Only by freeing the global black is the American black free

The following is a reply of mine on Black Agenda Report, here.

Communist? Don’t be ridiculous.

There’s a world of difference between global class consciousness and American class consciousness. The former treats every human being in the world equally – the latter treats every human being in the United States equally. The United States is the most powerful criminal society in the world – so the difference between the two consciousnesses is vast.
BAR’s main focus is on the oppression and mistreatment of American blacks (and other American poor). Yes, they have secondary focuses on the rest of the world. But if BAR wants to solve the problems derived from capitalism, problems which ultimately come home to roost for American blacks, they need to primarily look outside the US – they need to examine the primary victims of capitalism, who are NOT American blacks.
While American blacks struggle to remain out of prison, employed, and finally to join the oppressive bourgeoisie class (which they call “success”), global blacks struggle to not starve to death, they struggle to not suffer debilitating diseases, to not lose their homes or spouses or children to imperial wars – to not lose their communities – to gain some measure, any measure, of control over their lives.
It’s not an either-or choice. I’m not saying ignore American blacks because others suffer more. I’m saying that the problems of capitalism, capitalism itself, isn’t threatened by a focus on American blacks as the victims, which is why Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were only killed after their transition towards global socialism.
It’s like someone who tries to attack the mob by causing the mob boss to pay higher wages to the mob underlings. This does not threaten the mob boss – it only annoys him.
However, if the REAL victims of the mob boss – the community around him that he degrades – the decent people – are secured and boosted in their power, the mob boss can be destroyed.
Unless BAR wants to bring down the global capitalist system, the most they can do is transfer money from the American capitalists to the American workers – the same thing that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Jeremiah Wright are trying to do. Meanwhile, the true victims of America, including those blacks in the Motherland of Africa, will continue to suffer horribly, and to a degree that American blacks have never and will never experience.
Only when the Mob Boss is destroyed is the Mob Underling able to live again as a moral creature, instead of a creature who calls “success” his entry into the ranks of imperial bourgeois dominators of the world.
Until Africa is liberated, until Asia is liberated, until Europe is liberated, until the Middle East is liberated, America is enslaved.

The House That Rupert Built

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The World According to Monsanto

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Who’s to blame for price of oil?

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In the Land of the Master Chess Player

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Little Waste in Shantytown

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To Fire 6/18/08

I’m reminded of Dante’s Inferno, where the author passes through hell to reach heaven. Doing this is a very bad idea.

For me the trip took place from 1997 to 2000. I was becoming utterly disillusioned with both the educational system and American society and was very angry about my Usenet experience, which I thought might offer a hope for America but instead merely reflected and worsened the culture. Partially in fear and despair and partially to learn I put on the mantle of a totalitarian dictator with respect to the messageboards of two web-based games – Voltec’s 1-on-1 basketball game (beginning in ’97) and then Grand Slam Baseball (beginning in ’98).

The psychology of a totalitarian dictator is not like it’s portrayed in various media – the primary motivation of a dictator is to save the people from themselves. Since there is a constant interplay between dictator and the people, in order to win and turn the people into sheep the dictator needs to convince them that they are better off to put themselves in the hands of the dictator. He doesn’t do so for nefarious reasons, but because he believes them to be better off if they turn themselves in.

A common misperception is that the best defense against a totalitarian dictator is a kind of paranoia about the possibility of such – and violent reaction against anything that threatens to subvert one’s will. The best way to defend against such dictators is to be a great self-manager – to always command oneself not out of fear of subversion of the will but out of love of freedom, which requires such self-management.

The problem for me was not this project of totalitarianism, but that the project succeeded. I turned people into sheep, and they handed over their will to me. This was an abyss of horror far worse than anything else I’ve experienced or conceived.

It was inevitable following this tragedy that I become a severe enemy of totalitarianism, since I am one of the very few living humans (especially young ones) who understands it and since one of the major reasons I undertook the project was that I saw the United States moving in that direction.

I didn’t have any idea I was undertaking a totalitarian project when I started – my intellectual basis for the project was the Domination/Imitation Duology, which I developed in 1997. I noticed that people would imitate the behavior of people around them, such as people in an auditorium sitting a certain way. My focus was on the psychology of domination and to understand the basis for this domination and imitation.

Perhaps the endpoint of this line is in my allegiance to and pursuit of anarchism, which is the anti-thesis of totalitarianism.

Dante was wrong. It’s self-abusive to go through hell to reach heaven. Humans should never make that sacrifice. We need to build a society such that other humans don’t think they need to take that approach.

