Capitalist Production, Resistance & Creating Conditions For The New World
Glamour, sex, radical thought and lots of drugs. That is the ticket for some people. There is a middle class notion that revolution is a fashion show. A sort of play on the edges of reality. Something to do before getting on with the serious business of life as a participant in the system as it is. Many youths become enamoured with radicalism and then move on considering it to be a form of folly or like the hi-jinks of college kids.
When I lived in San Francisco there seemed to be a revolutionary style. Cute witty people arguing at parties, performing deeds of daring do late at night, mostly petty crimes and low level drug dealing. Sexual ambiguity, transgender-ism, and lots of traditional sex with typical gossipy conversations at the coffee houses the next day about who slept with whom and who was in and who was out as the hippest among the radical community. But that was not what it was about and for those of us who are serious about our politics, it has always been a matter of life and death, of the dominant paradigm if you will that will become the model path for the future.
In the 18th century revolutions broke out to break the dominance of the previous paradigm in responce to the needs of the emergent capitalist mode of production. Due to capitalism the population of the world exploded, animals were enslaved and wiped out as never before, whole species and peoples were wiped out at an accelerated rate and natural resources were exploited as never before in history. This acceleration has caused massive dislocation of the natural processes of the planet and has led to the current ecological crisis. Even today leading to sexual dysfunction due to chemicals used in products just to mention one side effect that has only recently been realized by scientists.
As an elder member of the recent generation who has survived the ravages the captialist destruction and restructuring of social relations, and fought for a world that is moving on to the next level of society, one that is based on the conquest of the material needs of mankind, I feel I have earned the right to comment critically on the community I helped create. I was one of the original brick throwers after all. Property destruction as a responce to social inequity and the pressure brought to bear on human relations by capital, was my own personal method of choice with a written warning in the the form of flyer’s distributed in the neighborhood being effected followed by the judicious use of property destruction. Normally it was a response to gentrification.
Since then the role of radicals and artists in colonising formerly off limits ‘rough’ urban neighborhoods for the eventual gentrification by the actual members of the higher paid professional classes has been noted by several radical thinkers. One could say first come the drugs to destabilize the existing residents of the neighborhood. Turning such areas into high crime areas. The availability of drugs attracts the more adventurous of the educated classes who then move in to be closer to their connections or simply to take advantage of the low cost housing so they can pursue their alternative projects. Next come the entrepreneurial class, to serve this new community of artisans and intelligentsia, or perhaps they are failed artists looking for a way to make a living. This attracts the attention of the developers and power brokers who now see that the neighborhood is ripe for development and the draconian anti-drug legislation is used to evict drug using and dealing poor residents. The housing is destroyed or refurbished and sold or rented to the up and coming professionals who want to be where the action is. Gentrification is achieved, rents and housing costs go up, the remaining poor are driven out and the remnants are the homeless drug addicts who like ghosts inhabit the streets of their once thriving residential working class neighborhoods.
I fought back in my own primitive manner with bricks and photocopied collages warning the gentrifiers to stay out. It got me a few minutes of fame in San Francisco, landed me in jail a couple of times and gave me free access to the party and club circuit as a member of the underground elite.
I was for a short time a celebrity and my group was labeled by the media “Mindless Thugs”, we took the name and went with it. There was even a headline “Mindless Thugs Terrorise Haight” back in the day when terror meant Red Brigades and Badder Meinhof members knee capping capitalists. When offered the option to become real terrorists I chose to disband the group. I was not interested in violence against persons and I could see the seeds of degeneration into a mere gang of real thugs. The woman who was the co-leader of the group was attracted to the idea of having her own gang. When people would come up to us on the street asking us to trash business persons because of real or imagined slights experienced by members of the underclasses, I would tell people to take action themselves. But many had reasons to fear the authorities and left it up to us.
We were heroes, defenders of the poor and oppressed in our Haight Ashbury domain. We warned the business people to leave the street people alone and to open up a community service center for the homeless. That was done. The city opened a center and they came down on us with rewards for our arrest. But our ultimate aim to inspire insurrectionary resistance to gentrification was a failure.
The heat we brought on the community was taken with mixed feelings among the anarchist and ultra left community. The Situationists criticized our relative theoretical incoherence and some anarchists who had various illegal business arrangements did not appreciate the fact that the authorities started investigating what people were up to.
But the street people loved us and we always had a place at the squats and hangouts of the down and out.
Ultimately I left town with my girlfriend and we took a trip back to New York City where I had been working with the Yippies on their club project Studio Ten. I had been the manager of the place the just a few months prior. I then went to Boulder, CO where I had gone to school and been a DJ on Radio Station KGNU. I went back to DJing and working until I was black listed in my industry by a vindictive DA in San Francisco who made a point of tracking me down and spreading stories about me to my employers. He couldn’t prosecute me legally because nobody would testify against me in San Francisco but that didn’t stop him from accusing me of every unsolved property crime in San Francisco. Fortunately I could prove I was not in San Francisco when these supposed crimes were committed.
