The Anarchists’ Most Dangerous Enemies: Leftist-Progressive-Activists

Nobody wants enemies, and life is often hard to live through as it is. The evil in our contemporary world increases faster and exponentially by a thousand fold, as do the desperate enemies against humanity’s fleeting happiness. Unfortunately, there also exist distinctive persons whose dark desires find their fulfillment in the coercive powers of the State.

These dissemblers seek to rule over others, to bully, to mandate, to invade, to war, and direct, administer, legislate, oppress and control, commit legal crimes, and even get away with the horrifying acts of legal theft, rape, torture, mutilation and murder. We didn’t come into this Earth with such dire prospects, but this monstrous of life spits out its venom plainly – unto the very entirety of Earth’s inhabitants.

A few years ago, in the very large cities of the United States, thousands of Americans, in true Anarchist style, took over public parks, or really privatized-state owned parks, within the downtown or central areas. Like good Anarchists, and even if they weren’t Anarchists, they set up food-ration stations, ad hoc libraries, open artist studios, and medical spaces.

These people maintained functioning urban camp sites right within the centers of the Amerikan Empire’s megalopolis centers, such as NYC, Boston, Philly, D.C., Los Angeles, Denver, Oakland and Portland. They called themselves Occupy.

What was truly revolutionary about these acts was that it brought together unemployed PhDs with the chronic homeless, underemployed college educated, debt-ridden dropouts with travelers from the lumpen class, trailer park population. The campers radically claimed the public spaces that were supposedly in their name only. They ultimately understood that public spaces had always belonged to them – not to some distant owner ‘phantasm.’

The Amerikan Imperial State and their corporate media lackeys got hit with some heavy volts of scare and shock. The ‘Occupiers’ had succeeded in creating some revolutionary momentum, or as the revolutionary writer, Antonio Gramsci, wrote, the first and most important stage of any revolutionary action, The War of Position.

Yet, the Occupiers soon lost their momentum and their power. They handed it over to the State and then their fun times of squatting-camping transformed into dire defeatism.

Only a few revolutionaries took their actions to the next level, which was through opening up, and then squatting abandoned buildings, or repeatedly blockading and harassing downtown savage capitalism as usual. The reasons for the general defeats were not due to the winter cold weather, or the confusing Occupy signage and open assemblies that had no ‘common purpose’ – according to the corporate propagandists for the State.

The unfortunate reason fell again to the absurdity of human history. The Leftists-Progressives-Activists took over the energy, while transforming the joy, and then twisting the revolutionary momentum into the trite actions of political demonstrations, radical manifestos and three-hour long meetings arguing over pathetic agendas and personality cults. Like rats to a dumpster feeding frenzy, Marxist ideologues and other university ‘educated’ Leftists-kooks tried to ‘direct’ the revolutionary exhilaration into their perverted visions of a ‘United Left’ force.

Democratic party hacks had earlier visited the public occupations in order to direct the protests against the Republicans, but their lowlife tactics were too obvious for the occupiers. Even US government plants with outrageous signs at their protests didn’t work. But like always, the Leftist cabals finished the dirty work for the Amerikan Empire ruled through sociopaths.

Since the birth of the Anarchist ideology during the mid nineteenth-century, around the 1860s, our most fearsome and persistent enemies have been the noxious cabals, alliances, sects and cults of Leftist diarrhea mouths, Marxist vanguard party lunatics, Progressive university-associated weirdos, Social Democratic Liberal mouthpieces and other radicalized political kooks from the Left Spectrum.

As Anarchists, we must never lose sight of this. As in Russia 1921, Spain 1937, and in the US in 2011, these dangerous two-legged animals have ceaselessly come for us. We must always resist their penetrations, manipulations, and intrusions into our actions, and if the case justifies, defend ourselves, both our honor and dignity against any of their violent tactics.

