We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Politically, the capitalist and socialist refusal of autonomy takes the form of the centrist demand that all particular projects be subordinated to the general interest of development. Among capitalists diverse autonomous demands must not be allowed to challenge or undermine the central processes of profit making, investment and growth. Among socialists, such demands must not be allowed to impede the realization of the general interests of the working class, which in practice turn out to be the party's plans for realizing surplus, investment and growth. Thus the autonomous activities of women, blacks, peasants, students, industrial workers, and so on, must be either integrated within the overall development process (which eliminates their autonomy) or suppressed.

Harry  Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically

Red November, black November,
Bleak November, black and red.
Hallowed month of labor’s martyrs,
Labor’s heroes, labor’s dead.

Labor’s wrath and hope and sorrow,
Red the promise, black the threat,
Who are we not to remember?
Who are we to dare forget?

Black and red the colors blended,
Black and red the pledge we made,
Red until the fight is ended,
Black until the debt is paid.

— By Ralph Chaplin
author of Solidarity Forever

Gun Control

Civil laws develop simultaneously with private property out of the disintegration of the natural community.  -- Karl Marx, from The German Ideology

  I do not oppose gun control laws in America, but neither do I support them.  I do not support them because I do not see that they will do any good. I understand the impetus behind the drive for gun control, and I appreciate that it seems like a no brainer that fewer guns = fewer bodies, but it seems to me more and more grasping at straws in the face of the horror of our violent US culture. Like so many mainstream solutions to intractable problems, we seem content to understand the aspirins we take to assuage the pain of our cancers as the chemotherapy that will kill the cancers. Sometimes, we can't even understand what the cancer is: violence is the cancer, not guns, and any solution that does not directly address violence is bound to fail. Besides, even if gun control laws could significantly lower the numbers of guns, how long before knives, arson, acid, and car bombs become all the rage in our violent country?

  The last thing that this country needs is a "War on Guns": as has been coughed up ad infinitum by the second amendment crowd, the War on Drugs only barely affects the availability of said illegal drugs, and we can assume that guns would be the same. Unlike drugs, which are consumables, guns would remain around for a long time before they start deteriorating* . . . and as the flow of drugs into the US continues barely abated, so would the flow of guns continue. Banning assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and conversion kits may hold down death tolls somewhat; but even as every life is significant, pardon me for being troubled by any accounting which finds solace in 15 deaths instead of 20, or 30 deaths instead of 50.

  And let's not forget, per John Ehrlichman, how the War on Drugs was conceived as a racist/anti-left gambit. The history of gun control too has a whiff of racism wafting around it: the NRA, who supported many gun control initiatives in its history, was all in with Governor Ronald Reagan when California passed the Mulford Act in 1967. This legislation, which essentially prevented citizens from carrying weapons in public, was authored directly in response to the Black Panthers. The pivot toward free and open access to guns for all citizens, for both Reagan and the NRA, came later, after the threat of armed African American revolutionaries was somewhat diminished**. There is absolutely no reason to believe that, if we add another major prohibition for our existing law enforcement regime to enforce, that its outcome with regards to race (and class!) would be any different than our disastrous, racist drug war. Our police have shown an overt tendency to use laws and initiatives as tools of control (as opposed to mediation), and those tools are always wielded disproportionally against certain populations.  Does it seem wise to further empower institutions which have demonstrated, over and over again, the inability to execute governance in a consistently just way?

  Again, it is violence that we seek to eliminate, not guns. We can outlaw acts of violence, we can do our best to regulate the tools of violence, but violence itself exists beyond definition of the law. Law exists to institutionalize and legitimize the state, which in turn institutionalizes the violence of the class for whom the state functions. Capitalism, the religion enshrined in our country (and by the west in general), is based on competition and inequity, and violence is a natural condition of this inequity. Of course, any mainstream discussion of violence in our country almost exclusively assumes that violence is anti-social (be it resistance or simply the white-hot explosion of our culture's id) while explaining away state violence as something other than violence. The intransigence of the problem lies in the fact that to erase violence, you must destroy the very foundation of our culture, a culture that is built on violence. Considering the magnitude of that task - not to mention the fact that such an act would be considered revolution - it's clear why so many want to substitute gun control for real substantive change.