But that is not what I am writing about today. I am writing because I am wondering what the current generation of radicals is doing to unite and resist the capitalist war machine. We had a big unified response to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 but it was largely ignored by the media and government. Now we have a war buildup in Afghanistan and people are not willing to stand up with the people of Afghanistan against this intervention. Part of it is the propaganda machine in action of the government that has promoted the idea that Muslims are terrorists. Also the idea has been spread that women’s freedom is at the mercy of American troops. So you have the demonization of Muslim men as bloodthirsty terrorists who abuse women. This has begun to be countered by groups from Afghanistan such as RAWA Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan who say unequivocally that American troops in their nation are only bringing death and destruction.
This is important because women are not asking for us to protect them. In fact they are saying they can deal with their men themselves just as they always have and after years of relationships with a variety of women I believe them. When a woman tells you to stay out and let her deal with a situation, she means it. Women are very practical and understand reality on the ground much better than men do. They have to take care of their children while men are off imagining they are doing important stuff.
On the other hand the USA does owe the people of Afghanistan restitution. The US destroyed their country in the name of a war on Communism. The CIA financed and trained the mujahideen with the aid of the Saudis and Pakistani intelligence.
Today I heard on Harry Shearer’s show that according to a recently retired member of the French Intelligence Organization that the Pakistani military and CIA financed and trained the terrorists who were attacking India to liberate Kashmir from Indian control. This is simply one more example of how US policy causes blowback in this case the attacks last year on Mumbai where many were killed. This by the very same group that was trained with CIA support. Just as the Afghani mujahideen became the warlords who terrorized Afghanistan and ultimately became the Al Qaeda movement. Others were trained by the Pakistanis to bring order back to Afghanistan and they were the Taliban. After that things got out of control when the USA was hit with the 9-11 bombings. Men armed with box cutters and a firm belief in the correctness of their cause. They were willing to die for their beliefs. Blowback for sure, they were trained and financed by the CIA, Saudi and Pakistani intelligence.
But this is all common knowledge now. The USA had been on a concerted campaign to turn these cold warriors into a new enemy to give the perpetual war machine a reason to exist. Over a decade from 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union to the 2001 bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon the Muslims were turned into the new evil force in the world for our crusader state to be at war with.
The Soviet Union gave up the ghost. The Communists realized they could not fight the capitalists and win on their terms. It took most of a century for them to learn that lesson and in the process the whole communist project became discredited. Anarchists picked up the slack but Anarchism is not capable of organizing itself into an effective social movement beyond the level of mass protests. It takes a communist organization, some kind of socialist network that is organized in a more than loose network to achieve a replacement of capitalism. The idea was fine. It is a movement of the masses to bring about social equality and an end to exploitation and war. But it has to occur as an uprising that spreads and unites the people of the world who have decided capitalism has had its day. Until then capital will always be able to organize more power and implement it in isolated areas of resistance and overwhelm that resistance.
Right now the resistance is mostly in the Islamic world. They represent the desires of the people of the world for a just and fair world united in common cause with a value system that places value on the community of man and the law above the interests of capital. Christianity has become the mouth piece of capital. The original message of Jesus has been twisted into a rationale for imperialist crushing of the worlds peoples in a system of wage slavery that is not far removed from the original chattel slavery. In fact in some places chattel slavery is making a come back including the USA and China where prison labor is being used by capital as sources of cheap labor.
What is needed is massive world wide resistance to capital. One massive revolt could bring it too its knees. Anything less will be doomed to failure. A general strike, boycott, refusal to pay taxes and to fight for the interests of the capitalist class will end its dominance. The religions of the world need to free themselves from this devils deal with capitalism. When it is done and their moral authority is in favor of the people then they might again regain some credibility. Until then they are simply another tool of oppression.
Market exchange has its place in society. There has always been a class of traders in history but in the past 200 years the merchants have seized control of the mechanisms of the state and they need to be put back in their place. The interests of capital and trade should be in the service of the people and the state not its master and this distortion of Adam Smith into the god that has become the religion of the State in the USA must be overthrown. If the destruction of the USA is the only way to achieve this, then that is what must be done. But the interests of capital have to be restored to the proper place in society, simply one mechanism of exchange, not the dominant form of social structure.
Post Modernism ultimately must be the bringing of capital under social control. Either through the mechanism of religion or secular means. But this genii which has brought so much material wealth to the world and environmental destruction must be put back in the bottle before it consumes all before it. For the sake of the children and animals of the planet we must do it before we have fed them all to this Moloch.
We can create a world where every life form is respected, the true costs of our technology is taken into consideration and rectified or we can watch it all go up in flames. World dislocation has reached a crisis and we now must devise a new system. Call it socialism, call it rational distribution, call it ecologically balanced development but its time has come. We are at the verge of the next real revolution and this one will take us to an entirely new world of multi-layered interconnectivity. Are we ready?
Tags: Ending Dominance Of Capital. Anti-Gentrification Effort, The Next Step