Are not the Fascists, the Zio-Nazis, the Neo-Cons, the Amerikan Empire supporters, the super patriotic flag wavers, the right-wing nutters, the political reactionaries, the so-called ‘Conservatives,’ or the Christian religious fanatics, are most pressing enemies? The answer is no.

Any Anarchist with some political sense and historical sophistication knows exactly what those groups stand for. They simply state the obvious: they desperately want to murder and physically destroy any resistance to their authoritarian desires in snatching control of the State. Like the Leftist cliques, their ends and means are the same: seize and run the State for endless war and for their favorite corporations.

The important differences between the Fascists and the Leftists are that the right-wing wackos are completely honest in their goals. The Left-wing wackos are not, and this explains their most pressing danger to any Anarchist actions or activities.

The Leftist activists will join our revolutionary festivals, talk the same game against capitalism and the State, and then suddenly, they will try to create a little mini-state within our spontaneous momentum. They always destroy the fun, since they didn’t lead the revolt in the first place – so it doesn’t deserve to succeed anyway.

Most of those Leftist-Progressive-Marxist mad dogs are not from the working or lumpen social classes either. They have often come out of the middle classes, the upper middle classes, the commandeering-managerial classes, and a few have even emerged from the political-economic elites. Che Guevara came from this class, as did Vladimir Lenin, and as did the turncoat radicals, ‘guerrillas,’ in the US during the 70s, the Weather Underground. How funny that a few of those Underground activists have the joined the ranks of cowardly, American university professors, all after their ‘radical stints’ fighting the system.

Some of these Leftist-Activist frauds will often public decry violence and they specially fulminate against the violent Anarchists; while at the same time, they accept the everyday structural violence that heavily inflicts the poor. These same buffoons often espouse a type of extremist pacifism – except if it is another ‘cool’ revolutionary that doesn’t affect their own comfort world, such as the Greek anarchists or Che Guevara in the jungle brush of Cuba.

The reason for their abject hypocrisy is because they have never suffered like the poor. They have always had a back door of escape, whether through surplus capital, family connections or through their elite university educations. These armchair revolutionaries love to manage and mandate because they are often first-rate cowards, always afraid of losing their comfort zones and actually engaging in the hard life of discipline and combat.

These Leftist-Marxist sects would like nothing better than to have some military force burn us all at the stake as the Christian Inquisitors previously did with the heretics and witches. If they could dispose of us through other legal, deceitful methods, they would do it. And they have committed such horrible crimes against us Anarchists throughout recent history.

Unfortunately, their methods have often worked. Most Anarchist factions that I have encountered have been small, clique-like groups that have acted just as morose, weird and intolerant as their Socialist-Communist competitors. They sit at their table stands with nasty glares trying to ‘sell’ their ‘literature,’ and often during punk shows or at political rallies. What were the differences between the latter group of Anarcho-Leftists, the miniscule Communist sects, and the Evangelical Christian cult tables that one generally encounters on university campuses and at other public events?

The revolutionary Karl Marx tried to expel the Anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, from the First International in regards to the future Class War. Marx’s defamations against Bakunin were intense and vicious, and like usual, they worked. From the beginning, these Activist hard cores have hated us. We Anarchists just don’t fit in so well with their demented nightmares of a Left coalition rallying around the State.

Some years ago, I visited a political rally in a park when I had lived in a hipster, pseudo-progressive, west coast city in the United States. The rally stage featured annoying speakers that loved to hear themselves speak, and other activist misfits. I also spotted the different Leftist and Communist sect groups and their tables. I first perused the Anarchists and their tables. As I walked around and peered at the literature, I was quite shocked by the nastiness of the table sellers – including the Anarchists. I further noted a table for the Democratic Socialists of America Club, (the Lefties of the Democratic Party), and I began to smile at their pathetic looking set up and overall lazy demeanor. Were these specimens of humanity ready to lead the next American Revolution? At least their open cowardice was honest.

