Wobbly times number 196

                                 

Once more, I shall attempt to clear up some confusion with regard to the conceptual framework within which Marx, Engels and indeed, many communists were working in the 19th century. To accomplish this task, I shall refer the reader to what Engels wrote about their interchangeable use of the terms socialism and communism i.e. why he and Marx sometimes used the term "socialist" and why "communist" in their writings over the years of their lives. Both terms meant the same thing to them, however why they preferred communist identity at the beginning of their studies and organization whilst socialist at the end remains well stated in Engels’s Preface to the English edition of 1888 as well as his Preface to the German edition of 1890 of the Communist Manifesto:

“Nevertheless, when it appeared, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. In 1847, two kinds of people were considered socialists. On the one hand were the adherents of the various utopian systems, notably the Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France, both of whom, at that date, had already dwindled to mere sects gradually dying out. On the other, the manifold types of social quacks who wanted to eliminate social abuses through their various universal panaceas and all kinds of patch-work, without hurting capital and profit in the least. In both cases, people who stood outside the labour movement and who looked for support rather to the “educated” classes. The section of the working class, however, which demanded a radical reconstruction of society, convinced that mere political revolutions were not enough, then called itself Communist. It was still a rough-hewn, only instinctive and frequently somewhat crude communism. Yet, it was powerful enough to bring into being two systems of utopian communism — in France, the “Icarian” communists of Cabet, and in Germany that of Weitling. Socialism in 1847 signified a bourgeois movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, quite respectable, whereas communism was the very opposite. And since we were very decidedly of the opinion as early as then that “the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the working class itself,” [from the General Rules of the International] we could have no hesitation as to which of the two names we should choose. Nor has it ever occurred to us to repudiate it.”

Neither Marx nor Engels ever used the term "socialist State". Socialism yes. But socialism for Marx and Engels meant a classless democracy and the political State was always meant to describe class ruled government. Included in this description would be a workers' State--the now infamously used term, "dictatorship of the proletariat". A workers' State would not be socialism. It would be class rule by the overwhelming majority, in reality, a proletarian democracy. Marx and Engels used the word State to indicate the governing structure of class rule whether the ruling class was the slave owning class, the land owning class of feudalism or the modern day capitalist class.  All political States were and would be class ruled. With the establishment of socialism by the working class, the State would die out because the social relation of Capital would no longer exist, common ownership and democratic control over the collective product of labour would necessitate the abolition of the wage system, commodity production and with it Capital as a social relation of political power.

A political State controlled by workers would include other classes. For instance, if the workers as a class controlled the State, they could get legislation passed which would tax the wealth of the capitalists and landlords in order to use that revenue to benefit people who had to work for wages in order to make a living. An example might be something like free healthcare paid for by the government using the aforementioned revenue. A proletarian democracy would be run by the workers in the class interests of the useful producers. The Paris Commune of 1871 was an example of a proletarian democracy or "dictatorship of the proletariat".


A worker controlled democratic republic is what Marx and Engels are proposing in section II of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. The reforms listed at the end of this section are general proposals which a workers' State might implement in 1848:


"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.


"These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c."

Further, it should be noted that even after the Paris Commune of 1871, Marx and Engels would speak in terms which many think they renounced after that workers' revolt. On September 8, 1872 more than a year after the Paris Commune was drowned in the blood of the proletariat, Marx said:

"But we have not asserted that the ways to achieve that goal are everywhere the same.

"You know that the institutions, mores, and traditions of various countries must be taken into consideration, and we do not deny that there are countries -- such as America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland -- where the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means. This being the case, we must also recognize the fact that in most countries on the Continent the lever of our revolution must be force; it is force to which we must some day appeal in order to erect the rule of labor."

As for the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat", it was never Marx's or Engels' intention that it would be Lenin's dictatorship of a party. In fact, that's just what they were arguing with the anarchists about in terms of the interpretation of the concept. If there has been any doubt as to whether the USSR was a dictatorship of the party, as opposed to being a proletarian democracy after the 10th Party Congress of the CPSU (B) in 1921, then I would suggest reading the well documented work by Maurice Brinton titled, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control .

