. This is a great introduction to local economics - the kind that actually matter to communities and individuals.

"Co-Op City" in New York. Housing cooperatives could be really helpful in this economy....

Start a co-op. For the truly radical. Identify a need in your community, even (or especially) one provided by big corporations. Get some friends and neighbors interested. Provide that good or service for one another and the community. All you'll need is a charter and some by-laws, maybe some start-up funds, and a lot of grit, determination, and willingness to learn. Find some resources here and here. It may seem ambitious, but co-operatives will need to form the backbone of future sustainable and democratic societies.

Start a garden. Go all-out. As a species, we've been digging in the dirt our entire history. Urban living has wrecked that for a lot of folks. Don't let it. Even if you live in the city, in an apartment or other shared living space, get your hands on some green. Herbs and other expensive meal components can be grown on a window-sill and the savings can add up. Even better, if you're really radical you can take up window-farming and make the most out whatever space you've got. Try container gardening, too. Sneak some potted plants into the common areas of your buildings - more green, living plants are proven to make more enjoyable living spaces, decreasing stress and making even the dumpiest shithole a more pleasing habitat. If you've got an actual yard, cultivate it. Share your bounty with neighbors and take the excesses to farmer's markets. Nothing undermines the greed of capitalism like sharing. Just ask Napster.

Compost. Goes hand-in-hand with gardening, and lessens your carbon footprint too. Don't rely on industrial fertilizers that wreck the global soil system. Read up on the best ways to recycle nature's materials. You might surprise yourself with how much of your waste is actually compostable and keep useful waste out of those god-awful landfills where they benefit no one and nothing.
Support a local political party. One important lesson of the Occupy movement that doesn't seem to get much discussion is how local politicians have tipped their hand. They're as in the pocket of global capital as much as our federal "representatives." Don't think third-parties and local elections are without consequence; in fact, it might just be the only way we can make some real fucking change around here. Take the local, and then state, offices in cities and important districts out of the hands of the mass parties and see how that changes the dialogue. It'll be important to have allies in office when OWS takes to the streets again next year. Plus the most influential economic policies actually happen on the state and local levels. Find someone sympathetic to your political beliefs locally, or there's always the Green Party, which could certainly use some energy and a swift kick in the pants.

This post inspired by some of the most radical thinkers in American history.

Yeah, localism. Yeah, individualism. Maybe middle-class aspirations. Or maybe working class aspirations, with the platform of historical inclusion in the middle-class. But it's movement and it's direction and that's what we need in 2012, not rebuilding the wheel or waiting for a Leninist Superman. Only dirty hands are worthy of the black and red!

This Year's Gift To Myself

2011-12-25T07:38:00.003-06:00

Most of my comrades support the 2nd Amendment and are thus tolerant of my frequent firearm purchasing binges. They know I can't pass up a good deal. Even if it isn't exactly practical, like two years ago when I ordered five thousand 62 gr 5.56mm bullets for my reloading bench. Turns out the box was so big it would not fit inside of my components safe. My solution was perfectly logical to other shooters- go to the range and shoot as much stored 5.56mm ammo I had so I could reload the brass with my huge stash of 5.56mm bullets. Thus the fewer the bullets, the smaller the box I need to store them in. Ergo, the new box will fit in the safe. I'm still working on that solution...
This holiday season was no exception. After two months on the front lines of The War On Christmas with my fellow Far Left conspirators, sabotaging Santa's sleigh and sodomizing various barnyard animals in nativity displays, I decided I deserved to treat myself. I was combing the local gun shops, seeing nothing special on the shelves. What? Yet another variation of the M1911? Yawn.
Elbowing my way through crowds of little bald macho dudes showing off in front of their leather faced fiftysomething girlfriends at the Glock display, I made my way towards the much less crowded surplus firearm section of the store. There were a couple of aging and overweight militia types, decked out in the latest digital camo fashion, hauling crates of ancient Mosin- Nagant rifles over to the register. I breezed past them, classifying them as Mostly Harmless.
I ignored the various overpriced AKs, ARs, H-Ks, etc. and headed for the used handgun section. Now I am sort of on the fence when it comes to the great semi- auto vs. revolver debate, but when it comes down to it there is something old- school sexy about a revolver. Sam Spade, Elliot Ness, or any other detective from the classic film noir period of the 1940s and 50s carried revolvers. Then there is the whole Zen of swinging out the cylinder and dropping another six rounds into the chambers. Hollywood has tried to make slapping a magazine ( the ignorant refer to them as " clips" ) into the butt of a semi- automatic look sexy but the hero usually squinches up his face when doing it, and appears to be in the process of pinching a loaf. It ain't the same, baby.
So back to the used revolver display. I see a Webley in pretty decent shape, and priced accordingly. Numerous Colt Police Specials- nice, but again priced well above the $500 dollar mark. I want a deal, dammit.
So then I come across some Taurus revolvers, Model of 82. Brazilian police surplus, caliber .38 Special. Holy crap, these poor guns look like they have been run over by a tank. The bluing on the barrels are worn down by holster wear. The grips looked like a bored dog had been gnawing on them. But they were priced accordingly: $ 169.00. This required a closer look.
I called the clerk over and asked to handle one of the revolvers. With one in my hand I checked the bore, the cylinder, and tested out the hammer. Everything checked out. I had to have it and bought it.
Other guys were putting layways on $1,000.00 + M1911s, the latest 9mms with 30 round magazines ( again, don't call them " clips", dummy ), or Berettas tricked out with a dozen " tacticool" items. Me, I paid in cash and walked out the door with my ugly duckling. I was shooting it on the same day I first saw it.
How did my beat up Model 82 do? It exceeded my expectations in every category. The chewed up grips fitted my hand nicely. The Model 82 is well balanced and solidly built, so its a little heavy for a revolver in .38 Special. But that keeps recoil minimal, so its a plus. The trigger pull is a little mushy, but no big deal. Double action firing is remarkably smooth. At 7 yards, three shot groups easily stayed within 2".
All in all, this was a great deal. And nothing gives me more holiday cheer than a good deal.

Merry Christmas, Comrades!

My Experience At D12 Seattle

2011-12-21T15:34:00.001-06:00

The following is a requested re- post of a reply a comrade made to this article: www.anarchistnews.org/node/19812
---

I was at the Seattle port action. I think that there is a lot of truth in this article about the role unions play, and the role of management in major actions such as this. I feel the article fails to differentiate between self- appointed managers ( approved by either individual groups or no one ) and that managers that were elected/ approved by GA's for specific roles ( such as peace and safety ). It is important for revolutionaries to note that whenever you have an action as large as this there will be some sort of management system on some kind of level. The real question should be what role those managers have, what is the LIMIT TO THEIR AUTHORITY, and what is their mission statement. Those managers who attempted to co- opt, or limit the scope of the shut down failed, but I think those are the managers that the article is targeting.
This brings me to an interesting point that I would really like to discuss. We are now observing and analyzing the polarity of this struggle- and that is not necessarily a bad thing, or a new thing. The polarity of this struggle is primarily between the reformists, and the revolutionaries. The hard- line reformists on the one hand work for the bourgeoisie ( ruling class ), while the hard- line revolutionaries work against capital and for the proletariat ( working class ). Now here is the issue- we have a highly decentralized collective of revolutionary networks in America. Revolutionary Anarchists ( because some self- described anarchists are reformists or lifestyle-ists ) don't work with Marxists ( except when they are concerned with immediate survival ), and Marxists don't work with each other ( ISO, FSP, SA, RCP, CVO, non- aligned, etc. ). This sectarianism on the revolutionary front weakens it, and allows the reformists to use divide and conquer strategies to throw a wedge between those who know what is going on, and the undecided workers. This also weakens the revolutionary pole, which aids the reformists in the information war ( bringing undecided workers to their side ).
I felt the greatest strength of the port shutdown in Seattle was that revolutionaries came together to shutdown Gate 18 ( where the shit went down at ). The reformist liberals stayed in the safer yellow and green zones. We created a 5' barricade, and adjusted that barricade to meet our needs against the cops. While many of us were pepper sprayed and hit by bicycles, we were able to limit that police violence through our collective cooperation. This is really important because the Seattle protesters that came to shut down the ports were not a very large group ( considering the scope of the work ). Overcoming sectarianism is what allowed the revolutionary left to maintain that shutdown- and I have never seen the cops so frightened in my life.
Now which pole do the Trade Union Bureaucrats ( TUBS ) belong to? They belong to the reformist pole. They have a history of funneling the vote of their membership into the Democratic Party. Does that mean unions are worthless institutions? Hardly. Many of the key infrastructure on the coastlines and in the north are maintained and run by union workers. The hard truth of the matter is that they will be integral to the success of any revolution in America. I am against the notion of alienating the unions and working without them- however I do think it is important that we recognize the difference between union bureaucrats and union rank- and- file. Anarchists, in my opinion, have had trouble with this differentiation, and as a union member, it bothers me. I feel that this is a critical part of understanding where unions are why they are there. The institutions have become reformist because of the points laid out in the article regarding Taft- Hartley, but also because the TUBS have become comfortable in their positions. They are the reason that unions have moved away from the paradigm of class struggle and into a paradigm of capital- labor cooperation. I am not as pessimistic about unions, and I think we should be trying to provide outreach to their rank- and- file, but we should ignore the reformist protest of their leadership. The TUBS will plea that we ignored a democratic union, but many unions are democratic at only a local level.
Differentiating the rank- and- file and the TUBS is critical! There were many union members at the shut down who supported it wholeheartedly!
I feel the article did a great job outlining the importance of the non- union workers, but also did a great job of explaining why we must hold our ground and not give in during major direct actions such as D12 regardless of who wants to cross.
---
Sectarianism Is A Cancer.

Back to my experience at Gate 18, which should be a subject on the minds of every revolutionary who participated in the shutdown. Sectarianism is destroying the revolutionary left, and only serves the bourgeoisie. We need to build bridges between the revolutionary sects on both ends of the Marxist- Anarchist aisle. Currently the strategy for Anarchists and these various Marxist groups is to build walls against each other. The Anarchists are building a wall, and the ISO, SA, RCP, etc are building walls. This strategy is " whoever builds the highest, strongest wall will be the victor of the revolution !" Unfortunately history has shown that this strategy is a bust, and that it allows the bourgeoisie to easily rip us apart. All of these groups have been failures for the past fifty years in creating a revolution ( I am using fifty years because of McCarthyism ). All sectarianism has created is a handful of weak cargo cults who think they are better than each other.
---
How Do We Overcome Sectarianism?

cultish dogma and open that up for a debate and discussion. There are a ton of unanswered questions of previous revolutions that every group has tried to answer but failed. No one has the answer to everything regarding a revolution, and my evidence is the fifty years of failure in the United States. I have meet individuals in every organization that wish to address the problem of sectarianism. We need to network with these individuals so that we can overcome our differences. We also need to be willing to have our dogma and theory poked and prodded at so that we can improve upon it. This will not be pretty- it will be ugly, it will hurt feelings, and it will smash egos. It will also likely destroy or radically change many of these sects since their survival relies on secrecy, avoidance of criticism, internalized discussion, dogma, and a blockade of debate and communication with other revolutionaries. As revolutionaries, we will have to re- visit the age old debates of the State, democracy, consensus, bureaucracy, management, and the shortcomings of the Russian Revolution.
I have created a Facebook page to help build this network here:
www.facebook.com/pages/Open-Network-of-Revolutionary-Activists/28...

I hope that you all will build the networking sites needed or Facebook pages to network revolutionaries in your respective districts.
I consider Anarchists and Marxists as comrades and i am open to any comments, discourse, concerns, suggestions, questions, or proposals. Please use the FB page so that we may get started.
I also recommend a review of Ben Seattle's strong polemics regarding sectarianism and Party building.
www.struggle.net/Ben

The Presidential Selection of 2012

2011-12-18T07:55:00.002-06:00

No, that is not a typo in the title. That is a more accurate description of our current political process, particularly of the presidential contest, than the sappy bullshit about our Republic you hear Ken Burns or other amateur historians spouting. The candidates are selected for us by the elite and then we chose between the Democratic and Republican wings of the Property Party.
Whether the GOP finally decides on Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney is a small matter ( the other contenders having been displaced by the inevitable winnowing process as big money throws its weight behind those candidates who can talk right- wing crazy on cue but who won't actually rock the boat too much ). Never in the history of American politics have the two parties been closer in their ideologies. Contrary to what the few remaining true believers in Obama think, bombs do not magically stop killing people just because the guy in the White House as a ( D ) after his last name. The very same liberal democrats who took to the streets to protest Bush's War suddenly fell silent on the subject once their hero assumed power. And Obama's political foes in the GOP do not question the President's drone campaign in Central Asia on moral grounds, but in terms of how much more tons of high explosives those drones would drop if they were President.
Civil rights? The Obama administration took over the continuing erosion of the rule of law from that of George W. Bush without missing a beat. The National Defense Authorization Act now makes it legal for the U.S. Military to arrest American citizens overseas or in their own homeland. Goodbye, Posse Comitatus Act. Again, the GOP candidates do not criticize the actual destruction of our rights as U.S. citizens. Their complaint is that the President is not throwing more people in jail.
Both the President and the Republican candidates agree on the fact that Capital must be dominant over Labor. Again, it is a matter of degree. The Democrat must make promises to organized labor and throw a few scraps to the workers now and then. Of course the promises to the Unions can be ignored until the next election cycle comes up ( remember the Employee Free Choice Act ? ) and workers can be distracted by minor cuts in payroll taxes while our Democratic President quietly praises indentured servitude programs like Georgia Works. The Republican candidates have it easier- they do not have to pretend they are a friend of the working class. Their solution to unemployment is to build more prisons.
" Why am I voting for Obama? Two words: Newt Gingrich ( or Mitt Romney )." With President Obama sounding like Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich sounding like, well, Newt Gingrich, even the standard shitty reason of Democrat diehards to vote for their idol falls flat. More and more people are waking up to the fact that the Two- Party system is a pretty crappy form of representative government that is unresponsive to the needs of 99% of its citizens.
The rallying cry of America's workers for the upcoming Occupy campaigns in the spring should be simple: We Deserve Better.

Nationalism, Political Parties, and Team Sports

2011-12-09T10:00:00.001-06:00

Since the Obama Administration has continued renditions (and has since the new administration was barely a month old), CIA black ops secret prisons (there's one in Somalia now), the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens, wars public and secret throughout the globe, GPS tracking of American citizens, and all the other worst abuses of the Bush Administration, dedicated Democrat Party loyalists have been forced to either abandon their team or give in to their baser impulses and change their ideology to support their team. In other words, many Democrats, in Congress and in the public at large, have rediscovered their inner neoconservative. But don't tell them this. See, "neoconservative" is a word associated with the Enemy, their opposing Team, and as such is an object of hatred.

In George Orwell's 1945 "Notes on Nationalism", he wrote of nationalists:

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

To put it more simply, it's not the action that matters, but the team that does the action. Political parties in our binary political system are as meaningless as a college football team, and the rivalries between groups are identical in their pointlessness.

If you live in a college town, like Columbus Ohio or Oklahoma City, you see this mindless fanaticism from team fans (short for fanatic) all the time. In "Buckeye" country, the blue and gold of their Michigan rivals are hated and reviled. It's only scarlet and gray here, thank you very much! Both teams just play football. Big fucking deal, right? And yet, there's a sense of moral righteousness in one team's support, and their opposition to the other team. People will be genuinely outraged if you wear the wrong colors. Fights may even start. For what?

The Democrat and Republican parties, especially over the last couple decades, have been different in word, but not significantly different in deed. During the 8 years of Bush, these deeds were associated with Republicans, and neo-conservatives. Those are on the opposing team, so members of the Democrat team opposed it. Now the Obama administration continues and expands what the Bush administration did. But the current administration is a Democrat administration, so for a member or supporter of the Democrat team they must oppose anything that challenges the Democrat administration, and they must support anything done by the Democrat administration. If it was a Republican administration, as members of the Democrat team they would oppose it.

You can see this in how members of the Republican team opposed Democrat military intervention in Libya. Obama has been a conservative in nearly all his actions, has been since the beginning, and yet the "conservative" team members still complain, and the "liberal" team members still support him. Not because of the actions themselves, but because of the team undertaking those actions. The actions don't objectively matter, what matters is Team. If you try to explain this to a member of the Republican/conservative team, or to a member of the Democrat/liberal team, they will just shut down. Or they will get very angry. They hate to have this sort of thing pointed out to them. Objective thought is impossible. Team is all.

For a related comparison, look at the reaction to that coach at Penn State, who covered up the rape of children, and was forced to resign. There were riots, not because children were being raped (which I would consider an excellent reason to riot), but because the coach that turned a blind eye to it was being forced to resign. All the anger and hatred of the fan(atic)s was directed not at the rightful target (child rapists and their defenders) but at the people in the media and at the college who dared to reveal this and demand accountability for it. Classic nationalism, it is not the objectionable act they oppose, but the revelation of that objectionable act and the associated discredit it brings upon the object of their worship.

With college teams, their coaches are looked at as being the team. Attacks on the coach are attacks on the Team. With national politics, the president is looked at as being the embodiment of the team, the political party. A verbal attack on the president and his actions is considered an attack on the Team, and this cannot be allowed to stand by the team's supporters.

If we can't get past our slavery to team politics in our country, we'll never be able to make any progess. Instead we'll continue dancing like puppets on the strings of the people who control both parties. They're able to do whatever they want, and the team supporters back it or oppose it depending on which team is committing the actions this year.

O Verdugo!

2011-11-23T10:48:00.003-06:00

American Public Media's segment Marketplace has been running stories on my hometown of San Bernardino and the Inland Empire region all week. Every morning I drive into work listening to NPR and feel my heartstrings ache to hear stories about "Verdugo" (as the thugs call it) and Rialto, where I lived on my own and first organized as a socialist. 17% unemployment, epidemic-level foreclosures, businesses shutting down and boarding up.

Today's article in particular hit me hard because it was an issue my friends and I noticed and discussed a lot in political terms. Why is the area so religious? Why is it so conservative? Along with crime and drugs and alcohol abuse, pollution and traffic and apathy, the religious thing colors the IE with crayons of nihilism. This community seems nigh suicidal.

So I had to write a comment, and I'm reproducing it below:

I spent the first 25 years of my life growing up in San Bernardino. I had to move to Minneapolis, Minnesota with internet friends to get a real job, even after 4 years of college. This was just ~before~ the recession hit - the economy in the Inland Empire is nothing short of abominable. I was always disappointed when members of the community turned towards religion in times of hardship. It's a rather conservative area and voted Republican for as long as I was conscious of politics. Republican strategy seemed to strangle the Inland Empire, and the Democratic Party - disorganized, no message, Republican-lite when it gathered influence at all - hardly bothers with the area.

Having blinded themselves to politics, never banding together in an economic sense, struggling with poisonously high real estate costs ... and then to turn to religion? It never failed to look like escapism to me. The same with the meth epidemic, or the rampant alcoholism. I don't generally have a problem with Christianity, and I especially appreciate it when churches provide services to the poor - services gutted from county, state, and federal levels of government. But the brainwashing makes me uneasy, as do the homophobia and oppression of women and the, yes, racism - not all churches accept blacks and Latinos.

Even as an aid to the poor, these churches only address the symptoms, not the disease. The real disease is an economy that systematically keeps down the poor. Prison rates in the IE are huge. Gangs are a problem because there are no concrete, constructive alternatives. The school system is a wreck. No churches can possibly alleviate all the conditions that cause these problems. The region needs good jobs that pay a living wage and keep cash in the local economy rather than sending it to faraway home offices and Wall Street as profits and investments for the few. Sadly, until then all churches can provide is an sedative for the groaning, pained residents living in this post-industrial wasteland I'm pained to call my home town.

OWS evicted from Zucotti - not over yet

2011-11-15T11:34:00.001-06:00

Thank you for the invitation. I give you, a post!
OWS was evicted in the dead of night early 11/15. I can't imagine who thought it would be a good idea. From Twitter:
" 'NYPD Counter Terrorism' unit sent in. Unfuckingbelievable when the terrorists are @ Goldman Sachs. http://twitpic.com/7eehku"
"#OWS RT @NewYorkObserver: Here with credentialed photogs from NYT, WSJ and Reuters they're also being barred from #occupywallstreet"
"Isn't it against the law for the NYPD to bar credentialed press from entry to Zuccotti and #occupywallstreet? What are they trying to hide?"
"#OWS NYPD breaking domestic and international laws right now. livestreams: 1. tinyurl.com/3t7np8x 2. tinyurl.com/68yxafj"
"Watching NYPD laugh as they tear up the library. This is like Fahrenheit 451. Or Clockwork Orange. #ows http://redgreenandblue.org/2011/11/14/o ... t-by-nypd/"
‎"@wilw @occupywallst BBC reporting NYPD barred press from observing. Reporter quoted saying "I'm Press", Officer: "Not tonight"."
"FRONT PAGE of the @nytimes using the #OccupyWallStreet livestream as media is denied entry into Zuccotti Park #OWS"
"Residents near Zuccotti Park not being allowed out of building to watch; NYPD telling doormen to lock up, per reporter Melissa Russo."
"NYPD has closed the airspace above the park to prevent news helicopters from filming them. It's an unprecedented violation of free press."

Capital has used their mercenary arm to remove the inconvenience in Zucotti Park, the nexus of the OWS movement. They are, perhaps, under some illusion that this will be the end. Clearly they are not inhabiting the same reality as the rest of us. You do not kill a story about the fascist takeover of our economic and political process with a fascist takeover, particularly when you go out of your way to violate Constitutional rights.

You see, there's an ever bigger fuck-up in all this than the jackbooted thugs themselves, and that's the barring of the news media from covering it. Who the hell thought that would work? The NYPD seems to think they can boldly restrict information and cover up major actions and nobody will notice. They think they can kill a story just by blocking news coverage of it. That's a bold violation of Freedom of the Press, and corrupt though they may be you can be certain the Press in NYC will notice and react. On top of that, smartphones were on hand, and in hours the activities of the fascist army of Capital will be all over the internet in video and picture form. They will also be all over the traditional media, because the media won't have its own materials and will instead be going to the "citizen journalists".

So then, if the goal was to kill OWS and end public opposition to private ownership of our government, this eviction will be a massive failure. That should not be a surprise. Every time Capital has reacted to the existence of opposition to it, they have overreacted. I don't think they can help it. I don't think they know how to have a measured and reasonable response to opposition, perhaps because it has been so long since they truly faced any.

Capital should have called up their old puppet George W for some advice. When people were protesting his ridiculous and costly illegal war in Iraq, he just ignored them. When Cindy Sheehan was occupying space along a road near Bush's ranch in Texas, he just ignored them. And for the most part it worked. Bush was able to stay in Iraq, funnelling contracts to his buddies in the defense industry, until he left office. Obama, himself an ally of Capital and the 1% (populist costuming to the contrary), was able to use opposition to the war to get himself elected. Then he started another war, kept Gitmo open, and expanded a pattern of illegal drone-based assassinations (lately even of minors and US citizens), but that's neither here nor there.

Point being, the only way for Capital to fight a movement like this, the only way that will ever succeed, is to ignore it. Period. If you mention it at all, decry them as whining kids, and leave it at that. Of course, I wholeheartedly support OWS and the Occupy events and camps throughout the country. I only provide the method of the movement's defeat because of my absolute certainty that this method will not be used by the forces of Capital. They can't. It's not something they are capable of doing, restraint is not a word in their vocabulary.

Instead we will see the mercenary police forces (and when they receive massive donations from Capital and ignore the will of the public to carry out the will of Capital, could they be described as anything other than mercenaries?) continue to overreach. They will continue to trample Constitutional rights. They will continue to react disproportionate to the situation. And in return, the movement will continue to grow. Like steel tempered by blows, the resistance will make it stronger. It may even come to a revolution.

Now, I mention constitutional rights not because I think there's an mystical sacred significance to the document, but because most Americans do, and most Americans are under the illusion that it means a damn. It's easy to believe you have freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, when nobody is trying to remove these freedoms from you. What Capital is doing is they are dispelling the notion in the mind of the public that the public actually possesses these freedoms in anything other than name. But when you provide the public with clear physical evidence that they do not have freedom, you make the condition ripe for a revolution to gain the freedoms we've been told we have.

I can think of few moves worse for Capital to have made than to boldly attack the freedom of the Press as they did in Zucotti last night.

Thoughts from Camus on Rebellion

2011-10-25T11:44:00.006-05:00

Karl Marx isn't the "only" "great thinker" worth reading. For those of us who want to have a diversified theoretical toolbox for our interaction with the world, it helps to sift through the whole of human history and pick the seeds with the most vigor to take root in one's life. (Contrast this with the niche writing produced by microsects around the world, these hard and mostly barren clusters of stagnant thought, which cannot make the proper connections with mainstream culture but try anyway to co-opt or influence popular movements....)

It is impossible for any one philosopher or school of thought to sum up the whole of human experience and prescribe a program for operation. It's entirely necessary, however, to venture some sort of guess about what's going on. But even with the homogenizing effects of globalization, thinkers run the risk of over-simplifying complicated interactions. This is the lesson we the revolutionaries of the 21st century learn from post-modernism: that no single thought is ever entirely accurate, that no one philosophy can address all the factors in play, that any number and variations of paradigms can operate simultaneously within the social environment.

So after some time of laying off the political writings, I've recently turned to Albert Camus and his philosophical examination of different types and movements of dissent, a frayed old book entitled The Rebel. Written in 1951, The Rebel takes a good hard look at many thinkers who are still relevant to - and studied by - us today. Many, like Nietzsche and de Sade, are tarnished by reputation and still discouragingly misunderstood by our contemporaries.