  We are educated to believe the laws protect the underclass and powerless in our culture . . . and ultimately they do, somewhat, but only to the degree that protecting the underclass serves the state, not the underclass itself***. It is (obviously!) not a bad idea to enact good laws; but laws serve the state (which, per the Marx quote above, is interchangeable with private property in our culture), and what we really want to do is to change our culture. To this end, we need to rebuild what Marx calls "natural community" . . . you could, for instance, begin with the idea that access to healthcare is the right of every person (not "every citizen" - break away from the chauvinism of arbitrary borders, build a community of humanity worldwide). You could follow up with the idea that everyone is owed a living, and that everyone has equal access to the riches of the world. You could see to it that no one stands on another's shoulders. You could turn these concepts into laws, if you are able, but most importantly, you want to build these values: our laws, good and bad, ultimately serve a corrupt master. It is the culture we are trying to change, so that is where we must start. Building a natural community in this manner will do more to end mass killings than any law we could pass.

  Again, I don't necessarily oppose gun control. If it were up to me, every woman would have free and open access to any gun she wanted, while every man would be completely banned from owning any guns****. And Lord knows that I am not aligning myself with second amendment types; as I've said for years, guns don't kill people, idiots who think think their rights to guns supersede the safety of our citizens do. Besides, the whole idea of trying to control guns is quickly becoming technologically moot: it will take years for liberals to regain anything resembling control of the Congress and the White House, which is an absolute minimum requirement for passing gun legislation. By that time, it is likely that home production of guns will be easily accessible with the latest 3D printers and computer machining equipment, and the patriots of the US will be flooding the countryside with guns for no other reason that to support their reactionary ideology. Gun control will very soon be an impossibility; only changing the culture will save us.
____________________
*  This is not, in and of itself, a reason to oppose gun control, and I do not suggest that it is. If I believed that gun laws now would drastically reduce illegal weapons even 50 years from now, that would be a reasonable result. I do not, however, believe that to be the case.
** Note that Reagan supported the Brady Bill, as well as an assault weapons ban, which would put him right in line with current Democrat gun control efforts. It is also worth noting that he supported these initiatives well after he had to worry about gathering votes for public office (1991 and 1994, respectively).
*** See Adam Smith's defense of welfare: he understood that a free market economy required a buy-in, both literally and figuratively . . . and if nothing else, he understood that it was in the free market's interests to keep its workers from revolting (or, you know, dying of starvation).
**** Yeah, I know, gender's bullshit: let's go with any less physically capable being can own a gun, any physically capable being can't.

Labor Day

Labor Day’s a sop
tossed out by the bosses
like a dry husk
Joe Hill didn’t die for Labor Day
Joe Hill just died

When Joe Hill rises again
we'll see who takes his place
in the cold ground

                             -- Wm. Zink

Look Out Your Window

  Watch what's going on. The cries for UNITY! are peaking, the vilification of VIOLENCE! as the ultimate evil is surfing along just behind. The new marching chant: CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG? But, I have to ask: under what flag shall we march?

  Who is making this appeal to unity? Is the (overwhelmingly white) mainstream of the country going to be comfortable holding hands with 45 on this? Are they comfortable with the fact that his cries for unity include the torch bearers who marched Friday night in Charlottesville? Are they comfortable with the fact that this amounts to the erasure of white supremacist evil? Are we really going to ask our oppressed comrades to unite with those who would oppress them? Again I ask: under what flag shall we march?

  I'm totally fine with the old "love the sinner, hate the sin" bible shtick, but it is not clear to me at all that that is what is going down . . . looks much more to me like "love the sinner, tolerate the sin" all for the sake of UNITY . . . because when UNITY becomes the primary force in all our efforts, then TOLERANCE raises its fair weather head to erase anything that may stray outside the lines, to build the tent big enough to include any ideology, no matter how repugnant.

