The Revolution We All Need

Introduction

I have written this document to explain honestly what I believe and why I believe it. It has been written for all people. I address the people I come from as well as the many other people who I have come to love and trust as family from other backgrounds.

You are all in my hearts, all of the time.

These are not idle thoughts but calls to action. If you unite with these words, don't beat around the bush and talk about particulars; I'm interested in the spirit of what you have to say and what I am trying to say. We all need to get down to destroy all that threatens to hold us back and the only way to do that is by being realistic. And I'm being as real as I can be.

I don't think we can make a perfect society, but I know we can make something better than this... at least for those of us who are poor and have nothing at all. It can't get worse than this, and I am willing to fight with my life. I'm fighting as much for me as I am for you, even wealthy people, because I want us all to be friends and live in peace.

But I'm tired of starving, of being in debt, of having nothing really belonging to me. I'm tired of dying slowly and calling that living while some people ride around in private jets and families lose their homes and savings because of banks scamming us. I'll work with anyone who wants to fix this bullshit.

Have a brain and a heart. We need both to win.

I'd be willing to be friends and comrades with anyone who is serious about a revolution, from left to right to anywhere else on the spectrum. If we can all respect and care about each other, fuck all those personal dramas and petty beefs. Get that shit out of your system and cleanse yourself with the truth! There's no place for childishness or pettiness about different ideas.

The spirit of this document is this: I'm serious and ready to go. Who's with me?

Let's get a million people together. Let's get all your friends and family, or get your armies and militias. Let's get serious. From the Communist Party to the Tea Party, from the Anarchists to the Anarchocapitalists, from the Liberals to Libertarians, from Muslims to Christians and all other faiths, from men to women, old and young, parent and child, from the South and from the North, all lifestyles and all orientations: all that matters is that we want a better world for us and our descendents.

We know the government of the United States does not want us to have a better world; it is totally corrupt and unwilling to help us. We can't fix it, we can only replace it. We may even need to divide in to separate nations afterwards, like freeing Puerto Rico and Hawaii and making sure they can survive as independent nations. We have to be open to any people who do not want to stay in the union - though we will encourage everyone to work together.

That is what it means to have the "consent of the governed" instead of just tyranny by majority.

Local communities will have as much power as possible; the smaller the central government's control over individuals' lives, the better - but the greater involvement of individuals voluntarily with mass forms of democracy, the better! We need mass and democratic management of big businesses and property itself. Without corporations, we can fight corruption more easily. These are some of the basic rallying points of our new revolutionary path; we need to be able to be willing to negotiate on all issues with all people involved, but we have a final destination in mind.

That destination is equality - an equality that does not infringe upon anyone's individual freedom to express themselves and utilize their talents.

All that is necessary for this is millions of people who agree and who are willing to get armed or prepared in humanitarian ways; help us get connected to strategic resources and people. Many people have no idea how useful their connections and resources are to poor folks and to a popular rebel army. I'm telling you, whoever you are: we need you!

We need a new world with real freedom for individuals to live their lives, real justice for those of us who have been denied it, and real equality between each other as human beings with opportunities to be happy. They wrote that in the Declaration of Independence when America was founded; is it so much to ask for now? Let's make the ruling class give us what it has promised humanity for so long yet never delivered.

Please, share your thoughts.

Photo by Stéphanie V. Jaouen

The Revolution We All Need

It should come as a surprise to few that I have been white my entire life. Thus, I feel adequately qualified to speak on the issues of white people as a whole, especially in relation to poor white people. I am a poor white person from a poor white family from rural Ohio, Appalachia.

I never had any money to go to college and I refused to turn over my life by joining the military - the only financially stable option offered to my people. Many of my friends and family faced this. Many of my friends have lost their homes; everything they ever had and understood, despite having nothing of real value to begin with. The only families who have not lost everything were the ones whose kids joined the military.

I migrated from the farm to a city instead, trying to find a new life. In Philadelphia, the original revolutionary capital of America, I have found only poverty, destitution, racism, government terrorism of the people, and rich kids partying while children starve.

I've been a hard worker my whole life. As an honest, intelligent and capable white man, one would think it easy to make a living even on nothing in America. I've never said no to a task or opportunity to make money, yet I've always lived paycheck to paycheck with nothing left to save.

My entire working and adult life has been spent living in the ghettos of Philadelphia because I didn't know anywhere else to go or anyone else who would let me stay with them. At first, I lived with a poor white family in a small, roach-infested apartment in the increasingly ghettoized part of Northeast Philadelphia. Then I briefly stayed in a suburb for the first time in my life with a middle class Jewish family that kicked me out because they felt I was from too low of a class to stay in their home.