The point of writing all this is to get people who "know" to understand what Marx and Engels actually wrote about the question of communism. Without reading what Marx and Engels actually wrote about socialism or communism, if you will, many, if not most people calling themselves "Marxists" have failed to grasp that they might be taking off from a conceptual base which does not correspond to the conceptual base Marx and Engels were taking off from. So, to reiterate:


1. A workers' State is controlled democratically by the workers. It is not common ownership and democratic control of the collective product of labour after the wage system has been abolished i.e. it is not the lower stage of communism/socialism. It is not a classless democracy. It is, like all political States, the dictatorship of a class, in this case, the still existing working class. Commodity production for sale can still exist in a such a proletarian democracy. A wage system can still exist. Under the wage system, labour power is a commodity.


2. Communism or socialism, if you will, signals a change in the mode of producing wealth from the capitalist mode which depends on wage labour and commodity production to the communist mode in which a free, classless association of producers democratically decide how to distribute the collective product of their labour. Socialism/communism means that commodity production for sale with a view to profit no longer exists, whether in its initial stages or in its more advanced stage. You can begin to see the outlines of this in various writings of Marx and Engels. Wobbly times number 88 contains some quoted examples.


"The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves...the struggle for the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies, but for equal rights and duties, and the abolition of all class rule." - Marx, 1864

Wobbly times number 189

Wobbly times number 170

What is socialism aka communism?

Socialism is not based on the wage system even a transitional 'socialist' wage system. Socialism isn't even about an equality of wages. To paraphrase Marx-- Where there is wage labour, there is Capital.  Capital is fundamentally a social relation of power, the power of the appropriator to own and control the product of labour.  This power is codified and enforced by the bureaucracies of the political State e.g.: the police, the military, the courts and the prison system.  

Socialism is based on the producers' common ownership and grassroots, democratic management of the collective product of their own labour.  Production is carried out for use and distributed on the basis of need.  Production is carried out in such a way as to ensure that the classless community can live in harmony with the Earth.  As with labour power, the Earth is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold as it was under the rule of Capital.  In fact, commodity production itself ceases to exist.

Under the wage system, the producers market their labour power to employers for the price of the skill any particular producer is selling.  These skills differ in their price in money depending on: their value i.e. how much socially necessary labour time is embodied in them e.g. education/training and price i.e. what the supply/demand dynamics of the labour market are for the particular skills. To sure their price also depends on the relative strengths of organised labour verses those of the organised capitalists. Capitalists control most of the wealth and therefore are able to dominate the political State.  The State is primarily the organised political expression of the ruling capitalist class and their allies in the landlord class.  The more organised power the workers are able to bring to bear against the capitalists in the struggle over the wealth the producers create, the more political power they are able to exert and the better their working conditions, the shorter their hours of labour and the higher their wages will be. 

Under communism, the associated producers plan what they want to enjoy in terms of goods and services, knowing that it is their labour time which will go into creating the total social store of the wealth they own in common. They also know that each producer can withdraw goods and services from the common store of wealth on the basis of how much socially necessary time the individual producer has put into wealth creation, regardless of their particular skill, as it is obvious that the production of this wealth could not be accomplished without every producer's participation in the necessary division of labour in an industrialised democracy.  Of course, there will have to be deductions from this time-based access to wealth used to replace the means of production as they wear out and to allow for those who are unable to participate in production e.g. children, invalids, the sick and those still undergoing training for skills needed in the society to have their needs met. As such, the wage system is abolished as soon as socialism has been established. 

In a socialist society, gains in productivity will translate directly into increases in free-time. Freedom like this could be used to spend more time with family and friends or just doing whatever an individual wants e.g. artistic activity, sports or just plain relaxing.  

Under capitalism, productivity gains left in the control of employers allow for greater and greater accumulations of capital (the wealth workers produce) and power for the employing class.  As the capitalists politically press to lower wages and working conditions in order to achieve higher rates of profit, productivity gains made by the working class lead to redundancies, insecurity and servility.  All talk amongst workers of organising to legally shorten the work day is met with cries of horror from the capitalist class and their hirelings in the corporate and State media. Imperious pleas for increasing productivity multiply as the blame for whatever current economic slump capitalism is undergoing is laid directly at the 'lazy', 'pampered' workers' door. Unorganised workers tend to be bullied by employers into doing unpaid overtime.

Only the workers acting as a class for themselves can establish socialist self-managed governing structure.  As the history of the 20th century has demonstrated, socialism was never able to be established, although many attempts were made. Parties claiming to have established 'actually existing socialism' for the workers through capitalist State action and 'communist' wage systems have utterly failed to do much more than maintain class rule over the producers and further fetishise the social relation of Capital.  

