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Anti-capitalist Texts

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Articles From "The Poor, The Bad And The Angry" #1

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 labor power, they 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….

We are reproducing these leaflets and explanations of their contexts, not to overestimate the significance of our efforts, but to encourage others to engage in similar endeavors. These are small, practical, examples of modern subversive intervention against the society we despise.

by English Journal Aufheben 52 Kb

April 29th, 1992, Los Angeles exploded in the most serious urban uprising in America this century. It took the federal army, the national guard and police from throughout the country five days to restore order, by which time residents of L.A. had appropriated millions of dollars worth of goods and destroyed a billion dollars of capitalist property. Most readers will be familiar with many of the details of the rebellion. This article will attempt to make sense of the uprising by putting the events into the context of the present state of class relations in Los Angeles and America in order to see where this new militancy in the class struggle may lead.

attacking BART's attacks on workers 37 Kb

by the ICG (International Communist Group) 105 Kb

On the Iraqi side, defeatism was general. The Iraqi State sent tens of thousands of proletarians in uniform to the front, to serve as cannon-fodder. But in face of this situation, the proletariat did not remain passive. Struggles occurred even before the beginning of the bombings by the Coalition armies. In Mossoul, in the North of Iraq, in Kurdistan, people rioted against the famine that resulted from the "war restrictions" that had been imposed jointly by the Iraqi State and the Coalition. In Sulaimania, in the North also, demos against the war were organized by women. The Republican Guards intervened and fired at the crowd. 300 women were arrested and later executed. But in the South of Iraq also, the situation remained very tense in the face of the bombings and the launching of this war, in which proletarians knew they had nothing to win.

Article For Up-comming "The Poor, The Bad And The Angry" #2

further rebutals to BART's attacks on BART workers 10 Kb

Unpublished Extras

It is difficult to talk, in a general context, about the new wave of humiliation and violence against asylum claimants. The burning ZASt (central office of call for asylum claimants) in Rostock was made a symbol for by the media and the Left. Difficult, because here, so many things are linked together unseparably, and on the other hand so much splits into thousands of "scenes" and "communities" with their respective relative truths. The riots in front of the asylum camps refer to questions like the housing shortage, rising unemployment, restructuring of the factories, state labor market policy, juvenile rebellion and so on. In relation to this, answers from our side (??????????) are remaining partial at best: punitive expeditions that declare whole quarters as "racist", "Autonomen" who decide to categorize their ghetto even more strictly, anti-fascists fixated on a re-run of "1933", "friends of the foreigners" blaming anyone who is only trying to understand, for example, if there possibly had been any molesting of neighbors, as "defending the pogroms"...

by "S" 4 Kb

The guerrillas of the Zapatista National Liberation Front are fighting "for a better life... for socialism." And there is no doubt these soldiers - and everyone under the thumb of rulers -- can get something better by fighting. Zapatistas interviewed by journalists have said that they're not sure what kind of system they want, but there has to be something better than this one. When your back's against the wall, you fight. But you have to be aware that the paths you take could be dead ends. We believe that the whole framework of the nation and the state is a dead end which can never get rid of exploitation, can never go beyond class society. Nationalism always means an alliance of the poor with the rich against other alliances in other countries. And even if it's only a nationalism of the poor, we know from many revolutions in the past that when struggling people give over power to leaders they put their trust in - whether it be the Bolsheviks in 1917, the Chileans in 1972 (handing in their weapons to Allende's leftist party), or allow Anyone who feels their own exploitation in this global system of capitalism is inspired by this new revolt. We don't see this just as a revolt of some people "down there", that we hope succeeds -- we see it as a revolt of people we have something in common with -- what we have in common is being members of a social group: the exploited and dispossessed of the world. And we see that if there is to be true success, it won't be just these people who struggle to achieve it - it will be people all over the world acting together, for our own individual and collective interests, who achieve a worldwide revolution.

Democratic ideology essentially contains two sort of the illusions:

  1. The idea that under all circumstance the morally superior way of making decisions is having some sort of electoral participation by the majority.
  2. The idea that the method of decision making is what distinguishes different sort of social system.
13 Oct.: Strike spreads to Air France freight at Roissy, then to airport bus drivers, against the budget plan which called for 4,000 layoffs, a wage freeze, abolition of bonuses, and the farming-out of some jobs to subsidiaries.

Analysis of English riots of several years back
by group "BM BLOB" of London 43 Kb

Over the last year, from the summer of 1991 onwards, the UK has erupted in a fresh bout of urban rioting. This time it's not only confined to England but has spread to Wales and more recently, Scotland. Even the Republic of Ireland has had its troubles with disturbances on Dublin's north side and south side (Fatima Mansions), and also in Cork City. It's not the same as the last major outburst in 1985, nor is it anything like 1981. July '81 was an expression of the decaying inner cities and instigated by black youth. The solidarity of black youth, dragging whites in their wake, was again to the fore in 1985 but this time its most ferocious expression emanated from those estates built in the late 60s/early 70s. The kind of point-block, concrete jungles of the Loughborough estate in Brixton and especially Broadwater Farm in north London which in the 70s even received some bullshit architectural award. But by 1992, continuing this urban drift, rioting has become largely an expression of the ubiquitous low-rise modern estate but with one big difference: the vast majority of the protagonists are white youth. There've been the same vandalistic sprees with youth attacking police, hurling fire bombs, looting, and setting fire to shops. Derelict buildings have been torched, schools and council housing offices set ablaze - even law courts and police stations firebombed. Most have been occasioned by some incident, often a death, related to police pursuing joy-riders. In that sense it's more like the riots in France in the early 80s.

Article by "S" from sources such as Il Manifesto and the European Counter Network (a computer network).