Redistribution-violence-1-1

ojore lutalo-ashanti alston- interview with robyn maynard

2010 Interivew

 

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(from the introduction)..

Like many US anarchists, my first interactions with the Greek anarchist movement occurred primarily through hastily translated communiqués reporting spectacular attacks on banks and police stations, riots, and student occupations. Increasingly filtered through American insurrectionary discourse, what these reports often lacked in historical background or political context they made up for tenfold with enthusiasm and hilariously bad English. Encountering a movement this way resulted in a mythology; for many of us I think “the Greeks” were more or less a fantastic and strange monster, a terrible force that had found some magical alchemy of anarchy that we Americans could never get right. Though conceptualizing anarchy as an unknowable (“opaque”) monster has its appeal, creating such a mythology out of a foreign anarchist movement has its problems. Implying that there is something “special” about Greece ignores that the greeks’ biggest attribute is probably their self-confidence, not some perfect alignment of social conditions. Some of our biggest obstacles on this side of the Atlantic might be psychological as much as material in nature.
Turning the Greek anarchist movement into a mythology has also meant creating the perfect vehicle for asserting various anarchist sects’ particular platforms: syndicalists, if not dismissing Greece as in “a low stage of struggle,” focus almost solely on “workers’” actions; insurrectionaries present tale after tale of bombings and fire attacks with almost no discussion of the political context or the thousands of hours of boring, “activist” work that goes into making that context; “anarchists without adjectives” praise the ideological and tactical diversity of the Greeks without acknowledging the tremendously divisive and even violent conflicts between anarchist groups, or the substantive quality of these divisions; and so on.
This ‘zine was prompted in large part to get past these stunted narratives, to present at least some of the political background and specific organizational and tactical approaches taken by thousands of active Greek anarchists. It could never be a complete picture, of course, as it is a small publication and primarily based on excerpts from the excellent book We Are An Image from the Future. That book, a set of memoirs, analyses, timelines, and theoretical pieces depicting the revolt in December 2008, is not a “history book” but itself an incomplete text on the constantly growing and changing phenomenon of Greek anarchism. More oriented towards cautious observations and lessons relevant to those on this side of the Atlantic, I’ve included several pieces written by non-Greek authors who seem to have one foot in Greece and one foot in their home country, as I think this position offers a unique level of awareness and perspective on the situation.
I was also prompted to assemble this publication by my recent visit to Greece, and several surrounding countries. Though I was only there for a brief time, and only visited three cities, it was an overwhelming and incredible experience. A week and half before the visit, on May 5th, 2010, three innocent workers were killed by a fire bombing of a bank during one of the country’s largest and most militant general strikes in recent history. To my knowledge this was an unprecedented occurrence, and during my time there, anarchists all over the country were wrestling with the meanings and consequences of this careless action, both internally and with the public at large. A large part of my discussions there centered around these deaths, contextualized by the fact that over the last 10 years the Greek anarchist movement has essentially catalyzed a low-level civil war both dependent upon the anarchists but at the same time far beyond them in scope.
Despite the tragedy, and the differing perspectives thereof, I was impressed with the maturity, sincerity, and care put into the discussions, and the comrades’ refusal to sound any bells of retreat or capitulation with the State. Anarchists knew that the government and the institutionalized Left would exploit these deaths to repress their struggle, and were proactively prepared to deal with that. One of the Greek anarchists’ strengths, and one of their notable differences from the American movement, has always been knowing that the best defense is usually a good offense. It remains to be seen if popular support (which has not necessarily diminished) and internal divisiveness will allow them to preserve this offensive. For the sake of us all, I hope they can.

A Pamphlet from the radical anti-national tendency, the capitalized letters of the Serbo-Croat version of the sentence “Self-management is the essence of our communism/anarchy” (Samouprava je Esencija Naleg Komunizma/ Anarhije) form the word SENKA, which is the name of the collective that signs this text, and is the Serbo-Croatian word for “shadow’:

OCR’d from the zine, there is sadly no digital english version but the original serbian is here; https://zajednicanenacija.blackblogs.org/senka/

SENKA – Community, Not Nation! Platform of the Radical Antinational Tendency

The dominance of nationalist ideology in Serbia is not limited to politics and daily life, but is increasingly present among self-proclaimed “communists” and “anarchists”.

Disgusted with this miserable state of affairs, we decided to write this text and use it as a platform to develop a new, radical anti-nationalist tendency, whose existence we see as essential.

This tendency must provide a response to the shortcomings of liberal anti-nationalism, which is never able to address root causes as it turns a blind eye to the causes of all social problems, including nationalism. It must also reject the cynicism and opportunism of left wing nationalism (from Stalinism and social democracy, to “anarcho-stalinism”, the “chetno-left” and back again).