The point of this post is not to discuss the ideas, but to encourage my readers to pick up this obscured essay in light of recent developments in the United States. So then, for your consideration, a condensed quotation from Camus, and a picture from the news that rocked California and the #Occupation movements Tuesday night and Wednesday.

Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? It is for the sake of everyone in the world that the slave asserts himself when he comes to the conclusion that a command has infringed on something in him which does not belong to him alone, but which is common ground where all men - even the man who insults and oppresses him - have a natural community....

[A]n act of rebellion is not, essentially, an egoist act.... Moreover, the rebel - once he has accepted the motives and at the moment of his greatest impetus - preserves nothing in that he risks everything. He demands respect for himself, of course, but only insofar as he identifies himself with a natural community.

Then we note that rebellion does not arise only, and necessarily, among the oppressed, but that it can also be caused by the mere spectacle of oppression of which someone else is the victim. In such cases there is a feeling of identification with another individual.... Therefore the individual is not, in himself alone, the embodiment of the values he wishes to defend. It needs all humanity, at least, to comprise them. When he rebels, a man defines himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.

I rebel - therefore we exist.

- Camus, from "The Rebel"

Protesters struggle to get a woman in a wheelchair away from the teargas and rubber bullets at #occupyoakland, 10/26/2011

Victory Without Demands

2011-10-19T10:14:00.015-05:00

Within the spectrum of thoughts that take #OWS seriously there are two prominent currents creating a discussion I enjoy. The question is over whether or not a movement can be "successful" with a "tactic" of "no demands." One current of thought points to Occupy California, which issued no concrete demands at first (statement) and, at least temporarily, seemed to end in "defeat"; ie, not a lot of institutional gains appear to have been made.

The other opinion on this subject looks at absence of these tactics as a positive, or at least inevitable, aspect of the movement. This is the side towards which I lean. I wasn't a part of Occupy California, and only watched at a distance from here in Minnesota where a similar campaign (opposed to budget cuts, etc.) generated virtually zero publicity (statement from one of the participating groups here). It had clearer demands, such as a moratorium on tuition hikes (if memory serves me correctly). But it didn't go anywhere. Last year around this time, a march around the Loring Park neighborhood with a hip-hop show featuring Guante (an artist I admire and respect a lot) was energetically attended and yet made zero lasting splash.

This dog has done more for "the movement" than that march in Oct 2010 (not pictured).

All across the country for decades, grassroots activists have been building their protests and vocalizing their demands. Even the biggest demonstrations - such as those against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for LGBTQ rights - have been ludicrously slow in gaining attention in the media, much less institutional traction. We have, in fact, seen a decade or more of entrenched corporate politicrats ramrodding their own agendas through the federal government. One reason Obama was able to win by such a large margin in the '08 elections is that he spoke, however abstractly, to the very concrete and diverse hopes of tens of millions of people: an end to war and torture, the beginning of new health and jobs reforms. But he only passed half-measures watered down by Republicans and remained faithful to the cash ambitions of corporations and Wall Street.

We should all know what happens to a dream deferred - and if we didn't already, we see it now - and it is not in fact one dream, which is the agenda of the totalitarian clique - it is many dreams, myriad dreams. A collective and participatory dream.

People who try to "draw valuable lessons from history" often end up dismissing old methods by insisting "they didn't work" at x, y, or z period. There is an almost lazy ignorance of the role of material conditions and changes in society. As Nietzsche put it, "The historian looks backward; eventually he also believes backward." If we're serious about fidelity to realism, in opposition to idealism and denial of the life experience, we can't get hung up on terms like victory and defeat. We need to foster the growth of movements that liberate our human potential. That means understanding very well the causes and conditions under which they operate.

You have to recognize that #OWS doesn't just represent a shared emotion, isn't just another protest, isn't just going to go away. It's a trend in our social arrangements. It's a product of the interaction of complicated factors. Its persistence - it's flourish and contagion in even just a few weeks - is indication of a new watershed. A deep and lasting change in how the global citizen sees the world.

New York City, Capital of the World that was, birthplace of the world to come?

This is the cutting edge of the folks who no longer accept the debate as it has been inherited. For the occupiers it isn't about debt and taxes, safety nets and healthcare and retirement benefits. This is the language of the bourgeoisie, of the middle class, of the bought-off proletariat that fought hard and settled for being included/deluded/diluted in the American Dream. Some of these words can still be found in the signs and rhetoric, but they are dying off like desiccated branches. They begin to taste like ash. The occupation, seated at the edge of a new experience, gropes in the dark for new props, new signs, new words to explain what will be next.

We build the old from the new. Boil, distill, mix ... human is the alembic.

There is no guarantee they will be "successful." Of course not: history takes dictation from no one. That's the fundamental downfall of totalitarian thinking! There is no such thing as "summing up," no such thing as "the final word." (Because life is beautiful.) But every morning that you wake up and you have the option of wandering over to a public space occupation and picking up a book from a book tent and sitting and listening to a drum circle, or reading Vonnegut on a bench, or drinking free coffee from a small business that proactively supports free speech and democracy, or can have a civil conversation with an environmentalist, or an anarchist, or an End the Fed advocate, and feel calm and at ease and thrilled by a deeply social satisfaction - some instinct in us unfed by the privatization of public space - that is the thrill of life. Of living. Of experiencing humanness differently than advertised or advocated or inherited.

If we need to redefine "victory" in order to overcome the limitations of the term, then we can say every day where and when there is an occupation, there is something of the old victory, and something of the new. Who can say how long it will last?

But the real question you should ask is, you detractors and/or critics and/or skeptics, is this: what will make these people go home? Now that they've come together and learned just how widespread and interlinked their net of oppression is - now that they've seen an entirely new arrangement is possible - how could they possibly ever stop?

A sentiment that may be finding its conditions ripe, for once.

A Defense of the Security Industry/Field/Function

2011-10-13T07:50:00.013-05:00

Since Friday, I have visited Occupy Minnesota several times and slept on the lawn of the People's Plaza once. I'm planning a much more detailed account of my experiences there, one that a blog cannot encompass, but one part of the discussion at last night's general assembly touched on my own field of work: safety and security.

As gossip tells it, the occupation movement is "disorganized." I would rather describe it as "dynamically organized," as each person gives input and discussion sets policy, always open to revision. Currently this structure is proving very adaptable and inclusive. A lot of ground work and precedent is being set right now. And of course we have a tendency to criticize new endeavors, and a healthy dose of that is good, very good. So last night the general assembly discussed a case in which the role of the security working group was examined.

I had not heard the rumors, but someone was kind enough to explain to 50 or so attendees what had happened. The previous night, a group of people decided to split off from the occupation with an impromptu march. In the course of the march, a smaller group of people fell behind. At one point some young gentlemen got off a bus and proceeded to beat up an old man and mug a young girl. It isn't clear what condition these folks are in now, or whether or not the attack was politically motivated, or if the police or downtown security did or can do anything about it.

It caused quite a bit of debate. The occupation has an internal team of people, ostensibly all volunteers, to make sure conduct in the People's Plaza remains safe. What exactly they do, I don't know - I heard nothing about this except the call on Twitter for some volunteers, preferably people with security experience. And although I'm now officially on the record as both an occupier and a security guard, I wasn't feeling particularly moved to answer that call. (First of all, I'm actually a "Certified Protection Officer," thank-you-very-much, although the term "guard" has a historical appeal that resonates with me.) Mostly that's because I can't spend all my days at the occupation - unfortunately - so I don't want to have responsibilities that carry outside of the limited time I have there.

The guards of Ashurbanipal, an Assyrian king. Alabaster relief, ca. 645 BCE. Security is an ancient and honorable responsibility.

But listening to people debate the role of the security working group really raised some questions about the industry and how it relates to society as a whole. Some of the more decentralization-minded folks (whom the media would likely broadbrush as "anarchists") have legitimate and vocal concerns about authoritarianism. When one facilitator suggested that no marches leave the plaza without some security escort the phrase "slippery slope" immediately came up. No one wants their spontaneous actions to be babysat. But nobody wants our activists to get the snot kicked out of them, or be too intimidated to participate, either.

"Slippery slope" is often used in a way that bypasses spectrum thinking and reinforces all-or-nothing dichotomies - and I think this is such a case. Behavior cannot be split neatly into "fascism" on one hand and "freedom" on the other. Just as we cannot divide up our experiences neatly into "privilege" and "oppression."

"If I had more time and could speak," my fiancee said to me afterwards, "I would have told them that walking alone downtown at night is different for me than it is for them. They need to check their privilege."

We were of course short on time. In the end, the facilitator (who did a good job with the meeting on the whole, I must say) made us aware of the issue and then dropped it. Essentially this leaves everyone to make their own decisions but doesn't raise the security-consciousness of the occupation. If anything, it is dangerously dismissive. This would be a prime opportunity for a teach-in, covering de-escalation (which every activist should have in their tool belt, IMHO) and personal safety. Self-defense lessons could be invaluable, too.

Call me a starry-eyed hippy, but I believe everyone is more or less capable of engaging in the kind of critical thinking necessary for security. Some people may be more vigilant than others, or more charismatic (which could help in de-escalation) or may have just plain more experience. But, as my fiancee once again put it succinctly, it's really a matter of cost-benefit analysis. If you leave the encampment and go out into the (sometimes dimly lit) streets of Minneapolis, you run risks considerably different than if you're in your sleeping bag among your fellow activists. The People's Plaza works because folks trust each other. I find that inspiring. But you do run the risk of getting in a shouting match with other impassioned people who happen to disagree with you, and you run the risk of being held liable if others make bad mistakes and cross the police. So, you know, all our behavior is a matter of cost-benefit analysis on some level or another. It's just not that everybody sees it that way.

So that is one function of security I strongly endorse - the raising of awareness. If you or a group of your friends want to do something risky outside of the plaza, liability falls on y'all. I feel like it is the responsibility of the collective to provide both training to the members as well as specialized members for escorts to meet the safety needs of the individuals and groups who require those services. But it shouldn't be mandatory; adults must be allowed adult freedoms.

The fresh look this gives me on my own field of work in the capitalist system is significant.

Education and protection services provided by security are useful in any society, no matter the complexity or level of industrial development. In a decentralized community, every member has a responsibility for their own safety and the safety of the collective. It's a foolish and unfair bourgeois conceit that any given member be treated as a representative or "unofficial leader" of an avowedly leaderless movement, an experiment in direct democracy, a horizontal organization. The only reason to put a single face on such a movement is to make targets, martyrs, to diffuse collective thought and united action. This is why a more successful and mature occupation should probably cycle members through all working groups, including security working groups. Everyone ought to have some taste of each job as well as receiving daily updates from all other working groups. Only then will everyone have an appreciation of exactly what security (and other) challenges face the individuals and the occupation.

This is one of the advantages of the horizontally organized community: the direct sharing of knowledge. Unlike government, academia, and business, all members of a collective share their information as freely as possible. If everyone hoists a part of the work, it is more fulfilling to our humanity than working the same repetitive drudgework day in and day out. For almost 100 years we had our days divided into three segments, one for work, one for recreation, and one for sleep. That informal social contract has informally expired: work now follows us home through technology, and involuntary furloughs and temp work makes our livelihood much more precarious. (Labor arrangements that provide alternatives to hourly wage have yet to be fully explored; take the initiative yourself!)

Likewise, the social need for security - like the need for sanitation, socialization, civic participation, education, and rest - extends beyond the conventional workday. Industrial and federal bureaucracies expand to deepen the management of these needs at many removes from general society. But neither this society or its constituents can continue to function under increasing structural and mental stress.

"What? You need me to come again? I feel like I just left!!"

Despite the tangential nature of this discussion, I hope I've made the structural implications of the security/direct democracy dynamic more clear, if for nothing else than to exercise and clarify our critical thinking. A community that does not take its security concerns seriously and incorporate it in all aspects of its functioning will continue to run into adversities that impede its expansion and evolution. In short, if the embryos of these occupation movements do not develop responsible safety ethics relative to their own needs, the social environment will abort them and resist their re-establishment until future catastrophes.

The function of security often carries with it a hint of authoritarianism to folks whose prime concern is liberty and democracy. It needn't. Like all the other functions of institutions, it can, with enough mindfulness on the part of collective associates, be effectively distributed in a fair manner. Like many other fields, it needn't be the exclusive domain of trained "professionals," but instead part of human development in a free-affiliating society with voluntary and negotiated division of labor.

Our One Demand: Everything

2011-10-10T13:06:00.008-05:00

Revolution is ballet on the back of a bull.

It's been far too long, and it is far too late past our naivete to presume we can make some totalitarian summary of what has occurred since the Arab Spring.

With no more or less than that hesitation, the pause of someone who has not commented on the game despite watching closely for a summer - and most of an autumn - I turn my analysis towards Occupy Wall Street, the populist movement that has grown from a dozen protesters in Zuccotti Park to a swarm of tens of thousands in New York and thousands more in over 70 cities in the nation and the world.

It is, of course, a direct employment of the same tactics used to bring down Ben Ali and Mubarak, the same tactics leveled in the tilt against (a medievally entrenched) Gadhaffi, against the tyrants of Bahrain and Syria and Yemen and Iran. For different reasons, not all of them have "succeeded," at least as far as having their demands met.

And a lot of U.S. critics are especially derisive of #OWS because their demands seem nebulous, without realizing that this is a manifested symptom of how terribly fucked up this country has become. There are at least a dozen strong demands among the protesters, and countless other intelligent, thoughtful, and creative ideas coursing through its collective veins. A lot of people come out waving a sign about their "pet issue," but see others with different issues and think to themselves, or say aloud, "Right on!"

It is a conglomeration of decades of unmet demands.

And as such, it neither can nor needs to articulate "clear" demands. We the occupation as a whole have little faith that such demands would even be met, and even if they were the Democratic spirit of "bipartisanship" and the Republican ideal of "obstructionism" would only leave us further dissatisfied.

This is the next stage of the global populist uprising, what protesters and commentators are very rightly calling the "American Fall." Government as it has existed in this country for the last sixty years, ruled by oligarchical cash, cannot continue. Nor can it facilitate its own further evolution. The very social forces that gave rise to the state have changed into the anathema of the state. Its products have made it obsolete. The institutions of tradition are bankrupt, having spent the last 150 years careening through a menagerie of manifestations: monarchy, bourgeois republic, state socialism, Stalinism, fascism, authoritarianism. With the internet and all of human history now at our fingertips, we see through every cynical maneuver the ruling elite take to re-establish their rule of profit.

I'm faintly amused whenever I hear one side or another take up a debate about whether or not #OWS "wants" the "end of capitalism." Is it "anticapitalist"? Certainly one key demand is "the end of corporate personhood," a cornerstone of capitalist structure. But you can no more call for the "end" of capitalism than you can call for the end of the west wind.

Social forces are material forces, governed by social and material causes. No matter to what degree the protesters are aware of the fact, capitalism has run into one of its greatest impasses in unprecedented ways. Socially, ideologically, even physically - even the Earth itself has slid past the brink of ruin without any clear way back. The protesters from #OWS are only evidence that more folks feel the crush and the worry and the lack of alternatives than ever before.

The bottom is falling out. Some are losing their fear. Others will follow.

Minnesota State Shutdown

2011-05-31T10:44:00.004-05:00

File this one under "Recovery Strategies: Failed." How do you justify putting more people out of work? It can only take an ideological hatred of government that puts some anarchists to shame.

Not that I'm a big fan either, mind you, of the parliamentary form of capitalist democracy. I'm much more of a hands-on kinda guy myself.

But the hypocrisy is sickening. Why the tax-or-cut fetish? Republicans are so set on "not raising taxes (for their rich backers)" that they'll shut down the government entirely?

To prove what, exactly? That we don't need building codes approved, or children educated, or highways paved? Or perhaps just that their rich backers can be made even more wealthy by stepping into these roles themselves, and charging extravagantly for the services.

Don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining. The GOP consistently runs a strategy of deception, blame-shift, and obstruction. The DFL, on the other hand, is relatively good-natured, if still much too constrained by in-the-box thinking and totally inept at handling the sheer batshittery of the Repubs. This is their fault, and the fault of an electoral and representative system that cannot represent everyday people, but of course everyday people, who are honest and eager to "contribute to society," get fucked because that society barely even belongs to them.

Grand Illusion

2011-05-30T12:00:00.006-05:00

" I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high- class thug for Big Business, for Wall Street, and the bankers. In short I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."- Major General Smedley Butler, U.S.M.C.

Memorial Day is here and time once again to be unceasingly reminded that this day is not just about beer, BBQ, and having a party. Without fail some pious jackass will somberly point out that this day is to honor those who gave the Ultimate Sacrifice for all those freedoms you enjoy.
O.K., before we really get rolling in rant mode, let me point something out, particularly to you Professional Patriots out there, who wait eagerly to pounce on anyone who you perceive as " disrespecting the troops." This little post is not attacking the soldiers, Marines, airmen, or sailors who are currently serving, have served in the past, or became casualties in the many wars this country has fought. So just sit back and cool your your ass down. I know, I know- you really want to prove what a big ass American ( more like a nationalistic, neofascist cur, but more on that next time )you are and really give in to a bout of More Patriotic Than Thou shit- flinging indignation- but settle. It ain't happening. In fact I will take special pleasure in deleting any comments made by red, white and blue flag waving jingoistic assholes make on this post. This blog isn't a democracy- so don't bother.
So let's get to the problem I have with our two holidays honoring our people in military service ( the other being Veteran's Day, which used to be Armistice Day, a commemoration of the day World War One ended- but somber reflection on the cruelty and wastefulness of modern war was for pussy Europeans so we renamed it Veteran's Day ). First of all, there is something dishonest about the whole thing. On these days you get your average American asshole pimping out himself in " patriotic" wear. You know, he is going to respect the fallen and the maimed by stretching an t- shirt with the Stars and Stripes emblazoned on it over his beer gut. Over burgers and brats he may take a few seconds and get a beer induced tear in his eye as he thanks the troops for preserving his freedom. And then goes back to stuffing his fat face.
All right, now let's examine an uncomfortable truth. If you study the military history of the United States you will quickly become aware of the fact that most of the wars our military has fought has been not in the name of freedom but for the purpose of taking shit away from other people- their land, their rights, and their lives. Ask Native Americans in what way were they such a threat to the American way of life that they had to be virtually exterminated. Or the Filipinos who in 1898 were freed from Spanish rule- only to be attacked by the American Army when they had the temerity to declare their independence. Four years and 200,000+ corpses later the Philippines became America's only true colony.
A history of the banana wars is also educational in the application of freedom by our military. Haiti, Nicaragua,and the Dominican Republic, were all visited by the United States Navy and Marine Corps when the profits of a few wealthy owners of American fruit and sugar companies were threatened. The rebels in those countries were hardly a threat to the rights and liberties of the American citizen.
And how can one stand before the monument to the miners, their wives and children who were gunned down by the Colorado National Guard at Ludlow in 1914 and talk of how the U.S. military's primary purpose is to protect our freedom? Again, an unflinching look at our history shows that along with the Pinkertons, Uncle Sam's favorite strike breaker was the National Guard.
And the military is not shy about turning its bayonets on veterans either, when they defy the Establishment. General MacArthur did not hesitate to use the Army to shoot at veterans of the First World War who marched on Washington D.C. in 1932 to protest the non- payment of promised bonuses for their service.
In fact I can think of only four wars out of the many fought by our country in which the result was the protection of, or the expansion of liberty- The War Of Independence, The Civil War, The Second World War, and The Korean War ( can any of you Reds seriously tell me the South would be better off if it had fallen to Kim Il Sung's army in 1950? ). The rest were either outright acts of conquest or conquest with a little sugar to make it more palatable for our gullible citizenry.
Notice too that those four wars were fought by citizen- soldiers: volunteers in the Revolution, volunteers and conscripts in the others. But citizen- soldiers are not the best material for conquest. Their cause for fighting is largely tied to home. Send them overseas to a far- away land to fight in someone else's war and they begin to resent it. Conquest is the province of the professional military. The British had their Redcoats, we have what one journalist has called " Imperial Grunts".
Professional soldiers are rotten representatives of freedom. They exist in a highly structured world where there is no debate, no questioning of authority. Civilian society is held in contempt, whether it is that of the country being occupied or that of their homeland. The usual answer to a problem is to annihilate it- using reason is for pussies.
One of our grand illusions in this country is to pretend that the troops are fighting for our freedom, that if Afghanistan or Iraq was not occupied then a horde of jihadi would somehow swim across the ocean, past our Navy, and invade California. The real truth is that there are relatively few people who actually defend our country from nations that could actually launch a serious attack on us. These are the Air Force technicians sitting underground in bunkers maintaining the nuclear tipped ICBMs in their silos or sailors in submarines prowling the oceans, ready to retaliate against any nation that seriously posed a threat to us.
What about terrorists? As we have recently seen, a handful of elite fighting men can take care of them ( not having our ruling class create the conditions that breed terrorists would help too- more on that next time ). Special Forces have done more to eliminate terrorist threats than the thousands of conventional forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan.
Face the facts. The grunts in the infantry, artillery, and armored forces are used these days by our ruling class like they were one hundred years ago. They are the instruments of an imperial policy, not the defenders of your freedom.
The expansion of American liberty has most often been the work of civilians, by ordinary citizens who stood up against the injustice of the elite. Your rights as a worker were not given to you by the military. The Civil Rights Movement was not a movement of soldiers or won at the point of a bayonet. Indeed, if you look back on the struggles of ordinary Americans to win basic human rights and dignity more often than not you will find the rifles of U.S. soldiers pointing at them.
P.S. I may be a bitter old bastard, but I do acknowledge some of the good the military services provide. Here's a short list:
1)The Coast Guard for their rescue work during natural disasters, especially during Hurricane Katrina when every other Federal service had its head up its ass.
2) The Army Corps Of Engineers, without whom the Mississippi River valley would be one big fuckin' lake every spring.
3) Finally, the GI Bill that provides the means for people to get into college who otherwise could not afford to go ( since I benefited personally from this one I am a little biased).

How many Parliamentarians does it take to screw together an industrial restoration?

2011-05-07T09:27:00.010-05:00

Out of the "amorphous," "uncertain" Libyan rebellion rises a road-map towards parliamentary government. More opportunity to elucidate my own apocalyptic Marxist heresy.

Note how in the early days of the rebellion, the media was unable to articulate the "character" or "direction" of Gaddhafi's antagonists. It defied their paradigms. Some on "the left," including conventional Marxists, made a big deal of the early use of the pre-Gaddhafi monarchist flag (which has pretty much been adopted, it seems, now that the rebellion's leadership is developing into a "legitimate" institution). There are complaints that the leaders of the rebellion are too pro-Western, in bed with the imperialists, making deals with the devils, etc. etc. And clearly this is true. And clearly there are times when people's movements are all-to-eager to compromise, even when they have the upper hand (*cough*Wisconsin*cough*).

Other times, there just isn't the higher-level thinking prevalent enough to make and stick to reasoned, virtuous choices. (Funny, how in that photo, I can't make out a single black person, despite gathering outside a black President's home in a city that roughly half black.) You can argue all you want with people about the things they ought to know better about. It isn't that people are immutably evil. It's simply that sometimes they are just too engaged in the habit of ego to be good. Their capacity isn't any generally less.

Anyway, I digress; points about individual egoism is only circumstantial to Libyan "leaders" and their promise to make a conventional parliamentary government. In my experiences with "politicized" folks (approximately meaning in this context "folks who have become passionate about the socialization of enmity enough to 'do something' about it") most people gravitate towards (or rattle around between) one of three positions when it comes to leadership (perhaps more acutely "management" - so-called "leaders" whose function is to mystify through a process called "government"):

High respect, and/or apologism for perceived bad policy. This is how liberals in the U.S. usually treat Democrats and how conservatives in the US treat Republicans.
Moderate respect, and/or criticism or even hostility towards perceived bad policy. This is how liberals and conservatives in the U.S. generally feel towards their opposing parties; how conventional Marxists think of parliamentary politicians on the whole. This latter point is because, in my experience, conventional Marxists can't imagine an imminent reality that isn't governed by parliamentary procedure but they do want the formation of their own Party (a "working class" party) to take the helm of it (functionally restoring the industrialist paradigm).
Nil respect and/or apathy and/or hostility towards leadership's existence and whatever institutions support them/enact their policies. Superficially, the whole gamut of anarchism fits in here - but I think there is room for something else, a creative anti-Parliamentarianism, an antagonistic philosophy that combs the social ruins of bureaucracy in decline and recombines the fluid constitution of what we once conceived of as concrete institutions.

The rebellion against Ghaddafi's eccentric, chaos-chronistic tyranny (unpacking it: this green-flagged government ostensibly linked "outdated" [the scare quotes of bourgeois perspective] tribal government with "advanced" [and the scare quotes of Vanguardist perspective! Look Ma, no hands!] people's council governments - by arbitrating past and future modes via cult of personality a la Stalinism or "third-world socialism") ... the rebellion against Ghaddafi's eccentric, chaos-chronistic tyranny ought to reveal to us the interstices between "forms" of "government."

The question that comes to mind: if a people can voluntarily enter into a war against a hated tyrant, "how much" government do they need? What is the purpose of "government" as we know it - "rule of law," as many Western politicians claim, or the negotiated slavery of populations, organized into classes, to an industrial mode of production? A mode of production whose harried, unresting, replicative logic extends beyond the control of any singular class or class alliance. A mode of production which blindly and mindlessly pillages the living and the dead and all the "useful" things of nature and leaves swaths of ruins and polluted wastelands in its wake?

an interim government would immediately take over to provide day-to-day governance and keep order, the Associated Press news agency reports.

It would comprise members from the NTC, technocrats from the Gaddafi regime, senior military and intelligence officers and a supreme court judge, he said.

A constitution would be drawn up and put to a referendum, followed a few months later by parliamentary and presidential elections.