  

Wobbly times number 150

On progressive nationalism

"The right of self-determination means that a nation may arrange its life in the way it wishes. It has the right to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy. It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations. It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign, and all nations have equal rights."  Stalin, Marxism and the National Question

To speak or write about 'nations' doing this or that or having rights is a prime example of reification.  Stalin was a revolutionary social democrat in 1913 when he wrote the above and like Stalin, most social democrats of the time thought similarly about the right of national self-determination.  The ever growing move away from promoting class conscious praxis for the abolition of the wage system, toward what might be called 'progressive nationalism' on the eve of World War I, demonstrates how far the socialist workers' movement which Marx and Engels had been part of, had been coopted and folded into the dominant ideas of the capitalist epoch through reified thinking in general and political opportunism in particular.  

As Marx critically observed about reification in The Holy Family Chapter VI

"Once man is recognised as the essence, the basis of all human activity and situations, only 'Criticism' can invent new categories and transform man himself into a category and into the principle of a whole series of categories, as it is doing now. It is true that in so doing it takes the only road to salvation that has remained for frightened and persecuted theological inhumanity. History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”, it “wages no battles”. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims."

Nationalism is the political movement of the capitalist class (aka the bourgeoisie) to achieve domination of the producing classes through the establishment of its own political State.  The conception of national sovereignty for the capitalist class develops within and emerges from the womb of feudalism, the system the bourgeoisie sublates via political revolution.  Under feudalism, political power is held by the aristocratic class and sovereignty is in the hands of a monarch, aka the sovereign.  Thus, the 'right of national self-determination' is the political program of those rulers in waiting who wish to impose the wage system on the majority, the working class.    

Colonialism grew out of aristocratic class rule and the well learned historical examples for the projections of class power presented by the Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerian etc. slave owning classes.  The primary difference between the ancient domination of slave producers within empires, from feudalistic empire building, was the ever growing wealth and consequent political power of the capitalist class, a class which began to seethe and chafe under aristocratic rule as its colonialist mercantilism expanded in historical tandem with the closing of the commons by aristocrats in search of private sources of wealth.  Privatisation by class ruled governments is hardly a new concept.  Henry VIII made vagabond (read 'unemployed) peasants criminals, having them hanged along the roadsides of his kingdom. However, the major political-economic consequence of the closing of the commons was the ever growing employment of displaced peasants as wage-labourers, the workers who created the product of their collective labour as commodities, owned by the employing class and made available in markets for sale with a view to profit.  In the West, this roiling, ever wealth accumulating capitalist class began to show its political face in alliance with the landlord class in parliamentary institutions. In the ideological sphere the decline of feudalism was marked by the gradual decline of feudalist legitimising religions e.g. in Europe, the Catholic Church and with that decline, the rise of the Protestant movement with its work ethic and the ever dominating ideology, bourgeois individualism.  "Dieu et mon droit" was dying.

Whether or not it is labeled 'progressive', nationalist ideology is based on the notion that the employers and the workers have class interests in common.  But within the inherently exploitive wage-system, exploiters and producers have no class interests in common: Buyers do not have interests in common with sellers when they come to the marketplace for commodities.  Anti-colonialist nationalism has been and is the struggle of nascent ruling classes to cement their sovereign rule over the producing classes of workers and peasants through the establishment of a political State.  While the establishment of a capitalist political State may liberate the bourgeois from domination by monarchists or faraway colonial ruling classes, it does nothing, in terms of promoting the emancipation of the workers from wage-slavery.  

"The emancipation of the working class must be the act of the workers themselves"   This was the principle on which the First International was based.  That principle is as true now as it was then.  The wage-system existed then and it exists now, even within political States labeled, 'socialist'.  

In order to emancipate themselves, the workers will have to abandon contemporary leftist mythologies concerning 'progressive nationalism', 'boring from within' the pro-capitalist trade unions and parties, as well as the absurdly conservative notion of, 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work.'  Until they do, they will continue to spend their lives, as they spend their money, as wage-slaves, all equal under the law, in their own identities, democratically voting for bourgeois to lead them in government, while competing with each other for approval-votes from employers--because, as bourgeois ideology goes, the only way one can be free is if, some other one is un-free.  C'est la vie under the rule of Capital.    

