Class War, Always and Forever

There exist certain unmistakable symbols and ideas, which define a political movement or an ideology.

For Communism, it is the hammer and sickle over the bright red flag, the labor gulag and Stalin’s execution lists. For Fascism, it is the strutting dictator stapled with phony medals, goose stepping SS soldiers, the swastika and the death camps, experts in the art of murder. For Liberalism, it is the grey institutional, corporate-bank building filled with bureaucratic drones, the local white stone courthouse, the police station, jail-prison with bars, the office of the local sheriff, and the brown brick, state school, with yellow school buses added for a little touch of class.

But what exists for Anarchy? We have the classic A with the circle around it. We have the long N shaped symbol with an arrow moving upward and a circle around that. And we have a black flag with some red in it – with part of the flag having a star, or even a fist, or whatever. There is also the Anarchist Black Cross, a type of Greek Cross or a Medical Cross, which usually has a clenched fist on the top of the vertical bar. We can also add a punk looking individual to the mix, and some Anarchists have even appropriated the classic black and white pirate flag with the skull and crossed bones. But there is an idea that maintains its constancy within all Anarchy practices: the Class War.

How many memories and bad experiences do we continue to hold from all of our crap jobs history – or where we still trudge and grudge our lives away?

All of my diverse jobs in my personal life were bad ones, including the one that I held for the most labor time of my life: as a lowly paid, graduate teaching assistant at some western land-grant American university. My second longest work stretch was my time surviving in the US Military. I was lucky to not get kicked out of that one.

My employment history mostly shows a shattered list of short work stints, about a few months at the most, and in the end, the owner bastards often fired me. I am damn proud of this spotted work record too. I have openly lived my life as a true warrior inside of the Class War. I have never traded nor soiled my honor, nor my dignity, to a boss-manager parasite.

Believe it or not, I’ve actually worked hard – if the job interested me. I have always arrived on time to work, and while inside of the wage struggle, I got straight into the labor intensity. I have never liked just sitting or standing around, and I always tried to find some initiative or creativity on my own in order to learn more things. But in the end, we all live under the loaded shotgun of the Class Struggle. The loaded shotgun has always aimed at us – the regular workers, the drinking class, the working class.

The commandeering class parasites don’t see it that way however. They want to avoid the most work as possible in order to collect a higher salary with lots of benefits – the worker ants damned! Those losers constantly delegate the hated work jobs, often cleaning or organizing tasks, onto the lower worker peons. Those hacks also have the ear of the owners. And the owners only want one thing – profits!

This is the Class Struggle: the owner wants more work out of the wage slaves, while also hoping to cut down the employee wages in order to increase profit margins; meanwhile, the workers want to conserve their energy for life outside of work, while hoping for a measly pay raise – maybe some time in the distant future.

Since its ugly surfacing some hundreds of years ago, Capitalism has waged a most ruthless war or struggle against the lives of most humans. Whether we like it or not, we all must survive in the Class Struggle, and fight until the bitter end – inside of the Class War.

The owners holding the capital have waged a relentless war against us. Our wage slave jobs slowly rot out our bodies, and eventually clog our vital energies, and so we must fight back. We battle the owners every day on the job, or we fight back as consumers against their crap products, or we even expose the owners’ dishonest practices through writing scathing reviews on the Internet. There are many more ways to struggle.

There is also sabotage. Sabotage does not just imply purposely breaking the machines; although, in extreme situations, this works too. It can also mean following every single rule in the business in order to slow down production or any system of overwork. It can even mean informing the state authorities about the owner’s negligence of the laws. Yes, we can use the divide and conquer method against our foes, since they have continually used similar methods against us.

Another sabotage tactic is giving out the product for free to customers in order to show our appreciation for choosing the business! This has also worked splendidly in the past. The owner crooks can lambast all they want about stealing, but this is just giving the customer a bit more appreciation. Customer service is king – and especially under Global Monopoly Capitalism that truly rules our evil world.

Capitalism steals more than our wages. The system robs us through its flimsy tax scams, which we lower orders can never use, such as unemployment and social security money. In the United States, most employers reject the unemployment claims of fired workers most of the time – and the corrupt judges generally rubber stamp the boss’ dirty deeds. We can only receive some federal, state and city back taxes, if we make less than the poverty wage. Anyway, the poverty wage is so low that it exists as a worthless system for any wage earner.

The thugs in the US federal government are getting a little nervous however. They recently started an Earned Income Credit scam that allows the peons to keep a little crumbs from the ‘taxed money.’ Nice try. Those band aids never help.

Capitalism also robs the lowly paid wage workers grievously through stealing their surplus labor. Every day that we arrive to work and labor hard, we actually create a surplus product ready for sale. Our unpaid surplus labor creates a surplus of value, or wealth, for the owners. Yet, we only receive a low wage that barely pays for our dismal lives of bill paying, taxation and basic cost of living, such as food, housing and clothes.

Nowadays, many wage slaves have to work two or three jobs in order to live in an sub-standard apartment. Landlords have also become desperate within this capitalist shell game, and in many small cities and towns, ‘with jobs,’ they have lifted the prices for basic living into the American megalopolis price zones of New York and San Francisco.

Many Amerikan landlords have transformed themselves into property pimps who push anyone who can’t pay their exorbitant rents into the poorer or rural suburbs, such as the young, lumpen poor and minorities.  The displaced poor then have to flush their money into urban scam ‘public transportation,’ which costs more than actually driving a car around the city. Other wage slaves living in the more rural parts will have to dig deeper in their pockets for paying gas costs, state mandated taxes, state mandated insurance and auto part-repair bills. And these people still have to buy decent food, wear cool clothes – and possibly enjoy their scant leisure time.

The owners have successfully colonized and scammed our leisure activities. Most of our ‘fun activities’ cost something: bars, restaurants, cafes, concerts, festivals, amusement parks, outdoor sports, parties, lotteries-casino gambling, etc. We have to throw our money away to another group of owners in the ‘service industry,’ and whose members often represent the more noxious elements of the small business owner class. Going out and enjoying our lives, during ‘our time off,’ is not so cheap anymore.

