futurewidow posted:
I guess I see our role as opposing capitalist cultural hegemony and offering up some kind of alternative.

What does that mean though? How do you meaningfully accomplish these two objectives?

noavbazzer posted:

AmericanNazbro posted:
the destruction of the west

It seems like first world communists literally believe that events will conspire to bring about some sort of Downfall of the whole western world and if they only build up their cadres they can swoop in and form the new USSR.

yeah i think marx said something aobut that or somethiing???

gyrofry posted:
the goal of communists should be to be kind to your mother

yes

noavbazzer posted:
then wouldn't it be more honest if you said that the job of first world communists is to figure out what they should be doing

i mean when you have stated objectives that are pretty vague and you don't really know what you would do to achieve them then it just seems like you're relying on something to happen that will make it all clear. "the job of first world communists is to focus on reorienting ourselves to the fact that it is 2012 and capitalism has achieved global hegemony and seemingly obliterated all competing economic modes" sounds more accurate to me. you can't realistically hope to oppose capitalist cultural hegemony and offer an alternative to anyone if you're operating on what Das Kapital and Imperialism can tell us about the 21st century's political economy and the delusion that the communist parties of the world are as relevant as when the USSR was still around.

dont get me wrong i sympathise but if more or less old school marxism wants to offer something to the fight against global capitalism it needs a lot of new theoretical work done and that may very well be the only kind of work that first worlders can contribute to that cause at this point in time.

I don't agree with this at all. If someone is wholeheartedly dedicated as an out-and-out "Marxist" to some sort of anti-imperialist assault on capitalism then they just need to go join a struggle somewhere. Abandon their life here, book a flight somewhere where that's going on and start learning, training and fighting. That's what Che did. Anything less is just liberal-trot Opinion-having.

That said I think that's utterly retarded and delusional, not because I think it's so silly that someone could learn to fight or be accepted such a group (it happens like all the time actually), but that that in anyway deals with the reality of the world. But that's not a problem of theory, it's a fundamental problem of "Marxism" as this sort of Universal Theory.

Edited by babyfinland (Feb. 20, 2012 06:49:11)

babyfinland posted:

noavbazzer posted:
then wouldn't it be more honest if you said that the job of first world communists is to figure out what they should be doing

i mean when you have stated objectives that are pretty vague and you don't really know what you would do to achieve them then it just seems like you're relying on something to happen that will make it all clear. "the job of first world communists is to focus on reorienting ourselves to the fact that it is 2012 and capitalism has achieved global hegemony and seemingly obliterated all competing economic modes" sounds more accurate to me. you can't realistically hope to oppose capitalist cultural hegemony and offer an alternative to anyone if you're operating on what Das Kapital and Imperialism can tell us about the 21st century's political economy and the delusion that the communist parties of the world are as relevant as when the USSR was still around.

dont get me wrong i sympathise but if more or less old school marxism wants to offer something to the fight against global capitalism it needs a lot of new theoretical work done and that may very well be the only kind of work that first worlders can contribute to that cause at this point in time.

I don't agree with this at all. If someone is wholeheartedly dedicated as an out-and-out "Marxist" to some sort of proletarian-based assault on capitalism then they just need to go join a struggle somewhere. Abandon their life here, book a flight somewhere where that's going on and start learning, training and fighting. That's what Che did. Anything less is just liberal-trot Opinion-having.

That said I think that's utterly retarded and delusional, not because I think it's so silly that someone could learn to fight or be accepted such a group (it happens like all the time actually), but that that in anyway deals with the reality of the world. But that's not a problem of theory, it's a fundamental problem of "Marxism" as this sort of Universal Theory.

your plan is to join the CIA though, lmao

noavbazzer posted:
then wouldn't it be more honest if you said that the job of first world communists is to figure out what they should be doing

i mean when you have stated objectives that are pretty vague and you don't really know what you would do to achieve them then it just seems like you're relying on something to happen that will make it all clear. "the job of first world communists is to focus on reorienting ourselves to the fact that it is 2012 and capitalism has achieved global hegemony and seemingly obliterated all competing economic modes" sounds more accurate to me. you can't realistically hope to oppose capitalist cultural hegemony and offer an alternative to anyone if you're operating on what Das Kapital and Imperialism can tell us about the 21st century's political economy and the delusion that the communist parties of the world are as relevant as when the USSR was still around.

dont get me wrong i sympathise but if more or less old school marxism wants to offer something to the fight against global capitalism it needs a lot of new theoretical work done and that may very well be the only kind of work that first worlders can contribute to that cause at this point in time.

while i think you have a good point, we have to look at the history of revolutionary theory and recognize that the advances tend to come out of class struggle. class struggle certainly exists in the first world, but the revolutionary (or pseudorevolutionary) formations in the first world certainly have a different character than those that exist in Nepal, Colombia, and India.

