The Oaxaca situation and the world.
www.indymedia.org is reporting from the Mexican province of Oaxaca where the teachers union and other progressive groups have occupied the province, installed their own government and attempted to throw out their reactionary governor. An indymedia reporter was killed on the barricades by paramilitary gunmen, most likely sent out by the "legal" state.
Rage against the Machine sings at one time: "justify / those who die! Justify / those who die!", and it is really true. In capitalism, everything becomes commensurable with the economy - with the form of money - and this includes all of humanity, the arts and the subjective, real life of human beings. Their creations are twisted away from them and their real associations alienated from them.
We find spontaneous struggle that breaks through the artificial quietness that burgeoise ideologists want to enforce and give the world an idea of. The great problem, really, is that the masses need to be better organized. It is truly a pity that the mass movements are not better anchored than they are. They come, and they go again, with only remnants left. In many places, reification has taken a hold of many people's entire consciousness. They take frameworks such as private property of the means of production as an axiom, that it -must- be so. They believe the Soviet Union was what all communism must event to and they believe that they can do nothing. Only when their interests are threatened - and not always then - do they mobilize. The interesting thing about all unrest, and all threatened interests, is that one must certainly realize that different things appear to be different attacks. What the American proletariat sees as an attack on their collective interests is different from the Swedish one, which is different from the Thai one, etc.
The harsh conditions of life in the early 20th and late 19th century certainly served to mobilize people for their interests: and quite effectively. But those days are not gone, and we do not live in a paradise created by liberal economics and burgeoise democracy. People die, the state commits heinous crimes and capitalists ruthlessly violate all that is human. Though we cannot expect a revolution until a crisis, when, as in Marx words "man is at least compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life" and the huge contingence that exists there, happens we can attempt a sharpening of the class struggle and to wage a succesful and offensive class war.
A basic cornerstone of this must be to break the reification, to show at all times. To move up the positions of what peoples interests are and to legitimize them. It IS legitimate for each and every worker to have a good pension, to reap the fruits of his labour, to be safe and to have good wages. We must always show how they are entitled to far more than they believe they are. The main problem here, of course, is the great risk for reaction instead of revolution as I have written about before. Often, these things are painful processes and must therefore be handled with care. It is easy for despair to set in. Rather, we must light a fire and make a very clear, concise case. We must not resort to empty phrases, to lies or to sheer propagandism. Our collective propaganda (in the original sense of the term) must be a flow of clear understanding and reasoning that shows effects and causes. No worker is stupid, and treating them like it is losing the battle before the first shot is fired, but absolute opaqueness and faith in their own critical ability - however slumbering - and their own actions once they are realizing their position is of outmost importance.
Hasta la victoria siempre!
Rage against the Machine sings at one time: "justify / those who die! Justify / those who die!", and it is really true. In capitalism, everything becomes commensurable with the economy - with the form of money - and this includes all of humanity, the arts and the subjective, real life of human beings. Their creations are twisted away from them and their real associations alienated from them.
We find spontaneous struggle that breaks through the artificial quietness that burgeoise ideologists want to enforce and give the world an idea of. The great problem, really, is that the masses need to be better organized. It is truly a pity that the mass movements are not better anchored than they are. They come, and they go again, with only remnants left. In many places, reification has taken a hold of many people's entire consciousness. They take frameworks such as private property of the means of production as an axiom, that it -must- be so. They believe the Soviet Union was what all communism must event to and they believe that they can do nothing. Only when their interests are threatened - and not always then - do they mobilize. The interesting thing about all unrest, and all threatened interests, is that one must certainly realize that different things appear to be different attacks. What the American proletariat sees as an attack on their collective interests is different from the Swedish one, which is different from the Thai one, etc.
The harsh conditions of life in the early 20th and late 19th century certainly served to mobilize people for their interests: and quite effectively. But those days are not gone, and we do not live in a paradise created by liberal economics and burgeoise democracy. People die, the state commits heinous crimes and capitalists ruthlessly violate all that is human. Though we cannot expect a revolution until a crisis, when, as in Marx words "man is at least compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life" and the huge contingence that exists there, happens we can attempt a sharpening of the class struggle and to wage a succesful and offensive class war.
A basic cornerstone of this must be to break the reification, to show at all times. To move up the positions of what peoples interests are and to legitimize them. It IS legitimate for each and every worker to have a good pension, to reap the fruits of his labour, to be safe and to have good wages. We must always show how they are entitled to far more than they believe they are. The main problem here, of course, is the great risk for reaction instead of revolution as I have written about before. Often, these things are painful processes and must therefore be handled with care. It is easy for despair to set in. Rather, we must light a fire and make a very clear, concise case. We must not resort to empty phrases, to lies or to sheer propagandism. Our collective propaganda (in the original sense of the term) must be a flow of clear understanding and reasoning that shows effects and causes. No worker is stupid, and treating them like it is losing the battle before the first shot is fired, but absolute opaqueness and faith in their own critical ability - however slumbering - and their own actions once they are realizing their position is of outmost importance.
Hasta la victoria siempre!
posted by Björn at 3:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home