In the long term, we hope to shape an anti-nationalist tendency which will take on many forms, but will fundamentally seek a radical rejection of the alienating phenomenon of the nation in its entirety, from everyday life to the level of the spectacle.[1]

Why Anti-Nationalism?

There are various strategies of domination used by the ruling classes to keep the population ina subordinate position. These strategies of domination often permeate into the most intimate spheres of our existence. As such, national identity isa weapon in the hands of state and capital that serves to fictitiously unite the population and thus serve as a method of social control.

At the same time, nationalism can have both left and right, as well as liberal and fascistic forms.°

Let’s first take a look at the left-right dichotomy: The right wing strategy of domination utilizes national identity by appealing to supposedly natural characteristics and long term historical continuity. The fairytale nature of these fictions is alluring as it provides simple explanations and grandiose promises. On the other hand, leftists often speak of the working class as a homogeneous social group, giving it the same abstract and fictitious characteristics as those given to the nation. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is a tendency to equate “the working class” with “the people”, which is again just a more leftist way to affirm the idea of the nation.

The other dichotomy (fascistic vs. liberal nationalism) is represented in Serbia primarily in the divide between the so-called “first” and “second” Serbias. This division reveals another ideological construction which opposes nationalism through the ideal of the civic state. However, this is just another model of the nation state, but with a different ideological foundation. While fascistic nationalists, as advocates of the idea of “blood and soil”, propagate the ethnically based nation, liberal “civic” nationalists advocate the myth of the “rule of law” and seek to base the nation on the status of the citizen of a modern nation state, with all of its totalitarian characteristics, and in the context of market supremacy over all other forms of social organization.[3]

None of these models question the idea of the nation state, the nation, or capitalism. In other words, they offer no solution to the atomization in which we find ourselves, completely unprotected from the domination of the state, nation and capital. The managers of our damaged lives [4] can be recruited from the right and the left, and from fascistic or liberal circles.

These strategies of domination, left and right, fascistic and liberal, are not even clearly historically distinct, and concrete political strate-gies have always been fluid (left elements of nationalism and fascism; the left that continually appeals to the people, which is essentially the nation; the structural consolidation of nationalism in the Yugoslav system; liberals grasping for fascist solutions in times of crisis, etc). The impossibility of clear separation is rooted in the fact that all stra-tegies of domination share a common goal and are based on the same institutions. One becomes both a “citizen” and a “Serb” by birth, which in the nation state is equivalent to incorporation into the (civic or ethnic) nation.

The process currently underway in Europe, carried out by the ruling classes, is the generalization of the fascistic strategy, thus leading to the normalization of ethnically based nationalism in both left and liberal politics. Although we have never had faith in the state and li-beral ideas of human rights, the generalization of chauvinist attitudes sets us back on hard-won freedoms, and complicate future struggles, especially when it comes to the issues of racialized minorities and the normalization of the militarization of society.

Under capitalism, we are oppressed through wage labor, and nationalism presents that labor as beneficial to the progress and deve-lopment of the nation, which will ultimately advance the position of all classes as members of a common nation. The work may be hard, but when we have an ideologically constructed prophecy to guide us, subjugation is more effective.

Nationalism teaches us that freedom always implies the lack of freedom for another. Moreover, the creation of the modern nation state has always required the creation of homogenous and docile populations. The methods of homogenization in nation states always began with the imposition of standardized language and uniform culture created by bourgeois intellectuals and nationalist ideologues, to biological control of the population, to ethnic cleansing and genocide, all through institutions for the total control of the citizenry (hospitals, schools, prisons, army, police).[5]

“The people” are often presented as a spontaneous community of culturally identical people, sometimes in contrast to the nation which is defined exclusively in political terms. However, all characteristics of the so-called Serbian people (as one example) were defined thro-ugh the violent process of the creation of the Serbian nation. There-fore, even if a strained conceptual difference between the people and the nation can be made, we are still essentially talking about the same phenomenon in which the violent process of homogenization, tho-ugh extremely abstract in nature, are now presented as spontaneous and natural “ethnic” characteristics. But it is clear that that belonging to a people is still determined either by existing state borders, or by the desired borders of expansionist nationalist programs. In Croatia, Bunjevci are considered Croats, but in Bačka (Vojvodina province, Serbia), some of them are considered a separate ethnic group. We can see in this case, that the dominance of Croatian, or Serbian nationa-lism can have a decisive influence on whether or not a group can be considered part of the nation/people, and not its so-called ethnic cha-racteristics, such as dialect, customs, traditional costume, etc. Likewi-se, nobody in Croatia speaks about the existence of a separate Lika nation/people, or a Timok nation/people in Serbia, even though the inhabitants of these regions share some of these ethnic characteristics which set them apart from the broader population:

“We live on the supposedly same land (be it thousands of kilome-ters wide), we speak the same language (the newly arrived are rarely taken into account), we live under the same laws… Let’s be clear: is the unity of this distinguished People not built simply and purely on its national borders? For if we look close enough, and if we listen to its spokespersons, there are indeed geographical boundaries delimi-ting our People – our workers and our poor! At times you only need to walk a few meters to become someone else’s worker, someone else’s poor (…) The People, in and for itself, is nothing. It does not think. It does not act. To be completely honest, it doesn’t even exist. Like all phantoms of unity, the People is but a thread that ties us to our servitude. What is or is not the People is fully determined by those who hold its reins. [6]

All of the above considered, it is clear why we believe that we must oppose nationalism even when it is presented to us in its supposedly most benign left wing and civic forms.