Wobbly times number 138

"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them." Henry David Thoreau

"Darkness thus surrounds two worlds that are distinct but always associated. The same horror banishes the sexual function and excretion to the same darkness."  Georges Bataille

WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN?

               or

How I see what causes so many neuroses in class society.

Remember the capitalist dictum: 'Find a need and fill it'.  

What humans need is more fucking with birth control pills and condoms i.e. we don't need an expansion of the population. Lack of fucking causes so many neuroses. It also creates needs which are filled in with the commodification of human relations i.e. pornography, generalised advertising and prostitution to name but a few. 

Humans are more like promiscuous apes, chimps and bonobos than monogamous apes like gibbons or alpha male, once a year mating gorillas.  Gibbons split off on the ape line 22 million years ago and also have sex about once a year.  Gorillas and orangutans split a few million years later.  The last of the apes to split off and the ones closest to humans genetically are the chimps and bonobos.  Chimps and bonobos are naturally promiscuous. Male chimps have the largest balls in the ape family. Gorilla balls are the smallest. Human males fit in between, still they are only a tenth the size of chimps and bonobos.  I contend that humans are as naturally promiscuous as our closest relatives in the animal kingdom are because of the size of the gonads. Larger gonad size, larger production of sperm. Female chimps usually have more than one male's sperm in their vagina. Male gorillas use body size to gather larger amounts of females under their control as they have less sperm and need more recipients. Evolution is funny that way. Humans can be mostly monogamous. It's an effort though as divorce statistics and the sale of sexual gratification attest. 

As the old saying goes, "Variety is the spice of life".  Our evolutionary history gives lie to the notion that humans are by nature, monogamous or alpha-male polygamous.  Within the official ideological cauldron of patriarchal forms of marriage lies a roiling mass of social and psychological distress e.g. infidelity, divorce, one parent families and the blues.

The human race has had thousands of years of problems with monogamy, historical proof positive that we are not monogamous animals by nature but that we are forced onto this Procrustean bed by class dominated society's patriarchal legal, moral and cultural norms.

"The pathology known as "hysteria" was named over two thousand years ago as a condition that affected women and had something to do with the willful difficulties of the uterus. Already in the times of Galen, a doctor who lived around the time of Jesus, medical experts recommended a "massage" of the genital area of women suffering from this malady, which relieved the symptoms and restored the women to health. It was commonly known from that time forward that hysteria was related to female sexual satisfaction although different societies responded to this problem in quite varying ways.

"The 19th century saw a great rise in the disease to the point of it being a near epidemic, at least among middle- and upper-class women. This was undoubtedly related to the heavily repressed sexuality of the era as well as to what Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English describe as the masculinization of industrial society (For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. Anchor Books, 1978). In a world in which a reasonably wealthy woman's role is purely sexual and where sexuality is solely the realm of men, the greatest taboo was the idea that traditional coitus might not in and of itself satisfy the demands of women's sexual needs. Although many doctors of the time observed that over half of their female patients were not satisfied by their marital duties, they also were able, with a straight face, to declare this majority "abnormal" and in need of medical treatment.

"As in ancient times, treatment for hysteria consisted generally of manual manipulation of the womb area to provoke a "hysterical crisis" in which the woman convulsed and moaned and was relieved of her tension to the point of even being somnolent. In this way, women's sexual needs were deemed to be an illness and without ever using the word "orgasm" doctors of the time made a fine living with women patients who returned frequently for treatments.

"These treatments were so common and were consuming so much of the time of doctors that this actually led to the invention and perfection of the vibrator. The first vibrators were huge, expensive machines sold only to doctor's offices (and came with names like "The Chattanooga"). With this modern technology the time to treat a hysterical patient dropped from one hour to ten minutes, allowing the doctor to see many more patients in the same time. Needless to say, the medical establishment was quite enthusiastic.

"As the end of the century neared and more and more homes were connected to electricity, the technology of orgasm came into the home in the form of small, inexpensive vibrators. For the first time this technology was in the hands of the women themselves, but all mention of these machines carefully avoided mention of sex or orgasm. Instead advertisements gave glowing reports of rosy cheeks and youthful energy.