We must structure our crowded lives around our ‘jobs.’ which slowly degenerate our meager existence. The boss-owner group can take off whenever he or she wants, and do whatever he or she wants during work hours: a golf game, a two-hour lunch, a visit to family, personal shopping, or even just a light nap or refreshing break. We continue working, and worst of all, the job steals away our precious personal time – and sadly, our fleeting youth. The owners makes the work-life schedules, not us.

The owner-bosses like to take multiple week vacations throughout the work year. Few wage slaves get the old, two-week paid vacation from the distant past. If you ask for it, it tells the boss that you want fewer hours – and he or she will soon terminate your employment.

Most wage work doesn’t even have work contracts anymore. The owner can fire the employees at will, and they often do just that – for whatever reasons. There are so many other wage slaves, and especially young ones, banging on the doors. The owner can just go down the list and call up the most pliable worker.

In some service professions in the US, such as restaurants-bars, distributing centers, cleaning services and construction-repair work, the bosses have a massive pool of illegal immigrant workers to exploit. Other businesses can use a pool of legal, foreign visa students-workers. The owners inside the education, nursing and software industries exploit this privilege all the time. I have yet to see the federal, state or local governments punish those dishonest owner crooks who prefer to hire non-Americans. If you can hire a foreigner to do the same job, worker harder, and for less pay – than why not?

Ultimately, more and more owners refuse to pay the full amount of salary when they fire employees, or when the employees quit. Fighting for the rest of the pay is simply not worth it, since the legal system always backs up the owner class, and the proof of outright theft is on the employee. How many employees have the time or energy to fight back? If the wage slave does not have any family money to help him or her, then he or she had better find another crushing, soul killing job – or he or she will then join the ranks of the homeless ‘bums,’ or drifters.

The worst part of the story is still not over. As this Global Monopoly Capitalist system becomes more outrageous and more brutal, so there emerges a smaller pool of available jobs. The only jobs left will be those high paying administrator-commandeering manager-executive class jobs. Those people do no useful work whatsoever, except attend meetings and pass e-mails. Those jobs are for the people who have attended highly rated universities and have some wealthy family contacts. This leaves the rest of us thrown into the Capitalist Maelstrom.

The lucky ones will have some important manual skill where they can find work as ‘independent contractors’: electricians, builders, plumbers, welders, or simply fix-it-all, jack of all trades, people.

For the rest of us, losers, the future enters a biting darkness. I include myself in this group, since PhD bums in history were stupid enough to believe that there were jobs for intellectually smart-street wise dummies. In the past there were job prospects, but the sociopaths that hold power in the Amerikan Empire don’t care anymore. Why should they? Most PhD recipients have transformed themselves into pathetic cowards. How can any PhD with any sense of honor and dignity work as an adjunk, part-time teacher for less pay that any McJob dweeb?

What can we do to forestall such a monstrous future waiting for us?

We must embrace the Class War, since the elites, the top owner class within the boards of directorships of the major corporations and banks, including their top political class minions, have already declared war against us – from the beginning of human history. Before it was the master-slave relationship, now it is the owner-wage slave relationship.

We have only two choices ahead. First, We could bow our heads and keep looking for different work situations, and if we have family money to help us out, then we can survive with odd jobs.

The other option is that we can reject work altogether and just become traveling bums or drifters – like the hobos of the Great Depression. Yes, I mean drop out of the work force, travel around to different parts of the country, and find the odd job for some desperate cash.

Yet even this old ‘job search’ system is dying. Most of the ugliest, slave-like jobs either require a background check of a few pages, inclusive of a drug test, or they are only reserved for the illegal immigrant slaves who will desperately do any job, including septic cleaning and slaughterhouse killing.

The Class War continues: always and forever!

 

 

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #10: talking about a what revolution?

In our modern languages, most words have multiple meanings, often depending on the context of the phrase. Most historical events share similar aspects to the words we use within everyday language. Historical events change their shape and significance depending on the perspective of the writer or the artist.

Revolution has represented one such word used throughout modern history. Some writers and historians have also used it to describe momentous events during ancient history. The ancients around the Earth would have agreed that changes in power and governance had similar momentous effects as celestial revolutions. The gods had their struggles, victories and defeats, and so did the temporal powers on Earth, such as empires, kingdoms, ethnic groups, families and heroes.

Our English word for Revolution comes from the Old French word, ‘revolucion,’ referring to the movement of celestial bodies, while the word originally alluded to the Latin, ‘revolvere,’ the actions of ‘turning and rolling back.’ A good example has symbolized the movements or revolutions of the Sun in our solar system within the Milky Way Galaxy, all within our cluster of galaxies, and somewhere within in our section of the Universe.

The Sun has around a 365 day, 24 hours per each day, elliptical revolution around the planet Earth, which creates the diverse regional climate and floral seasons inside of our cyclical years. Our climactic seasons are revolutionary, but they always return and roll back. Winter hits dreadfully, spring opens up, the summer heats up, and the fall-autumn brings in the harvest and new directions. Here we have our cyclical revolutions, which also correspond to one of the six truths of history: all things come into being and then pass away.

Thanks to the modern ideology of Liberalism, some European and Euro-American intellectuals have hijacked the term, ‘revolution.’ This simple term now carries a lot of loaded meanings and significance. Many people in Europe and within the post-colonized zones around the world: the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania, now solely use this term with its newer political meanings.

According to the Liberal authorities, the word Revolution applies specifically to political meanings, signifying dramatic changes in the political landscape, or the State, or the particular Government holding power. These pseudo-experts move even deeper into the total terminology.

Revolution also implies a significant change in power relations, not just in the makeup of the State, but also in the wider society and culture. The Liberal junta has told us that ‘the revolution,’ is something akin to a political-economic-cultural super event. The political revolution changes everything from the mentalities of the people to street fashion, from political cataclysms on a specific date to changes in family relations or social morality. Liberal academics have even equated cultural changes throughout human history, as bursting originally from political revolutions or super event changes.

This is false and it is bad history. Unfortunately, the Liberal elites and their ideological followers have won the recent wars of history, i.e. World I and II, and so they have been able to manipulate the historical writing too.