At that point, the only friend I had with a place to stay was Haitian. In immersing myself in a new environment, I began to understand a different people who had a different culture and language from mine. I discovered an entirely different world that existed parallel to mine but which, in the final analysis, was in exactly the same position as my own. These people became like family to me. I understood better what it means to be human.

Many poor whites in the city seem to be formerly wealthy, though some are not and turn to radical white chauvinism. They do this because they do not understand that other people are facing the same struggle they are. They do it because they don't understand that this concept of "whiteness" itself was invented to separate us from people of color so that we won't unite to destroy the wealthy and powerful. We're not white; we're Irish, Italian, German, etc. We're not Americans, either; we have pretended for too long that we are part of this government - it was founded by the rich and powerful to defend the rich and powerful. Corporate America wants us to defend them and their government, to defend their money and their fancy houses in the suburbs, to defend their businesses and their political puppets.

The rich white people want us to believe that if they look like us, they are us. But we aren't that easily fooled; at least I'm not.

They want us to work hard and pay for the prisons full of innocent people, for the military occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan and the inner cities of this nation, the bombings of Libya and everywhere else. They even want us to pay for Apartheid in Israel! They finance a Western fortress in the Middle East while they butcher the Arab natives of the land. They allowed the rich Jews who did not want to integrate in to European whiteness to move away and form their own paradise with endless help from the same treasury filled with the wealth the rich have stolen from us all. If that does not make you sickened and angry, what does?

You're being robbed every minute of every day. Its only logical to pick up a gun and learn how to fight.

We need to destroy this system not just because we're poor, but because everyone who has been made poor by America deserves reparations from America. We have pretended for too long that we are part of this government; it was founded by the rich and powerful to defend the rich and powerful.

In my lifetime, I have seen my family come to ruin and destitution because of a system that does not care. As I write this, my parents have no source of hot water; they collect it from a hillside spring and boil it on the stove in pots. They have no sources of income and haven't for at least half a decade. Most of my people in Appalachia are on welfare.

All of America's leaders and politicians and bankers have failed us. They only care about their profits. We all knew that yet we let them keep robbing us for so long. Now, there's almost no money left. Now, we have only one choice: unite and take what's left all for ourselves.

But we can't do it alone.

All oppressed and exploited nations and people of America deserve reparations.

Reparations can come in many forms. People need homes, jobs, schools, opportunities for advancement, occupations that help us form healthy ways of life that utilize our talents and maximize our happiness. We understand money is not unlimited, especially not now, but we can see plainly that money is not being invested wisely for the people. That is why we will take control of those resources.

The natives are still forced to live in mass impoverishment in the deserts and on insulting "reservations." Black folks and immigrants have been forced to live in shantytowns and ghettos. Appalachian people have been left to die, their resources stripped out of their land and paid nothing for this rape of the Earth.

Poor white people have been abandoned by their rich counterparts, and they are in a uniquely useful position to challenge the white establishment. They must rise up! But if they want to be able to claim their own, they have to be allied to and work with all other poor people. We have to stop fighting our brothers and sisters!

Why fight immigrants? They're just trying to survive just like we are. Why disrespect and make fun of Black people? We'd have to be senseless not to make friends with all people and be polite and have manners just like our mothers taught us. I'm sure some people have experiences that make them what they are, that make them afraid or angry at other people, but we can't live our lives assuming things and negatively generalizing whole cultures and races. We have to build with them and unite with them and train with them because our enemies are the same people.

Anyone who engenders fear and hatred towards non-white people from our nation has to be redressed and taught a lesson. They have to be struggled with and fought, if necessary, because they are making it hard for US to get OUR reparations. We're united in the cause of giving everyone what they deserve, and we'll have to be united in fixing this nation after we take it over. We have to get started now, people have to be communicating, people have to be going from city to country and country to city. We need a program of revolutionary acculturation.

We must build a New America and carry out swift justice for all poor people!

If you are a middle class or wealthier white person, especially an activist type or some kind of Liberal, how much do you care about and support the impoverished people of the world?

If you don't care that children are starving because one or both of their parents can't afford to support them, if you don't care that the men who can't find jobs are becoming alcoholics who abuse their wives, that people are dealing drugs just to get by, that the kids are becoming addicts...

If you don't care that we see no future in sight, then don't be surprised when the cities are rioting and on fire and the rural people of America are grabbing their guns and preparing to enter the suburbs!