  Again, I would remind you, infinite tolerance is an impossibility. At this point surely someone on your social media feed who orbits in the galaxy of militants (or even some progressives!) has hipped you to Popper's "Paradox of Tolerance"*. This Unity the masses are calling for comes at a price, and the price is too high. We can not tolerate the bullshit of these racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, elitist-worshiping assholes and still have a country that honors justice. As they say: NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

  "So fine, no unity without justice, blah blah blah. But you're all as bad as they are, reducing everything to violence. That is the reaction they want. Just ignore them, don't dignify them with a response." Yeah, how's that been working for you? Again, I'm not going to call anyone out for non-violent resistance, as long as it really is resistance, and not just avoiding the problem. The thing is that, without active resistance (AND NOT JUST IGNORING IT!) the problem will not go away. So, if you are going to follow the pack and denounce violence, you fucking well better have another solution . . . because, I tell you what, militant resistance is having an effect: the white supremacist assholes are cancelling rallies left and right. For that, you can thank your local antifascists.

  Until the oppression which defines our country is vanquished, free speech is a luxury. Until everyone is treated equally, unity is a dream. It is time to cure the disease, not treat the symptoms.
____________________
*   "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." -- Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Get On the Bus

  Don't misunderstand: I love every last one of you crazy leftists. I love the arguments. They always sound like that scene from Life of Bryan to me:

  You must know your destination before you start your journey, right? Well . . . sorta.

  All the arguments are really important. They are vital. They are the crucible of revolutionary theory. When we all get on the bus, we are sitting on the East Coast, and we know we wanna head west to California, maybe Arizona. But exactly where? That is, of course, the question. Some say Sonoma, some say Frisco, some say LA. There's a San Diego guy, and a small anti-social cadre in the back who say California is a mistake, and that we only should go as far as Tucson. The arguments are furious, passionate, recriminations fly. So the bus driver just sits there, waits 'til we figure it all out, right?

  Wrong. You get on the bus, and you drive west. Work it out on the way. And if anybody calls you a gradualist, tell 'em to fuck off and get on the bus.

  But as far as those pantsuit clowns who only want to go as far as DC or Harrisburg, they get on and stay on until well after the continental divide, or they can just stay off the damn bus.

AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL

RIP Heather Heyer

Remember what she was willing to fight for, remember what she died for.

Tolerance v. Tolerance

If you tell me that you reject violence because it is not constructive, I will, up to a point, listen to you. You better be ready to provide context, though, because tolerance as a basic principle is meaningless.

One cannot be infinitely and unilaterally tolerant. A given situation requires action, and even inaction is a choice. Along the same line, tolerating the intolerance of others does not add to the general level of tolerance in the culture.

Everybody has their deal. Everybody has things they can and can't do, everyone has their limit. But, if you are willing to characterize your limit as something beyond limit, you need to come correct. Principles need to be operable & defensible. I will listen to you if you tell me you are a pacifist. Passive resistance is, after all, still resistance. All I'm saying is that if you call yourself a pacifist, you better be ready to lay down in front of the tanks . . . or, admit your pacifism is a limit, not a principle.

Kevin "Rashid" Johnson

But the exercise of labor power, labor, is the worker’s own life activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not reckon labor as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life.  -- Karl Marx "Wage, Labor, and Capital"

 

The Russia Con

 Two things you can be sure of in this lowbrow comedy that the Russian affair has become: everyone is motivated by something other than getting to the heart of the issue, and everyone is hopelessly addled about the whole affair in a very public way. Nothing close to the truth will be reached until the motives are stripped away and the narrative is cleaned up. Let's take a quick tour through the shitpile, shall we?