I am also a historian, and I will correct those bumblers in this blog. Revolution is a change, but it is often a faster change than the long changes throughout human history, such as evolutions, and which are often more historically significant. Political revolutions only change the form of government or the face of the State. The tyrannical nature of the State always stays intact and acts with full criminality, revolution or no revolution.

Human history shows both evolutions and cataclysmic revolutions, but a revolution is simply an evolution that bursts forth out in the open. Think on our natural Earth: avalanches, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and severe earthquakes. As long as we have an Earth, the evolutions and revolutions will continue to turn and roll back around. Such is the cyclical birth, life, growth, decline, death model that all living beings face. So what’s the big deal about revolution?

The ideological subsets of Liberalism, such as Leftists, Progressives-Socialist types, Conservatives-Reactionaries, including the lunatic fringe, Marxist sects, still harp on the word, revolution. All of these ideological gangs enjoy writing about ‘the coming revolution, the decline of the American Empire and the upswing in revolutionary activity, and that a revolution is coming our way.’ Will these ideological fire screamers ever stop proclaiming the imminent second coming of the Great Revolution?

Of course, there have always existed the multiple political flare ups representing riots, rebellions, revolts, skirmishes, hot and cold wars, wars of attrition, global world wars, violent attacks, uprisings, mutinies, insurgencies, coup d’états, overthrows, disorders, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, dissidence, defiance, resistance, countercultures, strikes, sedition, subversion, regime changes, occupations, invasions, sabotage, and seizures of power. As long a the human condition under civilization excretes, these dreadful and pathetic political cycles will never change.

A short review of the putrid annals of world history is in order. Before delving into such a historical mess, as an Anarchist doctor historian, I have noticed that the whole Revolution cult has been quite Eurocentric. Most of the more notorious Revolutions in modern history deal with European powers or with post-colonized countries, such as Mexico, China, Iran and Bolivia.

In the ancient world of kings, queens and authorities, there were no revolutions, only palace coups, assassinations of tyrants and military downfalls of once powerful empires. Revolution has seemed to exist solely for ‘the strong and powerful European.’ It has had something to do with a successful overthrow of a previous regime, and it has been a part of modernity, or whatever that means in our current world.

The first historical allusion to the term of revolution came out of the Reformation Protestant revolts in Europe during the decade of the 1570s. A French political philosopher and historian, Jean Bodin, described the previous political and economic tumults in Germany as types of prerevolutions.

The Protestant Movement was revolutionary when it began and it did successfully ally with most of the German states in the Holy Roman Empire. However, it soon became part of the European reaction against further ‘revolutionary actions,’ such as repressing peasant revolts, real democratic representation and end to usurious taxation, egalitarian Christian communities, and full religious toleration.

The Protestant authorities became some of the most heinous murderers of dissident women, labeled ‘witches,’ during that historical period. The Protestant Movement was revolutionary in the beginning, but once it seized power within the Holy Roman Empire, the Movement debilitated any revolutionary sentiments permanently, while it helped create new imperial powers, such as Prussia.

In Early Modern Europe, the main European powers also began to label their mercantile capitalist-murderous slave plantation systems as revolutionary. The English described the non-violent overthrow of the Catholic monarch, James II, and the parliament coup d’état of Protestant William of Orange and Mary Stuart as ‘The Glorious Revolution of 1688.’ Meanwhile, white slavers continued to kidnap and sell the poor English, destitute Irish people, and later, thousands of kidnapped Africans, so they could work and die horribly in the American plantations.

On a beautiful August day in 1772, the Swedish king, Gustavus III, simply called in his army, surrounded the parliament building, and the legislative cowards caved in without any violence. Liberals hated him because they said he ended the so-called Age of Liberty in Sweden, yet most Swedes knew that the Age of Liberty was only for the aristocrats and the wealthy bourgeoisie. His act was revolutionary, but did it really change the lives of most Swedes?

And there was the Revolution of Revolutions, the French Revolution. This Revolution was truly revolutionary in the beginning. It did guarantee freedom of religion and association, eliminated feudal privileges and land extortions, pledged citizen equality before the law, created a representative republic, and it abolished African slavery in the colonies. However, like all government hacks, it resorted to anti-subversion campaigns, called the Terror, and it stopped at equality of gender. Eventually, this Revolution would terminate in the Napoleonic Empire, and eventually, a horrid invasion to restore African slavery against the Haitian Revolution of 1791.

And there’s the American Revolution. The revolutionary Constitution of 1789 still stands today, yet the federal government and most state and municipal governments simply ignore it, while corrupt judges write precedents that twist its meanings in order to further government power.

Mexico had an official Revolution starting in 1910 with Madero’s election campaign. If a historian would compare Mexico 1910 with only a hundred years later – Mexico 2010, then the descent of Mexico into absolute horror is plan to see. Bolivia also had a revolution in 1952, called the ‘National Revolution.’ Yet, in the 1970s-90s, a succession of right-wing military dictatorships destroyed the country all over again. Some Peruvians describe the coup d’état of the Christian Socialist, military general, Alvarado, as a type of Revolution in 1968. There are also the various Argentine revolutions: San Martin and 1810, the Peron-Evita regime in Argentina during the 1940s, the recent conflagrations in 2001.

Later in Latin American history there is the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979. Almost all the post-colonized countries of Latin American have experienced some types of revolutions. Revolutionary changes, yes, yet has real freedom been able to flourish?

World history has two Chinese revolutions: the Nationalist of 1911 and the Communist of 1949. Russia also had two revolutions, 1905 and the Bolshevik coup d’état of 1917. Royal Thailand had a revolution in 1932 – yet kept the royalty. Ireland has had various revolutions against its same mortal enemy throughout history in 1641, 1798, 1848, 1867, 1916 and 1969.

France has also had its various revolutions: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871 and 1968. The Spanish military revolt in Africa, in political alliance with the Carlists and the Fascist Falange, referred to its rebellion as the ‘Nationalist Revolution’ versus ‘The Spanish Revolution,’ proclaimed by Leftists, Socialists, Anarchists and Marxist Revolutionists in the 1930s.

How many hundreds of recent revolutions have taken place in decolonized Africa and Asia?