I had thought that most Americans despised the Leftist-Activist-Progressive-Radical cults because they were simpleton, ignorant fools. But the truth was, and still is, that most Americans detest those miniscule Left factions because they have never been for real freedom. Instead, Leftist-Progressive radical coalitions have represented intolerant doctrinaires who care more about control and pettiness. The Evangelical Christian sects got their first licks in American culture, and so Americans are well-acquainted with weirdos, control freaks, and spiteful types over inconsequential issues.

These same dishonest and cowardly activists also want civilian disarmament and a state monopoly control of guns – so hopefully, they don’t have to do the confiscations once they ‘take power in the distant future.’ They continue to rail against all gun owners as closet right-wing fascists.

These furtive types also like to work in other cowardly professions, such as professors at universities, researchers at ‘not-for-profit corporations’ and they love the inconsequential work desks of our numerous institutional structures. Where snobbery, intellectual foolishness and cowardice mix together, these people tend to congregate and fester.

Recently, in another large city on the west coast of the USA, a Socialist sectarian actually got elected to the city council. This political opportunist used the old rallying cry of a 15$US minimum wage. Some cities already have high minimum wages for some workers, so this was nothing new.

The Leftist media outlets on the Internet immediately ran with the ‘victory story.’ They just left out the political details. The minimum wage hike would take effect over a certain ‘amount of time,’ and it would it only work in certain ‘industries and occupations.’ This same Marxist political faker made specific alliances with certain ‘small business owners.’ Finally, the ‘radical’ will receive a nice politician salary of six figures, while other local businesses, mostly in the hospitality services and social services sectors, will simply hire their friends and connections, rather than pay a higher minimum wage to an unknown. Global Monopoly Capitalism for the political-economic elites, and for the elites only – keeps on thriving.

Most dangerously, these Leftist Activist mobs prefer to support the criminal state versus their Anarchist rivals. When any type of pseudo-progressive government takes power within the duopoly scam political system, they will immediately rally and support the ‘progressives’ over the ‘reactionary right-wingers.’ The moderate centrist, sell-out candidates utterly hate the Leftist radicals – but they serve a good purpose in rallying the other Lefties to get out and vote for the political scam artist.

In regards to the Amerikan Empire under the rule of Sociopaths, this political scenario has become extremely dangerous. Already, both political parties are plotting their future ‘progressive candidates’ for the believing-ignorant public. A gay male fiscal Conservative and a soccer mom activist-Christian-light have been some of their feeble attempts in trying to publicly redeem both the Amerikan capitalist nightmare and the Amerikan genocidal Empire.

We Anarchists would never fall for such a trite political mechanism in redeeming such an evil system of rule. The corporate media propaganda will of course do its dastardly campaigns – but the Leftist-Progressive-Activist gangs have ultimately legitimized all the false change agents. These criminal activities in transforming a cruel and murderous system into something benign and good has represented their most heinous political activities.

The Amerikan Empire can never change, and nor will it ever change its criminality and just stop committing holocausts. No empire in world history has ever changed into a friendly community of autonomous societies, while no state apparatus has willingly handed over its unrestrained powers, and then closed shop for the sake of humanity. The only thing more addictive than opiates are the ambitious wills of politician-thugs in holding their political power with the immunity that goes with such power – all with the privileges that come in committing legal crimes.

We Anarchists know this truth. We have to spot these political cliques and warn others about them once they place themselves within our actions. Our Leftist-Progressive-Socialist-Activist enemies have held fast to their dishonorable plots disguised underneath their diseased political wings. For now, we Anarchists hold fast to our minds, honor and dignity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #11: The Perversion of the Modern City

 

Human civilization has made its own history through the tempests of culture and creation.

But with all of civilization’s benefits, humanity simultaneously cursed itself to permanent warfare. Warfare does not just exist on the battlefields with armies and weapons; it also functions inside the unjust and unequal distributions of class power within both society and culture. The warfare of urbanization has represented one of the most absurd attributes, whirling inside the tragic saga of the human condition.