What we see in Libya is a habitual surrender of the vital forces of rebellion to the industrial mode of government, which domesticates the human animal in order to turn the gears of the earth's mal-apportionment. Their instinct is to destroy that which oppresses them, but in doing so their only choices has been an alliance with the devil they don't know (yet).

But, precisely because of the unusual historic balance of powers that I described in my last post, more of that interstitial space has been revealed than might normally appear in "simple" (perhaps better explained as "previous") civil war scenarios. To glance a moment at our own Civil War (because I assume our readers are most familiar with that), the South adopted the old Articles of Confederation without batting an eye. Hell, it was a handful of property owners who went to the state governments to instigate secession - it wasn't a people's movement at all until the ruling powers capitalized on regional patriotism. It simply went from being states in the United States to being a Confederacy without a struggle for form in between. Those rulers had cohesion as an organized class.

These people, in a Libyan refugee camp across the border in Tunisia, are not represented by any "real" (parliamentary) government and might never be.

The Libyan rebels have slipped, however temporarily, through the cracks of the industrial mode, and these cracks are widening. There is very much a chance the "22-nation contact group" working with the transitional government can foster a parliamentary government and bring the rebellion under control, declare a revolution "complete," and integrate them all some way into the current world order. But as resources become scarce, as labor becomes redundant and what industrialization has deemed "work" becomes "scarce" and commodities, environments, modes of living become antagonistic to the survival of our species, more of these interstitial gaps will yawn open with less opportunity for "appropriate" re-incorporation.

Who will build the new infrastructure for millennial capitalism's catastrophic zones? Where will they get the resources? Who will pay for it? And who will benefit? Worse yet - how, in light of peak oil and capitalism's sociopathic waste of resources - how can it possibly be sustainable?

On Libya, ghosts, and the grinding balance of power.

2011-05-05T09:32:00.009-05:00

The salvage and armament workshops of the Libyan Rebellion are not a conscious choice for "badassery," although that is certainly one easy (shallow) reading of it which a sympathetic audience informed by a particular kind of American ("Developed World"?) aesthetic could (will, does) make on first engagement. Something like this:

The theme of institutional collapse resonates with me. I see evidence of, I sympathize with, the post-industrial character of its teleology (christ, I hope I'm using that word right). I oppose dictatorships and blatant totalitarianism. Therefore, when these rebels whip a bunch of weapons together, I am inspired/entertained/thrilled.

Yet this isn't a case of life imitating art. It goes without saying that the rebels are not forging caltrops and cobbling armored trucks out of spare parts because they watched Mad Max or read any of Axler's Deathlands books and thought to themselves, "You know what would really take the wind out of Ghaddafi?..." It's proof of ... something resembling the converse, not "art imitating life" (certainly not "high art") but something along the lines of "tropes and memes and narrartives gaining recognition because of their realistic relationship with the characteristics of our time." It's about reflecting our attitude and understanding of what forces are in play, on the surface and underneath.

Libya might be seen as something like the first post-American war. While Iraq and Afghanistan were official operations of a desperate empire, and the mission creep conflicts in Pakistan and Yemen and elsewhere are a spreading transitional stain (culminating in bin Laden's capture, a hollow victory come much too late and at a high cost).... Libya has been a conflict for which the United States proper is much too busy and much too overstretched.

There were times when the U.S. would have been glad for an opportunity to swat Gaddfly, although he proved capable of playing his cards at opportune moments well enough to avoid too harsh conflict with The Cowboy and Co. But he and his country were never really priorities. The Superpowers of the Cold War could and did prop up the most necessary markets with dictators and take down the others through cold calculations. When America was a hyperpower it acted with still more impunity - hawks could argue this leverage was even wasted on "humanitarian" missions in countries like Iraq and Bosnia. 9/11 provided pretext to dispose the humanitarian approach that focused on crumbling countries and promote a more geopolitical strategy. Amidst these concerns Ghaddafi mattered very little.

A vortex of revolution.

Today one might think Libya would matter more to the United States, with the oil crisis and a Middle East more uproarious than any point in the last twenty years. There are interests to protect and promote. Yet the Obama administration is showing significant - and wise - constraint, electing to bust in the door but let NATO - France and Britain especially - sweep out the room and allowing the rebels to redecorate. That makes this an operation unlike any other in U.S. history. In its infancy, the U.S. was nearly at the mercy of the European powers, depending more on diplomacy to play one side off another while consolidating territory in the Americas. In the next period the United States openly pursued European-style imperialism, right down to owning colonies and conducting extra-territorial development projects, but differing in that after two World Wars the United States came out far ahead. At the beginning of the Cold War, post-imperial Europe depended on the United States to clean up its sloppy actions. After the USSR plummeted, the U.S. called on European powers to back it up or take on leading roles in volatile but less profitable crises.

Clearly one can read the current conflict in Libya as more of the latter. Or could - if it didn't happen within several broader historical contexts, of which I think three are decisive:

The "Arab Spring" and the failure of the Arabic dictators and terroristic jihadism to liberate and provide for the young generation or the populations in general.

Second, the inability and/or half-measures of neoliberalism (contemporary colonialism) to either a) incorporate these cultures and markets into the world economic order or b) continue to re-create/rejuvinate the existing oppressive orders and thus secure bargain-rate (globally competitive) exploitation from the native masses. Whereas b) is a trend that can be bypassed in the future by slaughter and destruction (resetting capital and labor), the self-determination of these markets in the global scene is not something neoliberalism wants nor encourages. Arabs beware: Western contractors have a hard-on for your wholesale catastrophes.

Third, a historic crisis of millennial capitalism - a term I use with malignant facetiousness, purposefully mocking the "new golden age" promised to us in the 1990s - a capitalism not only grown on the bones of neoliberalism and directed by the delusions of Western political egoism, but fed by the growth of the Internets and now starved of fattening credit. What we commonly call "the recession" ushered in this crisis, but in reality it is a watershed in economic decay. This form of capitalism goes out with a wimper, not the bang of the 1920s ... so far.

Libya's ragtag army illustrates particularly what is happening globally: a sort of conjoined wearing down of major global forces, with nothing waiting in the wings - no relief and no expectation of relief. NATO has not yet proven strong enough to oust Gaddhafi, nor is the United States prepared or willing to boot him forcibly. Gaddhafi is too weak to stay and too strong to leave (but not too strong to leave civilian targets alone, of course). His oil legacy and his mercenaries prop him up as artificially as NATO missiles and jets artificially clear the air for the ground-bound rebels. What happens to a war deprived of its decisive victories? Unless by the grace of Allah Gaddhafi is torpedoed sometime soon, we're about to find out.

My argument is that all around the world, in every government and in every social struggle, the whole balance of powers is on life support. No side of the antagonism clearly holds the power. Not in the case of Scott Walker vs. Wisconsin unions, where legalism has detoured either justice or tyranny into marshland courtrooms. Not in US/China trade relations, where devaluing the yuan remains necessary and impossible. Not a single traditional actor can act, and no traditional opponent retains the strength or street cred to pose a threat. Everyone seems to be in a race against time yet no one can move forward.

Scuffles certainly lie ahead - and by no means will I declare "decisive" victories a thing of the past. Yet the "decisive victory" over bin Laden also proves a divisive victory with the already-teetering Pakistan. Bold actions become fewer and far between because, unlike pre-Hiroshima Earth, post-Hiroshima Earth is all but incapable of World War. The atom bomb and worse still haunt our memory. I lay that scenario of ultimate nuclear annihilation to the side, here and in the future, because I want to believe it unlikely (we know better, there is limited prospect for conventional victory) and there's very little we can do collectively in the case it approaches that. (Except maybe turning to your Republican friends and saying, "I told you so.") (Nuclear terrorism and limited exchange are still very, very much in the scope of my analyses; in fact I would describe them as "almost inevitable.")

Without the mass destruction of capital and manipulated reconstruction, capitalism has to walk a very fine line. Too much reset and the situation could spiral out of control (for the individual actors as much as the species, thank god). Too little reset and profits plummet - you begin to *gulp* break even. Because anything approaching sustainability threatens growth, you can believe that not only is "green capitalism" predominately a PR hoax, you can also pretty much count out significant jobs programs that consider labor before the needs of business.

How long is the "fine line" itself sustainable? Isn't a balance of forces a good thing, something we should be thankful for after the long and bloody 20th century? Couldn't we, say, let the giant firms greenwash the polluters a lot in exchange for just a little energy efficiency, and blow up and rebuild terrorist hideouts so contractors generate some cash, and let the markets cycle Joe Stiffs through - you know, all for the sake of some rather 2000-2010-style dependability? Just to avoid all that gosh-darn insecurity that comes with too much conflict or not enough growth?

I think not, and for one very good reason that I humbly take zero credit in discovering: climate change.

Whereas humanity is becoming increasingly slow to act, it seems as though La Madre is sort of coming around. And her timing, from an anthrocentric perspective, couldn't be any worse. How long has it taken to recover from Hurricane Katrina? How long will it take to recover from the 100+ tornados that just whipped through the Midwest? NYC can't even figure out a monument to replace the Twin Towers from a man-made disaster 10 years ago and we're being asked, not as a city or nation, but as a species, to try to persevere against unusual weather patterns, and the awful effects of unconsciousable agricultural and industrial practices, and on top of that the "usual" shit, like the earthquake in Japan, which because of our haughty spread across the globe now have increased opportunities to hit us in vulnerable places simply because we have more vulnerable places than ever before and more disastrous consequences of being hit in each.

Add to that the fact that we have less and less of an idea where our gas, not to mention our food and water, is going to come from over the next 15-20 years. Not only do we, as a nation and as a species, have less of an ability to resolve our current problems, but those problems are only going to snowball and we have less of an ability to keep up.

Libya not only illustrates and hints at these trends, but it also shows the hope. It provides a snapshot of not, as Lenin once said, what is to be done, but instead what someday we will all have to do, in one fashion or another. Instead of bringing "new" products into production, which requires raw materials and fresh resources (preferably from a poorer neighbor), we can, should, and someday (if we're survivors) will - cannibalize, salvage, retool, repurpose. To illustrate another way, this process of reclaiming industry's product is to capitalism what necromancy would be to magic. To reinvest life into what has already been discarded. To find purpose in all the pointless doggerel of capitalism by rearranging it, now at no cost because, especially under duress, it has no exchange value.

And because, as capitalism insists is not true but as we know in our hearts, there is no real price on material things, and we enter into a contract with the earth as well as with our peers when we agree to use nature's bounty. All sociable nature, all rational humanity, detests the dictator, too, and the ghosts of labor that still abide in commodities can be cajoled into rising up and destroying such fiends, if we're willing to pay the price. This has been a long entry, but I want to end by saying that I hope that the Libyan rebels win their freedom against the tyrant who is equal or worse than bin Laden. And I hope in doing so they can point the way forward to all of us who yearn for the freedom to build our own lives out of the haunted scraps provided us.

Reflection takes more than a mirror.

2011-05-04T10:35:00.002-05:00

This has not been

an ahistorical debate.

No such victory exists.

2011-05-02T06:31:00.008-05:00

With ter'rist mastermind Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (formerly of the Saudi bin Laden family), founder of jihadist organization al-Qaeda and all-around reprehensible character, dead at last, nothing fundamentally changes.

The war in Afghanistan simmers on. The jerryrigged Iraqi government still sways like a house of cards. End of operations in Pakistan? Not bloody likely. The quagmire of conflict yawns ever wider and deeper. It will not end just because this one ghost has been dragged out and exorcised.

And it looks like cowboy justice. Special operatives descend - not into a cave on the AfPak border as the Bush Admin led us to believe, but a compound in a city north of Islamabad. There was no tribunal, no Gitmo, just a firefight and what we can only assume was an inconspicuous burial at sea. Even Nazis, considered history's worst, got the Nuremberg trials.

Bin Laden fought like a dog and got put down like a dog. But, like a diseased animal - and what is an evil human but a diseased animal? - I have only pity - but not contempt. Contempt for anyone is a hypocritical emotion: it ignores our common condition.

You see, this was never about justice: justice calls for a rule of law, for methodical investigation ... in short, those trappings of civilizedness the United States government increasingly treats as a luxury and not just abroad but at home, as well.

And this was never about closure for the most wounded people of New York, those who lost loved ones. Not only does more death fail to resurrect those who have been lost, nor sooth the greatest sort of pain we're capable of feeling, but it co-opts that tragedy into the very cycle of international violence that perpetuates precisely that suffering on people everywhere. Those people can or could only find their own closure, and God help them if they feel it in this sad old man's death.

Nor is this about closure for that other East Coast pain: the wounded pride of New Yorkers (and sadly many other American residents as well), the terror giving way to self-righteousness and indignation. Truly as if the personal members of the American beast, with their diffusion of responsibility for the animal's sins, should by the rules of karma always escape inevitable reprisal made manifest. And what, exactly, should absolve these unwitting citizens from the same coincidental shackles of every other victim of birthplace who lives in the shadow of violence all across the globe? Innocent populations are mowed down all the time, but only the United States Government has the power and pull to wreak vengeance no matter who has wronged it or where the guilty parties hide ... and bust down every door it pleases along the way.

Just because the privilege is unique to this government, does that mean it should not persecute these rabid animals? Who else is going to hold them accountable? No one else has the resources, or is willing to destabilize nuclear-empowered regimes like that of Pakistan in singleminded determination to neutralize rogue actors and create new bogeymen.

The grave of one threat, and/or the cradle of the next?

Power eats its own foundations. Action sows the seeds of entropy and failure. Osama bin Laden is not the first nor will he be the last to be quashed under the weight of a collapsing empire, a slow landslide that buries friend and foe alike.

Anyone who rejoices in the destruction of even one fiend would be wise to note you, too, stand within range of this fallout, and you will not be judged by innocent nor guilt - if you will be judged at all.

Trump: The Joke

2011-04-30T09:44:00.017-05:00

First of all, apologies for the long posting hiatus. A perfect storm of writing other things, sickness ( both me and the computer ), and just plain ennui kept me from the blog. The fact that no Southern governor did anything outrageously stupid during Confederate History Month didn't help either.
Fortunately Donald Trump has come along to make writing a post about him insanely easy. Trump is a perfect example of how retarded business/ economics majors are- even if they did go to a top college. See, when you get everything handed to you on a silver platter there's no need to use your brain. Just get Daddy to throw money at a problem until it goes away. Or when you are out in the big, tough world of business, run to the surrogate father of all rich white American assholes- the Federal government.
Trump is such an epic asshole he makes George W. Bush seem charming. Trump has made a number of idiotic statements that reveal the secret 12- year old inside the big, tough businessman he pretends to be ( how the fuck these bourgeoise shitbirds think they are so badass when they have never served in the military, worked at a real job, or felt the effects of the sacrifices they demand everyone else make, is really beyond me ). The dude is so desperate for attention and out- of- touch with the real world that he doesn't usually know how fuckin' ignorant he is and even when he does, he doesn't care, because even negative attention is better than none.
So let's review what Trump has been up to this month:
1) He is sort of, maybe running for president. This is classic Trump- he is always desperate to grab the spotlight and shine it on himself, but doesn't want to actually do anything. Trump is allergic to work, so look for him to drop out of a race he was never really in.
2) He revived the idiotic, racist conspiracy theories about President Obama's birth certificate. When the President gave him a backhanded bitch slap, makin Trump and the rest of the mouthbreathing birther assholes look like morons. Trump then loudly, and lamely, claimed to be " proud" of the part he played in this colossal waste of everybody's time.
So you're proud? Whatever junoir, go sit in the corner.
3) Trump gave a surreal performance in Vegas yesterday, engaging in a profanity laced diatribe against the Saudis, Chinese, and American politicians. Of course the Pavlovian teabagger dogs that made up his audience lapped it up ( never mind that Trump and other rich American assholes own factories in China and are as likely to move away from there as a Frenchman who lives next door to a brothel- goddam, wake the fuck up people ).
4) Trump also advocates outright imperialist aggression, you know like the good old days when a Western power could simply walk into someone else's country and take it. Trump baldly stated that the oilfields in Iraq and Libya should belong to the U.S. since we went through all the trouble of attacking those countries.
( You know, I actually find that kind of honesty to be refreshing. I get so tired of the elaborate fronts that the U.S. government creates, mafioso style, to justify its presence in so many nations around the world ).
Crazy shit like this is why Trump: The Candidate should not be taken seriously. Even if he does decide to run ( not likely, but weirder things have happened ) he will not get the Republican Party's endorsement. Trump is rocking too many boats and talking smack about China and tariffs are not going to win him very many friends in the GOP establishment.
However, Trump: The Joke, will be very usefull to the GOP if he quits and endorses a blander Republican brand like Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. Idiots like Trump, Palin, or Bachmann are great for riling up the teabagger base, who then can be steered towards a more acceptable candidate ( i.e. someone who has more than a snowball's chance in hell of winning an election). In the meantime, enjoy the show.

What we're reading

2011-04-22T13:25:00.000-05:00

File Under "Know Thy Enemy": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt

Schmitt changed universities in 1926, when he became professor for law at the Handelshochschule in Berlin, and again in 1932, when he accepted a position in Cologne. It was in Cologne, too, that he wrote his most famous paper, "Der Begriff des Politischen" ("The Concept of the Political"), in which he developed his theory of "the political". Distinct from party politics, "the political" is the essence of politics. While churches are predominant in religion or society is predominant in economics, the state is predominant in politics. Yet for Schmitt the political was not an autonomous domain equivalent to the other domains, but rather the existential basis that would determine any other domain should it reach the point of politics (e.g. religion ceases to be merely theological when it clear distinction between the "friend" and the "enemy"). The political is not equal to any other domain, such as the economic, but instead is the most essential to identity.

Schmitt, in perhaps his best-known formulation, bases his conceptual realm of state sovereignty and autonomy upon the distinction between friendand enemy. This distinction is to be determined "existentially," which is to say that the enemy is whoever is "in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible." (Schmitt, 1996, p. 27) Such an enemy need not even be based on nationality: so long as the conflict is potentially intense enough to become a violent one between political entities, the actual substance of enmity may be anything.

Although there have been divergent interpretations concerning this work, there is broad agreement that "The Concept of the Political" is an attempt to achieve state unity by defining the content of politics as opposition to the "other" (that is to say, an enemy, a stranger. This applies to any person or entity that represents a serious threat or conflict to one's own interests.) In addition, the prominence of the state stands as a neutral force over potentially fractious civil society, whose various antagonisms must not be allowed to reach the level of the political, lest civil war result.

How the Union Resurgence Got Quashed by the Union Leadership in Wisconsin: http://gmfbrown.blogspot.com/2011/03/i-still-exist.html

After that, the movement completely died down at the precise moment when it should have been at its peak. Suddenly everything became about recall campaigns and legal challenges. The legal challenges to the bill were based, not on the content of the bill, but on a technicality about how it was voted on. As such, they can just vote on it again if it gets thrown out. And by the time any recall campaign can take effect, the bill, having passed will effectively destroy the public sector unions. And then, at best, we'll replace the party funded by the anti-union Koch brothers with the party funded by the anti-union Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And yet, this strategy was deemed to be "reasonable" because apparently "reasonable" and "passive" are the same thing.

I'm More and More Convinced It's the End of the World (As We Know It): http://www.amazon.com/Combined-Uneven-Apocalypse-Luciferian-Marxism/dp/1846944686/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303488895&sr=1-1

The world is already apocalyptic, and .... there is no event to wait for, just the zones in which these revelations are forestalled and the sites where we can take a stand ... to refuse either a sense of reconciliation with this world order or an illusion of the ease of bringing it down.

-----

Those of us who still find dignity in the idea of the human spirit - who even now consider ourselves as part of "the Left" - ought to discard these reactionary tendencies to hold onto the crumbling past and prepare for the ruins of the future.

Bicycle Licenses: Green Transit FAIL

2011-04-05T09:37:00.008-05:00

With no ado, please read this quick letter to the editor on the NYT re: the ongoing debate over bicycle lanes in the Big Apple.

Ok, this is stupid. Any longtime readers of this blog should know by now that transit is one of my pet peeves. Automobiles are stupid, expensive, inefficient machine systems, the hidden costs of which have only been made clearer to me since I began reading Ivan Illich's "Tools for Conviviality." And, having immigrated to the Twin Cities in 2008 - the best metro region in the United States for biking - I naturally have nothing but respect for the alternative, low-cost, low-tech, high-input transit tool. Bicycles require less infrastructure. Physical or bureaucratic. Anyone can pick one up, learn to ride it, and be much more mobile than a pedestrian, while not ever having to stop for an oil change.

And they don't cause potholes.

So even the mere mention suggestion that cyclists be "required to wear vests with visible identity numbers," especially as "more revenue for the city," is infuriating. This would de-democratizes what is virtually an equal-access tool. And those are fucking hard to come by in this corporate-dominated oligarchy. You may as well require licenses to buy a god-damn screwdriver.

We ought to be moving away from cars, not attempting to make bicycles more like them. Cars are dangerous. Accidents involving bicycles are rarely, if ever, fatal - unless they involve automobiles. Bicycles are for people who prefer to opt-out of the institutionalized mess composed of insurance companies, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and car dealerships. There's no defensible reason for litigating this form of transit.

Why for the love of God do New Yorkers even own cars. why. why. why.

If I had that kind of access to mass transit, I would sell my car. And I was raised on car culture, suckled on the oily teat of Southern California. There was a time when I identified very strongly with the freeway lifestyle ... until I've come to see how much waste it creates.

More and more I am coming to see Minnesota and the Twin Cities as a shining bastion of progressivism, one of the few states where the slash-and-burn budget experiments are failing to take root. Our economy is relatively stable and slowly recovering, there is a fair division of labor between NGOs/nonprofits and government, a high literacy rate, thriving immigrant communities, high literacy rates, grassroots culture, wide expanses of wild space and a responsible hunter culture, and a strong respect for the environment that springs from both conservative and liberal camps. And not to mention a strong, intelligent radical layer that is rarely reactionary (with some exceptions).

As for Mr. I-was-almost-murdered-by-a-bicycle, automobiles often have front and back lights, and "noise-emitting warning device[s]," yet they maim and murder far more people than bicycles. Had he been hit by a car, he wouldn't even be alive to make the complaint. There is still no substitute for vigilance, and no amount of legislation is going to force him to look both ways before crossing the goddamn street.

Maybe he could try unplugging his goddamn iPod from his head when he's out on the town.

Wrong On Libya

2011-03-21T08:06:00.004-05:00

I perhaps should have begun posting about this last week, when it became clear Qaddafi wasn't going to fall on his own and was, in fact, pressing down on the rebels all the way to Benghazi. I "misunderestimated" (to use a Bushism) the strength of the rebel forces. (To my credit, at least, it turned out to be more a matter of firepower than a matter of will.)

Yet the U.S. and coalition airstikes - codenamed "Operation Odyssey Dawn" - will prove a Faustian deal. Even if Western boots remain planted on Western aircraft carriers, none of us are so naive as to think this is out of the kindness of anyone's hearts. It is always a ploy for markets, oil as much as imports (Libya is 10% reliant on China for its imported goods, and if the Obama administration is serious about reviving manufacturing, we'll need increase our export markets).

But the model of the Western imperialists is actually not to have to occupy countries if they don't have to (Bush was an anomaly in this sense). They want an ally in Northern Africa to moderate in case Tunisia and Egypt don't go in their favor.

Obama also has spoken about Qaddafi's violation of the Libyan people's "universal rights." I remind our readers that it wasn't all that long ago that China and the United States butted heads over this rather philosophical argument. (Chinese leaders think of this phrase as being code for "Western values" and insist that different peoples have different values ... kind of the forerunners in global postmodernism?)

So basically all the old-school imperialists are banding together and having a good ole fashion show of force, brandishing the sabres and sending a message to Iran and China and any other regime they don't agree with that universal rights aren't negotiable, that you have to respect your people's right to protest and their right to free speech.

Because universal rights apply to our geopolitical enemies first, our friends last, and ourselves.... You get the picture.

(And I'm not even going to touch the cost of this intervention in dollar terms. You shouldn't put a price on human freedom, in my opinion. Political rhetoric, however, will latch on to any excuse to slash living conditions....)

"Fire the rockets! ... and the teachers, and municipal employees, and construction workers, and...."

Do whatever you can, and don't stop there.

2011-03-16T11:07:00.005-05:00

Sex trafficking is one of humanity's most atrocious practices and one that has expanded in new and awful ways with the rise of globalization, despite having absolutely no place in the 21st century or any other time or place.

If you are in the Twin Cities metro region, please consider coming to Demand Change Project 2011 in Saint Paul this May. You can buy tickets to their forums (at the downtown St. Paul Crowne Plaza Hotel) or attend a rally at the Capitol (for male-identifying allies) and/or block party (in support of women and sex trafficking survivors). This is a great opportunity to educate yourself and express solidarity with activists and survivors.

Please do not underestimate the value of this event, nor ignore the impact this monstrous practice has on your world and the value of life in general.

(Thanks to Eclectic Breakfast for bringing this to our attention!)

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" - MLK

Nuclear Power and/or Barbarism (with apologies to Evan Calder Williams)

2011-03-13T21:31:00.019-05:00

Recently I was privy to an argument on Facebook, wherein my older hippy friend N.C. and my college-age Marxist friend A.S. found themselves at odds over the sustainability of nuclear energy. (Obviously I needn't explain to you the cause for the debate.) N.C. pointed out problems with nuclear power plant regardless of where you place them. (The funny thing about earthquakes, you can't really hold anyone at fault. lololol ... seriously, though.)

A.S. points out that there is a need right now to choose between coal and nuclear power, that coal power is one of the leading causes of global warming, and that radioactive damage is limited by comparison (leading, in his words, to the dichotomy of "barbarism or nuclear power"). Fair enough. But someday soon we ought to see nuclear energy as marginalized as possible. The effects of radiation are awful.