How many of them died in their bile and blood, and how many were successful in seizing the state – and now the most important question of all – how many actually changed the lives of the poor and the suffering, often in whose the name the revolutionists had originally fought for?

What are the actual differences between a revolution and a civil war, or a revolution and an armed rebellion, or even a left-wing revolution and a right-wing revolution?

First, we Anarchists need to get rid of the cult of the Revolution, which we have infected ourselves through associating with Leftists. Our Modern Revolutions are not real revolutions at all. A change in the makeup of the state is not a revolution; it is simply a state changeover. A revolution is a quick change, turn, movement, or circle that returns to some previous stasis of power. In the case of the state, it follows The Who song, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again: meet the new boss, same as the old boss..’

The new state might have started out as guerrilla revolutionaries in the mountainous forests, but all states, in the end, share that common and continual war against their own subjects or citizens once they have seized power. They must institute some form of social control in order to maintain political legitimacy and continue to hold their sacred power.

The Marxist vanguardist party deception of ‘the masses’ is a blatant lie too. Most subject and citizen people don’t care about the revolution. They only want to survive and see their families survive, which in itself is a noble calling. Only powerful minorities make a state changeover. These powerful minorities often come from some faction within the same elites that they wanted to overthrow in the first place. Why do they want to overthrow their fellow elites? Because throughout world history, certain elite factions have often declared war against other elite factions. The revolutionary elites are the usually ones at the loser end.

There are true revolutionary actions, such as standing up to the boss or any government thug. These are revolutionary, and there are many ways to do it, such as Cop Watching, Squatting city owned abandoned buildings, Giving customers free samples to destroy the bosses’ profits, Boycotts and Disinvestments, and there many other creative strategies found in the annals of resistance history.

Finally, there will never exist any future revolutionary utopia. Nothing will ever change through any state revolution or any state turnover. The only true, ultimate revolutionary action will have the human race kill each other off and die out like the dinosaurs. Just look at history for your answers.

I must also admit that there will never be any true Anarchist free society in the future. There were Anarchistic societies in world history, such as the Bedouin warriors of Islamic world culture, some of the ancient Celt and German warrior nations on the European peninsula, the ancient Berber warrior nations in the mountains of North Africa, the Aboriginal cultures of Oceania, the warrior Malay cultures living within the forests of the Kalimantan peninsula, the Bushmen and Hottentots in southern Africa, the Mongol-Turkic warrior people of pre-empire days, and the warrior-hunter Native nations in the western hemisphere.

Unfortunately for our Native warriors, the all-powerful state-empire, exterminated and mutated their souls transforming them into reservation-captive nations. Any attempt at recreating such free cultures will result in another terror of previous extermination campaigns. We cannot fight the imperial state in open combat and hope to win. We will all lose horribly.

We are also conditioned against resistance due to the ubiquitous culture of technology fetishes and our permanent separation from the Earth. Humanity has permanently lost its dignity. As the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen,’ song so eloquently stated, ‘We’re the poison in your human machine.
 We’re the future, your future – No future for you…’ Johnny Rotten was right.

There was no revolution, there is no revolution, and there will be no revolution. There is simply change, whether it erupts violently, or it forms gradually. Human culture changes throughout the long and brutal reign of time, history and certain death. This is what we have waiting for us in our future.

As Anarchists, what we could strive for instead is revolutionary autonomous action. This means standing on our honor like the knights of old. We can further resist all injustices, while using creative methods of resistance. Ultimately, we can embrace the courage inside of all of us to fight with whatever weapons available – until our deaths – and against all powers and authorities, whether revolutionary or not.

 

The Amerikan Empire VIII: Diseased Culture

In the contemporary USA there is a serious subculture that mixes together gun owners, actors and historians. They call themselves the reenactors. These historical period actors represent the aficionados of old military costumes, weapons, and martial movements. They regularly follow the sacred dates of battle memorials. Other tasks include interpreting for museum exhibitions and extras for historical episodes on cable TV. They do reenactments at historical sites, while replaying personal battle accounts. They truly do live the history and experience the combat flutters – even without the dead and mangled human bodies lying around them.

Across this United States, there are thousands of local historical societies doing their parts for regional memory. There also thousands of mini-museums, which feature glass cases of local artifacts and human stories. There also exist live nostalgia sites, and especially in the West and in the South, featuring dudes and gals dressed up in historical costumes. Along the ‘done up’ stage, tourists can see the period furniture, walk in the local stores, and visit the bars and restaurants. They can also watch the dressed-up people ‘doing their stuff the old way.’ We should not forget the medieval lore of Renaissance Festivals too. No other nation on Earth has so many museums – and museums for every imaginable taste inside of our tiny Earth universe.

Museums were actually a new invention to the human condition. Museums were not part of the large urban dynamic until the late 1700s, eighteenth-century. People hadn’t the need for museums during most of human history. Life, art, conflict, love and death were all around them. They just didn’t need a special space in order to experience their lives. The actuality of living worked fine – filled with surprises, sublime joy and tragedies.

The official founder of museums was none other than the ego-maniac dictator of the French Empire, (1798-1815), Napoleon Bonaparte. Like a good state thug, he just stole the grand art works of Italy, especially some of the more famous paintings, after his army had invaded the country. His army transported them to Paris, and then placed most of them inside an old Royal Palace in Paris, called the Louvre. Now every major and minor city across the world – has its very own, sacred ‘museum’ space. Bad habits are certainly addictive. But the irony of ironies, art mausoleums of the dead, commonly called, ‘museums,’ have become synonymous with modern, high culture.

Returning to the American reenactors, they generally prefer particular reenactments. Their favorites are two wars in US history: the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. How many reenactments does one see representing the War of 1812 or the Mexican War? There is a definite reason for the reenactors’ preferences.

They prefer these two wars because they exemplified the good side to American culture: the right to complete and total personal freedom, and the cultural action of honor to defend such rights. The reenactors don’t just act and play for the sake of historical posterity; they also reenact because contemporary Amerikan culture represents the direct opposite of true freedom – and the fight for one’s honor to defend it. Only small sections of the American South still give obeisance to the cultural value of honor.