Humans have left the sanctity of the land, the hearth, and the family, in order to transform themselves into subjects under the weary gaze of the rulers. The subjects receive a new identity, and yet they become targets for both the rulers and the enemies of the rulers. Wherever there are political rulers, there are always enemies. A minute faction from the subject population reaches into the ruling clique, while another minute faction joins the enemy camp.

Some human ideas have been beneficial to civilization, such as fire for culinary, metallic-sculpture and martial arts, and the wheel for transport, industry and the ceramic arts.

The human invention of urbanization helped deliver civilization to Homo sapiens sapiens. The urban subject no longer had the obligation to work inside the Earth and hunt for food. They could attend to their own private gardens and enjoy the bounty of culture found in the city.

But there was also a terrible price on their heads, and a nasty fear had piqued those very subjects. What if the rulers became tyrants and then decided to sacrifice their own subjects in order to hold on to their own power? What if the enemies of the rulers surrounded, starved out and sacked the city, enslaving everything away in chains – including the subjects private belongings, and even destroying completely people’s extended families?

One of Urbanism’s stage right onto human history represented the 6 century BCE. On the Gulf Coast of Mexico lived a great people, referred to later in history, as the people of the rubber, or the ‘Olmecs.’

The land was good. The warm, balmy climate offered an agricultural abundance, yet its tempests disciplined the cities. The winds could bite, and yet they spread their ethereal honey on the plants and maize. The rains sometimes drenched and drowned the unwary travelers. Plants still made love to the rain. The reeds were often harsh to touch, but they helped in maintaining the delicate balance. Everything drank from the earth’s sacred blood, and then it all cascaded deep into the rain’s sacred liquid pools.

In the Olmec world, an impressive city of stone had stood proud to the world, and it possessed a marvelous large pyramid of brown boulder rocks in the center. Around the pyramid were bulky grey temple structures and some thick quarry palaces for the ruler’s family, noble relations, and priests. The massive stone pyramid holding the dark glare, gave the subjects a sense of identity, and it seemed that the calendar rituals and religious festivals truly connected to the earth world at both the cave level and sky worlds.

Sacrificial bloodletting enabled the elites to perform the magic effortlessly. All subjects possessed their blood lines to the city’s elites, whether through artisan, merchant or farmer relations. Their blood ties also ran deep into three distinct categories: territory, family and service-labor obligations.

Everybody had their own economic niche and knew their place within the city. There were no vagabonds or beggars, and no one starved on the streets. There weren’t any issues with festering garbage refuse, nor with rampant disease. The city was actually quite small compared to modern standards. It only had a few thousand residents. But each resident existed as part of a grander family, and an even larger kinship group. Everyone recognized his or her own sacred hearth and home within the great urban polity. The Olmecs were living in an almost paradise.

Yet, the urban polity felt unsettled about the constant warfare, the enemies that led sudden attacks, or even the unknown wrath of natural disasters, such as storms, quakes and floods. Like all things in the cosmos, the times began to change, with war and disaster occurring more frequently and more devastatingly. What was actually changing, if the same rituals of sacrifice and devotions had always stayed the same?

The elite families could change the rules for obligatory labor services and tribute taxes. With the continual wars, they often did demand more from the subjects. Living in a great city was a divine gift, but at the same time, the subject lived in dread of the elites’ magical and violent powers. What if the wars led directly to them? What if the city had actually defeated the enemies, yet the enemies had already destroyed all the family and kin ties?

Better to live free and easy than under the tutelage of a powerful, military dynasty – even with all of the blood ties. The subjects slowly began to leave the cities. They preferred to farm out in the mountains, near the water sources, runs, and forest clearings. Eventually, more people began to leave the city for the basic freedom found in the abundant Earth. About two hundred and fifty years later, after so many more years of warfare and emigration, the magical and powerful city stood abandoned.