And A.S. made the good (or perhaps rather "popular") point that wind energy especially (but also solar?) has its own impact on the environment. Some of my critics especially like to talk about the dead birds that seem to crop up in the vicinity of wind plants. But I can tell you, as an employee at an office building with a lot of very large windows, birds run into shit all the time. It's much easier for animals and biomes to adapt and evolve around these kinds of edifices than it is for them to adapt to large doses of radiation, or even extra carbon dioxide in the air. The buddhist in me hates to sound heartless but if they can adapt to make chirps sound like car alarms, they can alter their migration patters over time....

Breaking Wind: Silent But Deadly

A third friend, A.R., a chemist, chimed in and spoke about the pace of advancement in green energy industries. With the way these developing technologies are funded, he informed me, it could be decades before they could have a notable effect on how we power our society.

Aha. It all comes back to the ca$$$h money (yeah, I went there).

Look at the federal tax subsidies for the dead-dinosaur energy industries: oil, gas, and coal. That is a lot of money thrown at a not-problem. And while I seem to be the last person in America who thinks the federal deficit is not really the most pressing issue in the country today (I've yet to see hard evidence that a. "we're broke" or b. it's going to cause economic catastrophe - the banks were at fault for the only thing like that recently), I think this is money poorly apportioned. We could do a helluva lot better than renewable wind power by 2030.

I think this is a disastrously shortsighted energy policy. Oil, for example, is not in fucking dire need of federal subsidies. Alternatives are.

Oil made a killing by the end of last year, and it was being traded at roughly 3/4ths what it's going for today. Gouging takes place not only at the pump but on the stock exchange floor, too. There's no law in place to translate those profits into green R&D. If the U.S. government had a pro-Earth agenda, it would nationalize the dinosaurs and force exactly that change. But, firmly in the grip of capitalist industries, neither the Democrats nor especially the Republicans would ever go that far, not without extreme pressure from workers and voters. Before the oilpocalypse, BP spent very little of its profits on renewable energy but made a mountain of that molehill through their sophisticated PR machine. A lot, perhaps, has been forgotten concerning the oily money siphoned to Congress and the White House via PACs, but there's no questioning the influence on policy.

If I'm against oil, and I'm against nuclear power, and if I acknowledge that the problem is both critical and that the financial policy is unlikely to change, then what? Several people, my above-mentioned friend and my own father included (hi dad!), insist that a fall in standard of living therefore follows. Without energy, or perhaps more accurately, due to a fall in energy productivity if wind and solar implementation is made, our "standard of living" will crash. Is that what I want?

In a word, perhaps - although it's curious to imagine how our standard of living would be affected. Perhaps we could stop prioritizing a wasteful and hollow consumerist lifestyle where what matters most to us is what we watch on TV and what kind of car we drive and what we can order from the fancy downtown restaurants and who said what on Facebook (irony points!). I don't know what other people envision when they think of a fall in "living standards" brought about by drastically decreased energy usage. Perhaps they imagine the apocalypse. I imagine something more like widespread inconvenience - for the wealthy, of course, poor people are pretty used to getting by with a "low" standard of living.

AKA, "barbarism." At least to the middle class.

That NYT article bothers me for similar reasons. Not least of which is the tone - equating a few moaning yuppies with imagined - cynically expected, demanded - environmentalist hypocrisy. Yuppies are environmentalists like they are human right's activists - in the abstract. They are yuppies first and environmentalists second. They want to do more than live comfortably - they want to live well, with the private schools and the minivans and the fancy dinner out on the town. No meal is too quaint for them, and sustainability be damned, but naturally sustainability and bike lanes and buses are "a good idea." Hybrids are a status symbol. Green chic has taken the place of radical chic, and the great wheel of capitalism turns again.

I can't help but think of consumers as the "hungry ghosts" of Eastern lore

So yes, I think we can and should take some kind of hit to our so-called "standard of living." I think we could do a lot better with a lot less and do less damage to the planet in the meantime. A great many policies could be solved if we took economic planning out of the hands of profit-hungry corporations and put it back in the hands of a scientifically educated population. I do not fear having to change my way of life; I fear only that we've gone the point of no return, that there is no realistic fix to our mangled education, transportation, and industrial systems, that any attempt to unseat Mammon will unleash violence and chaos and ultimately annihilate the good along with the bad in America.

But there's no way to tell without trying, and no reason to go on if we don't make the attempt. All we need is some focus and some direction and the willingness to sacrifice the "comforts" we know in our hearts are toxic for us anyway.

-----

ADDENDUM: A note of optimism. I admit, my favorite part is when America springs to life. To think, I've waited years for that, and everyone told me I was stupid for believing!

Invention vs. Intervention

2011-03-09T14:49:00.006-06:00

I'm not speaking on any particular concrete basis today - I don't have any specific articles to back me up. But I did read on the cover of the Wall Street Journal today that "US sees stalemate in Libya." Yet I cannot accept that there will be anything so cut and dry as an East Libya/West Libya separation.

There are no superpowers to draw and uphold such lines now. This isn't the Cold War. Qaddafi has no imperial backer.

And he won't accept anything less than a reassertion of his power, and the annihilation of the rebel movement. If anything like a stalemate develops, even over the course of years, it will simply mean protracted bloodshed and victory to the side that develops new tactics. Even with superior firepower on the side of the tyrant, my money is on the rebels. Qaddafi has 1970s' tactics and some planes and helicopters and a heart of ice. But the rebels are honing their wits day after day.

The US is still trying to decide its angle. It still frets over the "character" of the rebellion. We know it will support a re-establishment of the monarchy (if its assessment of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are indicators). But blocked on the UN and so far unable to parse through international law, it looks like the world's police force may be sitting this one out, for the time being.

No easy parallels, not even a 38th.

And then they woke up.

2011-02-25T11:09:00.013-06:00

Obviously the U.S. government was quite successful in importing state capitalism into Iraq, as evidenced by the outbursts of grieved protesters and their now-archetypal counterweights, the riot police. Nothing says quote-unquote-democracy like citizens confronting men in burly black armor.

How many homes go without electricity so these dudes can hide behind big plastic shields?

Ahh, the bourgeois democracy. That is, democracy for the rich, a lifetime of squalor and servitude for most everybody else.

Thank the maker we don't have anything like that here. Oh shit, wrong link. Ahh, nevermind ... what's much more interesting to note is that since Obama got elected, class struggle has been relatively low. Riot cops haven't been quite so necessary, not even at the immigration rights marches I've been to. Those waiters seem to be reserved for parties of 10,000 or more....

And they're curiously absent from the current protests in Madison, Wisconsin, which have occupied the state capitol and seen thousands of people come and go from all over the state and indeed all over the nation.

Solidarity is a curiously effective component of democracy, contrary to how absolute democracy is usually portrayed.

And no riot police (knock on wood). Police officers have been encouraged to sleep among the protesters. They guard doors but for the most part leave the crowds alone. There's been a few arrests, I hear, but despite Walker's swagger and bluster, no crackdown yet.

Today thousands of people are again rallying to Madison. As in Egypt and Tunisia and Iraq, Libya and Bahrain and Yemen, Jordan and Morocco and Algiers (apologies if I've left any of my cuzes out), "the people have lost their fear." There are still divisions and bitter feelings, as the disenfranchised public sector workers feel public unions should be dragged down to their level, rather than restored to the elevation they once enjoyed. (Why you would side with the rhetoric of the people who cheated and defiled you, I'll never understand....)

It's quite affirming to finally see the workers of the United States standing up for themselves. They've done their "patriotic duty" for years - bought products, taken pay cuts, let politicians handle politics. We've just kept our head down and done our job. "Git er done" was the slogan of the American worker and we were proud to do it for the red-white-and-blue. But the politicians kept pushing our buttons, kept looking for the line, kept on pushing down our standard of living while raising the expectations. They picked this fight, not us. It's just the unions who got fed up first this time around ...

... but there are a lot more of us with a bone to pick. March is just around the corner, and when the snow begins to melt (and the rivers begin to flood) the whole upper half of the country will rouse itself, crabby from hibernation. We will pack sand bags and hoist signs and on March 19th we will hold nation-wide anti-war marches against the continued occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. May 1st is May Day, a day for workers and new-agers (a solidarity I approve of). There are always immigrant rights marches then too. May 22nd is Harvey Milk Day, for LGBT rights and there's a lot yet to be done.

The left has been anything but sluggish these last 10 years - the media just hasn't been watching. Now that workers are really moving into action however we are beginning to hit the establishment where it hurts - the wallet. In closing I'm reminded of a few lines of lyrics and prose I feel really speak to this sudden worker's empowerment.

The first is a song, by Suicidal Tendencies:
"And I go 'wait, what are you talking about, WE decided? MY best interests? How do you know what MY best interest is? How can you say what MY best interest is? What are you trying to say? I'M crazy? When I went to YOUR schools, I went to YOUR churches, I went to YOUR institutional learning facilities? So how can you say I'M crazy?'"
- "Institutionalized"

And the second is a bit of a quote from one of the best movies of all time: Fight Club.

"We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us."

Workers of the world, unite :)

There is no substitution for a people's revolution.

2011-02-25T06:14:00.015-06:00

The United States and the "international community" (read: global state capitalists) are attempting to hijack Libya's revolution, in a sense. To poor effect. The imperialist powers are scrambling to make their voices heard now that madman Muammar Qaddafi met his people's democratic demands with extreme violence and repression.

The problem? Once again: too fucking little, too fucking late.

(Not to mention the fact that this total arsewipe has no interest in playing by any rules but his own and their treatment of him sounds like dialogue from a work of absurdist theater. "The United States, France and other Western powers are trying to remove Libya from the 47-member Human Rights Council." Really? What the blue fuck was Qaddafi doing on there in the first place??)

Libya is a complicated situation in that Qaddafi does not represent Western neo-colonial interests, but is instead a fossil of the anti-colonial movements that swept the "third world" after the rise of the Soviet Union. He is, of course, no less a despot, and so his half-baked claims to Marxism are about as laughable as his allegations that Al Qaeda drugged his rebelling population, or that Wikileaks is a CIA conspiracy to overthrow the enemies of the United States (you know, enemies like Hosni Mubarak....).

So history, as history so often does, is cleaning house, deposing the archaic despots of the Middle East with little regard to their allegiances. It is a "combined and uneven" housecleaning, of course, one that has so far spared the monarchs in favor of the pretenders to democracy. But "Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi — neither a king nor a president" (sez NYT, accurately), responds in his own idiosyncratic way, ie, mowing down demonstrators with machine guns and hiring mercenaries to plug the holes left by defectors to his regime.

The Obama administration gained an unfavorable reputation during the Tunisian, Egyptian, and Bahraini uprisings. O didn't have much to say about Tunisia until Bin Ali fled. He stood on the sidelines with Mubarak and let his administration make conflicting assessments; Biden and Clinton painted the Egyptian despot as a stable ally, for example. That was egg on the admin's face almost as soon as the words were out of their mouths.

Granted the response to Libya, where Qaddafi has long operated as a gadfly to the West and attempted to woo African and Middle Eastern radicals for decades, might have required a little more consideration. How and when do you intervene when an antagonistic nutcase turns on his own people? The Obama administration seemed to want to find straight historical precedents ("it's like Somalia, or wait, we don't want this to be like Rwanda ... or can it be more like Kosovo....) when they ought to have been thinking a little more dialectically (what are the historical forces in play in Libya and the region and how do they interact).

For example, I think few of the instances where the United States has been involved in the last century showcase such bravery, determination, and agency on the part of the population involved. The mistake is in how anti-Qaddafi forces have been characterized.

These are not helpless demonstrators. These are not Kuwaitis clamoring for outside aid. As far as I know, no forces inside Libya have yet called on the "international community" for help. Some of Qaddafi's strongmen have defected and are training the rebels - and effectively. The rebels are seizing government weapons caches and pushing back the Colonel's forces.

They are creating a provisional government in Benghazi.

This isn't a humanitarian crisis for the United Nations to intervene in. This isn't even a civil war with two sides bogged down and exchanging blows. This is a revolution, the beginning of a whole new order.

not so bored now, are ya, asshole?

Sending Hilary Clinton to Geneva for international talks will end up being a waste of federal money. By the time the talks wind down, Qaddafi will be swinging from a lamp post (Allah willing). For Chrissake! Compared to the capacity of working people and activists to coordinate these actions in a democratic and nearly real-time manner through social media, international talks are like watching a brontosaurus wake up from a nap.

The best thing the "international community" can do is freeze Qaddafi's assets. By the time they've done anything else, they'll be dealing with a whole new government. Who are you going to impose a no-fly zone on then, huh? Yeah. S'what I thought.

Wake up and smell the incense, guys. The cutting edge of democratic change in the world has done a radical shift and the West is in danger of getting left behind. Without an urgent reassessment, the capitalist democracies are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history, much like Qaddafi - not any time soon, but too soon for comfort.

The support of democracy ought to be a geopolitical strategy.

Of course all this underlines how antiquated our whole political system has become, not just our foreign policy paradigm (which is still influenced by Cold Warriors, sadly). To address the necessary changes in our domestic structure is a task for another day.

Permanent Revolution in the NYT and Egypt

2011-02-24T08:57:00.010-06:00

The New York Times webpage is adapting to the protests in the Middle East. This is the beautiful thing about the internets: it adapts format. Newpapers can't give you a live feed of people's tweets, especially not as they engage in revolution. (Plus it gets me around the corporate blackout of Twitter! How utterly kind of them.)

But since that page is in movement and in all likelihood will be gone in a few months, I'll add something more substantial....

Egyptian activists have a dvanced their demands (partway down the page). Among their more routine call for the release of detainees, the end of the emergency law (which bears some striking similarities to certain U.S. legislation?), restructuring ministries and generally sweeping out the old guard, is a certain new phrase, an invention so radical that they need to explain it.

"- Forming a new technocratic government."

(Disclaimer: as a former table-top roleplaying game nerd, I have a particular soft spot for this phrase, a sort of hipster irony and nostalgia. So sue me!)

"Technocratic government: is a specialized government which doesn’t belong to any party. This government is used in the case of political differences."

Emphasis my own. Russians everywhere are amazed as Lenin spins somersaults in his tomb.

Is it naive of them to think they can end party politics? Perhaps. But there is something very appealing in the image of a country governed out of the makeshift volunteeropolis of Tahrir Square. A country where nuance and dialogue is the order of the day, where tweets and facebook groups coordinate the work of society and provides both jobs and compensation. The government is the people, pouring in and out of Tahrir like a fluid neural network, and the issues of the day are resolved in real-time, collaborative conversation.

Something that would take a lot of work. A lot of electing committees and discussing issues in a logical and civilized manner. A way fraught with challenges like any other system, but finally realizing both democracy and technology and advancing our lives in new ways....

"Our revolution and struggle will continue until we achieve all our demands.

The revolution is not finished yet… April 6 Youth announce that there will be another demonstration on Friday the 25th and a sit-in in Tahrir Square on Friday until the implementation of our demands."

The embryo of the future, a people's technocracy

Losing the Green Future

2011-02-22T08:32:00.016-06:00

Yet another of those sacred pillars of the American Empire is evidencing some particularly ominous cracks: the auto industry. As domestic automakers were some of the biggest losers and/or crybabies of the Great Recession, the character of the industry was profoundly changed. The federal government had to quasi-nationalize General Motors, long seen as the figurative engine of the American industrial economy.

this is called a factory. we used to have these in this country.

(But of course, the industrial sector in the United States has long been in decline. Just ask Wisconsin workers.

Or, for that matter, take a look around many places in rural America. Or Northeast Minneapolis. Or the Southern California urban sprawl where I was born. You can see the hollow shells of industry everywhere like the concrete exoskeletons of shellfish behemoths. All the crunchy capital and gooey labor long since fled to friendlier - aka more oppressive - climates.)

But the problem with the automotive industry isn't strictly its finances, despite the war on United Auto Workers the last few decades. It isn't government regulations, which every industry encounters eventually (if the government knows what's good for it). The problem isn't even design. I have no patience for the arguments that Americans only want big gas-guzzling SUVs and hostile-looking mini monster trucks. Those are the fault of advertisement campaigns and the dismantling of city planning and the cancer-like spread of suburbia as much as it is any dream of the American public.

The problem is systemic. The problem is the auto industry's linkage and co-strategery with oil interests. This is an alliance that has dismantled public transit in key metro regions (especially Los Angeles, where commuters sit trapped in their cars for hours with right-wing hate radio pumped through their car speakers).

By de-socializing transit, the capitalist system in America not only placed the burden of commuting on each family, but also spun a nationalist narrative that equated freedom with machismo and geographical dominance. Goading said families into accepting this burden. Even valuing it. To the point where the car loan is right up there with the other heavy hitters in the world of modern debt slavery: medical bills, student loans, and the car loan's dialectical opposite: the sacred home loan.

As consumerism rose and real wages stagnated the last 30 years, consumer debt became one of the quiet underpinnings of the U.S. economy. Now more than ever U.S. workers are searching frantically for good deals on commodities and services to make ends meet. The more progressive elements of the working class - including college graduates, many of whom can't find the high-paying jobs they were promised - also want to do their part to help the environment.

climate change has turned my home region into a tinder-box

But government initiatives to expand green, high-speed mass transit between urban centers keeps getting cock-blocked by teabaggers hissing about budgets that have come unbalanced (because of right-wing corporate tax cuts, mostly). And the working class hasn't woken up to the reality of car ownership yet - and it will be a struggle to do so, considering our suburbs have developed along auto, not mass, transit channels. (Massive retrofitting required - but that would also bring jobs back in massive numbers, if we can figure out how to pay for it....)

So the U.S. auto industries do a little bit, as part of their green PR campaign, to capture the green progressive demographic. Problem is, they want to offset R&D and capital and production costs by marketing hybrids and electrics as luxury cars. As if the fate of the planet, and the species, is a luxury.

Not exactly doing their duty as a human institution to make their own sacrifices for the good of the planet. While we spend our own hard-earned cash on new lightbulbs, energy-saving appliances, and candles for brownouts (something we Californians are pretty used to), they generally look for every feasible way to lower their own costs, including passing off that cost to consumers and the environment. Would they ever consider operating at a loss to fund green research and low-cost, low-emission transit options?

Not in your life. So don't believe any talk of "shared sacrifice." As in so many other realms - budget cuts are one popular example right not - there is more sacrifice to business than from business.

But, as long as the environment remains fashionable - and it should, considering it's not exactly poised for a rebound anytime soon - rest assured automakers will continue their lackadaisical wandering towards cheap green transit ... eventually ... in their own good time.

That's where China comes in. Apparently the F3DM, while doing next to nothing to redeem the stereotype of boring communist consumer goods (more of an industrial-era thing, you know, silver is the new Fordian black), is the first mass-produced hybrid. In the world.

You heard right. Cheap hybrids for everyday folks.

they also have high-speed rail.

A little bumpy, yeah, but what working person doesn't have something that's falling apartment? Nice things are for rich people - just look at Comrade X and his coffee pot. I'm being a little facetious, yeah, but it would be nice to own something so cheap that we didn't feel trepidation when trying to open it up and customize the damn thing.

All this once again underlines the role of government in business. As if the fat profit sharing GM autoworkers are going to get didn't hammer it home well enough for you. (Remember, GM was the one that got nationalized.) For Chrissake, as if the very internets you're reading this on wasn't evidence enough that government involvement in business can be good for both business and workers.

'Course the Chinese gov't treats their workers far, far worse than we do here (uhh, right?) and that needs to be changed. But this is just further evidence of a fraying American empire, unable to meet the stringent demands of the 21st century - the very century it has played such a central role in creating.

A couple other slick readings for you: ECW's discussion of last year's holes, which includes a good rendition of oil's significance true significance, and a recent post from Mr. Thomas L. Friedman that I, frighteningly enough, almost completely agree with: use Libya as an excuse to get off oil dependency once and for all. Friedman even says "history is back," which has interesting repercussions. Slowly the amber lets go of the Middle East, coagulates around the United States....

Egypt And Capitalism's Lack Of Vision

2011-02-05T07:27:00.012-06:00

Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich- that is the democracy of capitalist society.- V.I. Lenin

Our ruling class loves to pass the buck. When an administration comes into the White House they desperately try to hold as much of the creaking American Empire in place as possible, praying that the whole rotten structure doesn't collapse on their watch.
When the inevitable happens and one of their client states erupts in revolution against the corrupt autocrat Washington has been backing for decades, these assholes have the nerve to be surprised.
It is amusing to watch Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the rest of Empire's caretakers running about in a total gagglefuck over the revolutions sweeping across the Middle East. One day they back Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's self- appointed president- for- life. The very next they ask him to leave Egypt. The current strategy seems to consist of mumbling platitudes about freedom and democracy while quietly maneuvering another stooge into Egypt's presidency.
Nice try. The Egyptian people allready know Omar Suleiman, Egypt's vice- president, C.I.A. liasion, and former military intelligence chief, is an asshole and can be counted on to overwhelmingly reject him.
Why are capitalists so inept at Empire? Or building any kind of political stability in the world? Han China existed for over 400 years The Romans built an empire that lasted for over 7 centuries. The first great capitalist empire, that of Great Britain, spanned the globe but burnt itself out in less than two hundred years. Other European colonial empires were extinguished even faster.
The ruling class of the United States came up with a new variation of empire- indirect rule. By the mid- twentieth century, technological advances in communications, transportation, and armaments ( particularly in air and sea power )made direct rule obsolete. It was much easier to rule a country by proxy. A general, a monarch, or a dictator is much easier to maintain than a garrison. The fact that the autocrat was a native of the country he ruled on the behalf of the American ( now global )economic elite preserved the fiction of independence. The native military, not the American, would do the dirty work of empire- torture, imprisonment, and murder of anyone who rose against the status quo. Only if the shit got totally out of hand did the U.S. Marines go charging in.
So why is this brutal yet elegant system falling apart before our very eyes?
The answer lies in the lack of vision on the part of the real power behind modern nation states: the capitalist class ( aka the ruling class, the investor class, the bourgeoisie, the Bosses, The Man, The Enemy ). Unlike the elites of empires past, our rulers are not motivated to leave a legacy to history. They are not motivated by outmoded notions such as glory or honor. They are motivated by greed, the bottom line, the profit margin. There are no plans for the future- the capitalist only exists for the present. It matters not a bit to him if in order to increase his own personal wealth he has to impoverish thousands of American workers by sending their jobs to markets with cheaper labor. His interest in freedom is limited to his personal freedom to make more money- to to this he his perfectly willing to back dictators, military strongmen, and corrupt " democracies", where the people suffer from the attentions of not a single tyrant but from that of a hundred petty tyrants ( e.g. Haiti). All beholden to The Man, of course.
The stability of the Middle East is of no interest to the capitalists who caused it by backing autocratic regimes for so long. As long as their investments paid off, the Middle East can go to hell. Similarly, the long term well- being of the United States does not concern them at all. America may be bankrupt, in chaos, and reviled throughout the world in the near future but as long as our capitalists get their ill- gotten wealth, they are perfectly willing to let the country they profess to love so much collapse into ruin. If these parasites were true patriots they would accept a high tax rate on their fortunes and pay their taxes instead of putting the burden on the working class. If they really wanted to balance the budget they would voluntarily pony up the dough rather than make cuts to social programs working people use- cuts that are not going to make a even a miniscule dent in the deficeit anyway.
Capitalism has run its historic course and served its purpose of pulling the world out of the Middle Ages. Now it is dying and like a dinosaur, is crushing everything around it in its death throes. Markets are dissaprearing, resources are being consumed in ever greater quantities, nations are being destroyed, and economies are being broken. Time has come for the American people to wake from their long slumber, and , like a titan, shake ourselves free of the fetters our new aristocrats seek to bind us with. Follow the brave examples of the people of Egypt and Tunisia. One day, soon I hope, the world will stand amazed at the sight of millions of Americans standing up to their own corrupt, isolated elite and telling them " Enough!".

Friedman clouds important issues ... as usual.

2011-02-03T09:56:00.007-06:00

I know this is no surprise to my small audience, but Thomas Friedman - an incredibly influential economist and political commentator - has quite a flawed method of reasoning. Below I will respond to his article "B.E., Before Egypt. A.E., After Egypt," which was published February 1st in the NYT. But I would also like to point out that this is the man who wrote The World is Flat, a naive argument that technology resulting from capitalist globalization creates an "even playing field" for economic actors. While the world of communication has radically altered, creating with it a young global culture, the economics have not caught up and cannot catch up on the basis of capitalist production. Anyway, to the issue at hand.

POINT: Friedman's "retired Israeli general" tells him from the opening, "everything we thought for the last 30 years is no longer relevant.”

REFUTATION: All of the joint US-Israel strategy over the last 30 years was antagonistic to the Arab world. It is not merely "outdated," it was unsustainable, imperialistic, and unrealistic in the first place.

POINT: "The peace treaty with a stable Egypt was the unspoken foundation for every geopolitical and economic policy in Israel for the last 35 years, and now it’s gone. It’s as if Americans suddenly woke up and found both Mexico and Canada plunged into turmoil on the same day."

REFUTATION: This comparison is ridiculous. Israel's border with Egypt is tiny. The US borders with Mexico and Canada, two geographically and demographically huge countries, are likewise enormous. The United States is still able to dictate policy to much of the world (though in a decreasing capacity). Egypt is one neighbor; Canada and Mexico are two, and our only two, and the only two other countries on North America's mainland, at that. Israel and Egypt are both part of a complex overlapping geopolitical network that includes Europe, the Mediterranean, the "Middle East," North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, the "Arab World," the "Muslim World" ... the list goes on. The religious complexities of the region alone warrant in-depth analysis, not Friedman's platitudes.

POINT: Friedman hammers home Iranophobia in a not-so-crafty way by quoting a "Tel Aviv strategist" to paint a superficial Middle East backdrop for all of us paying superficial attention: "And it [the Egyptian Revolution] is happening right at a moment when nuclearization of the region hangs in the air."