"Something, however, happened between the beginning of the 20th century and the 1920's, because suddenly the vibrator disappears as a product; the ads are gone from women's magazines and the manufacture of the products themselves seems to drop off. One possible reason, reports Maines, is that some early pornographic films from the 1920's show the vibrator as a sexual tool. This connection of the vibrator with sexuality made it impossible for women of the time to continue the charade that they were "just relieving tension," and the vibrator disappeared from the home.

The vibrator as sexual technology returned in the 1970's during the era of sexual liberation. In 1976, sexual therapist Joanie Blank opened the first store dedicated to vending vibrators in a women-centered, sex-positive environment, and which she called "Good Vibrations.""

K. Coyle

As for men, Wikipedia says, "As a general rule, an animal's penis is proportional to its body size, but this varies greatly between species – even between closely related species. For example, an adult gorilla's erect penis is about 4 cm (1.5 in) in length; an adult chimpanzee, significantly smaller (in body size) than a gorilla, has a penis size about double that of the gorilla. In comparison, the human penis is larger than that of any other primate, both in proportion to body size and in absolute terms."  I argue that these anatomical, evolutionary, adaptive characteristics are the material reasons why monogamy, polygamy, private propety and the political State are obsolete, indeed they are all contributors to multiple neuroses (including the sadistic tendencies/acts of cruelty passing for mutual erotic pleasure) we see displayed on a daily basis  and much unhappiness amongst/between humans.  The social psychology which class society generates  is one of submission the many and dominance by the few, the powerful, the class with authority to rule.

Women and men are anatomically evolved to fuck a lot. Just like bonobos and chimps, we don't have sex just to reproduce. Reproductive competition, when it comes, comes between the various males' sperm in the wombs of women who have chosen many partners.  The female womb itself is naturally attuned to selecting which sperm get through and are most likely to impregnate an egg.  Women, female chimps and bonobos (unlike say, the monogamous gibbons or harem-like gorilla females) don't 'advertise their fertility; they have what is  known as hidden estrus, making them ALWAYS ready to engage in sexual intercourse and indeed for tens of thousands of years before the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry, there was no human monogamy nor is there monogamy among chimps and bonobos. Children were considered to be part of one big family in hunter/gatherer groups.  There was simply no need to know exactly who the father was. 

I don't advocate mindless promiscuity. I advocate conscious knowledge of how we humans are anatomically constructed; how we've adapted over tens of thousands of years so that we can survive. What I'm saying is that the cultural constructs which flow out of the agricultural revolution beginning around 8,000 BCE are having negative effects on social relations between human beings, in particular between men and women. The need to be able to identify the male's offspring in order to reliably pass on the wealth the males have accumulated in patriarchal societies has bent human social psychology and made so many of us neurotic, unhappy, violent, bored and feeling unfulfilled. Monogamy and polygamy may have proven necessary social structures of civilisation when civilisation was necessarily based on the maintenance of class rule, private property and the political State; but is now proving an irrational, unnatural imposition on humanity.  

Since the dawn of patriarchy (some say around 10,000 years ago), we've been acculturated (mostlly through priestly admonitions from the legitimsed authorities of class society) into accepting monogamy as being natural and anything else as being 'sinful', wrong, low, primitive, barbaric etc.  However, as I've indicated, men and women in pre-class, pre-monagamous society couldn't tell whom a child was fathered by and paleo anthropolical studies demonstrate that most pre-agricultural societies were based on egalitarian power relations, within matriarchally oriented tribes.  Why matriarchy? Because only the mother could always be known; paternity was ambiguous at best.  Polyandry was more the norm than the exception.

Thus, monogamy/polygamy comes about as the patriarchal solution for being able tell which kids should get the male's property/wealth...most of these inheritors being males anyway and most of the property belonging to father males in the first place. Historically, males owned most of the wealth in class societies' version of civilisation.  In prehistoric society, what there was of wealth, was held in common in politically egalitarian, extended collective familial arrangements.  The need for the political State to legitimate and enforce class society's social relations of power and the unequal division of wealth by threat of violence is/was largely driven by the very unnatural, patriarchally driven forms of marrage: monogamy and polygamy.  Polyandry died out with the advent of class divided civilisation i.e. after the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry. After the creation of systems of surplus wealth creation, exploitive modes of production were set up by ruling classes which had the purpose of taking wealth and by extension, political power  from the producers of wealth: the slaves, the peasants and the workers.