For us, our existence depends on ourselves and the comrades with whom we freely choose to associate. We do not need imposed ideo-logical narratives and identities because we intervene in our surroundings under our own power. We understand these surroundings with the help of collective intelligence in which we participate directly, without representatives.

What is the relationship between patriarchy and the nation? 

In this system, women are assigned the crucial role of the reproduction of workers and cannon fodder. Thus it is necessary to control all people assigned the role of woman as reproductive workers, with the assistance of patriarchal values and violence.

The nuclear family, a completely modern institution, is proclaimed to be the basic cell of the nation (from “time immemorial”, according to the ideologically constructed past of the nation), and women are assigned the role of the pillar of this capitalist institution for the repro-duction of workers. Being a “good woman” is dependent on the level of identification with the tasks assigned by the dominant ideology as being part of her “nature”. Violence against women has a disciplinary role when it comes to enforcing these roles.

Violence on the streets drives women into the private sphere, that is, into the false “security of the home”, which is in turn, her workplace. Domestic violence serves to break the resistance of women within that realm. The husband is thus assigned the role of boss and cop, which is in accordance with the Serbian nationalist slogan “god-king-husband”, which very clearly shows the hierarchy in the system of national reproduction. If we take into consideration the high rate of femicide in Serbia and the way in which the state treats the murderers, we can say that the state delegates its repressive function to men, giving them free rein to commit domestic violence in the name of the nation.

Thus the nation and state are not only embodied in institutions such as the army or the police, but also in institutions of national re-production such as the maternity hospitals and schools, and above all, the heteronormative household centered around private property, biological parentage and reproductive work which is normalized as female.

On the other hand, queer people, as well as disobedient women (those who reject “their own” ideologically constructed “female nature”) create a problem for this kind of society because they subvert the idea that the primary role of humans is to reproduce themselves and the nation. The existence of queer people implies that human beings have the-ir own intrinsic value. Nationalist patriarchal ideology rejects such a perspective as it understands the value of an individual only in relati-on to service to the nation. That is why homophobia and transphobia are not random phenomena, but rather a disciplinary element of the system, which is there to enforce our gender based labor roles. If the gender-labor hierarchy is brought into question, through rejection of the patriarchal gender binary, the entire basis upon which patriarchal capitalism stands, expressed in the form of the nation, is put in dan-ger. That is why we are forced to strictly monitor and suppress our queerness and internalize shame and hate people who, through their self-determined lives, call into question this imposed hierarchy. The struggle against patriarchy, homophobia and transphobia is not just a question of “human rights” or minorities, but rather strikes at the core of the patriarchal, capitalist system of the nation and there-fore concerns everybody. The possibility of the self-determination of everyone and the creation of authentic communities of free individu-als is closely tied in to this struggle.

Antinationalism vs. anti-imperialism: Why we cannot fight imperialism with anti-imperialism? 

Our anti-nationalism is opposed to the ideology of anti-imperialism which advocates support for nationalist movements as a tool against imperialism and which believes that there is some kind of fundamental difference and contradiction between nationalism and imperialism.

“Leftist or revolutionary nationalists insist that their nationalism has nothing in common with the nationalism of fascists and national socialists, that theirs is a nationalism of the oppressed, that it offers personal as well as cultural liberation.

According to a common (and manipulable) misconception, im-perialism is relatively recent, consists of the colonization of the entire world, and is the last stage of capitalism. This diagnosis points to a spe-cific cure: nationalism is offered as the antidote to imperialism: wars of national liberation are said to break up the capitalist empire.

This diagnosis serves a purpose, but it does not describe any event or situation. We come closer to the truth when we stand this concep-tion on its head and say that imperialism was the first stage of capitalism, that the world was subsequently colonized by nation-states, and that nationalism is the dominant, the current, and (hopefully) the last stage of capitalism. The facts of the case were not discovered yesterday; they are as familiar as the misconception that denies them.”‘ [7]

If we look at things this way, it then becomes clear that: “Nationalism is the opposite of imperialism only in the realm of definitions. In practice, nationalism was a methodology for condu-cting the empire of capital.” [8] Therefore, instead of countering imperialism with nationalism:

“(..)we should probably be asking another question: How will the struggles of those experiencing the brutality of plunder in the capitalist periphery avoid limiting themselves to nationalism and to suggesting alternative routes to capitalist plunder? How can those of us in the prosperous zones organize without ignoring planetary inequality and without resorting to orientalism? How do we connect the struggles of the excluded and those threatened with exclusion with struggles in the global capitalist centers? How do we manage to respond in an internationalist way to the emergence of the far right, supposedly dire-cted against the effects of globalization? How do we stop the capitalist war machine? The answers to these questions depend on the collective intelligence and multilevel activities of the movement. Here we will simply make a few points.