I especially liked this post by JMP

http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2012/02/down-with-activism-up-with-revolution.html

a short bit:

The first time I ever met a revolutionary I was shocked at the gap between our practice at the centres of capitalism and her practice on the peripheries. This was back when the revolution in Nepal was still at its apex, before the party had begun to demonstrate the degeneration that might now cause it to falter and die, and the revolutionary in question was Hisila Yami (Comrade Parvati) who was visiting Toronto to discuss the current moment in Nepal's revolution. Here was a revolutionary who had participated in a protracted peoples war, who had used her experience in this war to write revolutionary theory about gender and revolution, and her behaviour and attitude was alien to the pseudo-revolutionary subjectivity of the activists I had known. Humility and discipline, criticism and self-criticism, an unflinching attitude towards the need for communism, a unity of theory and practice, and most importantly a refusal to be arrogant when she was firm. Since then I have encountered and worked with other people with a similar stance, a professionalism towards revolution that does not reduce it to a student game, and I really hope that I can learn from these people so that one day I can shed my own petty-bourgeois activist ideology and practice which has become severely habitual.

futurewidow posted:
lol i shouldn't pretend to know what I'm doing, ever

i think youre on the right track, figuring out what needs to be done is necessary to figuring out what are the next steps

pogfan1996 posted:

this i'm down with. be Serious

noavbazzer posted:
then my question is how do marxists participate in class struggle in the first world in a way other than simply being activist weekend revolutionary type? how would a marxist unify theory and practice? where would they begin?

you engage in the contradictions of capitalism. where are the contradictions of capitalism in the first world to which you have access? you find them and engage in them in a critical way

babyfinland posted:
what you DON'T do -- if you're a serious person -- is cloister yourself away from the yucky reality of the world and refuse to engage until conditions become more attractive to your Radical Spirit

this i definitely agree with, i find it applicable to anyone who holds the position of anti-capitalism though.

pogfan1996 posted:
http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/what-about-the-black-bloc-and-diversity-of-tactics/Yesterday on Facebook I was asked by a Maoist living in Toronto if I put Black Blocs in the same enemy camp as Obama. The question was specifically a response to my status as the time, which, among other things, said that I thought Christ Hedges, his house negro Obama and Black Blocs would all be left in the dustbin of history by the real North American revolution.

The answer to the question however is not a simply yes or no. It would be obvious folly to say crudely that Black Blocs are the other side of the same coin as Obama, which is what I believe the Maoist commentator was trying to lure me into doing. However, at the same time I recognize a number of serious issues with the Black Bloc. That’s why I am taking the space here to elaborate my views.

Firstly it’s got to be said that I am not opposed to the concept of street fighting, guerrilla warfare etc as part of genuine diversity of tactics – taken here to mean the mix of physical and non-physical means of direct action, as well as forms of action and organizing outside of direct action. I’m not a pacifist. I do think nonviolent direct action has a place, but only in concert with the application of other means of agitation, organization and action. However, I utterly disagree with those who attempt to defend non-violence as the sole movement tactic by providing an argument solely on moral and ethical (in other words subjective) grounds, like those from Taiaiake Alfred, the well known Mohawk activist, scholar and chief theorist of anarcha-indigenism.

As much as nonviolence may appeal to people’s hearts, we as revolutionaries are forced to be materialists and to understand history in order to develop genuine revolutionary strategies and tactics. On this particular issue I follow most closely Peter Gelderloos and others. I’ve always said that we are going to have to cut, shoot and bomb our way out of our current social conditions.

Many people do not like to hear that, but it has been demonstrated time and time again throughout history. It’s an inconvenient truth, but it is truth nevertheless. Chris Hedges and other left Obama apologists perpetuate the old liberal and social democratic lie that serious change could be achieved if we simply asked our rulers nicely enough to grant us our demands.

However, the debate around the Black Bloc within the imperialist “left” is often dogmatically and simplistically broken down into a difference between so-called diversity of tactics and pacifism. What often gets missed here in the push to defend diversity of tactics (taken in this sense to often mean specifically Black Bloc tactics) against liberal and social democratic critique is that often the promotion and defense of diversity provides an uncritical cover, whether intentional or unintentional, for what are quite often bullshit, infantile, settleristic, opportunistic and individualistic politics around class and nation.

