The Poor, the Bad and the Angry
The following article was written by the publishers of the magazine, The Poor, The Bad and The Angry. we ripped it off for Subversion becasue it develops at gretare length some of the points we express in our own set of basic principles - What We Stand For (See Subversion 18). You can contact PBA via the following website: http//www.webcom.com/maxang
OUR ANTIPOLITICS
We live on a planet devastated by social relations based on money and market exchange.
Regardless of the rhetorical or physical violence they offer one another in their
fight for power, regardless of leftist or populist verbiage, every government and
government-to-be, every politician and police force on this planet exists to defend and
maintain this system. Different politicians and parties propose different management
strategies for capital, but regardless of their jargon Yeltsin and Mandela, Time-Warner and MTV, Fidel Castro, the ecology lobby and the most bedraggled college campus
socialist groups are all in agreement on this: the world of wage labor is to be maintained
at any cost, and what capitalism is is never to be identified in clinically specific, clear terms. Seemingly normal and inevitable facts - that an individual has nothing
but her or his labour power, that they must sell it to an enterprise to be able to
live, that everything exists to be bought or sold, that social relations revolve
around money and commodity exchange - are the result of a long and violent process.
The world we live in is the world of capitalism. Imposed and maintained by terror,
mystification and inertia, capitalism is the historically specific form of class
society based on the exploitation of human labour power as a commodity, on wage labor,
money, and commodity production. Modern capitalism, in its free market and its statist
forms, is a totalitarian system that has conquered the world, devastating human life
and the planetary environment in an ever accelerating manner. But capitalism has
also given rise to social forces that could bring about the revolutionary destruction of
this system, and the rise of a new way of life; chief among them the mass collective
actions of proletarians fighting against the conditions of their exploitation and
impoverishment.
The class struggle is the primary liberatory force of our time. By class struggle,
we mean not only the fight of wage-earners against their employers. The class war
includes all the struggles of exploited and dispossessed people all over the world
against their conditions of exploitation and impoverishment, wage-earning and unwaged, urban
and rural, low-paid and high-paid. It encompasses our fights against racism, sexism,
and homophobia, but not as separate reformist issues. Class warfare involves both
fights for concessions from capital and the fight for our own power outside of and
against capitalist social relations.
So-called Socialist and Communist parties, social democracy, Leninism and all its
mutant children, are the left wing of capitalism's political ensemble/ideological
spectrum. Any and all political groupings that aren't openly and explicitly committed
to the fight against work and wage labour are counter-subversive efforts. We are against
any cooperation or collaboration with leftist parties and groups.
National liberation movements are movements in which the exploited are marshalled
to fight and die for the political ambitions of the local bourgeoisie or a substitute
bourgeoisie of guerrilla chieftains or intellectuals. No national liberation movement
has ever led to the rise of a society without exploitation; all regimes produced by
"people's wars" and "wars of national liberation" have been and always will be the
voluntary or involuntary lackeys [agents] of imperialism and the world market against
the needs of the local working classes and indigenous people. A Turkish proverb says
it best: "When the axe came into the forest, the trees said: the handle is one of
us." Any support for national liberation movements or for nationalism in any form
is support for the murder and exploitation of the poor by capital. The FMLN, IRA, PLO, ANC,
etc. are capitalist and counter-revolutionary organizations having more in common
with the mafia than with the armed actions of an authentic revolutionary movement.
Throughout the 20th century, labour unions have served capitalism both as labour merchandizing
outfits and as police organizations, specifically against the struggles of unionized
workers and more generally against the working class and poor as a whole. As 20th century states have become more frequently compelled to intervene in the economy,
labour unions, regardless of ideology or the subjective intentions of their members,
have tended to become mechanisms of the capitalist state. Working class peole have to fight outside of and against all unions and unionist ideologies.
The abolition of capitalism has nothing in common with democracy, nationalization
of major industries, power in the hands of leftists or workers' self-management of
the economy. The goal of an authentic, anti-statist communist movement is the abolition
of wage labour, the eradication of all forms of market relations, the destruction of
all states and national borders, and in necessary unity with this negation, the emergence
of new social relations where poverty and unnecessary toil are abolished and work
no longer rules social life.
In spite of their flaws and limits, the defeated social revolutions of the 20th century,
and the mass collective violence of the poor in revolt from Los Angeles to Kurdistan,
are the embryonic expression of the future anti-statist and unyeilding class dictatorship against capital worldwide: what must become a consciously communist movement
without frontiers or compromises, a new world trying to come alive. Communist revolution,
and class struggles that tend towards communism, imply the despotism of the exploited against exploitation and exploiters, the violence of the poor against their
violation by poverty. For us, communism is a real and living movement that tends
towards the abolition of existing conditions. The destruction of commodity relations
and the birth of authentic human community aren't simply waiting to be brought about as
a series of measures consciously enacted "The Day After the Revolution." These communist
urges live today as a repressed impulse in collective struggles, and in many small
gestures and attitudes. We fight for this. We seek companions in this effort.
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