REFUTATION: This region is "nuclearized." It's an open secret that Israel has WMDs, including nuclear capacities. Shame on Friedman for reinforcing American ignorance about the complexity - and the history - of the weapons situation.

POINT: Friedman says, "The best time to make any big, hard decision is when you are at your maximum strength. You’ll always think and act more clearly," and goes on to point out Mubarak had 30 years to introduce reforms to his country.

REFUTATION: Friedman apparently doesn't understand how a dictatorship works. Having a single strongman give the orders in a militarized security state isn't conducive to progressive developments. If democracy had been Mubarak's goal he would have pressed for changes to Egypt's constitution upon becoming President. A dictator "think[ing] and act[ing] more clearly" means only more thoroughly curtailing freedoms and curb-stomping public cries for liberty.

POINT: "Now he [Mubarak] is trying to reform in a panic with no leverage."

REFUTATION: Appointing new ministers and "promising" to step down in the fall are not reforms. They are executive window-dressing. "Reform" actually involved changes to the laws that keep the dictatorship in place, ending the curfews and the state of emergency. A tyrant will not make reforms; he stoops to grant "concessions." Nothing about what Mubarak has done changes the power of his office or sets a precedent of democracy.

POINT: "[I]t is virtually certain that the next Egyptian government will not have the patience or room that Mubarak did to maneuver with Israel."

REFUTATION: Friedman neglects to mention the U.S.'s vested interest in making sure the transitional government will play ball, and probably any government after that. Will they use force to prop it up? If necessary, you betcha. Friedman is propagating a naivete that harms the worldview of everyday Americans. It is the responsibility of writers, journalist, economists, political nerds, etc. etc. to dig down deep for the truth, not dumb down analysis until it whitewashes the importance of geopolitical strategy.

POINT: "With the big political changes in the region, 'if Israel remains paranoid and messianic and greedy it will lose all its Arab friends.'" Embedded quotation attributed to "Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster."

REFUTATION: Arab friends, huh? Israel has been paranoid and messianic and greedy for the almost 30 years I've been alive. It's astounding to me that they would have Arab friends even now, and any buddies they may have strike me as very good examples of the possible beauty of the human spirit. And also a bunch of people who are very, very scared of the U.S. military. Let's face it: Israel is never going to gain acceptance in the Middle East by siding with the U.S. and pursuing a policy of fear. That is one(?) country and two(?) populations that need to do some serious soul-searching now, as many pundits have pointed out. Let's hope for the sake of the Israeli people (and not necessarily its government....) that this soul-searching won't come too late.

POINT: "What the turmoil in Egypt also demonstrates is how much Israel is surrounded by a huge population of young Arabs and Muslims who have been living outside of history — insulated by oil and autocracy from the great global trends. But that’s over."

REFUTATION: Just the term "living outside of history" is enough to make my blood boil! No one lives "outside of history," no one, anywhere, ever. That is some kind of weird neoliberal fetish. "The end of history." "Stuck in the dark ages." No one is immune to history. Mubarak is falling prey to thinking he could insulate himself from the past. His clique thinks barbed wire can keep out thousands of young folks possessed by memory and empowered by hope. The U.S. thinks it can treat "backwards" - sorry, "developing," that's the word we use now - nations like puppets and pawns. The Middle East has not been "insulated" by the great global trends; it is a shaper of great global trends. Oil and autocracy are facts of the last 100 years. They are a part of our history and give form to our mode of transit, our cities, our foreign policy, our language, our unconscious anxieties and fears and expectations. Until we grapple (never to conquer) with the full dialectical extent of these issues we are victims of history rather than its inhabitants.

POINT: "It is vital for Israel’s future — at a time when there is already a global campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state — that it disentangle itself from the Arabs’ story as much as possible."

REFUTATION: You ever had someone you don't care for, say a family member, or a significant other's friend, come stay with you for a period of time? And at first you don't like them, you rail against their being there, you butt heads a lot? And then perhaps things settle down for a while, you find some common ground, etc. But maybe they don't get a job, or they don't earn their keep, and you get frustrated and tell them, "Shape up or ship out." Israel deserves to exist now partly by virtue of it having existed so long that it has integrated into the Middle East dynamic. It is impossible to "delegitimize" the "Jewish state" by any convincing force of narrative. But I do think it's completely reasonable that the Arabic narrative too take a dialectical change, that the people of Egypt want democracy and they want it to be safe from their militarized neighbors. It's only fair that these people have the opportunity to live in harmony. Good leaders would arrange more dialogue between the populaces of these countries, foster good feelings, talk about cultural values and common grounds. (What a hippy, Dresden!)

POINT: "There is a huge storm coming, Israel. Get out of the way."

REFUTATION: The storm is here. Friedman, you and your bad reasoning are about to get swept to sea.

And perhaps the entire notion, the paradigm even, of America as the City on the Hill, the light of freedom and opportunity for people all over the world, is on the wane, just as our own democracy is on the wane. This country has experienced a dialectical shift from the inspiration and model to the very barrier of the ideals it once pioneered. New models, global models, fueled by communication technology and ideas of participation and new, innovative solutions are in order. They have not yet been born; they have been struggling for form and articulation since the Tennis Court Oath. And there have been false blooms and flashes in the pan but now there are new challenges, new hopes, and America's ruling class paradigms and their dialectical opposites aren't going to cut it. We will be in doldrums for a long time yet.

Denounce Mubarak!

2011-01-31T13:31:00.005-06:00

Barak Obama promised change; hundreds of thousands of stubborn, fed-up Tunisians and Egyptians have delivered.

And I realize the United States is missing a tremendous - no, historic opportunity to raise its clout. To look, for the first time in decades, like it legitimately cares about democracy and self-determination over its own geopolitical dominance. Yet so far Obama and Hillary Clinton have done nothing but offer pathetic words of support for the tyrant Mubarak. Their lack of a strong stance in favor of Egyptian democracy plays down the influence America could have in the white-hot forge of revolution.

As it is, our lack of support makes us look like assholes. Our lack of mass pressure on Obama makes us look like we all support Arabian dictators.

All the government officials are scrambling to keep up with the opposition leaders, to see if its "someone they can work with," musing whether or not their precious Israli peace can be maintained. But the wisest way to ensure a government hospitable to American interests is to declare support for the people's self-determination. Through the revolution, they, as in Tunisia, will struggle until they get a government with which they are satisfied.

Media sources also continue to point out a "lack of leadership." Also bullshit. Every single one of these protesting Egyptians is a leader. Simply because they haven't (yet? or won't?) had the need to create a hierarchy doesn't mean they are weak or cannot democratically control their own economy and lives. Perhaps Egypt and Tunisia serve as a warning to all those who cling to obsoleting notions of "the political party" as the summit of society's functionality.

The people are doing it for themselves. Classical democracy is making a comeback, empowered by technologies and the internets. Do Americans really want to serve a government that stands in the way of that?

UPDATE: It seems the Prime Minister of Turkey knows how to vie for the respect of the new revolutionary generation. Hell, even Iran is trying to get its foot in the door. For shame, America. You fail at counter-balancing your own imperialist boogeyman.

Egypt And Tunisia: This Is How You Make A Revolution

2011-01-29T08:32:00.017-06:00

The workers, youth, and the poor of Tunisia and Egypt are doing what average people everywhere else dream of doing: they are pushing back against corrupt and oppressive governments. And they are winning.
The tried and true tactics pioneered by progressive movements through the last two centuries are being used again with devastating effectiveness: mass protests, solidarity among working people, and the general strike. These weapons are the reason why our own corrupt and increasingly oppressive corporate government in Washington fear the progressive Left far more than the reactionary Right. It is because only the Left encourages solidarity amongst workers, all workers, while the extreme Right only makes " revolution" with support from factions in the Establishment.
The Fascists in Italy took over Rome in 1922 after a farcical march. Mussolini and his thugs would have been wiped out in five minutes if one company of Italian soldiers had stood up to them. But the officer corps, the industrialists, and the aristocracy of Italy tacitly approved of Mussolini's coup: they knew Il Duce was going to crack down hard on unions, striking workers, and socialists. They were absolutely delighted with the Blackshirt " revolution".
The Nazis took longer to get into power but once again a Right- wing populist party was granted power with the blessings of conservative politicians, capitalists, and the German officer class. Once in power, the " socialist " trappings of Hitler and his cronies were speedily discarded- Hitler even going so far as to murder his former associates in the Sturmabteilung ( a.k.a. the SA, or " Brownshirts"), partly to eliminate a potential threat to his leadership, but also very much because the SA contained genuine revolutionary elements with roots in working class organizations. Even this small amount of working class solidarity made big business nervous.
Now we come to the modern day and the Tea Party ( I can already hear the howls of outrage: " What! You dare compare the Tea Party to the Nazis?!?!" Hey, if it walks like a fascist, quacks like a fascist, and shows up at political rallies with a rifle slung over its shoulder, your goddam right I'm going to associate it with fascists). Let's be blunt- the Tea Party would have never gotten past a few crackpots meeting in someone's basement if it wasn't for support from the highest levels of the Establishment. FOX News pundits, billionaires, and the Republican Party all threw their support behind this " movement". There is nothing spontaneous or genuine about it, except its white hot anger against what Teabaggers perceive as the Other. The Tea Party, for now, exists at the pleasure of its backers.
This is exactly why a Right- Wing movement cannot be considered revolutionary. To establish a revolution, you have to overturn the class in power and make a wholly new and better way for people to live and think. Our own American Revolution did that, much to the later chagrin of many of its instigators. The idea of every citizen having political liberty and a say in the way the country was run was a startling concept in the 18th century. Similarly the idea that economic liberty, in the form of the democratization of the workplace, remains a bold idea even today. The only truly revolutionary movements of the 21st century that promise that are Progressive ones. And the only Progressive movements that have the vision, organization, and discipline to carry through that promise are Socialist ones.
So, to return to our brave friends in Egypt and Tunisia, the revolutions they are carrying out are not supported by any faction of their ruling classes. It appears these revolts were spontaneous and genuine uprisings of working people, the poor, and students. They are deploying the classic weapons of the street- fighting Left: the protest, the strike, and solidarity. I can never imagine the Tea Party, or a similar Reactionary populist movement doing the same. Instead of reaching for a sign, their first instinct is to reach for a gun. The crazies who do the violence on the behalf of their masters in the Establishment are easily controlled by law enforcement. The Tea Party is nothing more than a madly barking dog- sometimes it bites the hand that feeds it but a quick slap on its nose brings it to heel again.

radical hope, radical change, radical values

2011-01-17T08:12:00.002-06:00

Following the crazy shooting now more than a week ago, I was directed to this particular post about a U.S. marine who is warning "those calling for a civil war," with the typical machismo you expect from a member of an "elite" fighting force. While his(?) words are directed, doubtlessly, at the right wing it is worth looking at from a Marxist perspective. In other countries and other times the "left" has made its own calls for "revolution." In places like the Russia of 1917, with starvation and deaths on the front lines of World War I, this sort of call is entirely justified. Perhaps even today in an authoritarian country like Tunisia, a radical left population is justified in kicking out its oppressors, that same government which fires on demonstrators with snipers. Or authorizes the use of lethal force on rock-chucking children. These are situations I am not intimately familiar with and cannot make an accurate comment, except with the caveat that I am getting second- or third-hand news.

The situation in America, however, I can speak to. And while we're pretty miserable for a "developed" nation, and we do some really miserable things to the rest of the world, things have to be a hell of a lot worse before the left here can even consider insurrection. The American right wants to throw a fuss up around taxes and welfare, gays and Mexicans, so that they can go on protecting privilege and wealth. They are talking about a right-wing populist coup. I don't support coups.

Regardless, this "marine's" tone does more than merely rub me the wrong way. It's downright infuriating. This country was founded on the idea that if government abuses its people, the people have a right to replace that government. This marine's attitude is completely contrary to that. In supporting the text of the Constitution, he violates its spirit, the spirit of this country, the infectious spirit of democracy stemming from the Declaration of Independence. This is the kind of guy who would support a coup to keep alive the perceived authority of a single, corrupted document.

The Right often complains that Marxists, and the Left in general, have no values or morals. But the truth is that the more scientific Left recognizes that the world can only be explained materially, and that material things are subject to the forces of entropy - even the United States Constitution. There seems to be some attempt in the media to connect Jared Loughner's rambling nihilism to Marxism. The argument as it exists right now seems to go "Loughner made some political statements. His perspective and the perspectives of his friends seems to indicate he was a nihilist, meaning his 'belief' is in nothingness. Marxism doesn't acknowledge God as the source of value, and it has a lot to do with politics, therefore Marxism must be nihilism. And Loughner must be a Marxist."

But actually Marxist "beliefs" are a lot more numerous than you might think, and flies in opposition to nihilism, and are in fact more concrete than contemporary mainstream "values." It certainly places a value on thoughtful analysis, rather than the knee-jerk reactions that masquerade in our media as "free speech." It values democracy, meaning thorough participation of ALL members in a given institution, not just incremental elections for figureheads who manage your exploitation. It values radical honesty and openness in human relationships and equality, something that would radically transform the nature of loving relationships - whereas mainstream society seems to cherish these abstract "family values." A far cry from any kind of critical look at human relations, "family values" is actually just code for censoring gay/lesbian/transgender/queer peoples, pretending monogamy is sacred, and making an excuse to psychologically torture people by binding them to the capitalist household.

Change is inevitable; that's common sense. Marxism is one of the only philosophies that actually engages change not just as an armchair observer, but as an active and progressive participant. The people of Tunisia have almost spontaneously realized their own agency. Even if not led by Marxists, they have been empowered through the legacy of common resistance. Our anonymous Marine refuses to recognize that when things change for the worse, the people have an obligation to sweep it away and replace it with new, fresh democracy. Loughner failed to see, or failed to find any teacher who could instruct him, that change does not indicate a lack of universal truth, but a higher, more sophisticated universal truth than he could wrap his mind around. Contemporary American values are hollow, obese with empty rhetoric, sweaty and pained at the strains of putting out global fires.

We need to rediscover democracy. We need to re-engage.

Newsflash: Rich People Don't Care About Us Plebes

2011-01-11T05:53:00.005-06:00

(Note: This was written before the tragic events in Arizona. Update on that front to come.)

Let them eat cake!

It turns out that the truth most working people have known since the 16th century (at least!) can be scientifically proven. Yep, that's right, Psychological Science just published a study that shows that rich people are less empathetic then their working class counterparts. What does that actually mean? That the upper crust of this society is less able to tell how a person is feeling from looking at them.

Huh.

Scientists from the study posit that because working class people have to rely on each other, ask each other for help, and generally work together to keep from dying a slow and painful death in the gutter, we've developed the skills to understand and communicate with each other better. Rich people? Well, they can pay someone to do that for them. Seriously. Being rich can make a person less "human" or at least humane.

This study goes to show that it's unlikely a good directed appeal will cause the upper class to be guilted into handing over their stuff (even if it's just something simple like food we're asking for!). The only way us unwashed masses are going to get anywhere is by working together to fight against the system that causes such drastic inequality in the first place: capitalism.

It goes to show that in a society where the majority of us already have to work with each other to survive, the wealthy don't do much other than act like insensitive jerks. But at least they don't understand what they're doing is wrong, right? Right?

Free Julian Assange

2010-12-15T17:27:00.000-06:00

Dividing Assange from journalism by calling him "politically motivated" put the U.S. government in the position to shut down anything it doesn't deem as "politically neutral," which covers anything from Fox News to Mother Jones magazine. It makes my organization's independently-published newspaper vulnerable to scrutiny and suppression. And it continues to expand the notion that the government has secrets, that the democracy has insiders, that a (supposedly) democratically-run country can pick and choose what it releases to the public about its own action, that only itself can hold itself accountable to the people, that it is essentially an independently bodied entity wherein lies "politics" and that is ITS jurisdiction, where the will of the governed is unsubstantial in fact. A truly democratic country would be transparent, sharing its decisions and results and discourse with every citizen, so that every elected official acting our behalf would be accountable and recallable to us. The breakneck pace of events in this day and age means a need for an IMMEDIATELY accountable government that can respond to collective discourse.

In short: make the U.S. government's business the people's business. Institute rules for a recall of all public officials, elected or appointed. Free Julian Assange.

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/12/journalists_and_political_obje.php#more

Clinton's Third Term

2010-12-11T13:26:00.003-06:00

I don't think letting Bill Clinton talk on behalf of the Obama administration is exactly going to drum up further support for the tax compromise. In fact, I think attempting to hearken back to the halcyon days of the pot-smokin', intern-shaggin' Clinton Presidency actually taints the popular vision of the old bastard and reveals him, and by extension the Democratic Party, for the sellout capitalists they've been all along.

"Hello, I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility so it's borrowing some of mine."
- The Simpson's Movie

The Whole World Calls You to Action

2010-12-10T08:25:00.003-06:00

It's such an exciting time to be following politics, I think my head might burst.

Remember how annoyed I was when the little prince made his wedding announcement, and the British government tried to make the country look the other way for a minute? Yeah, well, I think the students were planning their protests right around then. And looks like they've launched quite successfully. How ya like us now, Charlie? Wanna roll in your Royce through the protest, rub elbows with the rabble? A hundred years ago they'd've had your head, for flaunting your wealth amidst their distress. They might yet, and I would be loathe to blame them. Sell the mansion, sell the kids, shave your head and disappear - my advice to you.

And Comrade X's own anger seems to be manifesting across the left, bringing with it that early banner for reform, the petition, calling for endorsement of the Vets for Peace event in front of the White House December 16th. If you consider yourself liberal, leftist, progressive, or radical, you should read it, and sign it if you agree, and circulate it if you feel it should be passed on. Encourage others to spread the word. There is no other way to make change happen than to encourage one another and just do it. Protest. Walk out. Sit down. You know the drill; look at Civil Rights. Look at strikes. They didn't wait for the Democrats to make things happen, because the Democrats don't make things happen; the people make things happen. So you, you are a member of the people, go make it happen.

I love Wikileaks, too, and the knee-jerk reaction from the American government proves how bold the far-right powers have become. Thankfully this frothing at the mouth is getting called out by Europeans, who still have a spine. (How do you like that, America? All those hippy Euro democratic-socialists know more about democracy and freedom.)

This is only the beginning. There are bigger things to come. But if you want to see shit go in a positive direction and bring justice, you have to get out your surfboard now, because events aren't going to wait on you.

Obama's Tax Cut Deal: Seriously, Are You Surprised?

2010-12-06T19:16:00.013-06:00

President Obama is not even trying to look like a populist these days. Explaining why he decided to allow the tax cuts for billionaires to endure, he offered this little gem:" Make no mistake, allowing taxes to go up on all Americans would have raised taxes by $3,000 for a typical American family and that could cost our economy well over a million jobs."
He's using Republican talking points now? What's next, does he run for re- election as a Republican? He might as well, for there are no real differences between the two plutocrat parties today. Obama threw the man-of-the-people routine aside and finally revealed himself to be the defender of privilege and obscene wealth.
Turns out that far from being a socialist, Obama is trying to outdo George W. Bush as Corporate Tool Of The Century. From granting drilling exemptions to oil companies drilling in the Gulf of Mexico ( the first while Deepstar Horizon was still ablaze )to the mandate forcing the public to buy private health insurance, Obama is the bestest buddy money can buy.
It sounds great on the surface, don't it? Our ruling class is sooooo happy. " Every motherfucker in America is getting a tax cut now!" Trouble is, how in the fuck are we going to pay for it? The phony tough guys in Congress lecture us on being frugal while jetting around the country in private planes and sucking the caviar off of the bellies of the $500.00 an hour hookers they rented. Yeah, these flabby bastards are so tough... taking the bread out of the mouths of children, closing their schools, making the elderly work until they drop dead. It doesn't do squat to lower the deficeit, but it looks like they are doing something.
I will be thinking of frugality this Christmas, Mr. President, while you and your new Republican friends stuff your gobs with rare, and expensive, delicacies at the White House Christmas Dinner.

Wikileaks "Cablegate": government cover-ups revealed

2010-11-28T13:16:00.003-06:00

I need do little more than point you fine folks to the Guardian's assessment of today's Wikileaks release, diplomatic cables showing all the closed-door policies and deals our unelected bureaucracy has been making.

The State Department condemns Wikileaks for putting US interests in danger. But as far as I've been able to tell the last 10 years (or longer!) US interests have been decidedly AGAINST the interests of working Americans and innocent people around the globe. So I proudly commend Wikileaks and the brave folks who find this information and make it available for the eyes of the world.

Information can't be bottled up, can't be suppressed. Especially now, in the 21st century, an age of communication ... immorality is no longer tolerable. Least of all from our governments. Accountability! Transparency! Justice!

the front lines are everywhere

2010-11-27T17:32:00.002-06:00

Here are some scattered articles about American fascism and decline.

"Beijing isn't playing fair! Why isn't this backwards, uppity country doing what I want? Play American, assholes, or we'll start prying at your world interests!" They even say "Old-fashioned balance-of-power style diplomacy." Well, we internationalists are back on familiar grounds....
"Hey, you can't go spying on diplomats when we're telling the truth! You have to wait for the canned messages. We're servants of the empire, not some common riffraff you can put on a surveillance camera!"
First Bush, now Palin. I'm starting to think mis-speak is a conservative tactic to win over the less literate element in society, maybe some kind of linguistic anti-intellectual meme?
Small business Saturday: little businesses are just baby big-businesses. But of course in today's political environ, the capitalist titans are in turmoil and the aging petty bourgeois, stirred by their decades of mis-education by mass media, are gaining confidence.
Entrapment: nuff said on the case of the Christmas tree kid. "Mohamud believed he was receiving help from a larger ring of jihadists as he communicated with undercover federal agents, but no foreign terrorist organization was directing him, according to a law-enforcement official." The government is in constant threat of being torn down from all directions. All they need to do is find the group they want lynched and lure out the weirdos. Then its "OH NO SOMALIS." "OH NO, MUSLIMS." When thirty years ago it was "OH NO COMMUNISTS." And thirty years before that, "OH NO FASCISTS." There are so-called patriots in our midst who'd overthrow the government if they thought they could set up a goddamn dictatorship, and throw out all the colored folks.

Official lies are in full-swing this week, my friends.

No war on North Korea. No showdown with China.

2010-11-23T09:10:00.004-06:00

Today (or last night, the time zones make it unclear), North Korea assaulted South Korea with artillery, killing two soldiers. The South Koreans are holding vigils, and I'm sure world leaders are holding conferences. And of course in case you've been living under a rock, this comes amidst new revelations concerning North Korea's nuclear program, and tensions between the two countries have been high for some time now.

There has definitely been tough talk on the issue of North Korea from the American government for years, the better part of a decade really. But I for one do not want to see an invasion of the "rogue state," nuclear arsenal or no. Here are some reasons why:

We've already got U.S. forces committed around the globe. The tricky situation in the Koreas would require a lot of troops. More so if China gets involved (see below). It'd be a waste of human resources in a time where people need to occupy themselves with work, not war.
Ditto with cash. The corporations would make a ton but working people wouldn't stand to improve their quality of living. What did Iraq and Afghanistan do to prevent the Great Recession? Halliburton and Blackwater and their ilk raked in the dough on fat military contracts. Soldiers got the short end of the stick and I don't think a dime "trickled down."
North Korea is China's ally. After the boat incident last summer, the new rising star of international capitalism took a harder line on its little neighbor; if it wants to be a global player it needs to put more pressure on its batshit stupid friend there. And I don't think China wants North Korea acting the fool, so let them work it out.
Following on that last point, if the U.S. invaded North Korea it would be taken as a major offense to China, who has a sort of Monroe Doctrine attitude about the Asian Pacific. Nothing would prompt a showdown worse than aggression against their neighbor, and we can't have a war on China. It's not sustainable. Not even if our very beloved President issued a draft.

Face the fucking facts, America. We lost at the recent G20. We are no longer the Head Motherfucker in Charge. We shouldn't have acted like we were in the first place. We need to keep a cool head and learn some freaking humility. No more shitting around with these wars on these ruined nations. No more posturing and waving our proverbial dick at China; we need to take care of our own failing infrastructure and our own jacked up economy.

And that, my friends, is the point. The ruling class of this country fucked us over. The financiers, the politicians, the military. Their reckless policies in pursuit of corporate profit have stalemated our future as the American working class. We can't let them coerce us into more war - not with North Korea, not with Iran, not with Pakistan or Yemen or Mexico. No more military ops. No more drones. No more "support personnel." Draft workers into an national infrastructure, mass transit, and green energy construction program. Bring us up to speed with the implemented technologies of Germany and Japan. Fund it by levying an 80% tax on corporate profits. Nationalize the companies that don't comply. Issue an amendment to the constitution that provides for federal-level recalls so we can hold any politician who breaks with this program accountable.

It's time we get our heads out from our rectal cavities and go after the bastards who do nothing but pass bad policies before they drag us into more special-interest conflicts. War on North Korea will not keep us safe. It will take all the problems that have been festering under the surface in America for the last fifty years and burst them like a popped boil.

And there will be no going back.