American culture has always had a terrible link to cruelty, but over a hundred years ago, true liberty and the defense of honor made the American a respected world citizen, violently birthed out of a newly created republic. Americans shared these values with most of the nations of the world. Nowadays unfortunately, only the day-to-day cruelty remains.

Global monopoly capitalism, state-public-coerced schooling, corporate media-advertising-Hollywood garbage, the prison-gulag, ‘legal’ institutional powers, the ultimate police-gang state, and the military-spy-industrial-war complex have all done their insidious parts in transforming American society into a low and diseased culture. Due to this terribly diseased state of Amerikan Imperial culture, the Empire is rotting from the inside. The terrible news is that the sociopaths that hold and manage political power in the States – also know this.

Actual American culture features the horrible diseases of immaturity, boredom, indiscretion and ignorance, mostly due to Amerikan public schooling and the corporate media TV-Hollywood junta. Watching the momentous crap on American cable television, from reality TV shows, to making money shows, to TV shopping channels, can convince even the most patriotic observer on the actual cultural rot.

The other current diseases in the culture represent gluttony, fear-distrust, frustration, and explosive anger: all of which come from extreme monopoly capitalism. Mention leads to the obesity epidemic, the fast food nightmare found in every town and city in the States, the overuse of psychotropic medications that lead to mass shootings, and the street hustling and petty crime that plague most of America’s cities.

The most life threatening disease found inside the culture is cowardice. This mortal killer comes from decades of succumbing to the authoritarian police, militarized surveillance state.

The word ‘culture’ originally comes from the word, agriculture. Just like people use the earth to create foods, cooking and the arts of the table, culture owes its first connections to the holy earth. The most durable cultures have always been the societies that have used the earth for their daily benefits, and yet they have also respected the earth and taken care of it. They understood the balance between use and abuse. Their religious practices always referred back to the earth. We can think on the Native nations in the Americas before the arrival of the European invaders.

Yet, culture can also exist outside of any connection to the earth due to the human ability to mentally create, through both imaginative fantasy and the adoption of complex language structures and vocabularies. With the rise of monotheistic religions on the world stage, such as Christianity and Islam, human cultures created new arts, sciences, idioms and civil societies. These cultural changes help explain Modern Europe’s obsessions with its modern fighting words, such as language, class, people, race and nation. As long as there exists the concept of ‘Europe,’ these fighting terms will not go away any time soon.

I remember when I lived in Europe, a few Europeans had stated to me that America had no culture. Compared to their thousands of years of conflict and history, American culture did not come close to the high levels of Europe. However, every subgroup, region, city, society, club and clique has a culture, even if it is a superficial or weak one. The difference in cultures relate to the various cultural levels, whether high or low. There do exist hierarchies of cultures. And cultures, like the earth and people, can get infections diseases – and even epidemics. This is the current, unfortunate state of the Amerikan Imperial culture.

A very good way to measure the general culture level, within a particular place or region, regards local festivals and celebrations.

One summer, I attended an annual festival in a small, western American town. The weather was beautiful and I was looking forward to feeling the magic of the small town west. What I received instead was lots of boredom, fear of controls and ignorance about the actual history of the region. I didn’t learn anything new; although, there were lots of vendors trying to get me to spend a lot of money.

I heard there was a night concert downtown, so I walked around the downtown area, and found out there was no concert at all. Apparently, the town politicians mandated no loud music after sundown in the fear of attracting people drinking alcohol and having fun. The next day, I walked around the downtown area again, and all I saw were stands, either selling local junk trinkets or genetically modified laced greasy, fast food. I also spotted the traveling carnival rides. Almost all the locals walking around were either fat or obese.

The rides were mostly nausea producing machines, meaning they moved round and round and round, while the rest of the carnival structures featured ‘carnival games,’ or really scam productions to steal people’s money, like throwing a heavy ball into a small, tilted basket, all in order to receive cheap and bogus prizes. Even if the person wanted to just walk around the carnival, they still had to pay up front for just entering the festival zone. On one side street off the Main drag, I observed that there were more police walking around than actual locals. I was so scared of the police presence that I left the area.

I returned again, the next day, to experience the town’s premier music concert. I walked to the park off the main drag. As I stepped toward the park’s entrance, a security staff guy then approached me and told me that I had to pay a good amount of money in order to enter. He also said that I could only buy their overpriced alcohol from the inside vendors, and that they had to search both my body and personal bag for pre-entry. If I got too drunk, then the police would have to arrest me.

I was so shocked about ‘the rules’ that I waked away. I also noticed a heavy local police presence around the park entrance. As I looked over from the outside, the band arrived on stage, and when they started playing, the music was absolutely horrible. The band played Country music cover songs, with a background player for other instruments, such as piano, banjo or accordion, and the musicians used music stands, so they could sing the lyrics. I also noticed that the crowd was sparse and almost nobody danced, except for a few older couples. This so-called festival had a theme related to the town’s history, and yet, I learned nothing from this event. The festival was a bust – and so was the town.

This town was dying like so many other towns out in the American west, and it failed to reinvent itself in order to bring in more tourist dollars. That terrible festival represented the same terrible level of general culture found in the town.

No matter what the local politicians cook up in their deceitful minds, if the local town possesses a low culture, then the place is on the path of dying badly. During that particular festival, I experienced more fear, boredom, disgust and ignorance than anything else. I had really experienced some of America’s mortal cultural diseases.

This is the reason culture is so important to people around the world. Culture represents the totality of our body expressions, values, productions, actions, words and contradictions. Culture, like the planets around the suns, and the moons around the planets, revolves around our difficult lives. We all possess, live and create culture. And culture always goes through movement and changes, just like the universe. Finally, culture also has ties to conflict and resistance.

For example, during an annual religious festival, in the year 1580, in the town of Romans, France, the local people moved into revolt mode. The party started off with some hard-drinking and soon transformed into a liberating revolution!

In contemporary Amerika, some urban hipsters, intolerant leftists, rich liberals and other pathetic snobs like to focus their disgust on to the Revolutionary War and Civil War reenactors. Yet, it is truly their hypocritical, cowardly and low cultural lives that make most people gasp. As long as people breathe, they will create culture. The ones that move culture into resistance will create the highest and most powerful one. Meanwhile in the Amerikan Empire, the sociopaths holding power watch in fear.