There are many who benignly ask: “But shouldn’t the populations in the capitalist periphery organize themselves to resist their exploitati-on?” However, in every single historical instance, it has been observed that when a population organises itself in a vertical, pyramidal system of power “in order to resist the powerful countries”, the administra-tors of that system will attempt to integrate it into a wider pyramidal system. In other words, they will not turn against the stronger capita-list powers let alone against hierarchical systems in general. Moreover, contemporary internationalized capitalism, beyond the vertical stru-ctures on which it is based (the various nation-states, their armies and their police forces), is ruled by a suffocating transnational network of banks, but also by a media system that shapes the imaginary dimen-sion of humanity, and determines our abstract and symbolic thought. If we seek to weaken vertical power structures and open up cracks in the grid of the global economy, we must first try to change that very symbolic system. This cannot be done by reproducing interpretations that have failed on all grounds.” [9]

This symbolic system in Serbia is still significantly determined by nationalist ideology formulated in an anti-imperialist way. For example, in Serbia, both the left and right constantly call upon the example of the anti-imperialist struggle of Young Bosnia. The members of Young Bosnia fought bravely against the feudal and exploitative colonial system of Austria-Hungary. However, since they defined their movement as nationalist, their goal was not the abolition of exploitation as such, but rather that the Yugoslav nation, whose creation they were seeking, could reach the level of development of the most advanced exploiter. As such, they saw no contradiction in the fact that in their participation in the struggle against one imperialism they also supported the bloody expansionist aspirations of the Serbian bourgeoisie, especially directed against Albanians. One of the Sarajevo assassins, Vaso Čubrilović, directly and very explicitly formulated a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Albanians from Yugoslavia. As an expert in the field of ethnic cleansing, he offered his services to both the regime of King Alexander and the Titioist regime, and both accepted his services. [10]

In order for us to formulate our struggle against oppression and exploitation in an effective way, we must first reject the frameworks, symbols and models imposed on us by nationalist ideology—some of which we may not even initially recognize as such.

Why focus on Serbian nationalism? 

Anti-nationalism has a specific significance for all of us who come from the area of the former Yugoslavia.

During the 1990s, a particularly violent and fascistic form of nati-onalism was used as the ideological basis for the process of primitive accumulation [11] which was carried out in the form of a brutal civil war. While the ruling classes of Serbia and Croatia together coordina-ted the transition process from the so-called state capitalist system of SFRY (which itself was undergoing many liberal and market reforms), into a new system of free market extremism, the proletariat was drastically impoverished. The lives of the poor became quite cheap—redu-ced to mere bodies that could easily be sacrificed in a war whose sole purpose was to enrich the ruling classes.

Wars that nationalists today call Patriotic or Homeland wars can be characterized as wars of plunder—it was a brutal attack on the poor, for the sake of efficient extraction of wealth and its consolidation in governing structures. However, we should not forget that nationalism did not appear out of nowhere at the beginning of the war. Nationalism was formulated and reproduced as an essential part of the political and economic system of the SFRY. Republics of the SFRY were formed as nation-sta-tes, with their own constituent peoples and national “communist” parties [12]  During the 1990s, that nationalism changed its form and intensity due to the changed historical circumstances in which the needs of the ruling classes changed. But nationalism always had its brutal and genocidal potential. As long as the national ideology is in force, the potential for genocide exists. That is why we must reject national ideology as such, be it in its left or right form.

We live in so-called Serbia, where the most dominant nationalism is by far Serbian. As a result, we understand that specific nationalism to most threaten our interests and our efforts towards liberation from exploitation and oppression. We reject nationalism as such and are specifically focused on the form to which we are most exposed, and which directly seeks to absorb us from the moment of our birth. Currently, the most prevalent form of that ideology is the one that speaks of the so-called Kosovo myth [13]. Since Serbia took control of Kosovo in 1912, it has been for Serbia and Serbian nationalists exclusively an occupied territory and its Albanian population seen as a problem to be solved by means ranging from repression to genocide.” [14]

Serbia lost control of that territory in 1999 during a bloody attempt to realize genocide upon the Albanian population. [15] [16]

Community, not nation: self-management is the essence of our communism/anarchy

We strive to create the conditions necessary for a life of total self-management—this necessitates a revolutionary overcoming of the miserable state in which we live, in which we have to toil and struggle for the most basic necessities of life, as if they were a privilege. In this miserable condition of our lives in capitalism, other people are, at worst, seen as competition or enemies and at best, as others, as atomized and alienated individuals, with whom we share space but not life. This is the normalized order, because in this kind of system we don’t even have control over our own lives.