How’s Qt3 going? The place seemed fairly mean-spirited a few months ago when I checked in.

How have you been doing? – are there any developments in your life? Are you still writing?

Plutocracy Inc.

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Losing the Race

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Obama and a United South America

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Canadian autoworkers fight back

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Hard right Neocons and AIPAC

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Senate hearings interrupted to stop testimony

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Supreme Court condemns Guantanamo / Guantanamo prisoners have rights – Supreme Court

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On Obama and the American economy – with Aijaz Ahmad

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A Disenchanted James Petras / Chavez tells FARC armed struggle is over

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Capitalism and when to accept death

This is from a reply to a Joe Bageant piece on Dissident Voice, here.

 

Capitalism works well as a system of control. As long as we are controlled, justice is superfluous. If we aren’t controlled, justice is inevitable. Without capitalist control there is no capitalism, in the same sense as without a bully’s fists there is no bully.

When there’s a gun to one’s head, obedience or death become the options.

The vast majority of heroes throughout history rapidly become corpses following their announcement of such. Thus many of us are heroes within ourselves – few of us are heroes in society. Even the best of us (especially the best of us) feel guilty and unmanly. And so we beat our women. And so we feel even guiltier. And so our women prefer capitalists, who feel only happy and contented at the state of the world.

We living human beings under capitalism are those who choose obedience over death. All that separates us is the degree to which we resist obedience, accept the resulting oppression, and flirt with death at the hand of the state.

Precisely because we do not accept death, we are corrupt. Most of our “hope” is based on vanity, on the thought that we can destroy the system.

Even accepting death does not defeat capitalism, since capitalists will oblige the threat in such a way to cause increased fear of death in the remaining not-yet-dead citizens. Murder is exploitable, as feudal lords and all other capitalists understand.

Martyrdom is useful, but martyrdom lacks rationality and can also be exploited. The ruling class simply subverts the meaning of the murder and the martyr becomes irrelevant (for his populist purpose).

It’s popular in the US to say that capitalism is decaying, but there’s no proof of that. It’s only true that capitalism in America is decaying – it’s doing well enough in China and India. We may see several more centuries of monstrosity with different faces, different races, but the same old shit issued from master to slave.

Even the left, which considers itself sophisticated, rarely sees beyond it’s own national borders. This myopia, this lack of a global war to destroy capitalism, this continued desire to transfer criminal blood money from American capitalists to American workers, is doing as much or more to damage the future of the world as capitalism itself.

Some of us are waiting for the right time and the right structures so that when we accept death it will not necessarily be in vain. Until we accept our destiny and build those structures we will be guilty.

We’ll all become corpses soon enough – let us be wise prior to our death. Let us be forgotten by the elite instead of being called heroes, like the vain do who partake in foolish death.

Immigration: The Battle for Manassas

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Grand Theft Digital: How Corporate Broadcasters Are Hijacking Digital TV

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Issues of Western Imperialism

This is a reply to Lloyd Rowsey and Kevan Giffen, from here.

“Although the left was not even radical in the 1990’s, it was grasping at the same straws as it had been hoping would “ignite” the masses at least since Watergate. This hope, combined with a not-totally unjustified fear that real radicalism — a la Malcolm X and the Black Panthers — would subject them to the same treatment (as well as set back if not end their imagined progress with middle Americans), largely explains their contribution to the nihilistic nineties.”

You’re getting self-righteous, Lloyd. I’m addressing your use of “not-totally unjustified”. You are supporting the notion of race revenge. It seems extremely unlikely that this is a misreading, but if it is go ahead and explain the meaning of your words.

“Not that I have any problem with violent resistance to capitalism… Morality is relative in my book… I just felt like calling you out on that…”

Whatever. Capitalists will recognize the structural decay and become more repressive, and there will be a moment(s) of great tension and great violence. This is a matter of self-defense as the State terrorizes innocents in the name of maintaining the status quo or in their terminology, “stopping terrorists”. Successful self-defense against the State is in fact, revolutionary, as the Black Panthers understood. Shifts away from capitalism always include corporeal deaths, as Venezuela and Bolivia are only the latest examples of. And despite the celebratory attitude of the left, those are fairly minor shifts away from capitalism, still fundamentally supporting the global capitalist system. A major shift would be far more violent. Another transition to examine is the one from communism to capitalism that the Soviet Union underwent in the ’90s.