As we Anarchists lose tolerance for the repetitive boredom, ignorance, and media fear campaigns vomiting out of the crap television programs, corporate radio broadcasts, and Hollywood movies – we can create alternatives spaces using similar visual mediums. As we perceive the endless public signs and billboards that advertise useless crap, threaten us, attack and harass our daily lives, we can avoid their public spaces and take alternative routes, poster or paint over them, or even take the small signs down. If a state or corporate-funded cultural space wants to rob us so they can make a cheap profit, then we can set up an another space open to marginalized forms of artistic expression – whether on a deserted sidewalk, in a basement or in a public park. The culture of resistance always breathes new life into the general revolution – and offers a marvelous and new sense of freedom.

We Anarchists have made the first steps in resistance and freedom just through our rejection of such a corrupt system. We understand the truth on both life and death, and we see through the sociopaths’ methods of social control and their criminality.

Movement and deep activity are what we are after.

Capitalism and Slavery United: one of our most enduring enemies

Exactly one hundred years ago, the state government of Colorado and the Rockefeller owned CFI company, (Colorado Fuel and Iron), committed an atrocity against poor striking workers – even before the Great Slaughter of World War I. This terrible atrocity possessed the infamous name of the Ludlow Massacre.

What was amazing about this particular miners’ struggle was that they represented various nationalities and cultures: Eastern European, German, Greek, Mexican, Anglo-American, Irish, Italian, New Mexican, British, French and even a few African-Americans. This motley ethnic group had finally had enough with the mining system practiced in the state of Colorado at the turn of the century.

America’s business elites had badgered the federal government for a more ‘disciplined and compliant’ workforce, so the US state apparatus willingly allowed millions of immigrants to enter its borders. The mine owners preferred to hire the newly arrived immigrants due to their willingness to accept low wages and that they all spoke different languages. Unions had troubles organizing against the mine bosses. Those mine bosses also built company towns. Sometimes they literally took over a town with a pit mine in it, and later, transformed the village into a mining town.

In the mining towns, the mine workers and their families lived in shacks without the basic hygienic systems. They had to pay high rents, and buy their basic supplies from the company stores, meaning clothes, foodstuffs and the basic articles for survival. The company stores nickel and dimed the workers on shelf items, and the workers had to use worthless company scrip papers. Sometimes, the mine company paid the workers in those worthless papers, instead of the regular notes.

Workers had to inform the mine company guards when leaving or arriving. The mine company guards ran the towns like the prisons. These legal criminals even murdered or tortured the uncooperative and rebellious workers in the dead of the night. There was really nothing the miners could do, since the main mining outfits had monopolistic owners, such as the Rockefeller family. The Rockefeller’s 40 room villa was all the way on the other side of the continent anyway – Tarrytown, New York!

Mining was a very dangerous job. The mining schedule was a seven-day a week back and neck destroyer that went from sun up to sun down. Back then, accidents, explosions and mine disasters were quite common. Miners died through simple overwork, lung emphysema, suffocation-drowning through getting buried alive or due to flash flooding in the tunnels, or just having their bodies blown into various pieces due to sudden explosions. There was no compensation for any mining accident. A dead miner had to pay for his own burial, or the other miners just threw the dead weight into the common garbage ditch.

In Ludlow, the miners and their families created their own alternative town. They armed themselves with guns, set up a functioning mutual aid system at the campsite, squatted on the land, and the men wore ripped pants, overalls, caps on their heads, and red bandanas around their necks. This was the true origin of the term ‘redneck,’ yet in the current Amerikan Empire, racists and reactionaries have taken the class war term ‘redneck,’ as their own.

The state of Colorado and the Rockefeller monopoly counterattacked with allowing the company mine guards to join the Colorado State Militia. They too had guns – and cannons – and bombs. On April 20th, 1914 they fired upon the tent colony and burnt up the Ludlow miners-squatters camp, murdering around 20 people, most of whom were women and children.

This was not the end of the story. The men of the red bandanas moved the offensive into the Colorado hills. They killed mine guards, worker narc-snitches, and mine pit bosses. The actual number of killed company thugs is still unknown to this day. The miner-guerrillas were so successful in exterminating the mine managers and company town goons that Liberal Democrap, President Wilson sent into federal troops to intimidate the fighters.

Soon, the IWW solidarity union, or the Wobblies, joined with the miner-fighters, while the Rockefellers tried their hands at ‘company unions’ in order to squelch the mutual aid and solidarity networks. Eventually, the mine owners had to settle for union organization with the United Mine Workers. Now the miner job pays well, has some worker compensation packages, and there are less mine pit hours.

The miners had moved onto the war of offense because they had nothing else to lose. They had realized that they had become wage slaves.

Capitalism owes its evil birth from the rotting flesh of slavery. Capitalism and Slavery are historically intertwined like moss growing on an old stone building. We understand this history of Capitalism thanks to the nineteenth-century intellectual, Karl Marx.

Karl Marx was however wrong about his general theories of history. Marx stated in his 1848 writings that all culture and history, called the ‘superstructure of society,’ came out of the ‘productive base of labor and work.’ This theory is incorrect. He was mistaken because he was a philosopher trying to become a historian. History is not a social science but an art of interpreting human struggles and violence. Like artists, humans simply create their own history, and make up their own culture.

Karl Marx was actually quite brilliant in describing the brutality of the capitalist system. Capitalism spreads like gangrene, and grows into monstrous monopolies, while it becomes ever more contradictory as it expands out into the farthest reaches of the planet. This tendency to overproduce, to over-control, and to over-extend leads into the contradictory world of class conflict over wage slavery.

Class conflict or class struggle is simply the continual and incessant changes coming from the owners-bosses in demanding more brutal work output from the workers. The owners want the workers to produce more and more until the poor laborers drop dead because the owners run the businesses for the sake of profit. ‘Profit’ comes from the French verb, ‘profiter,’ which implies, ‘to take advantage of someone.’

Yet the workers only want to work the least amount as possible, since they have to give up their lives, their time and their energy for a survival wage. This is the contradictory condition within all ‘businesses,’ both large and small, imprisoned inside the capitalist beast.