Sarah Palin " Writes" Another Book

2010-11-21T07:30:00.036-06:00

So Sarah Palin has finally gotten her second book, America By Heart ( who comes up with these titles- was Stephen Colbert the ghost writer? ) out. Even now, legions of right- wing mouth breathers are digging out their hard- earned cash to give to a person that actively works against their economic interests.
Judging by Ms. Palin's last literary effort, Going Rouge ( yeah, Sarah, representing the interests of the ruling class is a real courageous act of rebellion- insert double eye roll)the sequel will be a collection of typical right- wing gibberish sprinkled with wild accusations of the unamericanism of the President and his family.
But remember the audience. These are folks who need a spellchecker whenever they write up a protest sign. And when it comes to reading, they are challenged by the instructions on a microwave dinner package.
If this tome were anymore dumbed down, there would be panels of cartoons rather than text.
Now there is a widespread belief amongst those who lean to the Left that Ms. Palin is as dumb as her followers. I disagree. You can question her knowledge on geography, history, or world affairs ( I'm still not sure if she is truly ignorant of these things or if it is an act to show the stupid she is " one of them" )but when it comes to hustling she is a master. She has that special GOP talent to convince working people of the Caucasian Persuasion that the very people fucking them in the ass are the ones representing their interests. Sarah is such a master at this that her audience even asks for a few more inches up their collective butts. No wonder she quit as governor- who wants to sit in a crappy office all day when you can print up a collection of personal anecdotes, reactionary propaganda, and other assorted drivel every couple of years and have packs of teabaggers throw their money at you. Need to rent a personal jet? Charge a $100,000.00 speaking fee. Sarah's shameless scamming is so epic that there is almost something inspiring in it. Call it The Audacity Of Knavery.
Well, now your humble muckraker must look not- really- forward to reading Sarah's latest pile of tripe in order to review it. But I am happy to inform you I won't buy it ( and handle it while wearing surgical gloves) but browse through it at the bookstore. Then I will take a page from Sarah's book and quit halfway through it.
So I can serve my country better, don'cha know?

You are an Asshole, Your Highness

2010-11-17T09:06:00.003-06:00

Naturally everyone everywhere is talking about Prince William's engagement to some tart named Kate Middleton (apologies if she is not actually a tart). And by everyone everywhere, naturally, I mean the goddamn tabloids - not to exclude the beloved NYT, of course ... since they actually sound like a tabloid themselves:

Interested parties can now focus on a new set of pressing issues: Who will design Miss Middleton’s wedding dress? Who will be Prince Harry’s date at the wedding? And, should Miss Middleton become queen — which would not take place until the death of both the current queen and the future king, Prince Charles — will everyone call her Queen Kate? (Her formal name is Catherine.)

It's always surprised me that Americans give a shit about British royalty. They aren't all that glamorous anymore. Politically, it's awful (don't you care that our country was founded on an opposition to monarchy?). I suppose it seems quaint by U.S. standards ... but when you find out that the British monarch still has technical powers, it seems a little creepy, especially considerign that the UK has no written constitution. There's a certain insistence that the kings and queens and princelets are all part of the government's "dignity" and not day-to-day work. Still, that doesn't quite sit right.

What's most worrisome is the timing, though. With a typically royal disregard for the "little people," the announcement seems intentionally designed to distract the British people from the seriousness of the upcoming budget cuts. In its own quaint British way, this is putting patriotism before politics. It's taking what's considered quaint and characteristic and beloved about Britain and broadcasting it everywhere and marginalizing the actual problems with the government. Even the media admits it:

"After an autumn of dismaying news about budget cuts and Austerity Britain, the engagement provided an all-purpose happy diversion. The BBC started providing saturation coverage of the announcement. Queen Elizabeth proclaimed herself to be "absolutely delighted.” Prime Minister David Cameron said that when he announced the news, members of his cabinet responded with a “great cheer” and “banging of the table."

Thanks, NYT. Circus triumphs over bread in the UK. It doesn't matter who gets thrown out on the dole; the tabloids will save the working class.

Practical Problems For Socialists: What About The Sole?

2010-11-10T19:26:00.004-06:00

We Reds have a bad habit of describing grandiose, generalized visions of the glorious socialist future, but fall on our faces when someone asks basic questions about day- to- day existence in that future. Like, "May I drive a car?" Or, " What kind of house will I live in?"
Here's a little thought exercise for the comrades out there. What to do about the sole. And I'm talking about the fish, not the spiritual item.
Currently, the Dover Sole is the most sought after flatfish on the seafood market. The price per pound is usually about $32.00. This is due to demand, the relative scarcity of the fish ( it's only habitat is in the English channel ), and the cost of the labor of the fishermen who catch it. In order to make a profit a seafood distributor has to cover these costs and then gouge the customer. How would a socialist economy make this tasty commodity available to the general public? Would it make what is essentially a luxury available at all?

Blame America

2010-11-07T12:58:00.003-06:00

America needs some fucking tough love right now. Listen to me, guys, somebody should've told you this a long time ago, or maybe they have been and you're just ... not ... listening. Take out the iPod earbuds and turn off the TV a minute. No, you can't just leave it on mute and watch it behind my back. I want to talk to you about something serious here. I think you have a problem. I think you've been acting like a goddamn lot of children.

You know how after you graduate college, you pretend for a little while that you're a real adult cuz you're out on your own, but really you have no goddamn idea what's going on, and you don't care because you want to do things your way, but "your way" is really just an excuse for being irresponsible and putting the blame on everybody else, and meanwhile your bills stack up and you end up paying a lot of your very hard-earned money on debt collectors and overdraft fees - but that's ok, cuz you're doing it your way, you're making your mistakes, you convince yourself that these mistakes are what it means to be free and there's a learning curve. It doesn't matter if debts and overdrafts are unfair, all you need to do is perfect your approach, and it'll all come together.

Come to find out it doesn't work like that.

It is exactly your blundering insistence on individuality that seals your goddamn doom. You know what's being done is unfair. (It's the same way with wars and the economy and rush hour traffic.) As long as you keep doing things your way, you'll be ok, it will be somebody else's problem, the trouble isn't you, it's all those goddamn other people who support the war or take the freeway home. Or it's the government's fault for letting banks get away with stuff. Eventually the government will catch on, right? - you'll keep voting and eventually you'll get a politician who'll be like, "Whelp, bout time to hold the banks accountable," and you won't have to pay overdraft fees again.

And that's exactly what happened - except increasingly now the so-called "middle class" is relying on paycheck advance - once a quaint feature of the topolganger lower class neighborhoods, now available in the common grounds of WalMart and internet banking. Which, as of this writing, isn't that popular a subject on the internet, despite outrageously high APR (120% at US Bank). Some US states made paycheck advance illegal; however, the point is that by sitting by and letting some nebulous "someone else" deal with it, we let "someone else" dictate the terms and conditions of our lives.

We act as though as long as we mind our own business, nothing is going to bother us. Having to think about politics or the economy isn't as important as doing our job and feeding our families. We just want to be left alone. That's all the American Dream has come down to: "Shut up and let me sleep."

9/11 was a rude awakening many people are still trying to out-maneuver. Terrorism - can't be bothered to examine the cause of it, must have some easy answer like "they hate us" (a sullen child's analysis if I've ever heard one). Here are a panel of experts (who made them experts? Who knows), I will copy down what they say, I will use it as a shortcut to absolve myself of responsibility. I cannot be held responsible for my country's foreign policy; it's just not up to me! I'm trying to work and have a family here, I'm upholding my part of the bargain by pursuing the American Dream, look what they have on sale for me today. ("Heart-shaped potholders? It's like they knooowwww me!!")

In reality, the system we allow to run rampant kills people abroad and enslaves them to corporate interests. We all know our government and our corporations are doing things that are downright abominable, things that would make our skin run cold if we could actually stand in the presence of the events. If we could watch an Afghani wedding party get blown up by a drone, it would fucking break us. Instead we hide from our complicity and make fucking excuses. "It's too hard, it's too much, I'm just one person, what am I supposed to do, I know it's wrong but what choice do I have, no one else is doing anything so I won't make any difference."

You fucking slimeballs. You've ingested all this stuff about how America is the best country in the world, and you parrot that, but you won't stand up against injustice? What kind of legacy do you think has been passed down to you? Cowardice? Helplessness? Apathy? Are these the values you stand for? Do you think you're doing your children, or your siblings, or your parents, your friends and coworkers any favors by standing on society's sidelines and shrugging like a sociopath? No wonder we can't look one another in the eyes. No wonder we snap at the fast food workers who get our orders wrong, or the retail worker whose been on her feet eight hours with a holiday line that never seems to move for her or you. You choose not to have empathy, because that might mean your little nugget of a head for once.

And you have no idea, not one goddamn clue, what's out there, do you?

What to Expect After November

2010-10-29T06:09:00.004-05:00

With a typical song-and-dance, the media is painting the elections as an epic struggle of Republican versus Democrat. This entirely distracts the American people from the real issue at stake - the fate of the working class at the hands of the two capitalist parties. Progressives and radicals need to be developing a wider vista of the political landscape. Gird yer loins and prepare yourself for the Democrats' retreat - no matter what size the gains of the Republican horde.

NPR is playing stories in which they interview candidates across the nation. The Democrat they played last night was insistent on his "independence" from the party that endorsed him, said the Republicans had some valuable ideas, and said he was prepared to ~~receive a reach-around~~ reach across the aisle. Even if Democrats hold or gain offices, they seem more likely than ever to be so-called "blue dogs," aka "the other Republicans."

The question among pundits is "how influential will Republicans become?" Many news stories cover the moment-by-moment bean counting of polls among likely or registered voters. And while the Dems are rallying to greater or lesser degrees in some states (Obama drew 26,000 speaking in Madison, WI recently), they're falling behind in others. It's an important question, of course - the face of the struggle will change state by state and even city by city. But unless we build broader perspectives, we as a political wing remain divided and frustrated.

(Remember the feeling of hopelessness on November 5th, 2004 - when Bush was elected to a second term? That is what happens when you don't have a contingency plan.)

My own experiences with people's political consciousness is limited to paper-selling and tabling and discussions online and at work. Still, advocating the issues that I do, you'd be extremely surprised by the uniformity of answers I receive from people. Political arguments move like memes through people's heads and it takes a lot of work to convince people that there is an alternative to our helplessness, our feelings of political and economic disenfranchisement. Perhaps there is some way to pre-empt people's response to the loss of Democrat "control" of the government (which is not to blame on human nature, alleged conservatism on the part of the American people, or the fact that right-wingers have better ideas, but rather the complete spinelessness and lack of leadership among the Democrats).

Whether or not the Republicans specifically win a certain number of gains in Congress, or gubernatorial positions, we can anticipate the Obama administration's possible responses. We can anticipate the tactics used by both parties because we know their character. We know their agendas, broadly speaking. We know the issues of this election and we know the methods the parties typically employ in the pursuit of their ends. So while many people may say, "We don't have a crystal ball, we can't know the political landscape after the election," I find it helpful to prepare.

Obama's pick for his next chief of staff has signaled, according to the media, a "low key approach" as opposed to the (relatively) proactive attitude of Emanuel. This may be an indication that Obama wants to "work with" the Republicans, even though, of course, Republicans have continually scorned him and have next to no interest in cooperating with him unless they can push his policies ridiculously far to the right. Even I admit that half the reason this poor man looks like such a bad President is because Republicans refused to meet him half way, and even turned members of his party against him. They used every word he spoke as evidence that he is unqualified to be President, even if they had to stretch the truth beyond recognition.

But he hasn't helped himself, either. Like so many Democratic politicians of the past and present, the O-man is setting himself (and his base) up for disappointment by reaching across the aisle to the almost feline-ly fickle Repubs. Government leaders, especially the Dems, like to look like coalition builders, like to look tolerant and amenable to "bipartisan" policies, even when these CONSISTENTLY disappoint Americans and undermine the position of the working class.

See the health reform bill for a now-classic example of this process, although welfare reform under Clinton is also a good example.

And in fact, the right-wing shift of the Clinton era is a good example of the swing-set election pattern the United States has developed. (It's a deceptive pattern. The more Dems concede to Repubs, the more the center moves to the right and, ironically, the more the right screams about leftist bias.)

So we can predict some attempts - mostly in Congress - in the next two years to reach out to Republicans on a number of issues. What EXACTLY these issues will be remains to be seen. One struggle we are likely to see will be over the Bush-era tax cuts, due to expire in January, as the decision has been pushed back. November and December will set the stage for the next period of political maneuvering with implications likely to color even the 2012 elections. In all likelihood, Obama, in his stern and gentlemanly manner, will acknowledge Republican wins as a new period and welcome it as an opportunity to work together. Republicans will unanimously respond with vitriol and incite their base against everything elephant.

The Democrats never respond to these things by whipping up leftist sentiment among their own base. All the talk about working across the aisles with Republicans actually proves DE-motivating, and frustrates and disappoints progressives. Dems respond to this disappointment by making excuses for their party leaders. "He's trying," they say and will say again, "it's all the Republicans' fault."

Rather than being proactive, Democrats plan poorly and drop the initiative time and again, allowing the Republicans disproportionate control over the direction of the country. Rather than rallying to end the war or push for single payer, Dems attempt not to "alienate" the right. But they needn't worry about that; the right is perfectly capable of alienating itself! If the Democrats used their positions to encourage counter-protests, for example, every tea-party rally would be scattered like leaves in the wind. A truly populist agenda is entirely possible in the United States, but the Democrats are unable to script a positive story to frame it. Instead, they let the Republicans catch the media spotlight and spout controversy about socialism and big government. Even the illusion of populist change embodied in Obama's vague '08 promises drew people to the polls in record numbers. The myth that Americans are conservative in nature actually contributes to dispirited low-voter turnout, and in turn enables Republican victory, creating a self-perpetuating cycle in this period.

It's almost like the Democrats don't even know HOW to use the power of government to help out everyday Americans. It would not have been hard to create jobs through Depression-era-style legislation (even though even Roosevelt's policies in the 1930s fell short too). Americans would have been receptive to bolder attempts to create - not just "save" - jobs. Republicans could have screamed bloody murder but if the Dems were ever willing to villainize THEM for a change, as corporate stooges, as reactionary - and CONSISTENTLY - Americans might have listened. Considering, y'know, we had just elected the Democrats FOR A GODDAM REASON.... We were sick of the Republicans.

The Democrats do not distance themselves enough from Republicans and right-wing policies, and do not attempt to paint a more positive picture of the left. Everyone accepts the premise that this is a conservative country and no one seems willing to challenge that presumption or attempt to change it, not even the people who conceivably have the most power to do that.

"Rank and file" Dems - the voters, not the politicians - do no service making up excuses for their politicians, but they inevitably will because they see Republicans as the only alternative. This is not true. Another alternative - pressuring the Democrats - exists. A third alternative is even available - breaking with the Democrats entirely. There are left-wing alternatives in many cities and states - sometimes the Greens, sometimes independents or other parties. This doesn't seem like a winning strategy in the short-term - it seems to be handing victories to Republicans by dividing the left among other parties. But nothing lights a fire under a political party like the thought of actually losing voters. That was what really gave the Tea Party such influence over the Republicans. As long as Dems can COUNT on the left to stick with them - as long as voters feel there is nowhere else to go - they have no incentive to reconsider their bad policies. If they have to work hard to compromise with their leftist base, agitating for progressive policies, they come out the gate hardened against the Republicans.

Y'all were enthusiastic about Obama, yes, but you were enthusiastic to hand over control to a politician. You wanted to rally for a superhero to fix your problems. If you're a Democrat, you need to hold your politicians accountable now. You need to go to the rallies and the fundraisers and the debates and demand actual progressive change, wave signs and chant slogans, and you can't just plop down on your couch after the elections. If you want a better country, you actually have to work for it, and that means working beyond (and inside) your job and your family and transforming your social institutions into instruments of change. You need to threaten the Democrats by voting progressively and embarrassing them in front of the opposition. You have to learn 'em, and then tell them to shape up or you'll really give them something to cry about by forming a new progressive political party.

So yes, come November people are going to be disappointed, and many of them will react in the coming months by making excuses and blaming the Republicans. But unless we start coming up with alternatives to holding our nose and voting Democrat all the time, we're going to be acting like abused spouses an awful lot. It is ALWAYS the time to challenge the people in power, even the people that we see as the better of two evils. How good are YOU if you don't challenge evil, especially the one that tells you you depend on it?

Colombia Part II: oh for FARC's sake

2010-10-28T06:04:00.006-05:00

I am so late with this blog post. Bad blogger, Dresden. Bad.

Much like the US government, I blame this problem on FARC. In and of itself, there just isn't a very interesting lesson going on here that hasn't been learned or discussed on the left a bajilion times. Basically the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia are a guerrilla freedom-fighting group that funds itself off kidnappings and taxing the drug trade. Not very honorable, or indeed revolutionary, tactics.

A Marxist group really ought to know better. A truly revolutionary group orients itself towards the industrial proletariat and the more forward-thinking intelligentsia, and picks up members of and influence in other oppressed groups only because all these groups share a common struggle against capitalism. And Marxism is the only philosophy, the only systematic approach that can link these struggles. Naturally Marxists shouldn't just waltz into other people's struggles and elbow in on the action, but should operate in advisory and solidarity capacities. At the same time, these organizations should not lose themselves in what amount to ultimately futile peasant uprisings. Such uprisings have their place in revolutionary situations but do not make sustainable socialist revolutions of their own; without the organized proletariat, industrial capital cannot develop sufficiently to raise the society fully beyond the reach of capitalism.

The kidnappings and drug involvement are also bad for P.R., of course.

Sure, you can attribute it to the difficulties of their situation. But you have to make some compromises according to your situation, and it's better to disband and infiltrate urban society than to hole up in jungle bunkers and draw military attention.

And don't think this means letting the US and Colombian governments off the hook. Oh no. Declaring FARC a "terrorist" organization isn't exactly conciliatory. There's all sorts of strategery in occupying this particular country, especially to maintain a counter-balance to Venezuela. So long as this US-imposed violence continues to tear apart the region, there is no space for a true and peaceful socialist revolution in Latin America.

New Low In Political Idiocy: Teabaggers Defend Puppy Mills

2010-10-06T05:42:00.015-05:00

Teabaggers have continously lowered the bar when it comes to credulity, but a protest aimed at legislation closing down puppy mills takes the fuckin' cake. Apparently our mentally challenged countrymen have a weed up their ass because they have been fed a line about how regulating mass- dog breeding centers will make it too expensive for middle- income Americans to own dogs.
Here's an idea, genius. Take a look out your window. See all those four- legged mammals digging through the garbage? Those are dogs moron. You can take in a stray. Or better yet, go down to the local Humane Society shelter ( a socialist organization according to zany Teabagger lore ) and adopt a canine. People do it all the time.
You know, I used to be worried about the Extreme Right in this country. But if it comes to civil war, like many of these clowns earnestly hope for, a single commie soldier could wipe out a division of Teabaggers in an hour. All the comrade would have to do is point to a cliff and tell them, " Sarah Palin says jump off that."

Colombia, Part I: the Capitalism of Coffee

2010-09-28T10:40:00.005-05:00

The more I read about Colombia, the awfuller the situation sounds. But I won't get ahead of myself.

The country has one of the most diverse geographies in Latin America, which is saying a lot. This leads to a corresponding diversity of agriculture and industry and its potential wealth is impressive.

You may have noticed in the news that coffee prices are going up, especially as Colombian coffee growers "go green." American retailers have been slow to reflect that price - for a variety of reasons. (One of which is we'd hang the bastards! You don't fuck with our coffee. It's in the Constitution.) One of those reasons is that it's still a challenge to find Fair Trade coffee in many places in America (Minneapolis is one gratifying exception!). Coffee futures are also on the rise after bad weather affected crops throughout the region. The US also imports its coffee from a variety of places. All the resources I've checked imply that of those countries which export coffee to the US, Brazil is the most notable, followed by Vietnam, Colombia, and Indonesia in some order. (Although Colombia seems to be the #1 import for "green," or raw, beans.) Perhaps the production and trade of beans and blends is too complicated to reduce in a way that draws clear lines. That's globalization for you.

But no doubt about it, corporations are interested in Colombia. (Where don't they stick their nose?) In 2006, the United States and Colombia entered into a free trade agreement, the text of which seems pretty typical of such a pro-business arrangement - even though over the last 10 years Americans have become increasingly hostile to the practice. (On a for-profit basis, "free trade" hurts workers in every country.)

"So what is this, Drez, some kind of coffee conspiracy?"

Au contrair. A conspiracy implies some kind of secret shared by insiders. Injustices in the coffee production system are often a result of haphazard business practices and a lack of developed alternatives. But we all know the military intervenes in the affairs of sovereign nations to protect US business interests. So in our next installment I'll take a look at the American presence in Colombia, the role of FARC, and just what is going down in this particular corner of the world.

Colombia, A Prelude

2010-09-27T11:15:00.005-05:00

Over the last week or so, your attention may have been directed more than once towards the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, also known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. The Feds claim that the door-busting carried out late last week was solely motivated by an attempt to find domestic groups that fund terrorists.

This raises a lot of important questions which I did not have the answers to, so I've begun to do a little research. I'm going to share not only the results of that, but also my research process, and perhaps you, O Loyal Readers, can help us all come to some consensual conclusions.

The first questions are raised by the FBI raids themselves. First of all, is there a legitimacy to the worry that domestic activists raise money for foreign terrorists organizations (or FTOs, as they say in bureaucratese)? What exactly are the motivations behind these small obscure groups? What relation do they have to an organization such as FARC? Should Americans feel that such actions taken by the FBI actually lead to increased security?

But of course in even asking those questions, we find our information lacking. Who or what is FARC? Why are they emphasized with equal importance to Hezbollah, one of the most infamous "freedom fighter" organizations in the world? (Many people, especially in the younger and post-9/11 crowd may not be familiar with FARC at all; others, such as myself, may have rarely paid them any attention.) Is it true that they fund themselves through drug trafficking and kidnapping ransoms?

These more fundamental questions also raise important political considerations - for those of us who are Marxists, or merely anti-war activists, and for those of us just being brought to political consciousness because damn, the world is fucked up lately, and the people we've let run things are doing a piss-poor job.

So I'm going to try to find the relevant news and information and share it with yall lovely people, and then apply a little of that good ole dialectical materialism, and we'll see what we come up with.

How's that for fair and balanced? (Eat it, Fox News.)

A list of preliminary links:
- Wikipedia Entry on Geography of Colombia
- Wikipedia Entry on Economy of Colombia
- Wikipedia Entry on FARC

Wiretap Expansion Threatens Internet Privacy

2010-09-27T07:51:00.008-05:00

For those of you who read my last post and are worried that the government's ability to crack down on its citizens might be on the wane, check out this heartening article. Don't worry, it's for our own protection. You can tell because it's been introduced by the Obama administration, and Obama would never do anything to hurt American citizens, right?

(Except in the case of Anwar Awlaki, of course, a citizen marked for assassination without any actual disclosure of sentencing, or a trial, or any of those "niceties" enshrined by that hippy-liberal "Constitution" nonsense. And don't tell me "oh it's cuz his a terrister," because it's only a matter of time before anti-war activists are considered terrorists, and then the union organizers will be considered terrorists, and so on ... it's called a "slippery slope," look it up.)

The trend towards police state is unnerving in America, almost precisely because it parallels the rise of the police state in other countries too - allies and not-so-allies alike. As this article points out, Saudi Arabia and the UAE banned Blackberries because there was an inability of the government to "monitor" use.

That article also points out that the Obama administration wants to watch every international monetary transaction that goes on between America and the rest of the world. Not just the major ones - not just the big crates of electronic exchanges between banks, for example, or between masters of finance - not, essentially, by those of whom could wreck the most havoc with mismanaging their fortunes (as evidenced by the recession). No, they want to watch every parent sending their exchange student cash, every immigrant wiring money back home to her family. They want to monitor every transaction, every last one, all the foreign aid donated to countries hit by "natural disasters," every eBay and Amazon purchase, every Malice Mizer t-shirt some American otaku orders from Japan.

These are the faces of the new federal suspects. All the new data-combing programs, all the new hires for the DHS, all the new training courses and technologies, the cameras installed in the last 10 years, are going towards atomizing and oppressing the people who inhabit this country.

People need to move from a mindset that trusts or fears the government into an activist-oriented mindset. They need to find the groups in their areas that oppose the abuses of civil liberties and get involved. If you can't find such a group, look on the internet and help start one. Talk to your friends and families. Organize protests. Those of us who are already activists need to be doggedly recruiting and organizing against the expansion of federal authority.

There is still time before the noose closes, and even if it does it's never too late to fight back.

ADDENDUM: And the Democratic Party continues to alienate its base.... I'm so over that stuffy corporate machine. Talk about out-of-touch with the country. They're going to scream and whine as power slips out of their hand, but the worst part is they're leading all of our progressives back into cynicism and inaction. The worst thing those of us on the Left could do right now is make excuses for the goddamn Democrats.

Minneapolis, Minnesota FBI raids

2010-09-25T10:54:00.004-05:00

Yesterday morning several Minneapolis peace activists got an unpleasant wake-up call: the Federal Bureau of Investigation busted down their doors and began rummaging through their stuff. The warrants gave them authority to seize computers, documents, cell phones, etc. on the grounds that they may have "funded foreign terrorist groups." One of these groups is allegedly FARC, which is a peasant guerrilla group in Colombia. Now, I don't know much about FARC (yet) and I know there is some disagreement about tactics and stuff on the left. But I do know that the Colombian government shoots peasants and dresses up the bodies like guerrilla fighters and that they have one of the most oppressive and violent regimes in Latin America, and I know that Obama praises these tactics openly, just how many other American administrations cozy up to tyrants and dictators, especially south of our borders.

This also gives us some very revealing insights as to how the Democrats intend to use the PATRIOT Act - to clamp down not on terrorist plots, but on ordinary grass-roots organizations trying to enact positive change. The Anti-War Committee isn't an al-Quada plot to blow shit up, it is a group of US citizens who want to end the bloody conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But under Bush the rhetoric was to paint any opposition to imperialist strategy as terrorism, and Obama has no intention of calling for the Act's repeal. No Democrat does. It serves their police state means towards their global dominance ends.

This is the real face of federal law: state-sanctioned terrorism. Forcing activists to live in fear. Making Americans afraid to stand for change. Turning our hope into dread. Close your doors, duct-tape your windows, and stay in front of the friendly glow of your corporate-mindwashing television.

