Tag: anarchism

My May Day Speech

May Day became a labor holiday in 1886, when police opened fire on a peaceful picket line during a general strike for the 8 hour day. It became a labor holiday in memorial to the four anarchist labor leaders who were hung for their participation, for the one who killed himself with a dynamite blasting cap, for the countless more who spent years in prison all so that workers across the world would not have to sacrifice seeing their families in order to feed them.

On this day we commemorate all our martyrs, the lives and freedom lost in pursuit of a world free from exploitation and oppression, of a world where a worker’s value is more than merely what they produce, where humanity is valued more than productivity and where labor is entitled to all it creates.

But we are here 130 years after the Haymarket riots, not to commemorate a long dead past but to celebrate a living tradition of active resistance against the sovereignty of capital.

I am, as I believe many of us are, sick to death of passivity in the face of the tyranny of the wealthy few. I am not a student radical at a posh university looking towards a future in the democratic party or a cushy job managing an NGO. My politics will not soften with graduation. I am a highschool dropout, I am a sex worker. I am a rank and file union member. I am a simple woman and I am here with a simple message, it is time for us to organize and to fight back.

We are past the point where we can make nice with the powerful, as every right and protection won by the last great wave of the labor movement crumbles as a sand dune into the sea, we must admit that no election, no mild mannered wheedling, no woowoo good vibes bullshit will save us from the dire future we face. However in the face of these deteriorating conditions, a spark of hope remains, and that hope is the same hope that our predecessors knew in 1886. Working class rank and file organization is, as it always has been, our only hope and direct action our only possible weapon against the capitalist class who would grind us into dust if it would increase their margin of profit by a dime. So I ask you, fellow workers, to unite with me to kill what is killing us, not at some distant future “proper historical moment” but in the here and now.

Thank you.

Voting Is Not Consenting To Be Ruled

If a guy has you cornered, gun to your head, which the state does have essentially and asks you whether you want to be punched in the gut AND in the nose or just punched in the gut, you are not agreeing to either.  Making the choice that hurts less doesn’t mean you can’t still fight back 

I mean like spending time you could be spending organizing resistance to the whole “punched in the gut/punched in the gut AND in the nose” choice, trying to get people to vote for “just punched in the gut” is a fucking waste

You’ll also note that the only time we get real concessions is when we get together to demand massive “unrealistic” change.

It’s a very basic bargaining tactic as well, asking for more than you think is possible for you to get, because they expect negotiation, and sometimes you do get the big change you want.

Also I remember thinking of lefty stuff as “You get helped if you need it but you don’t get left the fuck alone” when I was younger

But nah the choice is between not getting left the fuck alone by the electric company and your boss, and having to spend a million hours on hold to connect to the cancellations department of your whatever service and having to navigate and endless hellish bureaucracy to get your last paycheck or not getting left the fuck alone because you’re a participating member of community where your interests are in common rather than opposed.  

Being left alone to do absolutely your own thing is a privilege purchasable only by the very very well to do at the cost of a bunch of other people not getting space to be left the fuck alone at all.

Communism will require more direct, thoughtful participation from the average citizen, but it will also never require you to fax it copies of a year’s worth of water bills or ask you to wait on hold listening to a tinny version of Wind Beneath my Wings for three hours straight

Introduction To A Leftist Book I’m Working On:

I am not a child of the academy, in fact I have very little formal education.  I am a highschool drop out, a sex worker, and yet I think in terms of theory my voice might be a valuable one. I think too much of our theory has been written by the academy, academics with supposedly altruistic aims, academics who pretend to listen to women like me, pretend to be there for us and publish articles about us but never by us.  I am not here to be your plain speaking prop, a quote in a book you publish and profit from.  I am not here to be your romanticized image of a proletarian, so quaintly, charmingly uneducated.  I did not slog my way through Capital while  working late nights to allow you to use me to fuel your elitist anti-intellectualism, your belief that proletarians should not be expected to read theory because we are not smart enough to do so, a belief which justifies your belief that you (college educated, NGO types) are necessary to working class organization and struggle.  