You should worry less about the possibly upcoming short-lived “violent resistance to capitalism” and worry more about the second-by-second perpetual violence OF capitalism.

“Native American tribes were not perfectly peaceful, they got into conflicts just like any other civilization. This is because humanity thrives on conflict and struggle as do all living things, without it we would stagnate. Look at how many technological advancements came from WWII…”

You mean like nuclear weapons, “advances” in biology that can lead to a holocaust of man-made plagues, greater industrialization that has increased the rate of global warming, or various handheld or home-based devices that have desocialized and atomized whole societies? Please, tell me all about these “technological advancements from WWII”.

Humanity doesn’t thrive on conflict, but conflict is a necessary part of life in a world of varied desires and limited resources. That doesn’t mean that conflict should be glorified or put on a pedestal, as your corrupt “heroes”, including Mr. Nietzsche, too often do.

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” – Friedrich Nietzsche 😉

The words of every sado-masochist, spoken with more articulation. Reality is far different, as pretty much anyone can tell you, including disabled victims of the wars you glorify as “tremendous examples of the conflict that we thrive on”.

How about you ask Iraqis about Nietzsche’s phrase, and get back to me on the answer. Or are you going to use the handmaiden of the masochist with the phrase “survival of the fittest”?

What’s the matter, scared to ask Iraqis that question? Oh, but you’re surely not worried, right, because “what does not kill you only makes you stronger” and if that doesn’t work, it’s “survival of the fittest”.

Nietzsche and Darwin – they justify pain, violence, and death at every turn. It’s no wonder they are two of the major heroes of Western Imperialism. Where would the 20th century have been without such luminaries?

Primaries & Class

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To Fire 6/9/08

I’m participating in the unloading of 9 trucks a week, at an estimated average of 1200 boxes per truck – so that’s 10,800 boxes moved per week. I get paid about 2 cents per moved box, and that’s including for free the various box-moving preparations and other assorted tasks.

How’s your summer going? I like the summer in particular since the Notre Dame library is nearly empty and books are very easy to find. Maybe too easy – it’s as if college students and faculty don’t read. They can make the effective argument that they don’t need to.

I’m playing some of Dragon Quest VIII and Final Fantasy XII on the PS2 I’m borrowing from a friend. That’s gotten me interested a bit in continuing my RPG short story, although my time these days is very short.

I’ve entered the scholarly phase of my life which I predicted wasn’t going to happen for another five years. I’m reading over one book per week at the moment – I just finished Joel Kovel’s Overcoming Zionism and started Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option, both very good. After that I’ll probably move to The Colonizer and The Colonized.

Are you making new friends in San Francisco? Are some of your old ones still there? San Francisco must be one of the most fun places to be in the country right now, even if you’re apolitical.

I haven’t read much of War and Peace, although it’s still on the agenda. Once I whittle down my Notre Dame library reading list that will open up more time for it.

I’m looking for more books to add to my reading list, if you have any recommendations. I’m happy to read fiction or non-fiction.

How’s World of Warcraft going for you? Are you playing in a guild?

Talk to you later.

Leftist Campaign Issues

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US government and Iran

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Capitalism fuels brutality

This is a reply to an article by Robert Jensen, here.

 

The point of “male locker room talk” has nothing to do with truth, but rather with militarizing the culture. It increases the brutality of the culture as a whole. I wonder how many murders, rapes, and alienation in general results largely or partially from such conversations.

Capitalism fuels not just patriarchy but brutality, on both the male and female side. When humans compete for resources it’s a zero-sum game, and anything goes. So any psychological, physical, economic or social form of aggression “within the law” is considered not just acceptable but desirable. “Male locker room talk”, which furthers this aggression, is a very good idea within a capitalist system. Dominating others, controlling others, results in profit and gain, as any honest member of the ruling class will tell you. Nowadays the preferred term is “managing” others.

So you can try whatever “reforms” or “education” you wish, but nothing positive will happen until the structural causes of brutality are destroyed. There are some curious contradictions for a professor whose bourgeois paycheck is based on the capitalist system of brutality itself. Who knows, maybe you’ll get a raise when some “male locker room” monster successfully (further) exploits the Middle East, resulting in more capital to be passed along to the directly-state-funded class of humans whose role is to articulate and control truths created by society while pretending that they are the ones who create them.

There are many forms of exploitation, and many links between the “good” people of the world and the monsters who accumulate and control wealth. Until we destroy the monsters and their system and structures, none of us can truly be good.