HEAR US SHOUT! We will let the night roar with it!

We don't want them to be scared, but we want them to know we're angry as hell and not going to take it anymore. We are human beings and we want them to stop being vultures and join us.

They will know we mean it. They will know we mean business. We just want what they stole - and we're uniting to say that if we are not approached as human beings and given what we deserve, we will have to take it from them. And we will be many. We will be diverse and mass. We will be every nation, every people united. We will be your cooks, your bus drivers, your airplane pilots, your server at the McDonald's, your maid at the hotel, your doctor, your kid's Kindergarten teacher, your soldiers! Hell, give us enough time and we'll have your cops and security guards, too.

We are gathering together all forces that want to unite with this program, who want to protect each other during the coming storm. We are forming a broad collective of comrades dedicated to building a New America with reparations for all impoverished people. If you can get down with this, I want to talk to you, my comrades want to talk to you and meet you. Even if you've had disagreements or contradictions with us before, let's get over it; nothing is as important as building an effective fighting force to destroy Imperialism.

I ask only that we all get to know each other and spread this message. We all need to link up, work together, train together, and prepare our bodies and our minds. We have to be ready, all people of all ages, all capabilities; there is work for everyone to do. Everyone can contribute something because we all need to live together here in the same country. We have to wage a struggle to win.

What is needed most is friendship and understanding between all people and to create a broad popular army of brave people of all races, genders, ages and lifestyles to take power.

And we will ask our brothers and sisters forced to join the military to survive to join us when they are out. We'll take their training and spread it, we will form militias. We will welcome the cops and sheriffs out there to defect to us, and bring corrupt cops who abuse their authority to popular people's courts to bring about justice.

If we do not dare to stand together with others who demand justice, we are not daring to win. We have enough injustice to justify action and we have to start somewhere.

If not you, then who? If not now, then when?

POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

THE EDGE - Part 1 of 2

I apologize to my comrades and friends who had been following my blog. I did not have the internet for some time because I'm broke as hell and spend my limited money on expensive clothes, beer, whiskey, Newports, ammunition, and related effects. Sorry, everyone; you took a backseat to my self-destruction.

But there's hope! (hahaha) I spent the last half of 2010 and thus far of 2011 observing the world. It's a much better use of one human being's limited resources and time than attempting to change minor bullshit, that's for damn sure.

If you can't stop some bad shit from going down, at least prepare for it so that you are in the best possible position to maneuver when it happens.

So let's get down to business.


Listen to this muhfuckah while you reading.

Below are some sketches of what's going on in the world right now. This is a rough outline, and I welcome additional thoughts.

North Africa and the Middle East

Pretty much everyone's getting overthrown. What will happen?

Same shit, different day.

Above: A street scene in Tunisia, where all this shit started.
Below: A street scene in Germany, where all this shit started.

What's happening in the Muslim world is Europe in 1848. Much like the "Springtime of the Peoples," the remaining vestiges of Feudal life are being cast off. Monarchs and despots are being challenged, Bourgeois democrats are emerging in the foreground as popular uprisings swell the seats of power of damn near every nation in North Africa and the Middle East.

Conditions determine consciousness: industrialization in North Africa and the Middle East has a comparable role and developmental influence in daily life as it did in Europe in 1848. This is thanks to centuries of European and, more recently, American colonialism and neo-colonialism holding back these nations' developments. That should be a given to my audience... I hope.

What will happen is Bourgeois democracy spreads throughout the North African and Middle Eastern world. America is too weak to intervene, Europe is concerned with its own shit, and China isn't one to interfere in foreign people's shit these days. The nations in rebellion, pending successful political revolutions to match their economic developments and modernity, will seek a more independent path. This will be good news for the proletariat in those nations across the board.

With luck, the stranglehold America has had on the comprador Bourgeoisies of the countries in question will not just be broken but become a rallying point for the angry masses. Israel will become immensely pressured without question. Given America's weak world prestige owing to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is doubtful they have the energy or the sheer strength to intervene and protect their allies in Egypt, Yemen, or elsewhere. Israel will have to manage on its own, and with Lebanon firmly in Iran's top 10 friends list, Israel has already got one of many hostile borders to come.

In short, Arabia of 2011 is Europe of 1848 and bourgeois democracy is on the way for them. Its simply the only possible next stage, at least for most of the rebelling peoples. I wish them the best of luck in this endeavor.