The Black Bloc is the Tactic of Radicalized White Youth

Ultimately however I do not believe that the black blacks tactic is revolutionary in any kind of serious manner. Firstly, the whole Black Bloc phenomenon is an overwhelmingly white petty bourgeois and labour aristocratic phenomena. Further, to borrow what Chairman Fred Hampton had to say about the WUO’s Days of Rage, the Black Bloc tactic is overwhelmingly individualistic, anarchistic (in the sense of chaos) and opportunistic. More often than not it is the adventurististic street fighting of radicalized white youth. Their willingness to fight in the streets belies a serious revolutionary analysis, especially on the topic of revolutionary organization and tactics.

Yes there are colonized proletarians who take part. I am certainly not saying that it is an exclusively white “left” phenomena, just that in my experience, in North America, it is overwhelmingly so. However, personal anecdotes of the occasional colonized participant aside, it’s been the case since as far back as Seattle that colonized radicals have questioned the rather pale faces behind the black bandanas and ski masks. It’s also incredibly telling that no apologist of the Black Bloc has ever attempted a defence against this critique beyond anecdotal stories of “well this one time I saw some Indians and an African at one Black Bloc!”

In this sense the defence of the Black Bloc on these grounds is eerily similar to the defence by white feminism of the recent flash-in-the-pan SlutWalk movement’s whiteness and uninterpreted white privilege against the rather blistering critique by author’s like Ernesto Aguilar of People of Colour Organize! Many a time in those back and forths the response of SlutWalk apologists was to show pictures of the SlutWalk in Vancoucer, or San Francisco etc and say “see, there are some of you coloured folk in there!”

Regardless, though, on the question of colonized proletarian participation, a few good apples in amongst the rot doesn’t change the overall nature of the phenomenon.

The Wages of Black Bloc Whiteness

There is a real analysis out there however, emerging from the anarchist and post-Leninist Marxist left, that while admitting that the Black Bloc is overwhelmingly the tactic of petty bourgeois and labour aristocratic white youth, attempts to flip all of revolutionary history and the reality of current revolutionary struggle on their heads when it comes to the role of these social forces in North American revolution.

This flipping of reality is most clearly condensed in the book Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent published by the Euro-North American anarchist publisher AK Press and written by North American anarchist author AK Thompson. In it Thompson, who seems to simply just accept the movement’s overwhelming whiteness and petty bourgeois and labour aristocratic class nature marshals many big names in pursuit of his goals: Baldwin, Sorel, Foucault, Engels, Orwell, Heidegger, Aristotle, Artaud, Dyer, Conrad, Freire, Starhawk and many others. However, once you get through the extensive footnoting you will find Thompson’s main point, which is that perhaps the Black Bloc’s whiteness is actually a virtue, and not a serious problem for it, which is the conclusion of those of us who live in the real world.

This is because for Thompson, the white petty bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy, especially the youth and students, are serious victims of globalization! For Thompson these social forces (which make up the so-called middle class in North America) currently exist in a highly alienated space. To him they have become disempowered, suicidal and separated from reality in this new globalized world. He cites as proof the growing production and use by members of these forces within the White nation of anti-depressants and related drugs.

My analysis, rooted in the theory of African Internationalism, also accepts that indeed white workers (the labour aristocracy) are beginning to feel the crunch somewhat from the general crisis of imperialism. This because appeasing them with colonial booty only serves the bourgeoisie as far as it helps to sustain their rule. In the end the imperialist bourgeoisie doesn’t give a damn about white workers, and that’s why in times of crisis they attack labour unions, social nets and the like. However, to compare the relative pin pricks felt by the white nation during periods of crisis to the material conditions faced by the colonized is just pure fantasy.

Further, while both Thompson and I argue that the members of white nation can indded regain their humanity through struggle, what this means for the two us couldn’t be more different. Again, rooted in the revolutionary science of African Internationalism, it is my analysis that the only way for white people to rejoin the rest of humanity is to align themselves under the leadership of the colonized, breaking with their own imperialism and struggling for the complete destruction of the colonial pedestal on which the entire world capitalist system stands.

According to Thompson though, in order to regain their humanity the white petty bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy must act out on its rage and pass through redemptive violence – the Black Bloc being one particular manifestation. This idea, that through adventuristic violence petty bourgeois and labour aristocratic whites can be redeemed, is just pure white “left” romanticism.