Marriage is a cultural tradition which flows into the legal structures of class ruled societies. Publicly recognised, lawful relationships between men and women have been like that since patriarchy was found to be a necessary link in controlling property and inheritance of same after agriculture and animal husbandry were developed circa 8,000 BCE.  The mode of producing a surplus of wealth above and beyond personal need of the few is a foundation stone of class dominated civilsation and when conditions have been developed where it becomes possible for society as a whole to enjoy wealth beyond need, the material foundation stone of classless civilisation has been laid. It is when Capital as a social relation becomes recognised for what it is, a fetter on the freedom of the overwhelsming majority of individuals, that the rational bases of class society's foundations begin erode. 

It's perfectly possible (not easy though) to change cultural traditions i.e. recognising gay marriage by educating, agitating and organising within the culture; however, the class who rules will not change over implementing these measures. In the modern era, that's the capitalists and their buddies in the landlord class. Cultural change is what is happening now. Supporting cultural traditions is what social conservatives tend to do. For instance, I support marriage between as many people who want to be married to each other (gay or straight).  I even support monogamy as choice.  Why not? 

 Legalise polyandry now! That would be my personal slogan. However, I realise that this is a cultural change most people would not support at this point in history. La luta continua.  I do think that the whole cultural rumbling and grumbling about gay marriage contributes to the general historical transition social relations are undergoing nowadays, the transition from the monogamous (and polygamous) family, private property and the class dominated political State towards a free association of human beings who hold the social product of their labour in common and administer their collective wealth in grassroots, democratic ways, leaving their personal lives as a matter for individuals to design for themselves. Monogamy for most humans will ever lead to, "leading lives of quiet desperation" for the biological-evolutionary truth is that humans have an urge to satisfy their sexual needs within the variety of others they find around themselves. Thus, class dominated civilisation has become a fetter on freedom, an outmoded necessity worthy of sublation.

‎"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." G.B Shaw

Wobbly times number 123

From the pages of the "Industrial Worker" circa 1995

RED LONDON, by Stewart Home ISBN 1 873176 12 0 Published in 1994 by AK Press 22 Lutton Place, Edinburgh EH8 9PE, Scotland, UK 5.95 Pounds + 10% handling U.S. order to AK Press, POB 40682, San Francisco, CA 94140-0682 $12.95 + $2.00 shipping

 RED LONDON is a novel about a revolt of the oppressed against their oppressors. Its protagonists spend their working lives as members of what is termed these days by official authorities from Clinton to Habermas as the "underclass". The sell their time as prostitutes, obscure rock musicians, porn magazine photographers and so forth; while devoting their free time to sexual pleasure and the murder of the ruling class. They are libertines with visceral passions. Their practice of meeting out class vengeance is both crude and ruthless. They are serious proles with serious lusts.

 RED LONDON is not for the squeamish or prudish of heart. Stewart Home's prose is on a par with the Marquis de Sade when it comes to sex and violence. Here's a taste. The setting is a rock concert for conservative teens, given by an older Tory rock star, Sebastian Fame, whose neurosis of choice happens to be pedophilia. Security for the concert is by a gang of fascist boot boys, known as the Aryan Youth League. Nobody suspects that the Soho Prostitutes Collective has planned a guerrilla action.

 "The minders jumped to attention when a van skidded to a halt outside the hall. Twelve masked wimmin leapt from the transit, while the driver remained at the wheel. The heavies relaxed. Obviously these birds were a part of some practical joke, one of their mates had no doubt set them up by writing to Jeremy Beadle. The two AYL yobs were mentally incapable of accepting the fact that many of the greatest fighters down the ages had been wimmin.

"'We don't need to see your faces', the fatter of the pair laughed,'just get your tits out.' "'Get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out for the lads!' his mate chanted, but not for long! "Cleo floored the sexist retard with a kidney punch that brought blood bubbling up through his mouth. Then the kung fu chick broke the bastard's spine by bringing her boot down on th back of his neck. There was the satisfying crunch of splintering bone and the fascist bore became just another name on the Met's long list of murder victims.

"Simultaneously, Melody Thrush slammed a clenched fist into the other minder's mouth. Having rearranged the brickhead's teeth, she landed a devastating blow to his stomach and within seconds, the prick was puking his lunch. If nature had been left to take its course, it looked like the bastard would have retched up his guts, piece by little piece. Instead the steel toe-capped boots of several SPC members rained in against his body. After the first few ribs had snapped with a sickening crack, a badly aimed kick hit the cunt's head and the beer boy's body went limp. It was bloody unfortunate that his brain no longer registered the searing pain which accompanied the early stages of the beating. But, to the fascist, the icy numbness of physical blackout was more welcome than a million pound win on the pools.