The worker or laborer transforms into the wage slave because he or she must have some income, or wage salary, in order to pay government taxes and rent-utility bills for shelter, and then pay for foodstuffs and clothes. Marx correctly surmised that all working people laboring for a wage have to then ‘sell themselves’ to the owners on the capitalist market. The owners hire managers or company commanders to hire out for them. The plantation boss used overseers to manage labor discipline. The wage slaves, like the slaves of ancient times, must willingly give up large portions of their personal time and strength in order to receive this survival wage or slave wage.

This particular labor-slave cycle continues until they are too old, badly injured, or simply worthless, within the general labor pool. Once they go, then the owner can easily find a younger and more compliant worker to replace the labor loss. When the slave never woke up from sleep or died while working, the plantation owner then visited the slave market for a replacement.

The company owner reviews the labor market through hiring managers that do the employment screening. It is the not the tyranny of useless money that eventually kills the spirit of the average worker-laborer-employee, rather it is the tyranny of the cruel labor market represented through a fetid pool of applicants.

The first capitalist systems in the late medieval period, such as Islamic culture and the Venetian Empire needed an easy and compliant labor source too. They used what all empires have used throughout history: the capture, kidnapping and slow murder of slaves. The Muslim caliphates raided the pagan coasts of East Africa and the Christian Balcans, while the Catholic Venetians raided Muslim and Orthodox Christian territories in Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and parts of North Africa. During the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, (1400s and 1500s), the newer Atlantic world empires of Spain and Portugal would also raid North Africa for a ready supply of slaves. Eventually they would both go deeper into the African continent.

The other Atlantic world empires followed them, such as the Dutch, (Netherlands), with France and Britain in the seventeenth-century, (1600s). Following the Brazilian Portuguese use of captured slaves from the Tupamori Nation, the Spanish soon became the leaders in the use of captured native slaves from the Mapuche Nation of central Chile, the Guarani Nation of Paraguay, and the Apache Nation in the Red Rocks, or ‘Colorado’ frontier of Nuevo Mejico, (New Mexico). In the 18th century, (1700s), the British Empire would even overtake both the French Empire and the Portuguese Empire in becoming world history’s greatest kidnapping-mass murder-slave trade potentate from Africa to Asia to the Americas.

This imperial political-economic system transformed into Mercantile capitalism. The royal state with favored investors, usually aristocrat-noble relations or court favorites, controlled joint stock companies and the profits of final sale. Meanwhile, the slave planters had to bear numerous credit-debts through purchasing slaves and dealing with cash crop fluctuations in the market, such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, tea, opium and cotton.

Due to this capitalistic ‘mercantile’ monopoly, a new group of outlaws emerged in order to take fast money and loot for themselves, commonly called back then, ‘pirates.’ But for the West Indian ‘white’ planters, slaves were an excellent resource because they could also resale such movable capital. In the case of the Africans, they were the victims of kidnapping slave traders in Africa, and they had no legal resources. They were socially dead human waste.

Britain was also notorious for using just as many ‘white slaves,’ as their ‘black or African ones.’ The white slaves were often the victims of kidnapping rings found all over England and occupied Ireland. When the white slaves began to fraternize with the African ones, then African slavery began to have more ominous, permanent tones.

Britain’s world-wide kidnapping-slave-mass murder system was so successful that it freed up a special commandeering class of scientists, inventors and investors to fund and experiment in technological advancement. It is no coincidence that during this same eighteenth-century, Industrial Capitalism came into fruition.

But the old system of plantation agriculture slavery in the American colonial-settler states, with its numerous inefficiencies and ugly brutality – had to go. Industrial capitalism valued the factory system, which produced a lot more, and hid its brutalities under smoke stacks and within inferno like worker dungeons. A new slave economy was necessary.

Instead of the owners paying for the worker-slaves’ crap food and flea infested huts, they could pay the losers a ‘wage.’ Now, the lowlifes had to pay their own way through life – and literally beg for a ‘job.’ They were technically free – but like any slave, they permanently lost their honor and dignity.

We have returned full circle to the slave trade of Ludlow. These terrible relations between capitalism and slavery still breathe their noxious fumes as I write.

Now capitalism functions under even greater duress, and its contradictions are so much more intense due to the actual extremes of global monopoly capitalism. Even the technically skilled or PhDs, such as myself, have to suffer under the indignity of permanent unemployment or underemployment. Billions of us currently experience life as capitalism’s victims. Even if we don’t work for ‘The Man,’ we still slave under the mental guilt of not having any good employment prospects. Unless we have family money to support us, we must continually resell ourselves on the slave labor market for survival.

If we really own property, which means no mortgage debts or property taxes whatsoever, then we are all technically homeless. We give dirty stares to the pathetic ‘home bums,’ or permanently homeless, on the street corners; yet, their numbers will only continue to grow. Some of us reading this essay, will also end our lives down there – dying slowly in the hopeless gutter.

For the rest of us that are ‘lucky to have work,’ our ‘freedom’ comes at a terrible price. A good chunk of our time and our lives goes to the owner’s personal profit margin, while our general quality of life suffers. We also live impaired under the political-cultural ideology of global monopoly capitalism, called Neo-Liberalism. Most of us live in overcrowded and unhealthy cities, where most of our ‘wage money’ goes into a toilet drain of rent housing.

In order to live economically, many of us have to consume crappy genetically modified food. Meanwhile, both our minds and stomachs have to tolerate regular scam artistry, ubiquitous, large public signs that warn and threaten with the smoldering potential of violent street crime. All of us must endure the institutional violence of petty felony laws, common deceitfulness between neighbors, continual advertising overload, and pathological lying from politicians. Like the old saying goes, ‘slavery has never ended.’

Anarchists of Action: Violence and Silence, the Death of the Ego-Self

I read some interesting articles on the international Anarcho-blogosphere about the need for more insurrectionary Anarchism versus the more middle class oriented, Civic Anarchism.