As an addendum, I found I apparently was not the first one to make this comparison. Apparently Foreign Policy magazine beat me to the chase. But I feel good knowing that I independently reached the same conclusions as the Bourgeois experts on this one, and they even reference Karl Marx:

Like the uprisings sweeping the Middle East today, the revolutions of 1848 followed and fed off one another, with opposition figures consciously mimicking the rhetoric of revolutionaries past. David Armitage quotes Karl Marx describing the phenomenon, "Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95."

Damn straight, Marxy. We're on the same page.

But Marx is dead and I'm not. So as Marx probably said once, "bottoms up!" I'm off to a jazz show.

PART 2, COMING SOON - Featuring: a historical comparison of the lead-up to WWII and the geopolitical roles played by various world powers right the fuck now.

Marxist Movie Review: Total Recall

I remember awhile back when MIM (Maoist International Movement) used to do movie reviews from a Marxist standpoint. I enjoyed them thoroughly, although the MIM had their own ideological agenda that I didn't necessarily agree with. Of course, I have my own ideology as well, and I will unashamedly read them in to my reviews. Hopefully I'll do a couple of these a month - and I am open to suggestions about what movies to review. Enjoy!

WARNING: SPOILER ALERT
Watching the movie before reading this review is highly recommended.

Total Recall

Total Recall stars Arnold Swarzenegger as Quaid, a well-paid construction worker living in a big city apartment with his wife in some unspecified American city. The setting is the future, wherein a Mars mining colony has been established in order to retrieve a valuable mineral plentifully supplied near the colony. Quaid develops an unusually strong urge to visit Mars, and recurring dreams of a brunette woman lure him in to considering a somewhat controversial dream vacation package offered by a company called "Rekall." In the process, doctors inject a memory implant which gives the brain several days worth of experiences and memories as if they were real events, all within a matter of minutes without leaving the chair.

Against the advice of his wife and best friend, he goes in for the procedure. As the scientists are implanting the chip, it is discovered that Quaid's memory had previously been erased and a fake memory installed by another implant - hitting this implant causes a schizoid embolism that threatens to erode his sanity. An important note here is that while we may safely assume that he entered a schizoid embolism, we cannot be sure if this happened before or after the chip was (attemptedly) installed. The discovery of the previous implant may have been imagined by Quaid as part of the current implant's installation which went awry. This means that the remainder of the movie may very well be totally imagined by Quaid or totally real. The definition of reality is hereafter perpetually in question and never answered - an important allegory for real life.

After escaping Rekall, Quaid is confronted by his best friend and wife who reveal themselves to be agents for the Mars colonial government. He also receives a message from his pre-erasure self imploring him to go to Mars, which he does - being chased by colonial agents.

The Mars colony itself is rife with political overtones, though the movie almost tries to pretend to address these as a simple fictional plot rather than intentionally charged statements about society and revolution. The colony is owned by a massive mining corporation strictly controlled by the owner and CEO, Vilos Cohaagen, who is simultaneously the head of the colonial government. Due to the uninhabitable atmosphere of the planet, the citizens of the Mars colony must live in oxygenated domes. Workers are paid poorly and crammed in to under-maintained domes, where poverty and overcrowding result in rampant drugs, violence, prostitution, and other vices. This is analogous class struggle and the ghettoization of the proletariat.

Above: The anguish of the proletariat.

The air quality in the workers' domes is highly contaminated and has gradually caused strange mutations among large swaths of the population, turning skin red and even changing physical appendages in to new, unique (but not vestigial) forms. The rumor is that it is the rebirth of the alien species, but the corporate doctors write them off as simple physical deformations. One might draw a parallel to the suppression of native races and their social association with "mutation" and "impurity" (as a comrade interestingly noted, despite these Earthlings being themselves foreign to Mars, Martians and their culture are curiously referred to as "alien.")

A rebellion is underway by the mutant proletarians demanding higher pay, better air quality and other basic necessities. The rebels are constantly labeled as "terrorists" by the media outlets and the CEO of the colony in news broadcasts, despite the fact that the only mass killings we see are those perpetrated by the colonial authorities in the course of the movie. The CEO at one point cuts off oxygen to a workers' dome for assisting the rebels, nearly murdering the entire community of that dome (but at the same time revealing that the only reason he is still in power is his absolute control over life or death in the colony.)

Throughout the movie, it is hinted that a Martian artifact discovered in the mine which has caused operations to stop is of major relevance to the leadership of the colony. Quaid discovers while speaking to the rebel leader that this machine will "save Mars." The rebel leader is unaware of what it will do, but he somehow knows it will be a good thing. We might presume that his extreme mutation has given him great insight. This mutation appears to have given the rebel leader a "deeper knowledge" of the "bigger picture" of Martian development - making him a sort of "sage". He and the rebels are totally wiped out after he explains the situation to Quaid.