• Until someone shows me concrete evidence that the Russians purged voter rolls or hacked voting machines, they did not "steal the election" for Twittler. In order to believe that Russia did interfere with the election, you have to believe that the information attributed to their hack was by itself able to swing enough voters over to the Republican side to win the election, and that idea is just not plausible. It's the same thing with Comey and the emails: no one actually bothered by Clinton and her emails had any intention of voting for her in the first place.
• Calling the Russian hacks a "misinformation campaign" is a misnomer, because most of the damaging information leaked was accurate . . . i.e., the DNC really did collude against the Sanders campaign.
• Most of the "misinformation/disinformation" came from Wikileaks. Julian Assange, who is less motivated by the siren call of truth than a hatred of the US*, is said to have gotten them from the Russians, though no one on his end has confirmed that. And what is our evidence of that? From Politico: "Analysts can see that the attackers operated during business hours in Moscow and St. Petersburg 98 percent of the time, and they speak Russian, said Kevin Mandia, CEO of security firm FireEye." Uhm, say what? From Yasha Levine in The Baffler:

"So, FireEye knows that these two APTs are run by the Russian government because a few language settings are in Russian and because of the telltale timestamps on the hackers’ activity? First off, what kind of hacker—especially a sophisticated Russian spy hacker—keeps to standard 9-to-5 working hours and observes official state holidays? Second, just what other locations are in Moscow’s time zone and full of Russians? Let’s see: Israel, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova, Romania, Lithuania, Ukraine. If non-Russian-speaking countries are included (after all, language settings could easily be switched as a decoy tactic), that list grows longer still: Greece, Finland, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Kenya—the countries go on and on."

•  In spite of all this, it's still not unreasonable to assume the Russians are involved in the hack. Maybe they really are that stupid and incompetent; lord knows American policy toward Russia from 1945 to the fall of the Berlin Wall had the overestimation (& subsequent demonization) of the Soviet Union at its core.
• Russian hack or no, there's really nothing that came out that wasn't already being discussed in some corners of the media, and the DNC misbehavior was going to be a story even without Wikileaks and/or the Russians.
• Even if the Russians weren't involved, they certainly were trying to curry favor with the Republican nominee, as has been demonstrated over and over again, culminating most recently with Junior's own email scandal.

  So let's take a step back and take a look at where we stand: it is likely, though not definitive, that Russia tried to assert influence in the election by running a "disinformation/misinformation campaign". It is also clear that the information released, while embarrassing for the Democrats, didn't really have the weight to influence the entrenched positions in this severely polarizing election. That given, liberals really need to shut up about how Russia threw the election to their opponent. Clinton was a bad candidate who ran a shitty campaign; that's the totality of that story.

  Though the information did not really influence the election, it is becoming more and more clear that Russia expected quid pro quo for the favors done the Republican candidate. The conservatives need to shut up about how the Russian contacts are FAKE NEWS, because the administration is already neck deep in irrefutable evidence otherwise.

  The real issue at the core of the Russian episode is influence. There are plenty of people talking about this issue, yet it still tends to get lost with all the other hilarity that surrounds it. Now, again, the liberals are jumping up and down screaming about this influence; that is, after all, the very point of the laws that the administration was/is running roughshod over. So that's very bad, and worthy of all the hand wringing, right?

  Well, yes it is. But when you are talking about influence at the highest levels of our government, there are already foreign entities at the table who have the influence that Russia seeks, headlined by paragons of moral value such as Saudi Arabia and Israel. Asking "who is it that controls our government?" is an absolutely important question, perhaps the most important question we can ask; but at this point Russia is bush league compared to other countries, not to mention the Adelsons, Kochs, Gilberts, and other billionaire gangsters who really run this country (most of whom would happily be doing business with Clinton had she won instead of King Cheeto).

  All this is not to make light of the Russian problem. I will not, as some on the left have, write this off to "cold warrior mentality". Putin is an asshole who assassinates his enemies and rallies his supporters around the white male supremacist fear of the other. In other words, Putin is the leader the Orange Idiot wants to be, if only he had the brains, guts, and competence. You can already see how the alt-right has enshrined Putin as a hero; he is clearly someone to be resisted at every turn.

  At the end of the day, we give the Russian Con too much weight. We must respond accordingly, but we must also not be distracted from the much more dire problems that are being rained down on us by right wingers much more intelligent and competent than Twittler. We can't suck all the air out of the room over Russia just to see a thousand other things go wrong. We must focus not only on the misbehavior of this administration, but on the avarice and mean spiritedness of our nation's political culture as a whole.

