Analysis of racism and its relationship to capitalism

Although the traditional socialist line is that racism has come about in the past six or seven hundred years as a product of the emergence of coherent nation-states and capitalism, what we know of ancient, tribal history seems to suggest that racism has, in fact, been around for as long as society. In tribal times, people were raised to fear and suspect those from 'rival' tribes (each of which, since it was taboo for members of different tribes to even have contact, quickly developed hereditary physical characteristics unique to the tribe), because it suited the interests of the chieftains to conquer and enslave those tribes and take their land. The primitive oligarchism of tribal society was therefore not only the source of the more advanced oligarchism of feudalism and modern oligarchism in the form of capitalism, but also of prejudices such as racism and nationalism (which is, in effect, a form of racism, and certainly an evolution of tribalism in the same way that racism is).

So yes, capitalism and racism are heavily interlinked, but not so much in a father-son relationship as more like...cousins. Overthrowing capitalism will of course play a large part in ending racism, just as it will solve or partially solve most of the other problems present in today's society as well, because as most Marxists say it will remove people's subconscious material motivation for clinging to such prejudices, but ultimately to attack racism and all prejudice at its root is not necessarily to fight capitalism, but to emphasize that the characteristic which makes us people and which makes us equal is not a physical one, or a social one, or even a mental one, but the most fundamental characteristic of all - the awareness of one's own existence, and the consequent ability to experience suffering, to experience joy.

l'Agents Provocateurs

The march against NATO left the International Village of Resistance at about 10 Saturday morning, starting (I think) with a block from one of the French Communist Parties. Our coachload was sandwiched to begin with between a Die Linke delegation and the comrades from London (with whom we stuck tight for the whole demo, thanks largely to Geoff's Manchester Trades Council banner, which was very visible and served beautifully as a rallying point for the British group...and also possibly as our lifeline against police brutality, which I'll come back to later). I shared the banner with Geoff initially, and continued to do so for most of the demo.

There was nothing particularly reportable for the first hour or so - other than maybe the chanting, in several languages including English ("one solution - revolution", "how many kids have you killed today?", etc), French (mostly protest songs which I unfortunately didn't have the linguistic skill to follow rather than chants, including the Internationale at one point), German ("hoch die internazionale solidaritie", "nein zum krieg - nein zur NATO", etc) and (surprisingly, given the apparent lack of Spanish comrades in the demo) Spanish ("a-anti-anticapitalista" and "[insert politician name] - terrorista") - until we reached a fork in the road with the Vaubaun bridge to the right, towards which the march turned and somewhere across which I therefore naturally assumed the NATO summit was being held, and the road into central Strasbourg (where the summit was actually being held) to the left with several ranks of CRS riot police across it.

There was a tram platform a few minutes march towards the bridge, at which two members of the black block climbed the shelter to break down the unusually overt (by British standards anyway, it could be normal in France for all I know) CCTV cameras on top, to a roar of enthusiastic approval from the crowd. About half an hour later, at the peak of the bridge, the front ranks of the march encountered another CRS blockade (and I later discovered that the route over the bridge they blockaded had been confirmed with the state enforcement apparatus only the day before, so there was no excuse even by the standards of SOCPA in Britain), whose perpetrators showed the aggressiveness of their style of enforcement by throwing tear gas canisters at any demonstrators who approached them. It was around this time as well, I think, that police helicopters started to appear - at least, it wasn't long after when they started raining tear gas down indiscriminately on the procession as a whole...and the gas used by the CRS turned out to be a far stronger strain than I had experienced on demonstrations in Britain. There was a certain amount of panic, initially, with people running in all directions away from falling gas canisters, resulting in injuries from collisions etc, but this was quickly overcome and people began to be more calm in their retreat from the gas, at least in our part of the column, thanks in large part to Andy's initiative in rallying people around our banner. After awhile, the cops were pushed back, and eventually the line was broken completely - I cannot underestimate the role played by the black block in this initial victory.