This analogy may be more of a stretch, but I'll give it my best: We might take him to be the embodiment of the pro-revolutionary theorist. While many pro-revolutionaries imagine themselves to be the "subjective element" that can "change history," the rebel leader offers an alternate hypothesis. The revolutionaries in the film do not end up changing anything; in fact, they are more or less eradicated before Mars is saved. They never even live to see the Mars they fought for, but they fought anyway even if the fight was futile. Contrariwise, one could note that without the rebels and their specialized knowledge, Quaid would not have known how to save Mars. That is, the rebels played a role even if they did not actually change the world themselves.

We discover that Quaid was originally a pro-government agent whose memory was erased and a new life created solely so he could lead the government to the rebel hideout, which he does successfully. Despite this revelation, however, the "new Quaid" does not rejoin the government but continues assisting the rebels. This is a powerful lesson in "conditions determine consciousness" because despite previously embodying reaction, he now embraces progress purely as a result of his experiences within the rebel community.

Quaid then proceeds to the artifact and activates it. The CEO had claimed that this technology would destroy all the rich minerals on the planet to avoid anyone utilizing it, but its activation reveals it to be a hydration machine which turns Mars in to a fully habitable planet - undermining the CEO's stranglehold over the colony and freeing the people to develop Mars themselves.

For our coup de grace, we can take this analogically to be the technological development that makes Anarchism/Communism possible and totally abolishes class society and Capitalism. The ruling class attempted its best repression to keep the discovery from surfacing, even facing a stiff rebel resistance which took up arms to destroy that ruling class. Ultimately, however, repression and rebellion both failed, and it required the objective intervention of forces "from outside" of the established class struggle to actually create the necessary social transformation by fundamentally changing material circumstances.

More to Come

"There is no wild essence, like the red squirrel under threat but still holding on, which we could use to repopulate the wilderness. There is nothing real to go back to, and nothing at all of what existed before the motorway now survives." - Monsieur Dupont

We can only go forward, in the long run. The question is "to what?"


Those who are interested in this blog will note that my old posts have been erased. Those who know me will know that I have always maintained a firm position politically as a Communist, philosophically as a materialist.

For all intents and purposes, I would still consider myself a Marxist. That is in the sense that I am a Darwinist; while new discoveries and experiences have unraveled some positions of these great theorists, the core of their exploration remains intact and a useful foundation for newer, better ideas.

In my departure from Leninism, I embraced Anarchism. I would still consider myself an Anarchist. But we must be clear about what these things mean; terms are so confusing in the political milieu.

A summary of my position is negation. I am uncompromisingly opposed to everything that represents the world around me, in all of its backwardness and reaction. We live not only in a time marked by great and monstrous inequities and cruelties, but a time marked by devastation and despair. Nonetheless, it is not enough to understand and lament the universe for its current form. Its important to recognize the greatest tragedy of all: not just that it exists or has come to exist, but that its existence is both necessary and unavoidable.

We are thus trapped in a paradox: we oppose that which exists, but the only way out of it is through it. Those of us with an objective view can plainly see that no social revolution is nigh or even plausible. We also see that social reform is not only incapable of fixing the problem but manages to exacerbate it significantly.

Those of us who are paying attention to history and current events sees the American empire's might being challenged by a rising economic power in China, much as Germany felt threatened by England before World War I. We see a growing nationalist, religious fundamentalist, socially conservative movement gaining steam very quickly in the United States. We're seeing not only the prospect of a new world war, but the unavoidable birth of Fascism and the rise of a new Hitler (with Glenn Beck Himmler on propaganda ops) to challenge America's Wiemar reformist president, Obama.

Not only is this a backwards time, it is an archaic and primitive time.

This is all humanity is. Apes with books and cars. Stop trying to giving him Marx and Kropotkin; he can't possibly understand!

Those of us who are conscious Communist and Anarchists know there is nothing we can do of any social importance, however much we wish there was. Objective forces are lined up against our vision. Communism does not exist as a social relation, only as an unimplementable theory which a tiny minority even finds worth considering. We are time travellers from the world of tomorrow stuck in a nightmarish past that we can neither conquer or comprehend. We are doomed to defeat, failure, and death with no meaningful accomplishments to our name. We're fucked, and we're going to hell in a handbasket.

What is to be done?

More to come.