 ____________________

*  There are plenty of good reasons to hate the US. Assange's motivations are mostly self-centered and bad. 

The New Atheist

  There are a lot of annoying things about the New Atheist, but perhaps the most annoying thing is the fact that they get so self-righteous about "not tolerating a fiction", when in fact they celebrate a whole bunch of fictions besides the one they ostensibly don't tolerate . . . including fictions such as the idea that science exists beyond metaphor.

Privilege

  Discussions of privilege seem to be unsatisfactory, if necessary. There's no question that privilege exists, but it is just as true that the discussions of privilege are more often dead end name calling than paths to truth.

  Perhaps the issue is that we tend to get sloppy about discussing exactly how privilege functions: privilege is only active in specific social contexts; otherwise, it is latent, it is potential.  So, I exist privileged in several different ways: I am white, male, cishet, come from upper middle class, American, educated, etc. But, identifying privilege is only the start: figuring out how privilege functions is the important part.

  When involved in a social context with white, male, cishet, working class fellows, I have class privilege even though, judged by my income and lifestyle, I am working class: even if I am currently working class, I have the privilege of my upbringing because, coming from an upper class family, I have access to privilege that my working class fellows do not (for example, coming from money, I will have more access to money should an emergency arise that I can not handle with my own money and/or credit). In a social context with upper class fellows, my current working class status elevates their privilege slightly over mine . . . though in the end, products of the same economic class end up having pretty much the same level of privilege, regardless of their current circumstances.

  We can also imagine another specific social context (in academia, say) where a fellow's specific privilege my give them advantage over me even though they generally have less latent privilege than I do - maybe they are transgender, of color, etc. This privilege is limited to very specific contexts that are generally isolated from the center of power. Here, there is another level of dynamic at work: for not only are we analyzing how privilege works in a specific context, we are examining how that specific context fits into a greater framework of the social.

tl:dr; The problem is that we tend to think of privilege in its latent form as PRIVILEGE, when in reality we need to understand privilege as a social dynamic, and try to understand not only how privilege works in a specific social context, but also how privilege in a specific social context fits into a larger social framework of power and control relationships. AND THEN, we have to look at how these discrete events push back against and reshape the larger context . . . all this to say that privilege is a dynamic, not a state of being.

Fret Not, Uncle Noam Sez it's OK to Vote for Hillary

The following essay was submitted to another website in October of 2016 for a "get out the vote" discussion, but was rejected for various reasons. I toyed with the idea of putting it up here, but I started to edit the piece after it was rejected, and ended up not finishing it in time for the election. As I ran across it in my drafts the other day, it seemed to me to be still worth posting. The essay has been edited post-election for clarity; I did not include any sort of insight that may have come to me after the election.

We have better things to do than be amused by the war of the paper ballots. We have much more important business to be about. -- Peter Kropotkin, "Enemies of the People"

  Ugh, what a shitshow. I know that's been said running up to virtually every November for decades now*, but this one is special: it seems everyone is unhappy with these . . . people . . . that are running for office in this forsaken country. But, just when you think the marks are wising up, the equivocation starts creeping back in, fear takes over, everyone retreats to the old battle lines, and we're back to the same bipolar nonsense as before. Next election, everybody gets away with the same bullshit, just slightly attenuated for the times.

  And just so we're all on the same page, goofball Jill Stein and Bubba Libertarian aren't the answer either. All four of them make Obama look like a Roosevelt. Gerald Ford would have won this goddamn election in a landslide.

  As much as Republicans try to run away from Trump, he is the natural result of the Southern strategy, an evolution of the Lee Atwater ideal. The fact that he is a morally bankrupt dullard really animates this year's horror circus.

  As for Hillary, her candidacy is the culmination of a very simple strategy which has placed a Dem in the White House for 16 of the 24 years since hubby Bill first executed it in '92: as long as you are one tiny hair to the left of the nutball running for the Republicans, you can count on a lot of votes. From there, it's usually not too tough to turn the elephant into a monster, especially since the elephant usually seems more than happy to help the process along. It's actually a variation on the time-honored strategy of not getting eaten by the bear: that is, when you and your friend are trying to get away from the bear, you don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to be faster than your friend.

