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!

Kritik

In general, when considering the suffocating disortions of patriarchy, racism and capitalism, it is difficult not to feel as if we are falling underneath a great, heavy weight. When you consider the mass of your unconscious actions - turned into mere reflexes, never considered twice until now - you notice patterns of power, recognition, status, etc. Man as he is, is mutilated by the processes of socialisation that we grow up in.

I think it is difficult to fully realize how deeply these problems go, but even in the most "enlightened" company it is always there. Sometimes as a shamed silence, sometimes in outright statements of sexism or a reificated consciousness. The way in which our habits are formed are structured around the economical system that we live in. Time becomes money, the time of the day that is the most full of toil becomes estranged to the labourer and all his relations are defined from this, hard base.

Generations upon generations have lived like this, with moments of furious rebellion that lights up the blackness of capitalism. Like a fog that always surrounds us we face the image in the mirror. Our relations to friends, family, lovers, people we will never see again, must always be measured against time-space, occupied for the most part by the iron law of Capital. We have to sell ourselves, or spend our time in social functions that either replenish ourselves (with the knowledge that it is but temporary) or prepare us. A few oasis exist, but these are few and far between - as the minimal budget of the student can attest to. Each of these oasis are absolutely the creation of the class struggle.

As if this is not enough, there are the walls that we raise unconsciously as we stigmatise certain groups. A reflexive sort of action appears where women, immigrants and so on take on and internalize the role they have been given by the dominant power of society. This, of course, entrenches the existing patterns of interaction and gives off a sense that we are part of a god-given schema which is harder to break than the actual bars of iron in a prison.

Is everything night, then? Is everything we do, in a most postmodern sense, doomed? Are we all captured by this wish to dominate, structured around contingent facts and strewn with prejudice? No, not really. There is Kritik, as the old Germans meant it. Kritik in the sense that we take on the world, break it down, analyse it. This existential marxism is an individual one in the sense that "...man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind."
The sheer, moral outrage of so many activists: from animal rights to feminists, from the muslim protestors in the Middle East to the contempt against politicians of so many Americans is something of a movement, a Kritik, in this sense. Of course, it is not always very developed. Kritik is a part of class consciousness, but it is not class consciousness. It is the movement of the independent mind - as independent as a mind can become - and at best finds aufhebung as it joins with class consciousness to enrich both.

Nietzsche once said wise words about merciless criticism: Marx said even wiser ones. It is necessary to be a critic, and to be ruthless as well. If we really do believe in marxism, then there is nothing to fear. In the end, our premises and conclusions hold. For young communists, it is certainly an important skill, an important weapon to devastate all of our old prejudices, our venerable trains of thought with the Kritik handed down to us from Kant.

Kritik

In general, when considering the suffocating disortions of patriarchy, racism and capitalism, it is difficult not to feel as if we are falling underneath a great, heavy weight. When you consider the mass of your unconscious actions - turned into mere reflexes, never considered twice until now - you notice patterns of power, recognition, status, etc. Man as he is, is mutilated by the processes of socialisation that we grow up in.

I think it is difficult to fully realize how deeply these problems go, but even in the most "enlightened" company it is always there. Sometimes as a shamed silence, sometimes in outright statements of sexism or a reificated consciousness. The way in which our habits are formed are structured around the economical system that we live in. Time becomes money, the time of the day that is the most full of toil becomes estranged to the labourer and all his relations are defined from this, hard base.

Generations upon generations have lived like this, with moments of furious rebellion that lights up the blackness of capitalism. Like a fog that always surrounds us we face the image in the mirror. Our relations to friends, family, lovers, people we will never see again, must always be measured against time-space, occupied for the most part by the iron law of Capital. We have to sell ourselves, or spend our time in social functions that either replenish ourselves (with the knowledge that it is but temporary) or prepare us. A few oasis exist, but these are few and far between - as the minimal budget of the student can attest to. Each of these oasis are absolutely the creation of the class struggle.

As if this is not enough, there are the walls that we raise unconsciously as we stigmatise certain groups. A reflexive sort of action appears where women, immigrants and so on take on and internalize the role they have been given by the dominant power of society. This, of course, entrenches the existing patterns of interaction and gives off a sense that we are part of a god-given schema which is harder to break than the actual bars of iron in a prison.

Is everything night, then? Is everything we do, in a most postmodern sense, doomed? Are we all captured by this wish to dominate, structured around contingent facts and strewn with prejudice? No, not really. There is Kritik, as the old Germans meant it. Kritik in the sense that we take on the world, break it down, analyse it. This existential marxism is an individual one in the sense that "...man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind."
The sheer, moral outrage of so many activists: from animal rights to feminists, from the muslim protestors in the Middle East to the contempt against politicians of so many Americans is something of a movement, a Kritik, in this sense. Of course, it is not always very developed. Kritik is a part of class consciousness, but it is not class consciousness. It is the movement of the independent mind - as independent as a mind can become - and at best finds aufhebung as it joins with class consciousness to enrich both.