In opposition to this, is what we strive for: Community—the relationship of solidarity, mutual aid, and belonging that we all long for. It is a condition of total self-management, an authentic community of self-determined individuals. Nationalism, and the very idea of the nation, is one of the greatest enemies of the Community, because it gives false answers” to very real needs. The nation is a false community, it is a simulation, a spectacular response to our deep longing.

The history of anarchist and communist (we are not referring here to state-capitalist and, nationalist projects that called themselves communist) can be understood as anticipations and outlines towards a movement of total self-management. Self-management is the essence of our communism/anarchy.[18] [19]

From the moment that nationalism was introduced against us in the Balkans, there were those who opposed it and fought against it. The first socialist program in our language (1872) explicitly called for the destruction of all states in the Balkans. Not only imperialist powers such as the Austro-Hungarian or Ottoman empires, but against the newly formed, liberated anti-imperialist states such as Serbia, whose nationalists were already at work formulating their own genocidal programs.

That socialist program called for the formation of a Balkan federation, but not as a federation of nation states, but as a federation of revolutionary proletarians committed to the liberation of the earth from the misery of capitalism and the state. Those are the historical aspirations that we wish to affirm, transcend and realize. We are a federation of despair transformed into love and rage. For a Balkan federation without states and nations!

NOTES

[1] “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation(…) The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. 

 

[2] We are here referring to two conceptually separate ideological dichotomies (left nationalism vs right nationalism, liberal vs fascist nationalism). In reality, the manifest forms of nationalism usually represent a combination of these abstractly separate options. For example, the nationalism of the Miloievic regime could be characterized both as left (anti-imperialism) as well as fascistic (ethnic foundation, ethnic cleansing, genocide), etc.

 

[3] Here we can draw attention to the inextricable link between liberalism and nationalism in Serbian history. The politician Jovan Ristić (1531- 1899) was simultaneously the founder of the Liberal Party and one of the most prominent formulators of the Serbian nationalist program ofthe19 century. Ristic is included in the pantheon of ideologies of liberalism such as Latinka Perović, as well as nationalist intellectuals such as Milo Lompar, who, in writing about Ristić concluded that “there isa long term, often denied, alliance between liberal and national ideas”.

 

[4] “Reduced and degraded essence tenaciously resists the magic that transforms it into a faęade… Only by virtue of opposition to production, as still not wholly encompassed by this order, can men bring about another more worthy of human beings. Should the appearance of life, which the sphere of consumption itself defends for such bad reasons, be once entirely effaced, then the monstrosity of absolute production will triumph.(…) Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” 

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia. Preface and thesis 18. https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/5580-minima_moralia reflections_on.p

 

[5] Referring to these specific institutions, we rely on the perspectives of autonomist femi-nists from Italy from the 1970s. Explaining their conclusions, Silvia Federici emphasizes the operaismo term “social factory” put forward by Mario Tronti, but notes: “Tronti referred here to the increasing reorganization of the “territory” as a social space structured in view of the needs of factory production and capital accumulation. But to us, it was immediately clear that the circuit of capitalist production, and the “social factory” it produced, began and was centered above all in the kitchen, the bedroom, the home—insofar as these were the centers for the production of labor-poWer—and from there it moved on to the factory, passing through the school, the office, the lab. In sum, we did not passively receive the lessons of the movements I have mentioned, but turned them upside down, exposed their limits, using their theoretical bricks to build a new type of political subjec-tivity and strategy”. According to these authors, the state is primarily incarnated in the institutions that organize, control, and ensure the reproduction of the labor force.

 

[6] De Passage, Should we belong to the people? Antipolitika 3, antipolitika.noblogs.org

 

[7] Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism. 

 

[8] Ibid

 

[9] Clandestina, You Cannot Fight Imperialism with Anti-Imperialism, Antipolitika 3, anti-politika.noblogs.org 

 

[10] More information in: Jungslawen and Nihilist Nationalism 1907-1914, Antipolitika 3, antipolitika.noblogs.org

 

[11] “Primitive accumulation” is the term that Marx uses, in Capital Vol. I, to characterize the historical process upon which the development of capitalist relations was premised. It is a useful term, for it provides a common denominator through which we can conceptualize the changes that the advent of capitalism produced in economic and social relations. But its importance lies, above all, in the fact that “primitive accumulation” is treated by Marx as a foundational process, revealing the structural conditions for the existence of capitalist society. This enables us to read the past as something which survives into the present, a consideration which is essential to my usage of the term in this work”. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, Introduction. 