The ancient city had its days in the light of civilization, and even the ancient Olmec elites knew that their cities would die in the distant future – just like the old dynasties and the old, decrepit great grandfathers.

Our modern cities are vastly different however. These blights on humanity refuse to die and the political-economic elites that run such cities have used every conceivable criminal trick within the shadowy schemas of history to continue their misrule. Our modern monsters want their hells to live forever in order to burn and flay the ignorant and poor masses. And like always, they seem to get away with their horrifying games of corruption.

Our modern cities have become suffocating nightmares representing the perversions of global monopoly capitalism strangled with rampant state consolidation, street level criminality, institutional corruption, and city hall tyranny. Meanwhile, the urban subjects have to shame themselves continuously in watching the slow dying of the homeless, while enduring the public signs that threaten fines and imprisonment with those public, intrusive billboards that advertise useless crap.

Within the chasm of modern urbanism, most of us must deal with street hustling and the brutality of open poverty. Most terribly, the rulers constantly threaten their own citizens in demanding regular payments for all of this madness. The subjects must submit to unending and augmenting protection monies through rent paying, housing frauds, bad public transit, utility extortions, municipal and sales taxes, street fines, parking fees and wage slavery.

Meanwhile, the urban masses endure the miseries of contaminated dirt, household pests, rude behaviors, flim flam artists, common insults and reckless property pimping. The three wild animals that tend to survive in these environments are rats, cockroaches and pigeons. That our modern, urban populations do not end up as crazed lunatics on the streets, explains the marvelous surviving power of the human will under civilization.

Some crap historians have stated that this urban system of decay has always existed within human civilization. This is another abject and hideous lie. The Greek polis had only few thousand actual citizens. Ancient citizens fully participated in the life of the polis, whether at war, peace, festivals or simply speaking truth to power in the public markets and plazas. No citizen had to live a marginalized existence. Those cities were more like medieval monasteries without all the rules, controls, living in cells, and hiding away from the public. The Greek polis lived as a tight community of citizen-warriors-pleaders engaged in the full plenary of an urban, spiritual life.

The imperial Roman city had changed greatly since the days of Peloponnesian Wars in the Hellenic peninsula, (during the fifth century BCE), but the spirit of the polis still survived – and even as ancient imperial Rome, (around the second century AD), had reached a population level of few hundred thousand.

Urban Romans generally lived in two types of housing, either in the ‘domus,’ or a type of round-square urban house with a garden and front patio, or in ‘insulae,’ which were small apartments in block buildings. These homes had no glass windows and anyone could enter the domus patios and the insulae apartments. The Romans had little need for privacy because the Roman state did not imprison and murder their own citizens over personal conduct. People lived in the public realm because the honor of the community was more important for social cohesion.

The insulae dwellers did not pay our contemporary rent extortions as some historians have stated; instead, the residents of the insulae paid for their housing through labor or service obligations, within the personal political economy where the lesser clients worked for their wealthier patrons. Roman insulae dwellers received a regular dole of bread and some other foodstuffs for basic survival. No Roman complained about such a dole because an urban resident received the basic rights for survival and community support.

All Roman citizens could take part in the political and public life of the market, or the ‘forum.’ Citizens had the right to use the public baths and bathrooms of the cities, called, ‘latrinae.’ All citizens gathered their drinking water, cleaning water and community news at the public fountains. Roman public life also frequented the market stalls where each city street had a particular artisan craft on display, called ‘tabernae.’

Roman elites also built their far off cities, called ‘colonae,’ for a specific population size, and all urban citizens, whether soldier or artisan, possessed full inclusion within the greater urban life. Romanization was not just an arrogant Caesar conquering a territory, it also represented an inclusive, small city for all nations that desiring to live the Roman, urban, imperial dream.

How did our modern cities become the horrors of horrors that they are today? We can thank European imperialism and mercantile capitalism, with their invasions, prisons, epidemics, colonialism, slavery and mass murder, around the middle of the sixteenth-century, or the 1500s.