Another hour or so further down the road, the front ranks of the marchers turned into...a car park. A very large, gravely car park, with a heavy, lockable metal gate and surrounded by high concrete walls. For a moment, I wondered if some of those leading the march were police infiltrators and we were being herded into a remote car park away from the eyes of the public and the media to be riddled full of bullets by the helicopters which still hovered above - but then I saw the stage at the far end, and realised this was the site of the rally and concert I had thought was supposed to be held outside the actual NATO summit, and that the NPA or whoever had organised the demo were just really, really bad at negotiating with the police.

After about two hours worth of speeches and music, a plume of smoke appeared over the wall, followed within another hour or so by another, and two or three more. Later research has uncovered that the buildings on fire included a border control station (most definitely a legitimate target), a hotel (which was part of a chain, and which there are rumours was at the time being used solely as a staging post for CRS personnel shipped in from other cities - but I haven't seen anything to confirm or discredit that claim yet, so it may or may not have been a legitimate target) and a local chemist (not a legitimate target) right next to a block of housing inhabited by ordinary people (precisely the sort of thing a black block should be protecting). So I believe it was around this time that the black block fell victim to infiltration by police provocateurs, with the dual aim as always of reinforcing the stereotype of activists and particularly anarchists and black block-ists as nothing more than violent nihilists with an insatiable desire to "smash shit up", and to drive a wedge between the black block and the rest of the demonstration when they were later reunited.

After about another hour, a speaker (it might have been Bianca Jagger, but I don't remember entirely clearly) was interrupted by the advance of dozens of CRS grunts into the car park, preceded as always by volleys of tear gas shot from the ever-present helicopters, and we were forced to abandon the rally and retreat from the car park.

An hour of marching, made interesting by the parcels of tear gas intermittently delivered by those delightful pigs, and during which I think it was that most of the black block - plus some newcomers, unbeknownst to the rest of us and presumably to the other black block-ists as well - rejoined the main demonstration, took us back to the bridge, which the riot squad prevented us from crossing again - and those at the front of the march must not have been aware, just as I wasn't, that the road they were directed onto was a dead end, with no second bridge to be found further along.

There was a post office around half a mile up the road, at which half a dozen black block-ists - who I noticed were all wearing identical boots, which I discovered yesterday by coming face-to-face with two seperate groups of squaddies who stopped and searched us on the way to the rendezvous with the coach back to Manchester were CRS-issue - spontaneously took offence, and took crowbars to its windows and doors; I considered trying to pull them away... what stopped me was the fear that if they retaliated it might start a conflagration within the demonstration (in hindsight, that was probably what they were hoping for, although I hadn't realised they were police agents yet at that time - I made a judgement call by refraining from intervening, and I suppose it was the right one). Further along the road, a group of black block nihilists - and it should be noted that while just enough token nihilists to lend credit to the stereotypes are an inevitability in any black block, they had no doubt become more influential because of the actions and presence of the police infiltrators - and probably some of the police agents sustained their attack on public services, unity between demonstrators, and the media image of activists by completely wrecking several bus stops, and apparently (again, according to research done since returning to Britain) smash the windscreen of a passing car. Any genuine anarchists left in the black block at that time presumably broke with it and either left or took off their black jackets and masks and dissolved into the demonstration - everything the black block was doing by then was cynical at best, perhaps even explicitly counter-revolutionary, and I can't imagine any anarchist wanting to be associated or complicit with it.

Later, after provoking the CRS and forcing us into a position where we had the river on one side and the falling tear gas on the other (flanked by a barbed wire fence and a pile of rusty train tracks), the "black block" - if it could still be called a black block, which is supposed to defend demonstrators from police harrassment, not manipulate them into a potentially lethal situation - disappeared into the industrial estate outside which we had become trapped; one comrade from our group picked up a glove a black block-ist had dropped in his flight, which would turn out tomorrow to also be CRS-issue. We eventually managed to negotiate our release from the cul de sac into which we had been herded, thanks largely to Geoff's trade union banner - the trade unions being so much more powerful in France, of course, the idea that they might be exposed as assaulting official trade union delegates struck real fear into the CRS officers - although the route they forced us to walk back to the campsite was quite literally several miles out of the way; ironic, I think they wanted to deter us from coming back, but...well, I don't know about anyone else, but having experienced the peculiarity and severity of the repression the French state engages in only makes me more determined to aid in its overthrow.