I am a communist, but I do not trust charity.  Charity is all too often more about the emotional needs of the giver than the material needs of the receiver.  I am here out of self interest.  I am here for my own liberation, a liberation I know will only come through the liberation of the entire working class, because if you do not destroy oppression root and branch, it will always grow back.  I could jockey for position within systems of oppression, but I find that idea ultimately unsatisfactory.  I do not want to get away with war crimes only to be pulled over by the fashion police.  I could use the supposed “authenticity” (how I loathe that word) of my voice to make myself a career in speaking at conferences on the struggles of women like me (only while supervised by a nice properly educated academic of course).  I could get myself lauded and studied and listened to by a rapt audience of supposedly well meaning bourgeoisie, and give myself a marvelous sense of self importance without doing anything, but I do not wish to be a performing seal.

I am unsatisfied with the current state of leftist feminist theory, most of which is writing by bourgeois women done during the 60s in a haze of drugs and woo woo nonsense.  I have little patience for this.  I am a proletarian woman.  I do not have time for pontificating about the imagined witch-cults of medieval europe.  I have no need of a matriarchal eden to call patriarchy unjust.  I do not have the time or energy for a community garden.  I have no wish to overturn the advances of modern agriculture, no wish to fight high per acre yields that result in lessening the problem of deforestation, and a reduced need for agricultural toil.  All I have time for is revolution and that is what I am here for.  I do not mean revolution in the sense it is so often used today, where revolution is what we call a minor advance in blender technology, I mean the motherfucking revolution.  I am here for mass organization, strikes, and the overthrow of capital and the abolition of the state.  I am here to demand an end to this period of leftism being dominated by a waffling, hesitating, anti-revolutionary academic current, and the start of a period of active class struggle.

I am tired of the tired old “not at this historical moment” cannard.  There is no historical moment that will magically arrive and herald in the revolution unless we build that moment, unless we put in the work to build it.  You are waiting rather than doing only because for you the situation is not a desperate one.  This is not a system I can live in.  This is not a system I can have children in.  I am working myself to death trying to attain some scrap of security for me and mine, and it will never come, and so I write from a place of raw animal need.  I write from the knowledge that without hope of revolution, I have no hope at all.

I am tired of being told that shit that isn’t going to help me is the revolution and I am deeply unsatisfied with the current state of leftist theory in general which seems to be a lot of pretty revolutionary rhetoric and no action.  There is endless theorizing about what this or that minor aspect of this or that indicates within the framework of, through the eyes of… blah blah blah bloody blah and none of the fiery utile work done in the early 20th century, none of the crucial instructiveness of the writing that came out of black liberation in the 60s (really the only new left theory worth reading in my opinion, with black feminist writings of the time being some of the very best leftist feminist theory around).  There is examination of capitalism, but this is no time for arm chair revolutionaries who would rather dissect minor points of theory than act.  This refusal to act is as unsatisfactory to me as the bourgeois feminist obsession with whether the way we fuck is conducive to gender liberation.  

The liberation of the working class and the liberation of women are dependent upon us building effective mass organizations and fighting back. We cannot ask.  We must demand because our oppressors will never willingly relinquish their power.

So I am here to write something with a bit of fire.  I am here to write for those of us who need the revolution to be soon, because we suffer and die waiting for that mythic historical moment to deliver us.  So here we go.

There is a Bourgeois Leftist Distaste For Engaging In Propaganda or Euphemistically “Public Relations”

That must be overcome in order to build strong movements again.  Our ideas are intentionally misrepresented, made inaccessible to members of the working class, and generally hidden away in the hallowed and expensive halls of academia where those of us who need them cannot find them.

I wonder if part of the reason bourgeois leftists see public campaigning, and good marketing as immoral is that they too have reason not to want the working class getting their hands on leftist thought.

I Like Anarchists And Marxists

Be nice to each other, guys.  We don’t know who’s right yet (at least that’s what I think, they may both work in different situations, maybe actually some other non-capitalist thing works, maybe one works all the time, testing has been inadequate to prove anything.)