European Colonialism destroyed the ancient cities and the marvelous wonders around the world. It replaced them with the health horrors that still fester in our days. The European colonial invaders who hated washing and cleanliness wanted to infect the rest of the world with their own miseries. In that sense, they were successful.

The European colonial powers enforced mercantile capitalism through its brutal monopolies, massive land thefts, slave trading and export plantations that worked the kidnapped laborers to death. Mass kidnapping rings located off the coasts of West Africa could always replenish the exterminated labor pool.

European colonial statecraft set up the first prisons, Inquisitions, witch hunting tribunals, and other wondrous torture methods to scare the cowardly. European authorities imposed the first forced conversions in order to exterminate the native cultures. The European colonial city had thus transformed into cauldrons of sickness, disease and the bad death. And like all epidemics, they have spread out into the entire human world.

The European colonial elites further perverted modern urbanism through dividing the colonial city into racial caste and social class sections. There was one destitute section for the colonized victims and the other poor losers, where there was another nicer section, usually around the city center, for the colonial bureaucrats and military commanders, inclusive of wealthy slave traders and slave owners who owned their second homes.

We still see such eyesores today. We have our ghettos ransacked with no jobs or brutal jobs that pay badly, abandoned buildings, disease and rodent infestations, run down, street crime ridden sections of town, and next we have our gentrified, hipster zones where the easy job, six figure salary people enjoy clean, well-stocked supermarkets with eclectic cafe-bar-restaurants. The city’s government juntas don’t care about how many people move into their urban wastelands, which chew out their millions of victims. The more poor vermin that enter, the greater the slave wage, reserve army of labor population pool. These massive, megalopolis cities literally feed from the trough of criminal neglect.

Large cities that are also capital cities are even worse off than the megalopolis cities. A large population of the capital city essentially exists on state parasitism. These state spongers include paper pushing government bureaucrats, military, judicial, legislative managers, political executives, numerous guard-security-police forces, and other useless appendages, such as media hacks, corporate consultants and ideological front groups. They offer no useful skills to society whatsoever – except in maintaining the supremacy of central, state and municipal government power.

There is no hope in changing such blights on humanity and on the Earth. The smart losers become wiseguys, gangsters and street thugs, while the sad others have to either beg for the privilege of becoming a wage-rent paying slave, or the real unfortunates, sensitive others, just abandon all hope and wait to die horribly on the city streets. Suicide through urban neglect.

Many fall into the traps and permanent craters of modern, urban life. Some will die painfully from mental-physical illness, or they will become hopeless addicts partying on bad, cheap drugs. Some others just spend the rest of their days in the prison-gulag-concentration camp system. A few will make it as low-level, legal assassins for the state’s military institution. Eventually, poverty, war and misery will tear apart most of their fragile minds and bodies.

Living within our modern urban pits, the political-economic elites have continued their relentless war against us. We Anarchists know this truth and so we only have one option remaining: we must fight against such injustices through both our dignity and honor.

We can squat abandoned buildings. We could wheat paper and spray paint over their threatening signs, or we can set up spontaneous parties in the city streets. We might also set up free kitchens, guerrilla gardens, and feedings, or arrange a free, bartering market in a public park – or even occupy central city locations and make them our own domains.

We have only our personal wills to mental freedom – these gifts still remain with us.

Worlds of Pharmakopeia II: Cannabis Churning in the Mystical Orient

A cold wind was howling through the medieval streets of Rome during middle December. The days were real short. Darkness even shadowed the moon. This particular day was in the middle of the month, and the year was 1485. Christmas had its parties coming up, but the Pope Caesar had other nefarious plans tucked into his fat stomach. The sinister name of intolerance and hypocrisy was none other than Pope Innocent VIII, (the Eighth).

On this nefarious date he issued a strange papal bull against witchcraft and sorcery that seemed to infect the women of Europe, and especially the First Reich of Germany, bizarrely called, the Holy Roman Empire. This Empire was neither holy nor Roman.