Even if Thompson was able to throw twice as many theorists at you, this would not change the basic facts gotten to through real revolutionary science. In response to Thompson’s portayal of the white petty bourgeoisie and labour aristocracy, especially the youth, as victims of globalization and their movement as inherently revolutionary I am forced to think back to what Chairman Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party USA said in his presentation Social Revolution vs. Political Revolution, which was given on June 30, 1984 in the course of a political education conference held at the Uhuru House during the Oakland Summer Project:

The petty bourgeoisie is often radicalized – not withstanding what its complexion is. To see a petty bourgeois force in motion demanding revolution is not necessarily the same thing as seeing a revolutionary force in motion. The petty bourgeoisie is radicalized precisely because of the contradictions of imperialism. Precisely because of the contradictions of capitalism. Precisely because as a class force it is a dying force, and often the contradictions of imperialism accelerate its disintegration. Its impending death is something that comes to its notice and it is then thrust into motion.

In general I believe that there is an extreme level of idealism (in the philosophical sense) at the roots of the Black Bloc movement. This grows from the philosophical beginnings of the anarchist political project in general, which was rooted in 19th century European Enlightenment idealism, compared to the revolutionary science of dialectical and historical materialism of the (decidedly more historically and currently successful) communist movement.

The Black Bloc and the Differential Repression of the Colonized

That’s the Black Bloc at its best – white youth running around smashing windows because they lack, or do not want, a serious revolutionary analysis, movement or strategy.

However, one of the biggest concerns about the Black Bloc style of work from colonized peoples is that it may well actually increase state repression on genuinely revolutionary forces as well as colonized communities, immigrants and other vulnerable groups in North American society. Many apologists and advocates of the Black Bloc would simply sweep this issue under the rug, as if we are overreacting. For example, Seth Tobacman, himself a white man, in his review of BBWR dismissively calls people who have such concerns haters. I’m sorry that these concerns are so beneath a white activist like Tobacman, but for those of us who exist as colonized persons in this white power society, it ain’t hatin’ to feel serious concern that the adventurist actions of petty bourgeois and labour aristocratic white activists might bring increased heat down on our communities.

The mostly white, petty bourgeois and labour aristocratic anarchist and post-Leninist activists who make up the bulk of the Black Bloc get to go back home most of the time and return to their comfortable, highly privileged lives (despite the high rate of anti-depressant use). Yes sometimes they get arrested, and around the time of the G20 there was even a dragnet of Black Bloc oriented anarchist activists in Ontario. However even their ability to be arrested (in the sense of being able to fight arrest and conviction and to withstand the consequences socially and economically) and the nature of the state repression they suffer arises in part from their class position as members of the oppressor nation. Back during my polemics with the Black Bloc anarchists in my own city which followed the dragnet of anarchists in Ontario, and specifically regarding their place in all of it, I said:

Essentially what it comes down to in the end is this: those people who were arrested and are now being called political prisoners by-in-large could afford to be arrested, and may have even intentionally triggered their arrests in order to snatch the limelight (away from actual PP/POWs) in the wake of the G8/G20. As one person close to me put it regarding one particular arrestee who has been getting the most press, he is a “poor little rich white boy who can afford to get arrested because his father makes the big bucks to bail him out.”

However, the case of AW@L I’ve come to believe is not an exception, but part of a long history of differential levels of repression face by colonized and settler radicals and organizations.

White people, even those with maxed out credit cards and with a prescription for Valium, do not ever have to seriously worry about the cops, the state or what it will do to them should they turn against it. One only has to look at history and see that while white communists were black listed, and at times arrested etc., the colonial state waged an all out physical war with guns and bombs on the independent revolutionary movements of colonized peoples. And it is not even, as some try to make it out to seem, because white radicals, whether the communists of yesterday or the Black Blocistas of today, were not involved in armed struggle to the same level as revolutionary nationalist anti-colonial organizations.

Whether one looks at the decidedly non-confrontational Communist Party USA, or the window smashing Black Bloc, or the bomb setting, gun carrying, bank expropriating Weather Underground Organization and May 19 Communist Organization, the truth is that white activists have never had to fear the same level of repression as colonial people. While David Gilbert of the WUO and M19CO may be sitting for the rest of his life in a cell, the vast majority of white militants, including most of his old comrades, were allowed by the state to return to their regular lives eventually.