Also I feel like most of the Anarchists and Marxists I know disagree fundamentally on what the definition of a state is… so like that’s a weird thing to have be your actual fundamental difference “We can’t agree on what the word ‘state’ means, let’s form rival tendencies” ugh stop.

If Your Anti-Capitalist Praxis Involves Telling The Working Class About The Moral Superiority of Your Earthy Crunchy Organic FairTrade Lifestyle

You are 100% a servant of capitalism.  Your lifestyle is as “unethical” as any other because it is founded on the exploitation of labor, your “fair trade” ain’t that fair, your organic ain’t that green, your urban garden is probably poisoning you, and your pseudo ethical lifestyle isn’t accessible to us anyway, and if you’re telling us that that’s what resisting capitalism looks like, you’re doing capitalism a big damn favor.

Some Of What We Will Need To Overcome Capitalism And Create A Functional Post-Capitalist System

We need to get out ideas out there, and heard.  Our ideas are ones respond to immensely positively if you don’t just say “communism” because then they think Stalinism and have no idea what you’re actually proposing.

For this we will need people with expertise and influence in PR and marketing, we will also need innovative marketing solutions, the kind underdog startups use to kickstart shit on a shoestring because we’ve had some very negative PR due to bourgeois propaganda and we need to rebrand.

I suggest simple, punchy, memorable messages that stick in your mind.  Broad anti-capitalist/labor theory of value inspired stuff like “What is your boss costing you?”

We need functional active visible mass organization so that the disillusioned, the enraged, the disaffected have a place to plug in, organizations that prove their value through tangible results.

We need money to fund projects like free schools, advertising campaigns, businesses to fund organizational activity (the FAU in Uruguay have no dues because they fund the organization with print shops, with industrial printers bought with money from bank robberies many years in the past), legal aid, strike funds, and the like.  I do not believe that bank robberies are profitable or wise in this era, but also it has been shown that the voluntary donations of an already impoverished proletariat do not provide enough capital to effectively build the infrastructure needed to build a mass movement.  I suggest we find another way to separate the bourgeois from their money (perhaps we could market some kind of cleanse, superfood or dietbook or perhaps even a motivational or management seminar of some sort, those all seem to be effective ways to get a few bucks from the rich)

We will also need information systems people, computer science people, behavioral psychology people and similar.  I believe that socialist experiments’ past failures in the realm of consumer goods are many ways IT problems.  With capitalism we have made money a mechanism for distributing goods and services roughly where they need to go but it works so poorly that people die because of it, while others due to its myriad flaws.  We need a better, smarter system for anticipating what goods will be desired, in what quantities and where.  We live in a society that produces far more than enough of everything, there is quite enough to go around, it’s simply a matter of working out a system that makes sure Anton gets his lemonade when he wants it and Laurel her violin and Peter a new living room rug as the old one wears out or becomes displeasing.  A system that allows for goods and services not to be given on the basis of exchange but intelligently directed to those that need or desire them.  

Basically, we’ll need a great IT department.

I believe we will also be deeply in need of dissent, I believe deeply in unity between many tendencies of the anti authoritarian left, and even (provided they’re small and kept well in check so that we don’t have Stalin problems) the more authoritarian left (but not too authoritarian so we don’t have Stalin problems).  None of us know exactly what will work in practice, the path to communism is as yet unbuilt, unpaved, and to get to our goal we will have to stop and adjust and stop and readjust repeatedly when elements of our program turn out not to work in practice.  We must be willing to rework, to tinker, to tweak until the system runs smoothly, no dogmatic clinging to a program that has proven itself a failure.  Do not execute or shun those of dissenting leftist tendencies, they are not our enemies but our friends, do we not, after all, share the goal of a bountiful society founded upon a belief in the innate value of human life, upon the need for a society where no one goes hungry, no one is left out in the cold, where no one is forgotten or ill used.  A society free from oppression and bigotry in all its forms, where each of us is more free for all this?

There’s more, but yeah.