Clarification 21/05/2009: there were actually some Spaniards there, because I remember seeing CNT flags now, but I only saw a small group of CNT people as far as I know and I didn't see any sign of anyother Spanish organisation, so I'm not sure if they were there in any significant numbers like the delegations from other European countries.

The case against boycotting Israel

While it's true that Israel depends on foreign trade for its existence, and that a successful boycott would therefore ultimately bring it down, its not the way to do it - in fact, it could turn out to be the equivalent of the Treaty of Versailles, which led directly to the Holocaust.

What people often overlook is that such a boycott would hurt the Palestinian Jewish working class far worse before it would ever hurt the Israeli Zionist oligarchy, and that its biggest short-to-mid-term effect on the Palestinian struggle would merely be to isolate these workers and drive them further into the arms of ever more extreme fascists such as Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu. I don't want to speculate on where that would lead, but the worst case scenario is that Israel's last days would be punctuated by nuclear war as the most extreme Zionists, having gained control of the military machine, felt themselves backed into a corner.

For a better idea of what people outside the conflict zone can do to help defeat Zionism, we should instead look to the example of the Greek dockworkers who stopped a certain freighter last month in Astakos.

Barack Obama

A few people have been wondering about my nominal support for Obama...

To use an analogy, Barack Obama is a three year prison sentence, Ron Paul is an assassination, John McCain is a death sentence, and Sarah Palin is a summary execution. Obviously Ralph Nader (in this analogy, I suppose he would be acquittal) would be a far better option, but since a lot of people don't even know who he is, he's unlikely to win, instead of resigning to be shot why not go for the 3 year sentence and stage a prison break after 2 weeks?

My best estimate of Obama is that he is the equivalent of what Tony Blair was in 1997 - he talks big about hope and change, but he doesn't really believe it, he's hoping mostly to change his own bank balance rather than society at large and although he won't necessarily make things any worse than they already are he won't make any particularly significant changes either. However, the key difference between Obama's current Presidential campaign and Blair's initial Prime Ministerial campaign is that Obama's is fundamentally based - more than anything else - on popular participation. Hopefully, if he does turn out to be a good little tool of the oligarchy after all, he will have awoken a sleeping giant that he will be unable to put back down.

I'd prefer to see Obama win the Presidency and get overthrown than for that opportunity to never come because McPain and Failin caused a nuclear apocalypse within a day of taking office.

And of course, there's always the slim chance that he is in fact a genuine progressive, and that his sporadic rightward moves are feigns to attract the money of the oligarchy to use against them, rather than his general populist rhetoric being a feign to attract the popular vote. This I hope for dearly.

Uniformity

One of the contributors to the Convention of the Left session on education this afternoon touched - in passing - on a topic I believe recieves far too little attention from the popular movement. That topic was school uniforms.

The context of the mention was the current government drive to convert as many schools as possible into the new Academies, which they claim provide choice but which are in fact merely a means of class segregation - although government-funded, they are in fact private and require a hefty fee. The speaker's words, as I remember them, were a satirical take on the admissions policy: "Oh sure, we'll take your kids...by the way, the uniform tie will be £250."

That immediately brought me back to my time in high school, which was largely the beginning of my activism, focusing at that time on issues within the school and specifically on the issue of the uniform regulations; the main justification the headmaster gave for those regulations was the question of fashion - he claimed that allowing students to wear their own clothes led to bullying and elitism by the better-off students on the basis that their families could afford more expensive clothes. While an otherwise somewhat valid point, it was made completely null by the presence of non-uniform days which facilitated the creation of a pecking order anyway, and more significantly by the fact that the uniforms were easily as expensive as the most expensive fashions any of the students could afford anyway; then it crossed entirely into the realm of doublethink when you consider the regulations themselves, which prohibited any form of personalisation to the point of an untucked shirt or a loose tie being a detentionable offense, and to which the current financial fortunes of the family had no relevance whatsoever.