"Sebastian faltered and broke off midway through a song as the SPC cut through the hall in a flying wedge. After a few screams, the crowd fell silent and the only sound to be heard was the tramping of boots on the wooden floor. Cleo and Melody grabbed Fame. The other SPC members herded the audience into a side room. Adults were simply shot through the head and left where they fell.

"Sebastian was shoved across the stage and held against the wooden cross. Melody removed two hammers and a fistfull of six-inch nails..."

RED LONDON is Home's latest novel. Like his previous works of fiction: NO PITY, PURE MANIA and DEFIANT POSE, Home has set RED LONDON in a Britain which has already raced through the cautionary traffic light, flashing " a clockwork orange", into a nearly visible future populated by an increasingly class conscious, if semi-educated, proletariat, who live within the socio-economic boundaries of a capitalist system in terminal decay. In RED LONDON, the self-appointed vanguard of the lumpen and proles is composed of young men and wimmin, who have cut their ideological teeth on a tract penned by the then notorious K.L. Callan.

Callan's famously banned book, MARX, CHRIST, and SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE is passed in xerox copies between self-styled anarchist fighting units and individual anarcho-nihilists, like Adolf Kramer. Kramer is the main protagonist. His mental interior reads like a politico-genetic cross between Charles Manson and Ulrike Meinhof. He is the archetypical child of the urban terrorist movement, grown more sly; but just as psychopathically dogmatic as his forbearers. Adolf and his comrades are prone to using the blood of their class antagonists to dab quotes on walls at the scenes of their actions. It is invariably K.L. Callan's MARX, CHRIST and SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE which is quoted.

 "Adolf slit Gallon's throat with a flick-knife, then set to work ritually mutilating the bodies of the two class traitors. After dipping his fingers in the gouts of blood that were still spurting from Gallon's bulk, Kramer scrawled the following observation across the living room wall: Contrary to orthodox opinion, be it Situationist or conservative, it is quantitative--not qualitative--problems that lie at the root of the current crisis. "It was a quotation from MARX, CHRIST and SATAN UNITED IN STRUGGLE, magnum opus of that most mysterious of nihilists K.L. Callan."

 These exiles from main street move within a milieu of militant vegans, situationists, buddhist priests, nazis, skinheads and other assorted denizens of lumpen and prole origins. You follow them through the pages of RED LONDON as they drink, fight, and sexually amuse themselves in the public housing projects, whorehouses, streets and bogs of the city. RED LONDON is a simple book, written in a minimalist style, with more than a few repetitious icons e.g. the ubiquitous bottles of 100 Pipers Scotch, preferred brand of the underclass; the ever present sexual motif of couples, "beating out the primitive rhythm of the swamps." It's also an exciting bit of anarchist pulp fiction. The sex and ultra-violence can stir up your deepest Id-ish fantasies. But, I don't think that it should be read as an organizing prescription, the way its heroines/heroes seem to have read K.L. Callan's MARX... . Nor do it think that Stewart Home sees himself as the K.L. Callan of today. There is more tongue in cheek within RED LONDON than is to be found in the numerous scenes of oral sex. No. RL might better be read as a warning; much as the proles of yesteryear read Jack London's IRON HEEL, that foreboding tale predicting the advent of the fascist States of the mid 20th Century. The warining this time is for the bourgeois of the world, whose commodified morality leads them to treat their wage-slaves as nothing more than carbon-based biological work units to be thrown on society's scrap heap when they're all used up. Home has given us a novel about a pissed off underclass of midnight ramblers who are going to be the first to stick their knives right down the throats of the ruling class--and baby it hurts! The warning is as simple as that old working class aphorism--what goes around, comes around.

Wobbly Times number 57

M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.

(son of Costa-Gravis)

THE OTHER is ever present and presents a threat to those in power and their hired armed bodies of men. These armed bodies of men must be paid and paid well to keep their masters safe from THE OTHER. THE OTHERS are all over the planet, facing off against the ruling classes. The State is founded upon violence and the threat of violence. The State is founded on class rule. Class rule is maintained by appropriating the wealth which the majority in any class society produce for among other things, these armed bodies of men must be paid...above all, they must be paid. Whether they are slaves, peasants or workers, those who must submit to exploitation and the political State are THE OTHERS.