  Just once, I would like someone to be faster than the bear. That seems, however, too much to ask.  As we stand here, late October 2016, given the choices we have, anyone with any clarity of vision has to deeply and seriously question the efficacy of the vote.

*          *          *          *          *

  On November 8th, everyone will be running around wearing their silly little "I VOTED!" stickers like citizenship merit badges. Media personalities such as Louis C.K., who people inexplicably seem to think is a smart guy, say things like "if you don't vote for anybody, you are an asshole".  Everybody on your facebook feed is blaming non-voters for everything from the national debt to global warming. A non-voter would win the race to the bottom against a drug dealer, it would seem.

  From the liberal view, this vilification orbits around two poles: one, an abundance of evidence that the higher the percentage of voters that turn out, the more liberal the vote becomes; and two, the relentless campaign by the right to disenfranchise as many people as absolutely possible. Distilled, the liberal view is that an ideal election, with a 100% turnout of all eligible voters, would result in a truly just representative government that would almost perfectly serve the good of the people.

  The right wing, on the other hand, wants to control (read: limit) voting as much as possible. The leitmotif of right wing media during election seasons is voter fraud: the specter of Chicago-style Democrat voting haunts the imagination of almost every right winger. No, check that: the specter of hoards of brown-skinned voters haunts the imagination of almost every right winger. There is no point being delicate about it: fear of the takeover of America by non-whites informs all voting-related action by the right wing. And, make no mistake, they are very successful, with everything from gerrymandering to individual voting legalities and ID laws (read: brown people filters). Such is the obsession with voting fraud in the the right wing that a Trump voter was recently busted for voting multiple times, driven by the conviction that she had to do it to help counteract all the brown people she knew where doing it as well.

  And that, in typical bipolar American logic, delimits the whole conversation about voting:since the vote was hard won (it was), and since bad people are trying to take it away (they are), then voting is good and important (doesn't necessarily follow!). It's a horrific thought, but could the struggle for the vote be like Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's vault, a loud and furious fight for nothing?

*          *          *          *          *

Don’t sit this one out…we aren’t. Let’s act as citizens: stand up and take direct action by voting for leaders who support clean air, clean water and climate action.  Go #VoteOurPlanet.  -- Patagonia corporate voter PSA

The State organization, having always been [. . .] the instrument for establishing monopolies in favor of the ruling minorities, cannot be made to work for the destruction of these monopolies. [. . .] In virtue of [these] principles the anarchists refuse to be party to the present state organization and to support it by infusing fresh blood into it. They do not seek to constitute, and invite the working men not to constitute, political parties and parliaments. Accordingly, since the foundation of  the International Working Man's Association in 1864-1866, they have endeavored to promote their ideas directly amongst the labor organizations and to induce those unions to a direct struggle against capital, without placing their faith in parliamentary legislation.  -- Peter Kropotkin, "Anarchism"

  The big question is, of course, precisely what does voting achieve? As noted above, a liberal would have you believe that a perfect democracy with 100% participation would bring about a truly just and benevolent society . . . and, to be clear, "just" in this case aligns with liberal values. A conservative perceives justice in his terms, and will construct a specific voting population to best execute conservative values. Both views (and the American system only allows two) assume that voting is what constitutes government. Both views are mistaken on this count.

  The government governs, or so everyone seems to assume. The government carries out the act of governance . . . and unquestionably it is a large factor in controlling (governing) our lives, but is it the only factor? Of course not - it may not even be the largest factor.

  For most of us, the person who controls our lives the most is our boss. Our boss quite frequently answers to other people, but unless you actually work for the government, our boss doesn't primarily answer to the government. Now, the person your boss ultimately answers to, the owner/CEO, may tell you they answer to the government, but that's not really accurate: they primarily answer to shareholders or, if the company is privately held, they answer to banks. Point is, the whole question of governance is not as simple as "the government governs"; and frankly, the poorer you are, the more people have a say in your life.

  Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that voting is what constitutes the government (spoiler alert: it doesn't). Government, however, is only one factor that controls (governs) our lives; other factors require different actions. These actions take different forms, but generally when we want change, we expect the government to lead the change, because the belief (in this country, anyway) is that it is the government that controls everything. This kind of odd almost circular logic leads us to not only artificially limit our options for change, but also to place undue faith in the power of the vote to change things. Also, this illusion very conveniently serves the conservative establishment (not conservative in the narrow American political sense, but in the"deep state" political sense that also includes virtually all elected Democrats), which is of course run by the masters of capital; it is not an accident that the corporate exhortation quoted above urges the "citizen" to "stand up and take direct action by voting". Equating "voting" with "standing up" and "taking direct action" essentially neutralizes protest and direct action by bringing them under the purview of the governmental system. We need to be very clear on this point: voting is not protest, voting is not direct action. Voting is the act of perpetuating the government; and even if we believe that the government can work to the benefit of all (as our pal Kropotkin clearly does not), getting government square is only the start of solving the problem.

  Which leads us to our next question: is it truly possible to get the government square? That, friends, is something which should arouse your deepest skepticism. Even if the current state of governmental affairs leaves you undaunted, even if you believe you can make the government square, it's only part of the problem, and maybe not even the biggest part; and also not where one would start if one really wants to change the world for the better,

*          *          *          *          *

  Noam Chomsky, whose position can be essentially boiled down to "well, obviously Clinton is peak neoliberal, and a big part of the problem, maybe the biggest, but Donald Trump? For god's sake, you have to vote for Hillary in a swing state . . . ", speaks often of the necessity of voting. Unlike the "don't be an asshole, vote!" crowd, Chomsky understands the real import of the vote:

My feeling is that [voting is] a decision but it's the kind of decision that's kind of tenth order. I think it should be made in five minutes... Most of the time it's a very small decision, maybe if you can, you just have to compare the alternatives and see if there is on balance any difference but it doesn't seem to be a fundamental question.

Voting here is far from the much heralded "bloodless revolution" that US political supporters loudly proclaim it to be. Very far from revolutionary, voting is, at best, evolutionary. And given the principals in this election, it is not even particularly evolutionary**.

  It is this myth of "the bloodless revolution" that is the most destructive part of the American political landscape: whether you are a believer in the power of the government to change things, or whether you despair of the possibility of any true change because "the system is rigged", you are handcuffed by your faith in the government as the sole agent of change.

  Noam will tell you that it's ok to vote for Hillary, but he will also tell you that real change happens out in the street. We're not talking about charity work here; we're talking about active resistance, direct action to solve problems. We need to stand up, we need to strike, we need to march, we need to actively resist the bad that happens in our country, the bad that happens everywhere because of our country. You want to see everyone get a living wage? Then sure, vote for the politician who at least pays lip service to fighting poverty, maybe even practice your "ethical consumerism", but don't be under the illusion that change will come about that way: if you really want to change things, join them in the streets. Stand up for a living wage; make sure everyone knows this is a moral imperative.

  Ethical, compassionate politicians can only come from an ethical, compassionate culture. A good government is an end product, not a beginning. All the voting enthusiasts who do nothing more than cast ballots and bitch on public media are a much bigger part of the problem than the politically active folk who don't vote. At the end of the day, voting is no more than passive consumption of what the political establishment is selling you. It is rarely ever change, and it is never revolution.

*          *          *          *          *

  So here we are. If you need a reason to vote for Hillary, you've got it. Vote against a completely morally bankrupt administration in favor of a slightly less morally bankrupt administration; but don't pretend that solves any problems. If you really believe in the moral power of your politics, then go out and fight for them. Relegate voting to where it belongs, way down the list of your political priorities.

____________________
*  “How many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote FOR something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?"  - Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
** It is important to, at long last, elect a woman president. But if being a woman president is evolutionary in and of itself, and if that is a reason in and of itself to vote for a candidate, then Carly Fiorina would do as well as Hillary Clinton, just as electing Ben Carson would have been as good as electing Barack Obama.

Condi Sez "Leave 'em Up"

. . . and I'm not sure I disagree. Leave up the Confederate statues; make sure they are tagged with a scarlet "R" and cloaked in shame, so that all know the horror which spawned this country.