Within this peculiar papal condemnation, he also cited the use of a demonic herb, called cannabis, often found, or imagined, in satanic religious rites. His informant-experts for these underground, conspiratorial satanic covens represented two German Dominican monks, Jakob Spengler and Heinrich Kramer. They would soon publish a nasty book, called ‘The Hammer of the Witches,’ which would help in the murder of close to 200,000 ‘witches,’ mostly marginalized women, during the next 250 years in Europe and in America.

Unfortunately for the plant ‘cannabis sativa,’ this strange and mystical herb from deep Asia, received the taint of evil with the papal stamp of approval. Yet, this same Pope Innocent the Eighth enjoyed some other mortal sins during his reign. He was obese and lived a life of extreme luxury inside the papal palace. He fathered two illegitimate children and had them married off into one of the strongest Families in Renaissance Italy, the Medici. He dipped some of the papal finances into the new Portuguese African Slave Trade. Meanwhile, he tried to revive the Papal Crusades of another Pope Innocent, in order to exterminate the Muslim Turks, the Protestant Waldensians in Northern Italy, and the Hussites in the Czech lands. All cannabis haters in history have shared three evil characteristics: intolerance, gross hypocrisy and state murder.

What is it about cannabis sativa that attracts such hatred and venom? The answer lies in its historical origins: the mystical rites for Lord Shiva and the Islamic Assassins in the medieval period. Cannabis still has these mystical, ‘orientalist’ associations to this actual day. Whether the foreign visitor enters the medinas of Morocco or the festivals dedicated to Shiva in India and Nepal, the scent of the cannabis herb inundates the consciousness.

From its evil oriental connections until its later appearances in the United States, cannabis would connect to a more infamous notoriety. African-American artists smoked the herb while they played their demonic, African sensualized beats, called jazz. Attractive white women even took off their shoes in the smoky clubs, and they danced with the demons. Mestizo, mixed race, Mexican fruit pickers and outlaws also smoked the leaf, called ‘mota,’ during their raucous partying. The dangerous, criminal classes, of course, used the oriental poison. The Amerikan Imperial thugs had taken notice. The historical hatred against cannabis has simply been another combined form of intolerance and murder.

Cannabis is actually a marvelous and natural soft drug. It relaxes and calms the mental nerves, and helps with bouts of nausea and gastrointestinal pains. Some doctors state that cannabis has other helpful healing properties. Cannabis can spark interior mental activity or engaging conversation. It stimulates the human appetites, both culinary and sexual. The drug goes perfectly with foods, entertainment, the arts and it especially compliments other natural drugs found on the Earth, such as alcohol, coffee and tea.

The only negatives to the drug are certain habitual users of it. It seems to have the similar effects of antidepressants on them, which produce lethargy, ego self-obsessions, or minor neuroses. But these are some excessive users. I have also personally met aggressive and successful attorneys that were avid smokers of the weed.

I return to cannabis’ ancient history and its orientalist associations. Lord Shiva, the God of both Creation and Destruction, the Cosmic Dance and the Holy Lingam, (phallic power), the revealer of mystical Tantra, patron of cows, yoga and the third sex, married to the goddess, Parvati, father to the god, Ganesh – also partook of the mystical drink, called ‘soma.’ Legend has it that the mystical drink was none other than ‘bhang,’ a milky concoction containing cannabis.

Shiva’s wandering followers called ‘sadhus,’ still partake of the magical perfumed medicine. During my travels around the world, I have seen these holy men, and some thieving-fakers claiming to exist as sadhus, smoking cannabis out of funnel type ceramic pipes called ‘chillum.’ Watching those holy men in action with their long dread locks, scruffy beards, blue and white-painted dyes, bodies smeared with cow dung, rope necklaces and bracelets, and dirty loin cloths, added to the whole Indian-Asian mystical effect.