This differs sharply from the outright war waged with guns and bombs on the independent movements of Natives, Africans and other colonized people. It wasn’t just ostensibly armed organizations like AIM, the BPP and the BLA that were repressed out of existence by the white power state, but the entirety of the Black and Red Power Revolutions of the 1960s and 70s. Or does one have to be reminded of the brutal murder of decidedly nonviolent figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, or the bombing of the Africas of the MOVE organization etc?

While some white anarchists, including many I have met, may wish to believe that their choice to self-identify as an anarchist puts them in the same situation as a colonized person, an immigrant or anyone else pushed down by patriarchal white power, this is nothing but a white “left” fever dream. Even today, with the worldwide crisis in imperialism and high rates of maxed out credit cards and Valium prescriptions, do they have to constantly worry about getting beaten and murdered by police on a regular basis, stuffed into prison cells in disproportionately high numbers or targeted by discriminatory sentencing etc etc etc.

We the colonized, the immigrants and other most marginalized people do have to worry about those things. And that is why many of us are concerned that the adventurist, anarchistic violence of the Black Blocs will bring more of this shit onto us. The white middle class Black Blocistas can, with rare exceptions, almost walk away from the window smashing whenever they want, take off the gloves and masks, and leave the shit on us to pick up. People like Tobacman might say I am hating on them, but you know what, I send that hate right back out at those crackers. They can keep their bloc black, so long as they keep it to themselves and stay out of our neighborhoods. In the meanwhile we’ll keep building up seriously revolutionary forces.



+ a comment the author made:

For the record, I’m not based in the US normally. I am currently in Bermuda living with my ailing parents, and my normally for the past 7 years I have been based out of Canada I talk and write much about the US because my partner and I’s families are from there, I have spent much time there, and because my general focus, as a Native revolutionary, is North America as a whole.

Anyway, I am quite familiar with the the events in London. I am a member of the Uhuru Movement and we have a large presence in the UK, and our members there, including the Secretary-General of our International, were right in the thick of it. And I would agree with you that there is a major difference between the BB and the revolt of colonized citizen in England and France, however I think we can’t make major comparisons of them solely as manifestations of rage.

Indeed the Black Bloc is a manifestation of rage, but the rage of what, and about what? I would stipulate, as I did above, that the BB is a manifestation of the death pangs of the white “middle class” (an indeterminate term I do not really care for, and hence why I constantly referred to the Petty Bourgeoisie and Labour Aristocracy), which has become radicalized. To again use the same Omali Yeshitela quote from above (which I also applied to the Occupy Wall St. Movement):

The petty bourgeoisie is often radicalized – not withstanding what its complexion is. To see a petty bourgeois force in motion demanding revolution is not necessarily the same thing as seeing a revolutionary force in motion. The petty bourgeoisie is radicalized precisely because of the contradictions of imperialism. Precisely because of the contradictions of capitalism. Precisely because as a class force it is a dying force, and often the contradictions of imperialism accelerate its disintegration. Its impending death is something that comes to its notice and it is then thrust into motion.

I think that is radically different, and has radically different implications then the rage of the victims of white power.

As for Greece, it may be rage, but again we must ask, what is rage over? In Greece, as in other parts of Europe, the rage is the rage of the citizens of empire (as opposed the colonized, who are the subjects of empire), driven by the most recent and ongoing crisis in global imperialism which has caused the contradictions between the imperialist bourgeoisie and imperialist working class to become more exposed.

The key issue in the rage of the Greeks though has been the so-called “austerity” measures. The Greeks want to return to the pre-austerity status quo, which most socialists hope all on board with, but those socialists do not understand capitalism as a global system. The pre-austerity status quo was able to be provided to the citizens of empire precisely because of the parasitic relationship between the citizens and subjects of empire, and any return to such a system by the Greeks, or Spain or any other European nation, necessitates further exploitation of the vast majority of the world’s population. That may not be the active consciousness of those Greek workers who are rioting and striking, but it is the objective reality of their struggle when placed into the global context, and there’s nothing revolutionary about it, despite all the banners and flags that may be waved at the goings on by the KKE, KOE, KKE (ML) and others.

That’s why I say we cannot simply say it comes down an expression of rage, even if it does sharpen into an insurrectionist action (which has no yet happened, and I’m not really holding my breath for it to ever happen). We must ask ourselves where this rage comes, where it is going, and what it wants.

It can be utilized, and it can become revolutionary, but only if its participants come to a consciousness that understands these contradictions, and moves accordingly.

tl;dr