 

[12] More in: In the Dungeon of Nationalism: The Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the National Question, Antipolitika 3, antipolitika.noblogs.org

 

[13] One of the most common strategies for legitimizing newly emerging nations or nations in turmoil is the formation and maintenance of ahistorical and mythologized narratives of the “golden age” of the people or nation. As a rule, these narratives describe a period of wellbeing, interrupted by some kind of historical injustice, with the key im-plication being that these injustices can be corrected through a nationalist struggle to recover the dignity of the nation/people. Their goal is to establish a narrative of the long historical continuity and unity of the nation/people, as well as its “authenticity”, always with the aim of nationalist political instrumentalization. The Kosovo myth is just one such narrative, that in its current form, emerged in the 19th century in the service of na-tion building, and has since remained as the primary mythological bedrock of nationalist aspirations. That is why we do not deal with the “multi-century history” of the relations between Serbia and Kosovo in this text—that kind of formulation itself represents a nationalist falsification of history and projection of 19t century ideas onto the medieval past when the concept of the nation did not even exist.

 

[14] “A lot has been written here about the incursions of the Albanians to the east, because it concerned Serbian settlements in the northwestern regions of Turkey. Even today, this is the primary means by which the chauvinist press incites the Serbian people to hate the “wild” Albanians, while hiding the savagery inflicted by the Serbian army against them. How many tears have been shed over the fact that historical Kosovo is flooded with Albanians (…) The fires of burning villages were the only signal by which individual col-umns of the Serbian army could communicate to others how far they had reached. And the Albanian population —the survivors who could still flee—were pushed in front of us and, through the desperation of seeing their homes burn, gave us stiff resistance in Bu-janovac, and later, with the Turkish army fight heroically at Kumanovo. The Serbian peo-ple paid for this barbaric policy of the Serbian government and Supreme command with the lives of many.soldiers. With the fall of Kumanovo, all of those Albanians, who the Serbian army had, advancing from the north, pushed in front of them, settled in Skopje, where, seeking refuge, often found death (…) Since military operations ceased, it would seem like the elimination of the Albanian population would also stop. That Albanian belt that stretched along the old Serbian frontier, from Mitrovica to Vranje, had already been cleared, for which one man who sits as a member of the National Assembly stood out in particular! Grave silence overtook Kosovo, occasionally marked by sporadic revenge attacks, which according to the admission given to me once by a local district executive, were the result of the “tactless” behavior of our authorities:’ 

Dimitrije Tucović Serbia and Albania. 1914.

 

[15] The Humanitarian Law Center published a comprehensive report about the number of victims of the 1999 war (the Serbian state never officially released those numbers, but did not deny the HLC report). According to this report, the NATO attacks killed a total of 754 people: 454 civilians and 300 members of the armed forces. 207 civilians were of Serbian and Montenegrin ethnicity, 219 were Albanian, 14 civilians were Roma, and 14 were of other nationalities. From among members of armed forces, a total of 274 mem-bers of the VJ/MUP of Serbia and 26 members of the KLA were killed. On the territory of Serbia, 260 people were killed; in Montenegro, 10; and in Kosovo, 488. According to the HLC and HLC-Kosovo data, in the period from March 20 to June 14, 1999, Ser-bian forces, under the pretext of „defending Serbian territory from NATO aggression and Shqiptar terrorists”, killed 6,901 Albanians who were not participating in hostilities. During the same period, the KLA killed 328 Serbian civilians and 136 Roma and other non-Albanians who were not involved in the armed conflict. In the clashes between the VJ/MUP and the KLA, 1,204 members of the KLA were killed and 559 members of the VJ and the MUP of Serbia.The data clearly show that the leadership of the Republic of Serbia responded to NATO attacks by severe and massive retaliation against the Albanian civilian population—expelling and killing civilians, and burning whole villages and houses. During the NATO attack, in the Gjakova municipality alone, VJ and Serbian MUP units killed 909 Albanian civilians, in Orahovac 577, in Mitrovica 362, in Vucitrn 389, in Pec 496, in Glogovac 640, in Pristina 413, in Prizren 414, in Suva Reka 351, and so on elsewhere. On a single day, April 27, 1999, Serbian forces in the village of Meja killed 349 Albanian villagers, most of whose bodies were found in mass graves at the police training site in Batajnica near Belgrade. More than 260 villagers who were hiding in the forests of Sutice, Vrbovca and Cikatova were killed during a „ survey of the terrain” on April 30 and May 1, 1999. In the same period, the KLA killed a total of 328 Serbian civilians and 136 Roma civilians, among them 32 Serbian civilians in Suva Reka, 25 in Djakovica, 22 in Pristina, 4 Orahovac, and 5 in Gnjilane. Source: www.h1c-rdc. org/?p=34890

 

[16] More on the occupation of Kosovo: Damjan Pavlica, Contemporary history of Koso-vo, Antipolitika 2, antipolitika.noblogs.org

 

[17] “Descendants of survivors of such onslaughts are lucky if they preserve the merest relics, the most fleeting shadows of their ancestors’ cultures. Many of the descendants do not retain even shadows; they are totally depleted; they go to work; they further enlarge the apparatus that destroyed their ancestors’ culture. (…) It is among people who have lost all their roots, who dream themselves supermarket managers and chiefs of police, that the national liberation front takes root; this is where the leader and general staff are formed. Nationalism continues to appeal to the depleted because other prospects appear bleaker.” 

Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, part 3.

 

[18] Pockets of freedom lie in the shadows of history that serve as guideposts for our imagination and orientation towards the realization of Community. 

 

[19] The capitalized letters of the Serbo-Croat version of the sentence “Self-management is the essence of our communism/anarchy” (Samouprava je Esencija Naleg Komunizma/ Anarhije) form the word SENKA, which is the name of the collective that signs this text, and is the Serbo-Croatian word for “shadow’:

32.Various.BLM.Liberationwillcomefromablackthing

Info taken from diyhrt.info zines made by www.littlemouse.fun

Transfem Print

Transfema Read

Transmasc Print

Transmasc Read

 

Baedan_Queers-Gone-Wild-2

 

Interface-2-1-pp22-35-Alston

This interview  took place on the 4th of March 2009 and focuses on gender politics within the Black Panther Party and beyond. In particular I wanted to understand what forces shaped and changed the patriarchal nature of the Black Power movement in the late 60’s from a time where women were viewed as a threat to the strength of masculine self-realisation, as detailed by bell
hooks, to a point where women held leadership positions in the Black Panther Party.

Study Guide: This is a short introduction to anarchism, published in A6 zine format as part of UK publisher Fem Press’s Political Pamphlets series. https://femzine.bigcartel.com/product/political-pamphlets-1-2-3 

Source: Printed zine. 

Anarchism’s guise is one of self indulgence, meaningless chaos and destruction, usually fronted by a white face clothed in a punk-y aesthetic. It’s a political ideology that has been thrown out by the “respected” right and left, clumsily branded as self-indulgent and frivolous. This narrative against anarchism is born from the rotten fruits of capitalist realism, bolstered up by the beam of state realism, which aims at bleaching a free and democratic future.

Socialism is a broad term, one that is usually overtaken by Marxist and specifically Marxist-Lenninist principles: principles that push for a vanguard party, transitional state and rule of the majority against the minority (dictatorship of the working class). Even looking up at groups (and individuals within them) such as the Black Panther Party as a means to an end inhibits real autonomy, clouded by ideas of looking up to others to fulfil revolution. Anarchists argue that all of those structures perpetuate hierarchy and justify control as a necessary step in the struggle of autonomy. As Bakunin – a Russian anarchist prominent to its founding theory – put it: “Upon this contradiction our polemic has come to a halt [Marxists] insist that only dictatorship (of course their own) can create freedom for the people. We reply that all dictatorship has no objective other than self-perpetuation, and that slavery is all it can generate and instill in the people who suffer it. Freedom can be created only by freedom.” 

Whilst anarchists and Marxists agree on the elimination of capitalism and the wage slavery it invokes, there are sharp differences in the vision to get to a free society. Anarchists want an immediate abolition of the state and the hierarchies entangled within it. As white Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau express in their theory of the social contract, the state’s legitimacy is justified as a means to protect people’s rights – arguably concerning property – in exchange for giving up certain power to the state. It is put forward that the people consent – whether consciously or tacitly – to relinquishing some of their freedoms for the overall good of their survival, and at the point that this contract is disturbed by the state, the people should resist.

For Black people, this idea of a social contract does not bide with our experiences, something highlighted in Jamaican philosopher Charles W Mills theory of the Racial Contract. Mills argues that racism is central to the social contract. Mills argues that racism is central to the social contract and that the creation of the modern state was based on the subjugation of racialised peoples. He writes that what was established was in reality: “a racial polity, a racial state, and racial juridical system, where the status of whites and non-whites is clearly demarcated, whether by law or custom.” 

With severe exclusion from participating in the state, comes fierce resistance to its apparatus. Historically, we have seen Black people reacting to their repression through typically anarchist anarchist means. For example, when the Windrush generation came to the UK to help rebuild the country in its post-war era, Black people were often refused access to banks and other resources. We often hear about policies of redlining in the US and sanctimoniously flag it off as an American problem, but similar practices were happening in the uk. This led Black communities to set up their own systems of finance through a lens of mutual aid, whereby they would support each other collectively (co-operatives) 

Mutual aid is one principle of anarchism which is common amongst the spectrum of anarchist thought. However, like any other political ideology, anarchism comes in many forms, such as anarcho-communism, insurrectionary anarchism and egoist anarchism, amongst others. Some more common characteristics that spread across different anarchist schools of thought include:

 

Autonomy: reflecting one’s ability to make their own decisions without coercion by high bodies/institutions.