On a more common level, during the Hindu festival of Holi, which happens around springtime, young Indians and Nepalese drink the marvelous liquid ‘bhang’ shakes, or ‘lassies,’ and later, hit the public streets throwing brightly colored dyes on the surrounding partiers and walkers. They hit me too – which added to the great fun during that day. Shiva’s gift was a truly a wonderful act.

Islam conquered the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the eleventh century. The cannabis magic of Shiva would also influence the Sufi Muslim mystics that lived in those regions. Even the great Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, praised the herb and the wine. Cannabis entered the Islamic world: it stayed and it prospered. Still today in the Islamic world from North Africa to Afghanistan, the traveler can spot old men sitting in cafes, wearing their ‘chalaba’ long outfits with hoods. They smoke the green and brown ‘kif’ in their long pipes, while they sip on herbal mint tea, Turkish coffee and chew on honey snacks. Religious controversies have continued between the Sunni, Shia and Sufi branches of Islam – but smoking the flowering buds united them all.

One of the truths of human history has been its reign of absurdity. Cannabis had attached itself to one of the Shia sects of medieval Islam – ‘the Assassins.’ The Assassins were part of the Ismaili sect or the ‘Seveners.’ They also drank the luscious wine and smoked the enchanting herb.

The medieval Japanese Shogunates had their ‘ninjas’; while Medieval Islamic World Culture had their assassins. The assassins lived outside of society. Those disciplined holy warriors squatted in abandoned, foreboding military castles in northern Syria, Iraq and Iran. Their founder, Hassan i Sabbah, or ‘The Old Man of the Mountain,’ organized this Shia sect military order into a hierarchical brotherhood. Inside the castle, the warriors studied religious and philosophical texts, scientific works, learned various languages, and most importantly, the arts of killing. Their three preferred methods moved towards the silent variety: the dagger, the poison and strangulation.

Their victims were always political leaders within the Islamic world. If the Islamic political hack instituted unjust acts, mandated cruel laws, oppressed the poor, allowed poverty to accumulate, or stole lots of money from the just – then the Assassins went on the attack.

The Assassins first left a note pinned with a small dagger within the confines of the caliph or sultan’s palace. If that didn’t work, then the spiritual leader picked an Assassin to fulfill the last deed – a violent death. The Assassins always reached their victims, and after killing the state bum, they would often let frightened onlookers see the terminating work. Many of the assassins never returned from their ultimate missions.

Only one Islamic political-military ruler survived them – Saladin the Great. He survived three attempts on his life. They aroused fear in both the Islamic potentates and the European royal Crusaders. One of the Crusader kings even used the Assassins as allies against his Islamic rivals. Their enemies called them, ‘hashasheen’ in Arabic, or the Troublemakers.

From this Arabic word, the European Crusaders, and especially the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo, tied some connections between the sinister Oriental herbal paste, ‘hashish,’ with Assassin lore. According to the ignorant Euro-experts, hash was the powerful ingredient that transformed the Assassins into fanatical killers. This corrupted link also transformed European languages on the continent.

Most European languages have a separate word for killing and for murder: ‘matar,’ in Spanish, ‘tuer,’ in French, and ‘uccidire,’ in Italian. But these three languages share the same original word for murder, ‘asesinar, assassiner, assassinare.’ This outrageous relation between cannabis and irrational violence even stayed well into the 1930s USA with crap movies such as ‘Reefer Madness.’

This marvelous soft drug of cannabis has had its absurd orientalist associations. The real issue of cannabis was not its properties, but the European hatred for ‘the other,’ which still fuels the sociopathology of the Amerikan Empire. The murderous and hateful world empire still hunts for its victims through its continuous War against Cannabis, and all other ‘illegal drugs.’ The CIA can deal whatever it wants, yet the same US government prefers smokers to rot inside its hundreds of overpopulated prisons. In spite of all of this hate, Lord Shiva’s precious gift still wafts its distinctive breeze throughout all the lands of the Earth.

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.’