However, the issue goes far beyond an ambiguously well intentioned initiative with shattered foundations. In fact, the concept of a compulsory uniform for students was first introduced by Joseph Goebbels in Nazi Germany, who intended it as a contribution to the process of indoctrination - kill their spirit through uniformity, and encourage a uniform pattern of thought, so that the students become simply cogs in the machine.

Churchill's ministers and patrons loved this idea, of course, and in today's British schools the uniform acts to transform students into cogs in the school's battle machinery for its fight to attain favourable reports by the Ofsted inspection agency and positions in the league tables. This in turn encourages the mentality that the teacher - and by implication, any authority figure - is right by default, regardless of the logic of the situation (actually, this was an explicit doctrine in my school, which I was forced to - superficially, of course - formally accept before I was allowed to return to classes after my second suspension). The teacher is always right. The manager is always right. The politician is always right. The police officer is always right. The supervisor is always right. The stockholder is always right. The oligarch is always right.

The uniform is the embodiment and seed of the corporate identity; more than that, it is the key to Orwellian society (behind maybe Newspeak and the Thought Police, anyway). We in the popular movement should give far higher priority than we do to fighting its prevelance in our schools.

Proposed universal bill of rights

• "Person" is defined here as an entity which is aware of its own existence, and therefore potentially capable of suffering and joy, eg a Human or a hypothetical artificial intelligence

• All people have the right to defend themselves and others (both their rights and their body) with the necessary level of severity up to the equivalent of that of the attack, and to defend their material possessions (as freely given as a gift, personally made, or acquired through the above principles of fair trade) without causing significant harm to the aggressor either directly or indirectly, in rights or body

• All people have the right to free speech except in cases of deliberate and malicious slander

• All people have the right to defend themselves and others with the necessary level of severity up to the equivalent of that of the attack, and to defend your property without causing significant harm to the aggressor either directly or indirectly

• All people have the right to a fair trial if suspected of violating any of these rights

• All people have the right to freedom of lifestyle

• All people have the right to continued life, so far as it can be maintained
  

• As implied by the above, all people have the right to free healthcare, as well as and education

• All people have the right to freedom of travel

• All people have the right to freedom from any institutionalised bias against any inalienable and/or harmless charactaristic they may possess

• All people have the right to personal privacy

• All people have the right to access any information where this is not incompatible with the right to personal privacy

• All people have the right to an equal say in all decisions not predetermined by the rights described here, proportional so far as is pragmatic to the effect of said decision on your own circumstances

• All people have the duty to respect the rights of others

Outbreak of revolution as I envision it

I envision something along the lines of a general strike, but not a traditional general strike.

I recommend the following: a public transport strike, but instead of marching and/or rioting in the streets, the strikers continue to run the buses, the trains, etc, as normal, but *without bothering to collect fares*. The only difference is that not a penny leaves the pocket of the traveller, and not ear nor dime is given to the boss.

What generally turns the public against industrial action is the inconvenience caused by a strike; if instead of suspending a public service, you give people a snapshot of what socialism is all about (in this case, that snapshot is free public transport), they'll be on board (no pun intended) like a flash.

Of course, since this would be seen as illegal - unconsented use of private property - for this state of affairs to continue for any meaningful period of time, other workers in other industries would have to strike in solidarity with the transport workers (the idea here is that they do so according to the same philosophy as the transport workers - continue to run their respective sectors of the economy, but waive fees and charges and ignore the bosses), and specifically there would have to be widespread ignorance of orders / desertions / mutinies in the police and military in order to prevent the ruling classes from coming down on the strikers by means of the state; however, given the inevitable popularity won by the nature of the initial strikes, which would of course have effected members of the police force and military the same as everyone else, this is not only feasible but highly likely.

Eventually, with de facto cooperativisation having spread to all areas of the economy, it would no longer be relevant whether the former ruling classes were ready to give in because their capacity to act as an obstacle to freedom would have disappeared with their power base.

Thoughts?