Hundreds of Minneapolis activists turned out in solidarity last night against these raids. Because we don't fuck around. We know that an injustice to any group on the left is portent of injustice to us all. And without left opposition to the growing power of the right - led by FOX news, the Tea Party, and the Joint Task Force among other government agencies - then everyday Americans will live in ignorance and helpless fear.

We need a grass-roots political party that will repeal the PATRIOT Act and end the raids on peaceful activists.

Healthcare Reform: Greedy Insurance Parasites Stoop To A New Low

2010-09-24T07:00:00.017-05:00

I looked out the window on September 23rd and guess what? The sky was not falling as the reactionaries in the Republican party promised me. No ominous rumbling of tank treads shaking the streets or black garbed agents rounding up unwilling citizens and herding them into FEMA camps, forcing them to get flu shots. The Teabagger Nation must be somewhat disappointed.
Of course September 23rd was the day a number of Obamacare provisions went into effect. And in the fucked- up logic that right wing assholes are famous for, the most controversial was the law that prevents bloodsucking insurance companies from turning down children with pre- existing conditions. That is such a decent thing to stand for that I figured even the most black hearted GOP corporate lickspittle could get behind it. Guess I was wrong.
The controversy began almost immediately when several insurance companies threw their collective hands up in the air and basically said, " Fuck it! We just won't insure any children!" The blame was then placed squarely on President Obama's shoulders, the human lice that own these insurance companies claiming that not being allowed to turn away a kid dying of leukemia was going to bankrupt them.
Isn't this picture as fucked up as a football bat? If the very limited health care reforms hadn't have gone through the dying child would not receive insurance coverage. But now that it has gone through, the child receives no insurance coverage. Best health care system in the world, right? Sheeeeeeit...
But that's what teabaggin' favorite Mike Huckabee still claims. His argument for turning down a kid dying from a preventable condition is a blue ribbon winner in the Bullshit Argument category. You know, where you compare two unrelated scenarios and pretend that it makes sense to apply the same solution:
" It sounds so good and it's such a warm message to say we're not gonna deny anyone from a pre- existing condition. Look, I think that sounds terrific, but I want to ask you something from a common sense perspective. Suppose we applied that principle [ to ] our property insurance. And you call your insurance agent and say, ' I'd like to buy some insurance for my house.' He'd say ' Tell me about your house.' ' Well sir, it burned down yesterday, but I'd like to insure it today.' And he'll say ' I'm sorry, but we can't insure it after it's all ready burned.' Well, no pre- existing conditions."
This nugget of " common sense" ( teabaggerese for " this is the excuse I have for being a complete and inhuman asshole " ) was spewed forth at the hugely ironically named Values Voter Conference. O.K., listen you ignorant teabaggin' assholes out there in Dumbfuckistan: if your idea of " values" is fighting like hell to force women to endure unwanted pregnancies and then do everything in your power to deny the kid basic medical treatment once it is born, you got a pretty fucked up moral compass. You need to pull your heads out of your asses and realize that someday your kid could need life saving surgery, but you aren't going to be able to afford it because of a pre- existing condition. If you vote for a corporate tool like Huckabee, Palin, or O' Donnel, you are basically voting to kill children. It is as basic as that.
That's a hell of a price to pay just for the chance to flip off the Liberal Elite.

The Recession is dead; long live the Recession!

2010-09-21T06:27:00.003-05:00

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee, the "Great Recession" officially ended in June 2009, reports the Wall Street Journal. It's always nice to know when the academics define these things. It helps to have a good handle on how we use our economic terms.

And the article goes on to make plenty of sense. Americans still have no job prospects, they're exhausted, Obama has done nothing. Jobs may not come back until 2013 (plenty of time for a new Republican administration, or at least legislature, to claim victory for cut-throat economic policies that will rob working people of decent living standards). And those gains in employment - will they be largely service-sector jobs? Inquiring minds would like to know.

There might be solutions under capitalism, but they're not very ambitious ones. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international non-government organization (NGO) says the government could help by providing "additional job training and education programs to better match workers' skills to business needs."

But I find that questionable. What, exactly, are the "business needs" of today? The bottom line is - the bottom line. Businesses aren't hiring much because they can't profit off of it. Productivity soared on the heels of the recession as the bosses squeezed what workers remained for all they were worth (literally!). Now productivity has, according to one WSJ blog, hit its cap, so to speak. This leaves only hiring as a way to increase output.

But there's no reason to increase output if the revenue isn't there. And where is the money going to come from? It isn't infinite. It has to come from sales. The American middle class is not just broke - it's in debt up to its eyeballs and has only seen the tiniest relief. Mergers seem to be the tactic of the moment, with airlines and other industries looking to gobble down "post"-recession (stagnation?) deals. But any dolt who paid attention in high school economics knows that this leads to that most awful of capitalism's by-products, the (gulp) monopoly. (And Mr. Mathias makes the amazingly astute point at the end of his article, one we Marxists have been saying for forever - monopolies are the perfect opportunity to nationalize the industries that provide for people's needs.)

Republicans, Tea Baggers, Libertarians, and other denizens of free-market-fantasy-land (including many liberals and moderates) will probably insist that the ony way to deal with today's resultant monopolies is to bust them up the ole fashioned way (thank you President Taft). This is actually an idealist back-peddle, to think you can drive corporations backwards through time and make them behave like a small business again.

The only way to build jobs, to really build jobs and fix the economy, would be to take the monopolies and cartels (healthcare and finance and energy especially) and nationalize them. Then it wouldn't be up to the fickle whims of the capitalists to provide people jobs; federal aid would be direct and efficient. Not as a temporary stop-gap until the free market feels like playing ball again, but as a threat to corporate sovereignty altogether. Only then will we see actual nation-wide programs to create a green economy, float aid to the unemployed, and provide healthcare (and healthcare training!) to every American.

But it's clear the Democrats won't do that, so what are our other options at this point?

Patriot Day Sucks

2010-09-11T15:04:00.010-05:00

Yeah, I said it. I detest this day. Number one, because nineteen right- wing Arab assholes hijacked four planes and murdered 3, 000+ people who had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Number two is because the rulers of the U.S.A. leaped at an opprotunity to wage war faster than a chicken jumps on a june bug. Initially an international day of mourning ( many of the victims were citizens of other nations ), the extreme right- wing of the American ruling class, represented by the Bush administration accosted September 11 as an American- only tragedy, complete with the lowest and most humilating displays of jingoism this nation has seen since the U.S.S. Maine exploded.
Now, without fail, every September 11 I have to put up with idiots tooling around in pick- up trucks with American flags whose size is in direct opposite proportion to the driver's I.Q. I have to watch politicians make insipid speeches about " hallowed ground" and " heroes". Some of these pricks are the very one that denied healthcare coverage to 9- 11 first responders. Save your fucking false gratitude, assholes.
9-11 depresses the shit out of me. I meditate on the tremendous waste and loss of life that came out of this tragedy. Namely the two utterly useless wars that George Bush and Dick Cheney started and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who were killed to expatiate the bloodlust a large portion of the American public screamed for after the Twin Towers fell. Tragically, the poor people who died were quite similar to the 9-11 victims in one respect- they were killed for sins they themselves did not commit.

What America do you live in?

2010-08-26T12:30:00.003-05:00

So I'm sitting here at work, and someone left a newspaper out. One of the front page stories is apparently about how police forces around the country are cutting back response to "lesser" crimes like burglary. I can't get much further than that without messing with someone else's newspaper and, honestly, I'm feeling sort of ill and don't want to search for the news story online. (I ought to be home but need the money - ok, this is too much of a tangent now.)

You gotta wonder if the bastards at places like Goldman Sachs (or the aptly named Magnetar Capital) ever read the local newspaper. Or watch TV. Or have kids in public schools. Do they feel remorse for the domino effect their ideas and actions had on the rest of society? Working people have lost their homes, their jobs - all of the security that prosperous America once bestowed its middle class. Never again, reports the NYT, will real estate multiply the wealth invested in it. (Perhaps because the capitalist magic known as "bubbles" relies on speculation and market tricks.)

It may very well be that the era in which ordinary Americans participated in economic mobility is over.

So how do they sleep at night? I wonder if it isn't that they occupy a different social class than we do, and that the accompanying psychology inside that class creates a sort of co-occupant America, a country not of use and practicality but of trade-for-profit's-sake. Wherein everything has a price tag, nothing an end use.... Wherein we, the end users, the consumers and the workers, are, effectively, invisible.

1300 Miles to Mexico

2010-08-17T09:31:00.002-05:00

Many a terrible thing's been going on lately (when doesn't it?), but the immigration debate, perhaps, bothers me the most.

Maybe it strikes close to home because I'm from California. I went to a high school where the Latino students outnumbered the whites at least 2:1. In my lifetime I saw the population of California turn to 51% "minority." (And what a stink it caused!)

It also hits close to home for me today, where "home" means the Twin Cities. Recently the tiny Minnesotan city of Lino Lakes passed a controversial resolution in its city council, to the effect of not spending city money on translating city documents into languages other than English.

Lino Lakes, however, is some dinky-ass quasi-suburb on the outskirts of the metro area. In 2000, it was at least 95% English-speaking. Even if things have changed, there seems to be no need for such a measure. There are no expenses to printing said documents, probably because the majority of Lino Lakes is as whitebread as they come.

It's a conservative test. If they can pass it somewhere, they have an example to point to when it comes time to expand their English-only movement. The stakes have been raised.

It's part of a larger battle, to oppress, exploit, tyrannize, and generally destroy the hated brown-skins. I've seen it all before. "Why do we have billboards in Spanish?" "Why can't they learn to speak English?" "They take all our jobs!" "They're all having babies on welfare!"

I'm sure most people are aware of the Arizona law SB1070 that recently went into effect (with some federal injunctions - the proverbial 3" of knife pulled out). What most people may not be aware of is that there is an arm to this law that essentially attacks day laborers, making it a crime to hire or be hired from a vehicle that is in any way impeding traffic. So, right there, you have an economic front.

It's also illegal to "conceal, harbor, or shield" an illegal immigrant, which strikes me as awfully familiar, but maybe that's only because I had a "liberal" education.

Oh, that reminds me - there are attacks, again in Arizona, on "ethnic studies" in school.

Really the point the right-wing populists are making is that it is not ok to be in America and describe yourself as anything but an American. "We only want you if you jump through our hoops, submit to our re-education, and live according to our customs."

What is it Malcom X said? “History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.”

It's clear how conservatives think of Latinos. There is a refusal to treat them like equals, to allow them their own history and culture. A refusal even to allow them to scrape by through working on the fringe of society - ironic, considering this is a country wherein we are "supposed" to "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps." Supposedly our white grandfathers did everything necessary to help our families pull through, but the old Mexican man selling oranges at the side of the road doesn't count for that, he's "stealing" a job, he's ahistorical, he's inhuman, even. And shit on the kids who depend on this man for support.

Arizona is even looking to ban such children from citizenship. That hard-line right-wing that so insists on the sacred immutability of the United States Constitution is willing to look the other way so long as they can attack the enemy they so detest.

It's pathetic. I still remember the mother of an ex-girlfriend of mine, back in California, a woman so loving and willing to take me into her own home, working overnights at the Swanson packaging plant. Her husband, gruff but no less open-hearted, crippled with arthritis after a lifetime of labor. They crossed illegally, contributed their share, raised three brilliant children, all of whom are college graduated (one at least from an ivy league) or at least college-bound. These are parents who are devoted to family and to God - ostensibly the same God that the right-wing supposedly worships.

But if it were up to this right-wing - and I'm not even talking about the extreme right, now, you understand - this family would have been split up, or deported, years ago. The world would indeed be a darker place if not for this family of immigrants.

It would seem, indeed, that the border does cross us.

Immigration reform isn't enough. We need an immigration revolution - we need a solution that shows just how obsolete the idea of national borders has become. Continues to become. This is going to be a turbulent becoming, because it will at the same time destroy what we see as the stability of our status quo. The immigration debate is a part of that, a part that proves how quick we are to blame people whose circumstances are forced on them. Forced by our lawmakers, who have pushed a one-sided agenda of globalization and free-market slavery. "Illegal" immigrants are victims of the same bureaucracy that entangles us all, strangles our livelihoods, keeps us from good jobs, and destroys our potential. A little equalization - scholarships for the children of immigrants, for example - can go a long way, but for every single gain the right-wing hollers and howls and tries to drag in average-joe workers.

It works. Why? Because we want some solution to the economic crisis (created, may I remind you, by our politicians and businessmen). We want jobs, we want less crime, we want a stable and dependable society.

Racism, however, is not the solution we seek.

Anti- Muslim Rhetoric Inflames Ugly Americans

2010-08-10T15:36:00.002-05:00

Last week's mosque- bashing was the frosting on the hate cake. The not- really- built- at- Ground Zero mosque ( in reality a Muslim community center)is still portrayed as some kind of insult to the fallen of 9-11 by the usual right- wing blowhards. A Teabagger Republican politician claims that Islam is a not a religion but a cult of hate ( here we go again with the psychological phenomenon of projection- a speciality of batshit Christian reactionaries). A Florida pastor plans to hold a Quran burning rally at his church to memorialize September Eleventh. Hundreds of swaggering, " more American than thou" rank- and- file conservatives who wanted to join the in fun of picking on a minority which yields little power in our nation, picketed local mosques, insulted the Muslim parishioners and behaved like assholes in general.
Look, I'm no fan of either of the junoir Abrahamic faiths, but their followers have the Constitutional right to worship whatever faith they want to. A lot of conservative Christians don't like that, despite their lip service to the Constitution. Christianity and Islam are like estranged brothers, who hate each other because they are so much alike. The only reason Christians don't go around burning heretics, infidels, and women these days is that the secular power of the bourgeois state put a stop to that some two hundred fifty or so years ago. Back in the day, even your most ignorant peasant knew one thing- that the Church was an oppressive racket and needed to be beaten into submission. Christianity isn't innately more humane than Islam, only under much more control through humane secular law. But radical Christian fundamentalists seek to break their faith free of its restraints and subject the rest of us to their Dominionist vision for America. Call it the Christian version of Sharia Law ( actually both are very similar, coming from the same source after all). And believe me, the chance of that happening is far greater than some pipe dream about establishing Sharia Law in the States.
A few decades ago, it looked as if the sects of Islam was headed for the same fate as the Christian churches. After independence from their various colonial masters after the Second World War most of the predominately Muslim nations, with a few exceptions, adopted Westernized, secularized, Nationalist governments. Islam was the official religion in all of them, but did not dominate the state. True these states were far from perfect, mainly following the one- party state model, but a secular dictatorship was infinitely more preferable for women and religious minorities than the Islamic Republics of today. Unfortunately for the people of the Middle- East, the West decided such Nationalist governments, with their demands to control the resources of their own countries, had to go. After sixty years of having The United States, France, and Britain constantly fucking with them( via the C.I.A. or their favorite sword in the Middle- East, Israel)the Middle- East is made- up of theocracies or states that have adopted free- market "reforms" that have made them vulnerable to radical Islam as the number of desperately poor people increases.
Ironically the states that have dealt the most successfully with the challenge of Muslim fundamentalism have been the old Nationalist states like Algeria or Syria, with their creaky old welfare systems and conscript militaries.
So get off of your high horse, Christian fundies. For there is nothing as similar as a Muslim jihadist as a Christian Crusader. They are both bad news for the rest of us trying to get on with our lives without being constantly fucked with by The Ignorant Assholes Of The Book.

Time Magazine Is Just Awful

2010-08-04T11:59:00.006-05:00

Hey Time! Nice cover, assholes! You know, the one with the young Afghan woman without her nose? " What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan" you admonish us. Now do you want to tell the rest of the story? Or are you too busy coming up with your next brilliant example of yellow journalism?
Let me just make the most obvious objection to this glaring propaganda piece: the young woman in question, Aisha, was mutilated by her husband ( may he rot in hell) in 2009. So unless the entire NATO occupation force went to Disneyland on the day of her "trial", Aisha was cut to pieces while " we" were in the fucking country! Has this kind of atrocity stopped since we invaded Afghanistan? Seems to me the only thing NATO forces have done has added bombs and bullets to the equation.
Kharzai, the U.S.A.'s part- time puppet, presides over an Islamomafia Republic, complete with sharia interpreted law in the courts and dope deals under the table. His government is about as much concerned about democracy as the Gambino Family was. Afghan men are completely free to beat, rape, or murder the women in their homes whether they are in a zone controlled by the government or the insurgents.
Oh, yeah. The insurgents. That's the proper term. For the Taliban is but one group out of many. I wonder how many of these guys were running around the Afghan hills thirty years ago, to bring down a regime that actually treated women as equals before the law. But that regime was controlled by the evil commies of the U.S.S.R. so the U.S. government couldn't throw AKs and other weapons into the hands of these bastards fast enough. Wonder how many of these weapons are being fired at our own troops these days?
Man,the bullshit of U.S. foreign policy piles up so fast, you need wings to stay above it.
So what can we do to keep other Afghan women from suffering Aisha's fate? The sad and honest answer is... not much. The seriously deluded amongst the American government and public believe that if we just add a little more to the bomb tonnage dropped on Afghan and Pakistani villages, then we can put on our white good- guy hats and ride to the rescue of these beautiful damsels in distress. In reality the damsel is more likely to be the victim of a bomb or Hellfire missile launched from a NATO drone than attacked by the Taliban. Better bring a shovel, good guys. The lady is probably buried under a ton of rubble.
That is what we can do- stop deluding ourselves that the occupation is doing Afghanistan any kind of good. We can demand that the U.S. and NATO get out of there and let the Afghan people decide their own destiny. Afghanistan was once a stable and peaceful republic that promoted gender equality before the eyes of the law. They might be able to get that back. But first foreign interference has to come to an end.

Why Movies About World War One Piss Me Off

2010-08-03T10:43:00.000-05:00

I like war films. Most Americans do- I bet even Quakers secretly enjoy a guilty thrill when they close their drapes and throw Saving Private Ryan on the ol' DVD player.
See, nothing is as dramatic in film as a film about war. Decisions made by the characters effect the ultimate stakes of human existence- life and death. Stupidity, cleverness, heroism, cowardice, love, hate, cruelty, and mercy are basic human qualities that are portrayed on an epic scale against the backdrop of armed conflict. We can get a vicarious thrill watching Audie Murphy gunning down Nazi hordes with his Tommy Gun without the inconvenience of being in France in 1944. We can be horrified at the carnage of the landings at Omaha Beach without actually having nasty pieces of metal fired at you by someone who is desperate to kill you. Or we can marvel at the hideousness of fighting in the jungles of Vietnam without experiencing it firsthand.
What I am driving at is that there isn't really such a thing as a " war movie" ( or its cousin, the " anti- war " movie, which is a " war movie" with more gore and weeping). What is known as the war movie is really an action- adventure flick- granted usually a little more meditative on the human cost of armed conflict, but still a species of that genre. As Walt Whitman said of the American Civil War, " The real war won't get into the books." Or, as a German veteran of the Eastern Front of the Second World War suggested, his memoir should be read outdoors on cold nights in the rain or snow, in a hole you have dug, for days at a time. If you think you are learning something about the experience of war by watching a movie, you are badly mistaken.
But surviving the elements and struggling against the boredom of war are not what make exciting war movies. So Hollywood conveniently mentions these things in passing and gets to the good stuff- the fighting. For which I am extremely grateful.
Yet there is a war that is so badly represented in the film industry that it makes me want to tear my hair out. The First World War, aka The Great War, should be a source of action- adventure gold. Fighting in the trenches, fighting in the air, epic sea battles, campaigns in Palestine and Africa, heroic charges, stupid generals... it should be a no- brainer for movie producers.
Yet, time and again, movies about The Great War are produced as love stories. Yeah, that's right, love stories. For some reason what was probably one of the most unromantic wars in human history is constantly pitched as a great time to get laid. So there is too much smoochin' and not enough shootin'. This is especially true of the war in the air. Every single First World War aviation movie devotes an inordinate amount of time to dashing young fliers sweeping buxom young women off of their feet for a bit of horizontal refreshment ( the BBC comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth does an excellent job spoofing this stereo type). There is precious little time devoted to blasting an enemy fighter to shreds with a pair of blazing Vickers or Maxim machine guns. And even scenes like that are generally badly done (e.g. Flyboys, The Red Baron).Even infantrymen get their fair share of booty. Remember Brad Pitt stalking the battlefields of 1915 Ypres in the horrible Legends Of The Fall? The director must have invented two dozen reasons for Pit to remove his cap so he could strike poignant poses with his hair blowing in the wind. And of course we end up with about fifteen minutes of trench fighting and two hours of Pitt pouncing on everything wearing a skirt. And still striking those annoying poignant poses.
I am aware of the vast historical ignorance of the American audience. But why worry about it? Americans don't give a damn about historical content. Just show a bunch of Doughboys tearing the Hun a third cornchute with rifle and bayonet. Oh wait, they did!
In a rare burst of sanity and inspiration, in 2004 A&E network produced an awesome but little known movie called The Lost Battalion, a remake of the 1919 film of the same name. It tells the story of some 550 men of the U.S. 77th Infantry Division who became surrounded by the Germans in the Argonne Forest in October 1918.Despite being heavily outnumbered they held on to their positions for three days until relieved by the rest of the 77th. This has everything a good war movie needs- explosions, bad leaders who we can hate, good leaders we cheer for, ethnic humor, reflections on the insanity of war, bayonet charges, hand- to- hand fighting, and a chivalrous foe ( this is 1918 remember- the Nazis fought the next war). And not a single romantic moment! An absolutely classic American war film.
Other good films about the Great War:
All Quiet On The Western Front ( 1931): The soundtrack is scratchy and the special effects are dated but still stands out as one of the best war films of all time.
Paths Of Glory ( 1957): Stanley Kubrick's meditation on the bullshit of military justice devotes the first part of the film to some interesting trench fighting scenes. The rest involves a trial. Remove any throwable objects from reach- you will get very angry.
Lawrence Of Arabia ( 1962): A great film with awesome actors, LOA also has great battle scenes from a " a sideshow of a sideshow" of the war.
All Quiet On The Western Front ( 1979): The inevitable re- make. But surprisingly well- done. The sets are first- rate, the acting excellent, and the main character Paul Baumer narrates from the book during pauses in the action- nice touch. Surprisingly bloody for a made- for- TV- flick from the 1970s.

State Of Crazy: Interview With An Arizona Comrade

2010-08-01T11:33:00.018-05:00

An internet acquaintance of mine from the Liberal Gun Club, who goes by the screen name neotrotsky, lives in Mesa, AZ. He is representative of the thousands of white residents of Arizona who are disgusted by this rotten bill and want it repealed. Of course,they do not gather much media attention since the networks are working very hard to portray this controversy as a racial struggle. This is why the Minutemen and other racist groups get so much attention.
Neotrotsky is active in the arts and currently works for a theater company. Despite having a busy schedule, he took some time out to answer a few questions I had about the reaction to 1070's first few days as a law.
Comrade X: Where did the demonstrations occur?
Neotrotsky: Most demonstrations occurred at the Main County Jail on 4th and Jefferson in downtown Phoenix and at the Capital Mall. Other rallies have been held in the predominately Mexican town of Guadalupe, an unincorporated village surrounded by the city of Tempe.
Comrade X: Where you personally involved in or a witness to any of the demonstrations?
Neotrotsky: I was not involved in many of the protests due to my involvement with a theater production, but since the director of the theater I am working at is a Mexican- American, and less than half a mile away from the core city protests, we have been very much watching since the local Sheriff has been known to push crackdowns on mass groups of like- minded individuals. In fact the City of Phoenix has actively stopped lending police and logistical support to the First Fridays arts initiative, which seeks to hold street performances every first Friday of the month in order to encourage the arts scene in the downtown region. Many feel the timing was too convenient since there has been an increase of anti- 1070 sentiment in the community while the official city line is because of the summer heat- which has been fairly mild in comparison to previous years.
Comrade X: What is the general mood like in Arizona right now?
Neotrotsky: The mood is extremely tense, especially after the arrest of civil rights leader Salvadore Reza of the activist group Puente ( Mr. Reza was released yesterday- X), who was detained while standing across the street from a protest at the central jail a few days ago, and not even on state property.
The shooting of two police officers on the West Side due to an unrelated drug sting gone bad also has added fuel to the fire for both sides. Also, rumors posted on many activist Facebook feeds against 1070 , and for it, have stated that there is supposedly a $1,000,000 bounty on Sheriff Joe Arpaio's head, but there are many rebuking that, saying it was probably started as propaganda by the Sheriff's department to increase his tough guy image. What has been true are the bounties placed on Democratic Governor candidate Terry Goddard for his actions in bringing 1, 500 troops and millions of federal dollars to the border to investigate drug trafficking along the border, and his newly penned cooperative agreement with Western Union to start tracking payment transfers of large amounts of money across the border to try to find the money trail to drug traffickers using immigrants as drug mules or forced labor.
Comrade X: You recently related an incident about how a gun shop owner refuses to sell to customers who cannot prove they are a conservative. Could you expand on that?
Neotrotsky: My experience with the one gun shop ( owner) in Mesa that made ( a) comment about a T- shirt I was wearing- a plain red shirt with an image of Che screen printed on it... and kept asking me what I "planned " to do with the ammo I was buying. I said, " Er... shoot it?", thinking it was a rather odd question. Then he asked me for ID, when I then mentioned that there was no law requiring ID to sell ammo, but if he wished to verify my age , I had no problem. He then said, " Oh, don't need that. We need to make sure the wrong kind of people aren't getting this. You have a voter ID card?" I asked, " Why?" and he mentioned that it would prove if I were the " right" kind of person, because ( as he nodded towards my shirt) some people "should not have this - you should know". With Rush Limbaugh's talk show blasting on the stereo and shooting targets of Barack Obama on the wall, it didn't take me long to figure out what he meant. I walked out and he simply said, "Thank you. Now don't come back."
Comrade X: What a dick!