Decentralisation: pointing to an anti-statist approach where power is spread out in horizontal (non-hierarchical) structures. 

Direct Action: meaning being proactive in resisting and tearing down the capitalist state. This can be violent or non-violent, as long as it disrupts. Many anarchists believe that these acts will encourage others to realise their own power and capabilities to resist (also known as propaganda of the deed), whilst also highlighting the feeble nature of the state. 

Accountability: whereby people engage in open critique of each other in order to expel the exploitation of individual freedoms. 

 

These principles are not exclusively white, however anarchism as a theory was created by white thinkers and is now very much entangled with white people.

However, we must understand the impact and relevance of Black people within this history, whether named as anarchism or not. 

This is similar to the argument brought up in Black Marxism, a book by Black radical thinker Cedric J Robinson, which tells the history of Black resistance to capitalism and how this history needs to be valued in contributing to the overall history of socialism.

This single story narrative of socialism, and here specifically anarchism, obscures Black resistance, as stated above through the example of the Windrush generations set-up of anarchist systems, doubled with the bleaching of histories by a domineering Marxist narrative. In the African independence movements of the mid-20th century, statist movements dictated the story. When in reality, there were people advocating for a more communal structure, something that prominent Black anarchist Ashanti Alston points to in his pivotal speech Black Anarchism. For example, within the Zambian struggle for independence in the early 1960s, Black socialist state forces came up against an anti-statist liberation movement who were massacred by the newly formed Zambian independence government. This is not to overlook the incredible work of African socialist leaders such as Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba (all assassinated), but rather interrogates the problems with centralised power especially conserving that African states were created by white imperialists in the interest of capitalist “enterprise” a.k.a. exploitation.

In our critique of centralised power, we should also call into question the way we approach political action or “activism”, which is too plagued by hierarchy. 

Throughout our life, we have been programmed into behaviours of reliance, moulding us into beings that are always looking up to someone to solve our problems. This debilitation is a direct product of the capitalist system which creates and perpetuates teacher–student/boss-worker/state-subject dynamics , geared into making us unable to fight against injustice. We must obliterate this saviour mentality and acknowledge the capability within ourselves. In a practical and relevant sense, we need to stop idolising speakers at protests or “revolutionary leaders” but instead realise that every single one of us is capable of being a powerful disruptor of this system. Down with the vanguard, up with the people.

As Black people, we must be the drivers of our liberation. This means acknowledging that the overbearingly white anarchist movement holds limitations in dealing with, and even seeing, the manifestations of white supremacy. Black people can often get held back in having to deal with the problems of already established liberation movements. Instead of putting in all of our energy to change this, we must recognise our power and work on achieving true liberation, joining with other people (affinity groups) who share the idea that obliterating capitalism entails the eradication of all oppressive structures, including white supremacy.

In organising for this future, we have to engage in direct disruptive action that takes power away from the state, such as the squatting movement, strike, boycotts – including tax boycotts – and re-education outside of the state. Exposing the vulnerabilities of this system will bring us closer to breaking it and allow others to realise their power to free themselves.

There will never be a utopia but we can have a future that runs in a more mutually beneficial way, a future that does not trod on the backs of others to achieve its goals and which will not stay stagnant, but will move as we make decisions to create a more fitting world for us.

As the Black surrealist movement believes: if we can dream about liberation, we can push for it.

Let’s be the maroons of today.

 

Source: 2003 Firestarter Press Zine, Translated by Ken Knabb https://www.thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/4814.pdf

Study Guide: An article written by Situationists (A political current inspired by Anti-Authoritarian Marxism and Surrealism and the Dada movement) in France on the nature of the Watts riot, largely using the news and the array of condemnations by Black and left-wing political organisations to lay out an understanding of what happened, why and how. 

August 13th, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned.

Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests. Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an unhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say?

He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal Mclntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.”

And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never their real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve? We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion.

The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, the situationists issued an address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system.

Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation.

In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out.

It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers.

Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.” The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally.

They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects.

But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the politic of destruction. People who destroy

commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.

The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population  women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California super opulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global  spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power.

Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike [the FSM] challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role.

The spectacle promptly responded with exposes of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality, the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity.

The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to

hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates.

The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic—cultural spectacle.

By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life —- they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves.

It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general.

The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not sustained, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer tolerable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad side that initiates the struggles that change history” (The Poverty of Philosophy).

Africa has no special monopoly on that. The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people that the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because of irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere.

The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models.

This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see —- the moment they engage in a negating practice  that every hierarchy is absurd. The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values.

Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security.

They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown. Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage.

This is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks)  the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status).

It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war. A revolt against the spectacle even if limited to a single district such as Watts calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that would fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.