*******************************************************



Twelve-year-old Ian Hamrick on his gruesome death in M.I.A.'s

'Born Free' video

May 10, 2010 9:40 am
IanHambrickPic281x211


The most gobsmacking five seconds in a music video
in 2010 happens at 6:51 in M.I.A.'s infamously
gruesome clip for "Born Free." If you've
seen it, you know the moment -- a crew of young
redheads is forced onto a bus, dragged to a field in the
desert, and promptly shown that things are about
to get much worse.

At that instant, one slender, moppet-haired
adolescent meets a fate that takes the "Born Free"
clip from a police state dystopia to a
level of grim violence that might make
Tarantino flinch.

That young man is 12-year-old Angeleno Ian Hamrick.
Few actors earn their first break by getting shot
in the head by a paramilitary squad, but Hamrick is
awfully level and contemplative about his
small, shocking part.

"M.I.A. wanted to show people what an ethnic
cleansing looked like," Hamrick said in a phone
interview Thursday. "She wanted to show that
it can happen in any country, not just a place
like Iraq. Just because this is America doesn't
mean horrible things don't happen here."

Hamrick got the call for the clip, directed by
Romain Gavras, after an agency called for redheaded
boys for a music video, and put them
through a fairly grueling audition where they were
screamed at, batted around a room and told that things
would escalate considerably from there. Hamrick was
excited to work with CGI (even CGI depicting
his own exploding skull), but soon began exploring the
deeper wells of metaphor in video, especially from his
vantage point in an adolescent culture inculcated with
violent media from childhood.

But Hamrick felt a potency in the video absent from
far more graphic media such as "Call Of Duty" or
"Grand Theft Auto." Perhaps it was the verite footage
of downtown Los Angeles, or the visual nods to
news footage from Gaza and Baghdad, or that graphic
violence against children is still one of the last
taboos on screen. M.I.A. shared his sense that the part
might take its toll.

"She came up to me on set and complimented my work,
and we talked a lot about what she wanted the video to mean,"
Hamrick said. "She wanted to make sure I was OK, that I knew
what was happening and why she killed me. I said I did, that
she really accomplished her goal of getting people to talk
about something they don't usually see."

Most 12-year-olds don't have much life experience in
military executions, so Hamrick had to draw on his own sense
of panic and confusion at the situation to nail the part. His
quivering poise (andnotably slight stature) at the moment of
the shot makes it all the more harrowing.

"In the video, I look like I'm seven or eight, and all the
other kids were a lot taller," he said. "So when you see me
get shot, your reaction is like 'Why'd they have to kill the
little kid?'"

That shot also might have profoundly shifted his career.
TMZ reported that his appearance in a high-profile Shakira
video was re-cut so as to less prominently feature Hamrick's
now-infamous face. Hamrick has a wry cynicism about the
potential for thwarted future prospects, and hopes the "Born Free"
clip will instead open up darker, adventurous
indie fare for him. But above all, the most shocking
part about his role might be the preternatural professionalism
he took with him to the set.

"Look at a movie like 'Kick Ass,' that girl is 11 and
she's cussing and killing everyone," Hamrick said. "I created
a character that's not my real person. In some ways, it was just
another job, but in a lot of ways it wasn't, because it had a
message. I don't think I'm making content for kids
-- this is definitely going on my reel."

Wobbly Times number 1

OUR INSTINCT FOR FREEDOM IS COMING ALIVE



Socialism ...it's on peoples' minds





Capitalists walk in fear





A crisis of overproduction is upon us





Our wages are insufficient





commodities too dear





We cannot buy





all that we've made

(or could make)





Hallelujah I'm a bum





unemployment lines grows





The wage system's





outmoded



oh what shall we do?







Most financial institutions will go bankrupt


in some awful way


I hope I'm around


when the bosses must pay

when they lose their political power

their material ability to boss us around

and that my friend is simply a matter

of us taking matters in hand

After all

we create the wealth of our masters

which gives them their political power

over us

Amen

Land and wealth should be held in common

Political power




to be done away with
by materially equalising political power between all women and men

The rest is for future humans to
imagine and

make real