"They make a desert and call it peace." -- Tacitus

2010-07-30T20:47:00.003-05:00

If I have to hear the phrase that last month was "the bloodiest month in Afghanistan yet" ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME I am going to scream. Just scream.

It's like every month for years now. I'm starting to wonder if they even know they're saying it anymore, or if it just rolls off their tongues while their blank lifeless eyes gaze unblinking into the teleprompter abyss. Hello? Anyone out there? Hello?

Isn't someone going to say something?

The Enemy: The Uses Of Nationalism

2010-07-21T11:43:00.030-05:00

Of all the devices employed by the Enemy ( the Capitalists, the Ruling Class, Mammon, call them what you will), nothing has been as useful a tool as nationalism. Even Religion is merely an arm of the modern bourgeois State's body- even in America, where supposedly they are separate. Time and again the workers of the world have been swept up in the tide of nationalism to slaughter each other in their millions for the gain of a few rich men. How can a student of the struggles of labor forget that in 1914, even as it seemed workers- organized on an international scale- were about to achieve great victories against the Enemy, the aristocrats and politicians of Europe plunged the world into war. Seemingly overnight proletarian cries for unity were drowned out by crowds roaring for war, with pro- war factions in the various social democratic parties being among the most vociferous.
Even so, old- style nationalism made a certain amount of sense. The class antagonisms were much more sharply defined than they are today, but in times of international conflict the Ruling Class actually made some sacrifices. Most of the officer corps of the warring powers of The Great War were made up of young men of the upper classes and machine guns did not differentiate between a metal fitter from Birmingham and the son of an Earl. This shared sacrifice increased the feeling of national solidarity, what the Germans called volksgemeinschaft (lit. people's community), a submergence of class interests for the good of one's country. Of course, while it was impressive that the Kaiser visited workers in their factories to " ask" them to increase production, the truth was that the middle and working classes were doing most of the sacrificing when it came to money and resources. But the impression, which grew rosier as the First World War faded into memory, was that everyone pitched in and worked together for the cause.
The last gasp for the old nationalism, at least in the West and Japan, was the Second World War. Despite the resurgence of British pluck during the Blitz and the dogged resistance of the German and Japanese populations to Allied bombing, the war was just too costly for that level of enthusiasm to be maintained, particularly for the war's losers.
Even the Americans, the people least touched by the Second Great Catastrophe, were sick to death of war. The Ruling Class was rapidly seeing that there was no need for their sons to set an example on the modern battlefield and indeed, the few rewards military service had to offer them, such as glory and fame for the family name, had been submerged in the mud of Passchendaele and incinerated by the atomic blast at Hiroshima. There was no room for the heroic individual in the age of industrial war.
Instead, a new nationalism had to be invented, a new way to bring glory and honor to warfare that increasingly took on the character of mechanized slaughter.
The age of conscription gave the American elites their answer. The mass armies gave rise to a new heroic ethos, one that embraced the faceless masses and wove it into a Homeric figure for military personnel and civilian alike: The Common Soldier. In the American Civil War he was Billy Yank and Johnny Reb. World War One gave us Americans the Doughboy. GI Joe came along in the Second World War. Finally the Vietnam War developed the latest incarnation of the American Fighting Man- The Grunt.
Of course war and nationalism are always closely linked, as the later is the psychological tool to get large numbers of people to fight the former. In the new nationalism, the ethos of the Grunt ingeniously relies on the negative aspects of armed conflict to romanticize its legend. A large part of the military's image about itself evolved in the Vietnam War. The Grunt is victimized by the horrors of war- killing, being maimed, losing comrades, and enduring mortal terror- but he endures all out of a sense of duty to the ungrateful civilians back home who ignore or actively oppose the conflict he is fighting in. The Grunt is wiser than those soft people back home, knows better than the politicians in Washington DC how to fight his enemy, and it is his burden to endure criticism of the mission from effete liberal protesters even as he protects them from a cruel and insidious foe.
It is a powerful image, and one that a lot of Americans wish to identify with. Thus the flurry of " Support Our Troops" magnetic car stickers. Of course the troops doing the fighting and dying don't get any real support from a shitty little sticker but it makes small- time jingoists throughout the nation feel as if they are involved, albeit in an absolute minimalist and chickenshit way.
In fact, in the new nationalism being a soldier is the only honorable profession a prole can have. Think about it. Right- wing propaganda has smeared the once honorable profession of teaching as a job that only lazy and talentless losers, protected by an all- powerful union, take on ( that you would take on such a low- paying job already makes you suspect to money grubbing right- wing assholes who measure everything's worth through the prism of greed). Autoworkers? Whiny,overpaid, fat bastards who take a coffee break every five minutes and get undeserved benefits. In fact it would be hard to find any proletarian profession that is not despised or just plain ignored by the right- wing noise machine. The new nationalism has no place for those who are not billionaires or Grunts. And the Grunt finds out very quickly that despite the constant flag- waving and fine words uttered by politicians, celebrities, and jingoistic shills, once he/ she is no longer a useful commodity to The Man ( i.e. wounded or otherwise unfit for duty) he/ she is thrown away. After all, the Bosses can't use a broken tool.
In fact, the remarkable thing about the new nationalism is how overwhelming its negativity is. Old school nationalists dreamed of improving the lives of the people in their empires, through progress and science ( it was mostly bullshit of course- squeezing profit out of the colonies was the main goal). The new nationalism doesn't even try to make that pretense. Even its favorite drum to beat, American Exceptionalism, is shot through with negativity. Other people hate us because of our freedoms, our wealth, or because they are jealous that Americans are so awesome. All those fuckers in those snooty European countries should be grateful because America saved their asses in World War 2 ( actually the Germans had committed most their resources to fighting the Red Army). All those Third World folks should love us because we give them so much foreign aid. Instead they bite the hand that feeds them ( most of the aid given to foreign governments by the U.S. is military in nature- when it comes to actually feeding people, or building infrastructure America kind of stingy). We need to punish them.
Ah yes, now we come to the heart of this beast- being a patriot these days is all about getting back at someone. The Muslims. The Immigrants. African- Americans. Homosexuals. The Left. Single mothers. Unions. Europe. The Gub'mint. The list of enemies is endless. Like any good foe they are weak enough to pick on but somehow strong enough to never really be defeated. And The Enemy knows this. Like Goldstein in George Orwell's novel 1984 the Other dreamed up by Fox News and other right- wing propaganda outlets leaves the red- blooded, flag- eatin' patriot in a seething fume, unable to focus on what to do about his own shitty life. " If only those ( insert evil people who are destroying the American Way Of Life here) would go away, everything would be better!" he rages.
The new nationalism is all about destruction. Destruction of governments, economies, people. The irony is that the creators of this philosophy, this New American Century, have more in common with their foreign allies among the Global Capitalist elite than with their followers back in the States. Quite brilliantly The Enemy has convinced a large section of the American working class that their interests coincide with the elite's. Thus do these deluded souls willingly support those who partake in the dismantling of the thing they claim to love the most- their own country.

It's Not News, Democrats-Most Progressives Know You Suck

2010-07-19T11:36:00.002-05:00

With our corporate masters and their lackeys in the governments of the G20 nations all in agreement that rather than sacrifice any of their undeserved wealth they are going to institute austerity measures a pall of dread has descended upon the hearts of working people everywhere. The malaise is particularly evident in those liberal democrats who put so much faith in hope-n- change only to find out that it was chump change.
Instead of looking for a solution that will benefit workers and put the country back on the economic track the current administration scolds us for not being realistic. " Barack Obama is not Santa Claus" the Democratic Leadership Council ( DLC) admonishes us, wagging their finger in our faces ( what arrogance- personally I would like to break that finger off and shove it up the DLC's collective cornhole). No, I never expected Barack Obama to magically grant us every wish on the progressive list. I expected him to do pretty much what a democratic president does these days- make great speeches about getting shit done and then getting very little shit done. The fucking national house is burning down, with the Republicans throwing more gas on the fire and the Democrats trying to put it out with their dicks.
Already, four months away from the mid- term election, the democrats are playing the only card they have left in their deck. The " Vote For Our Sucky Party Or Those Guys Who Suck Even More Will Get In" card. How about I vote for someone who doesn't suck? I'm tired of the used car salesman approach the democrats take towards their working class base.
Face the facts, you true believers who think that every window- dressing piece of legislation that the O- Team comes up with, whether it was the vastly overrated health care bill or toothless financial reform, is a " start". Look behind the bullshit curtain and you will see the same old manipulation of power to get the right people in the right places to make sure The Man is still gettin' his- at your expense, of course.
P.S. Apologies for the paucity of posts. Both me and Dres have a shitload of, ummm, shit on our plates in July and August. We will try to get two posts out a week for now.

if you believe hard enough, maybe the money will just pour out of your ass.

2010-07-09T10:15:00.006-05:00

I came across an interesting link in the blog "Mark Mendall's America" today, discussing the pessimism that, with American business and consumers in its grip, threatens the whole world economy. The implication is that if the economy isn't friendly enough to business - if credit isn't sufficiently free-flowing, if labor costs aren't cheap, if markets are unprotected, if consumers aren't nibbling on the lures, then they'll hold their cash reserves hostage. No money for anyone else. (Obviously we're talking about the medium-term here, as the law of diminishing returns will set in after a few years ... leading to something like the 20 years of stagnation Japan has seen.)

The problem with faith-based economics, though, is that it doesn't address the underlying material conditions.

It's great to say, "Consumers need to buck up and spend," like Bush did after 9/11. Or for the economists to say, "Let's encourage business back to the table." (Businesses are indeed composed of "fat cats," and, like cats, must be coddled and cajoled into dealing with actual people. Unlike real cats, our entire social well-being depends on them.)

Yet this rhetoric doesn't deal with concrete policies. Let's look, briefly, at the pundents and their suggestions.

In this corner: Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under Slick Willy and member of Obama's "economic transition team." He spells out that US consumers are out of cash and credit now that the housing bubble has burst. Foreign consumers could fix this - if only their economies hadn't been geared to producing cheap goods and had instead given them some sort of consumer wage. Oops.

Guess we shoud've fought harder against NAFTA. When you lose unions, you lose a significant amount of the working class's involvement in the consumption sphere.

In this corner: Peter Morici, former Chief Director/"Head Economist" of the U.S. International Trade Commission. His article points out that the Obama administration's trillion-plus stimulus squandered much of the money and failed to produce an adequate number of jobs. This is ... actually, very true. (Don't worry, the stuff he says about the deficit being bigger than it was under Bushie is also stupidly ignorant, considering Bush didn't have more than a moment of the recession to deal with; any Prez under that pressure would have enacted some kind of stimulus.) Under the Obama model, a lot of that money went to NGOs and nonprofits and private corporations. Under the Republican model, it probably would have gone to private corporations and tax cuts for the rich. The difference is pathetically negligible.

A "New-New Deal" would have been better - but even that hadn't been sufficient in the 1930s. The economy had only been rebooted by World War II, the significant loss of industry and labor in Europe, and the unprecedented rebuidling effort of the Marshall Plan. In order to create jobs on the scale we needed (and still need), we need to bypass big business's profit model entirely. (On a related note, has anybody thought about how the census project is what kept employment even remotely afloat through the Spring? The census happens once every ten years - we only had this boon because it happened to be 2010. That's like calling Christmas sales sign of a recovery. It's seasonal, you idiots!)

Anyway. People don't get fed on prayer; people get fed on bread. People don't get jobs on faith. We get it from employers. And as if bakers hoarded bread, people would riot and take it, if employers refuse to give us jobs, we ought to take the workplaces. Obviously they aren't running the economy in our interests. Perhaps its time control of the economy changed hands.

Preferably before the budget cuts - which will be equally ineffective, and even more harmful for working families- come rolling in.

Conservatives Say The Dumbest Things

2010-06-26T10:12:00.011-05:00

I had a chat with a conservative friend ( come on- like you don't have at least one right- wing troglodyte as a friend or relative) during a backyard BBQ session about the Gulf Oil Spill. I mentioned that Nigeria has had unchecked oil spills for decades now and the Niger Delta is an ecological disaster. That must have triggered the dittohead Pavlovian Response, because suddenly I was bombarded with right- wing talking points and what passes as wisdom in conservative circles. Hold your nose:
1) " The Gulf Oil Spill is no big deal. It's natural and it will be cleaned- up naturally in about a hundred years."
2) " Lots of oil tankers were sunk in World War Two and the coast survived."
3) " Nigeria? Who cares? God has forgotten Africa."
The weird thing is this is a guy who would give you the shirt off of his back if you needed it. He voluntarily went to help sand bag a levy when a river threatened to flood a town. Perhaps being conservative means not being able to emphasize with people you are not immediately in contact with.
I don't get it.
Did any of your right- wing family members or aquaintences say something dumb lately? Share with the rest of us!

NATO In Afghanistan: Its All Over Except For The Dying

2010-06-22T07:03:00.000-05:00

" You know, when the puppet starts talking back to the puppeteer, the puppeteer's in bad shape." - Malcom X
Face it, American capitalists- your bid to wring any sort of profit from Afghanistan is over. Just a few days after you guys announced to the rest of us that Afghanistan is a mineral treasure house ( which was discovered by the United States Geological Survey in 2007- why the big hoopla now?) your handpicked puppet Hamid Karzai cut his strings and gave you the finger. The Japanese looters will get first crack at Afghanistan's wealth.
Karzai waxed eloquent on how Afghanistan will become the " Saudi Arabia of lithium" but given the fact that he is little more than an Central Asian mob boss I doubt that the average Afghan citizen will be cashing in on this bonanza. Nigeria and Brazil are examples of how corrupt elites " share" the wealth of their respective nation's natural resources- by dumping toxic waste on their people and brutally suppressing the smallest act of dissent.
In the meantime, Karzai has finally climbed down from his fence and decided that the Taliban are going to win this fight. After blustering about Pakistani interference in Afghan affairs through the ISI's support of the Taliban last year, he is now embracing them. He is openly talking of negotiating with the Taliban.
As Drez pointed out , there is a silver lining in Afghanistan's dark cloud of torment. The wealth of lithium and the other minerals discovered under her soil has the potential to transform a country broken by war to one that has an industrial base again. Even if that wealth is controlled by a tiny group of elites, it will slowly have a positive effect on the Afghan economy.
But to make even that tiny progressive step, the Afghan people need peace. A stable regime, even a corrupt Islamic republic ( which is basically what they have now courtesy of the American ruling class), is preferable to the bloody chaos occurring at the present.
Time for our American plutocrats to give up on this bloody imperial cluster fuck. Your chance to outdo the British Empire has come and gone. The people of Afghanistan want us out, the Pakistanis want us out, hell, most Americans want us out. Why the fuck are we spending so much blood and treasure over there still? To protect Japanese mining interests? To prop up Karzai's Islamic Opiate State? So the American Empire can save face?
None of these are good reasons to drop one more bomb, shoot one more bullet, or shed one more drop of blood. This useless war needs to end NOW.

The Hills are Alive with the Sounds of ... Profit

2010-06-14T06:13:00.019-05:00

Personally, I don't like to reflect much on political personalities and the changes in bureaucratic cogs. Rearranging the deck chairs (or changing the mast head) may have an impact on how people percieve what's occuring, but it doesn't change the underlying reality of capitalism, consumerism, and the fundamental character of the state. My comrade Nullstellensatz wrote recently in his own blog, "Liberals believe that fundamental change can be secured by replacing a few politicians." I would say that description applies to conservatives as well, only on the opposite side of the spectrum. Even the tea baggers are taking a conservative, rather than a radical-right, stance when they call for ousting incumbent officials.

Policies and personalities shape each other, but for all intents and purposes (or at least my own at this stage), I am not interested.

I am interested, however, in the study released last week concerning "mineral riches" lying under Afghanistan.

States the NYT: "The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. "

This is, in my humble opinion, the best political news of the year so far. My only criticism is the timing of this report. I imagine these particular causes for enthusiasm and concern are not obvious, so let's look at it in more detail.

Why Afghanistan Needs Capitalism

This central Asian, civil-war-torn nation is fucked. Caught between insurgents and imperialists, the every-day people can't get by, industry can't grow, government can't provide services, and the overall quality of life remains as landlocked as the geography. Agriculture remains the central feature of the economy - and opium remains the central feature of agriculture. No matter how much opium occupying forces light on fire, the economic incentive to grow drugs remains. Proving, yet again, that the characteristics of an economy play a decisive role in determining the characteristics of a society.

The presence of valuable minerals is a game-changer. But only, of course, for the long-term prospects. Local industry is hideously under-developed. Even hiring a bunch of people to go dig up some gold is pragmatically implausible. Who has the money to spare for shovels or gold pans, not to mention labor? And you probably aren't going to mine any friggin minerals at all without the use of hydraulics. And then you have to refine the mined product. It's the same way for each mineral, and it requires some serious capital investment. Not to mention supply lines for exports or distribution lines for commercial retail. And the presence of commercial retail in the first goddamn place.

So we can see the opportunities for domestic investment and development of a mining industry in Afghanistan is pretty goddamn microscopic.

That means foreign investment, foreign capital, which is a form of imperialism (which is an advanced stage of capitalism, not to be confused with colonialism, a cruder stage of capitalism). And in this case, foreign business is a little reluctant to put down roots. And will probably be especially hesitant to invest in such a labor-intensive industry. No matter how much investors may foam with lust for the Islamic Republic's rich lithium veins, the present situation just isn't safe enough to support their desires.

It is inevitable that foreign capitalism will attempt to make Afghanistan "safe." (Incidentally, "safe for democracy" is really just a code for "safe for our investments," they don't give a rat's ass if they need a dictator to do it. A sham democracy just looks nice. Foreign policy/public relations brownie points!) And there will be those investors who want to challenge the situation, "get the jump" ... and inevitably get creamed. (The poor sods they get to work for them are the "contractors" you hear about, getting kidnapped or beheaded. Workers get screwed every which way.) But it will take a while. It will take paying off the insurgents like they did in Iraq, and the blood of many more Afghans. Men, women, children. More US and coalition soldiers, too. Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, flag-draped caskets you won't see on the news. But we'll squeeze that precious dust from the rocks, by God.

Karzai, inevitably, will also have to go. More warlords and ter'rists too. Allies will become enemies and enemies allies. Eventually, either American imperialism will breed Afghani puppet-capitalists, or the United States will be forced to pull out in a humiliating defeat, and a breed of capitalists more acceptable to the Afghani ruling class (and more marketable to the Afghan people) will assume the role. The top three candidates for the position, in order of least likely to most likely, are Russia, China, and Iran. (I won't get into why right now; perhaps you can muse it over yourself and let me know what you think.)

"But Drez," you poor beleaguered souls may be saying, "I thought you stand opposed to all capitalism, foreign and domestic."

Too true, comrades! I don't trust capitalism as far as I can throw it, and as a vast and complicated political system I can't even hoist the goddamn thing. But history has shown (at least so far) that you can't "skip over" the "phases of development." Afghanistan needs some degree of capital investment to make a transition into a more sustainably democratic society. The Afghani working class will only have something to seize and be thus equipped to revolutionize their society - if there is an introduction of capital.

Or should I say ... a re-introduction of capital.

Why This Report is Suspect

(I mean, besides the fact that it's been released by the US government.)

This poor country gets a lot of flak. I mean, people talk about it like it's been the backwaters of the planet for its entire history. And that's just not true; back in the day, Afghanistan was a pretty swingin' place - well, if you were a rich Afghan or a rich Brit, at least. And you have to hand it to the European colonialists: they were interested in "civilizing the savages." Often that meant shooting the crap out of anyone who resisted their rule, but in this case it also meant helping draft a constitution, build up infrastructure, and introduce compulsory education. All very capitalist developments.

Eventually Afghanistan got some indepenence from the Brits, and then - as was fashionable in poor countries in the latter half of the century - went on a Marxist kick. At one point the standard of living began to have similarities to industrialized nations. The US backed the anti-Soviet forces in the country, the corrupt USSR invaded in retaliation, the Taliban took over, and the rest is history. (Or current events, if you will.) Booting out the Marxists in favor of the USSR and then the ultra-right wackos tore the country to bits.

Yay Umerika!

So in reality, the complete disarray of this country isn't an unbroken thread of barbarism, but a dialectic of development and the strategic intervention of international powers and the internal competition for the country's soul, so to speak (will it be a country ruled by might, or will it transcend nationhood and build itself on reason?).

And furthermore, there have been sophisticated studies on the valuable mineral deposits in this region at least since the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in the 1970s, though I don't doubt that the anal-retentive British colonialists also scoured the soil meticulously. The gold, at least, should have been common knowledge in geological (and, presumably, military intelligence; those guys are pretty damn comprehensive in their analyses) circles. The lithium has probably been known since pretty early in the invasion.

Now obviously, the US didn't declare war on Afghanistan just because there are gold deposits under Takhar. We aren't talking about oil, the great consumer-capitalist lubricant. Gold is a capitalist bauble in comparison.

It is the timing of this report that is suspect. At a time when the popularity of "the good war" is steadily sinking, and disillusionment in Obama is building, I think the administration is looking for some way to rebuild the confidence of its own investors. There have been almost 10 years of conflict and there can easily be another 10 and you have to reassure the corporate world that you can, and will, and should slug it out. It isn't a revelation; it's a reminder.

And it should remind us, too. It should remind us that war is a racket. Fought by we the workers, lost by we the workers, and won - win lose or draw for us - by the rich.

There has Gotta be a Better Way

It's not looking too positive now. In another five years the world may start shooing away the gluttonous supply of Afghanistan opium. That's good. Any number of people out of that particular drug trade is positive. Constructive jobs for the Afghan people? Also positive. Without a doubt some citizens remember, or have at least have knowledge of, a better period for their people. Keeping that hope alive can always infuse their struggle with purpose and vigor and throw off the oppossed oppressions of the US and the Taliban.

There is always a possibility, albeit small at this stage, of a third route that circumvents US capitalism and other forms of foreign oppression: a planned economy. Democratic control of the workplace by the workers and nationalization of industries and the co-struggle of workers and farmers - therein lies the key to this route. Such dramatic participation of the people in the economy and government could so radicalize Afghanistan that industrialization could occur in a matter of years and make it a major regional, even world, power. That was the effect on Russia in 1917 when it transitioned to vast Tsarist hinterland to a republic of worker's councils.

But that republic in Russia was quickly lost - an unindustrialized country simply does not have the economic basis to maintain this advanced form of organization for long. It would need to link up to working-class movements in more developed countries, such as Greece, Ireland, or Spain, where those movements are challenging capitalism's global oligarchy. It's a tall task. But otherwise, the people of Afghanistan will end up living in mining towns that resemble work camps, and their harsh but beautiful countryside will be subjected to the worst practices capitalism has to offer. The profit system leaves undeveloped nations few alternatives to exploitation, and so the working class there needs to seize foreign capital with zeal and vigor and just not let go.

Keeping it in the class

2010-06-11T11:11:00.006-05:00

According to the NYT, billionaire Dan Duncan's estate has effectively passed into the hands of his heirs tax-free.

$9,000,000,000 split between four children and four grandchildren. All of whom were doubtlessly living pretty decent lives before Pappy passed on. I'm sure they had no problem launching businesses of their own, or going to college, or getting sweet business gigs using the family name. How much have they had to want for? How much have they done to deserve their share of nine billion dollars?

We the workers usually grow up thinking of money as a reward. We're like little monkeys, pulling the levers of capitalism and getting pennies in return. While the gold pours up, into the pockets of the masters of machines. Perhaps they, too, see it as a reward somehow ... their right, as the favored strata of society. Our magnificent benefactors.

Certainly, the NYT says, our friend Duncan "contributed to a wide assortment of wildlife foundations and community institutions like the Houston Zoo and Houston Museum of Science, and an assortment of medical institutions. The various medical centers at Baylor College of Medicine received more than $250 million from Mr. Duncan and his wife, with more than $100 million used to found the Dan L. Duncan Cancer Center."

No mention of how much damage his oil pipeline could cause. In disruption of habitat. In contributing to Co2 emmissions. In the frayed nerves and muscles of exploited workers. There are dozens of pipeline owners like this; they are innumerable throughout history.

Duncan was also an "avid hunter," although he was not content with the regulated hunting of deer - oh no. When you are wealthy you hunt the exotic, for fame, to have "more than 500 entries in the Safari Club International record book for killing animals including polar bears, rhinoceroses, bighorn sheep, lions and elephants." Most of which are now endangered, thanks to the reckless passion of people - especially rich white people - like Don Douglas.

And it isn't just that the whim of one man decided the buying and selling of billions of dollars in a lifetime, ending in an accumulated $9b horde, or that his donations (which only skim the top of his lifetime profits) inevitably also fund unelected bureaucrats. We have a society in which an increasing number of social programs manifest as nonprofits at the whims of the rich, rather than in a planned, democratic way that could effectively meet the needs of the poor or sick or unemployed.

No, nevermind that. The worst part is we have a government that can't even feebly challenge this family's right to boundless wealth. Somewhere, somehow, our government thought it would be good to suspend the estate tax (we don't really need that money in a recovery, anyhow, right guys?). And now we might never get it back, despite the fact that this looks like a "temporary measure":

"Many lawyers say Mr. Duncan’s heirs have the means and motivation to wage a fierce court battle to challenge the constitutionality of any retroactive tax."

Heirs of wealthy estates can hire lawyers to do just about anything to the laws, given enough time and in the absence of working-class response.

But I say screw it, a death tax is ineffective anyway. Get the wealth at the source - seize the workplaces. Redistribute the wealth from there. We can take care of the capitalist estates after they launch a reactionary counter-attack. All we really need to worry about is organizing against them where it hurts the most.