The first thing that happened when W's posse seized Baghdad was that the statues of Saddam came down . . . we all saw it on TV, and I'm sure more than a few ran through the streets of their town waving American flags and crying "wooo-hooo" in celebration. For its part, Russia has been a veritable parade of statues going up and down in the twentieth century . . . and so it goes, and so it has gone pretty much all the way through history.

Here it is 2017, and we are still arguing about goddamn statues that should have been down by May of 1865 (not that these civil war statues are really civil war artifacts - they were actually erected much later to remind all those uppity black folk who was really in charge). Robert E. Lee should have been carted away from Appomattox to prison, or at least forced to trudge home without sword and steed. The stars -n- bars should have been trampled underfoot from coast to coast, and relegated to the back shelves of obscure museums, instead of the bumpers of jacked up pickups and rusted Saturns nationwide.

But they were allowed to stand, and where they are, they should remain, spray painted red as blood. They remain as the ashes on the forehead of our nation, the outward sign of our inward doom: remember, from racism you came, in racism you live, from racism you shall die.

Revisionism on the Fly

Did you ever wonder, when you were young & sitting in history class listening to lectures about thirties Germany, how you would have reacted had you been there?

Well, keep a diary, 'cause now you know.

Unlike fascism, capitalist totalitarian machines endeavor to divide, particularize, and molecularize the workers, meanwhile tapping their potentiality for desire. These machines infiltrate the ranks of the workers, their families, their couples, their childhood; they install themselves at the very heart of the workers' subjectivity and vision of the world. Capitalism fears large-scale movements of crowds. Its goal is to have automatic systems of regulation at its command. This regulatory role is given to the State and to the mechanisms of contractualization between the "social partners." And when a conflict breaks out of the pre-established frameworks, capitalism seeks to confine it to economic or local wars. From this standpoint, it must be acknowledged that the Western totalitarian machine has now completely surpassed its Stalinist counterpart.  -- Felix Guattari, "Everybody Wants to be a Facist", from Semiotext(e) "Anti-Oedipus" issue, vol. 2, no. 2, 1977 (added emphasis mine)

Let's Be All Nice and Polite About This, Porg

Those of us squarely on the side of punching Nazis continually find ourselves being beaten over the head with MLK. I'm frankly a little sick of it.

I am not going to be the authority on this, but I have spent some time looking at the civil rights movement. The confusion I find in most discussions about King is that white liberals always talk about nonviolence as if it was a principle, when in fact it seems to be a strategy. The difference is crucial: nonviolence as a principle means violence is never OK, while nonviolence as a strategy means that violence becomes an option when a nonviolent strategy is no longer effective.

King had very little choice but to employ a strategy of nonviolence: had he not, the white power structure in the south would have annihilated his movement before it had even gained the smallest of footholds, and it would have done so with the overwhelming support of the white population of the US. It is hard to believe that King would have stood strong through the violence the movement suffered had there been another choice.

I also believe that he had to be aware of the currency afforded him as a "reasonable alternative" to the more militant positions staked out by Malcolm, the Nation of Islam, and the Panthers. The white establishment may not have wanted to deal with King, but they wanted to deal with Elijah Muhammad, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, or Malcolm X even less. And, with the promise of violent insurrection on the table, the liberal establishment obviously chose the nonviolent spokesman as the most reasonable negotiation partner. The degree to which King profited from the more militant positions of his peers should be clear . . . and it should be equally clear that, without the option of violent insurrection, the principle of nonviolence would be impotent.

So, as you liberals share your "Resist" memes on facebook, please take the time to consider what "Resist" really means. No rational person has violence as a first option, but neither would a rational person take violence off the table . . . "by any means necessary", as Malcolm famously said. Without Malcolm and his militant peers, we have no Martin Luther King Day today.

Oh, and while we're at it, lose that fucking poster with the Muslim woman wearing a star-spangled hijab. It was created by a white man, and it's really fucking insulting. It's clueless and white. Thanks for your cooperation.

“The great majority of Americans… are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.