The Insurrectional Anarchist practices the original Class War methods of classical Anarchism, meaning Propaganda of both the Word and the Deed. These actions imply that the Anarchist reads and writes prolifically, and then proceeds into the insurrectionist mode. The insurrectionist mode involves industrial or commercial sabotage, firebombing work places and factories, destruction of targeted private property, attacking cops at protests, fighting back against Fascists at their demos, and killing selected targets from the elites and the powerful.

Some defenders of these methods call themselves Anarcho-Nihilists or Anarcho-Individualists. A few have even stated that their actions value more than their lives, and that imprisonment from the state becomes the beautiful moment of peace, and for a few, a true clarity of vision. They also state that the insurrectionist locked inside the prison inferno is truly free because he or she has no more fear of the State.

Civic Anarchism tends to exist in many urban centers of the ‘Western’ European and Colonial-Settler European regions, such as the Americas and Australia. The Civic Anarchist, and mostly associated with the Anarcho-Syndicalist, radical unionist bunch, reads and writes a lot, and then works within the system through ‘radical’ organizing. They eschew violence and often condemn the violence of certain Anarchists. The ‘civies’ might organize a workplace, or help out in a strike, but there is a lot more organizational tactics at work, such as endless meetings, writing articles for Indymedia, or setting up a benefit punk show for collecting more organizing funds.

According to the Insurrectional Anarchists, the Civic Anarchists play it safe like their Activist-Leftist, Middle Class counterparts. According to the hard cores, the Civic Anarchists are really Anarcho-activists, and they are not much different from the mortal enemies of Anarchists: the Marxist sect-ideologically crazy activists, with their ideological platforms and assemblies lasting over two hours.

The insurrectionists might have very good reasons to criticize the civic-minded Anarchists. Anarchy is not just talking at meetings and writing polemics. Anarchy also represents the actions of taking what is ours and attacking targets; however, the insurrectionists, like their civic rivals, are also guilty of too much talk.

Too many Anarcho-revolutionaries scream their violent works on their own websites and hard copy pages – and they have even given interviews related to ‘illegal’ activities to corporate news organs! A good example were some Eugene Anarchists that publicly proclaimed their resistance to the State and Capitalism after the WTO protests in 1999.

After their foolish interviews to the corporate press, the full violence of the State came upon them, and then a few Anarchists ended up doing some hard time in prison. While these same insurrectionists are often fanatics for ‘security culture,’ they have often broken their very same rules. Nothing is more damaging to any revolutionary group than having boasters and blowhards scream about their ‘actions’ against the enemy.

I have also read uncountable declarations on the Internet blogosphere, mostly coming from particular Anarcho-gun owners, stating that they were ready to violently throw down against the US government if they try to take away their guns. Oh really? Are those armchair tough guys going to risk it all when the SWAT team thugs show up at their front doors? It is one thing to write the tough words on the Internet, and it is quite another thing to actually engage in a heated gun fight with the authorities.

All of those hard cores know full well that the state spies and police forces are also listening and reading their pronouncements. In the dangerous world that we live in now, one simple slip of the tongue, and often a person goes down. Sometimes, the civic-minded Anarchist that printed the insurrectionist diatribe in his or her written format, whether electronic or paper, represents the one that pays dearly. Other times, the insurrectionist falls into his or her own imprudent post-action actions. The state authorities don’t care much either way, because at least they have found another enemy to destroy who is against the legitimate authority of the state.

Anarchists ought to remember the first rule of any organization antagonistic to the state: silence. For example, the Italian Mafia has always had its code of ‘Omertà,’ and the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Eastern Europe had the code of “Mesirah.’ The Gypsies have also used their code of silence against harassing state bureaucrats.

The Anarchist community has to abide in the code of silence. Silence has generally related to the first law of both prudence and maturity. We also have the old saying, ‘silence is golden.’ If an Anarchist has committed a propaganda of the deed, then the Anarchist must never talk about or refer to the past event – ever again. After an action, it is even best to stay away from friends and alcohol for a few months, so that the boasting, imaginative mind never tempts the loose, undisciplined tongue.

Most importantly, we Anarchists ought to realize that the mental concepts of our selves are illusions. We have our likes, dislikes, cares and preferences, but just like human culture throughout the various ages of history, all cultures change. So do we. We are not the same people that we were ten years ago, and definitely not twenty years ago. Yes, we do have similarities to those ancient selves of ours, yet we are now a different breed.

Even with these changes, our egos often get in the way of clear thinking. We often surmise that both our personal views and words are truth, while our perceptions are the absolute truth. We often dwell too much on the personal mind garbage. Instead of letting go, we get bogged down inside our recurring thoughts.

Unlike the Marxist sectarians, Anarchism contains some marvelous diversity within its methods. Squatters who take over an abandoned building and open it up for the homeless and vagabonds are doing a great work too. They have fixed up an abandoned property left to rot by some property pimp, and now they can live freely without the common anxieties of having ‘to make rent payments,’ or relying on the landlord to fix the problems. Other residents that have had to pay rents, have seen such successes, and they would also want to enter such living arrangements.

There are other methods that have worked splendidly, such as living in trees to save a forest area, video exposures on the cruel methods of factory mass murder of animals for cheap meat, corporate billboard sabotage, cop watching on a Friday night, setting up a spontaneous street party in a busy intersection, such as Reclaim the Streets, or camping out in a park right in the heart of a large, corrupt mega city, which led to the Occupy movement. All of these tactics have worked and they will continue to work because they have used the greatest powers of the Anarchist, direct action and mutual aid.

As long as we Anarchists keep up the diversity of our work, we will continue to be old nails on the floor for the creeps of the State. We Anarchists are not criminals however, nor should we glamorize muggers, petty thieves, robbers, looters, wise guys and con artists. Unlike them, we fight to build a better world for ourselves. The criminal elements only want their inflated egos caressed. Their worlds are only for themselves – and themselves alone. There is an old saying, ‘there is no honor among thieves.’ This is also the truth.

We can kill the obsessions with ourselves, keep up the revolutionary work, and finally, keep our mouths shut – bearing our secrets forever, while simply holding on to our reserve and dignity. The state authorities and the elites will definitely persecute us, but the invisible barbed wire of silence, coolness, and a noticeable lack of ego trips will weaken all of their insidious methods – security culture or no security culture.