Nietzsche once said wise words about merciless criticism: Marx said even wiser ones. It is necessary to be a critic, and to be ruthless as well. If we really do believe in marxism, then there is nothing to fear. In the end, our premises and conclusions hold. For young communists, it is certainly an important skill, an important weapon to devastate all of our old prejudices, our venerable trains of thought with the Kritik handed down to us from Kant.

I hate the Swedish Academy, I hate the King and I hate pompous burgeoise cultural figures.

Right. So this is an assault on our favourite institution in the world here - the Swedish Academy and their Nobel Prize. They have managed to spend decades upon decades choosing who is the biggest burgeoise ideologue or favourite upper class fine cultural icon this week.

Though it is a nice idea the very essence of it shows just how far right it is, and how much it remains a bastion of the old upper class. Really, the economics prize is a study in burgeoise values, time and time again the same tendencies have been mirrored in choices of the Nobel Price of Literature. Choosing Solzhenitsyn was nothing but political. Sartres own refusal to accept the prize as he was considered is one of the more heroic acts of our French friend.

The other establishment that truly anchors the lofty culture of our beloved ruling class is the king and the monarchy. I can but state my point with the famed postcard of Vertigo publishing: http://vertigo.se/vk/slott.htm.

Furthermore, I believe that even though it won't be the best thing the revolution will bring, the subsequent disappearance of self-absorbed petty burgeoise chronicles in daily news will be among the chief accomplishments of the radical left. Another Staël von Holstein is hardly conceivable for any civilized, rational human being.

The political point with this is the fact that the monarchy, morons in our newspapers and the Swedish Academy are all obstacles, are all bastions of the burgeoise, are all, in a word, ideological. Revolutionary action - the existential search for liberation, and the marxist action, the marxist praxis that this necessarily brings to any serious attempt to reach such freedom (a real freedom, not the Platonic freedom of liberals and other ideologists - be they Jean-Paul Sartre or John Fucking Stuart Mill) necessarily hurls us into conflict - polemic - with these groups and their generating of ideology, and thus of passivity among the working classes.

The Political.

What makes these actions so difficult is that we are living in a society that most people take for granted. That it couldn't be any other way. That you grow up, go to school, go to work, die. That's how it is, for the vast majority of people. What you can gain within that is what it's about. Politics is not for you.

Aristotle has a long discussion about the political, and he has a different idea than we do now. Now, we think of politics as seperate from the private sphere. That most of us live just privately, content with our little world, trying to carve what we can out of it. A rare few step out into the public sphere. They are ministers, political secretaries, members of parliament, etc. It's a sharp divide between the face on the TV screen and you, you watching it.

But is that how it is? Not being political is a political choice. Do you understand what I mean? When you choose to ignore someone in a line who is bothering you, you're still playing on the same terms. When you choose to ignore an insult, you're in the same court as the one who ignored you. When you say "No, no, politics is not for me. I am content with the life I am leading." then you are making a political choice. If you don't speak up, you assent. You do, really. Because they - whoever they are - they will make the choices they please if you don't speak up.

Politics is everything you do that involves a mass of people. Something you say in a lecture, somewhere you go on a break, something you read because you want to be enlightened. Politics is, as Aristotle meant it, the entire life we live with other people. It cannot be seperate from it. But you can choose to ignore it, and leave it to others. But what will you be, then? Who are you, really? A leaf, in the wind? Or a person? Living, breathing, thinking, acting.

Enhetens taktiska paradox:

// Heinz och Kunz kämpade och strida
Heinz socialdemokrat och Kunze kommunist
De stred i samma kamp på var sin sida
Och kom i samma fängelse till sist
Där grälade de jämt och ständigt om enhet
Med skarpa argument och mycket vett
För ingen ville släppa till sin renhet
Och ger mig sig en tum går det snett
Ända upp i galgen fördes kampen
De bytte hårda ord på alla sätt
Din jävla reformist, jag har principer!
Din sketna kommunist som ingenting begriper!
Tills repet sträcktes och gav båda rätt

Så tog det allt för lång tid tills vi lärde
Att det finns argument med tyngre värde
I galgen väger stora tankar lätt //
- den Tyska Balladen, Fria Proteatern


Enhetens taktiska paradox finns i spänningen mellan vad man kan tänka sig ge upp: det vill säga, om man kan tänka sig att stödja en annan grupp som kommer komma närmare sina mål och som sedan har en chans att överta ens egen plats. Problemet föreligger också på ett principiellt plan: ett samarbete tyder på någon form av acceptans av en annans ideologi och taktik. Till sist finns det också ett rent taktiskt värde, där frågan är hur relationen kommer utvecklas: till exempel till en situation där Vänsterpartiet är i mångt och mycket ett stödparti till Socialdemokraterna.

Men texten ovan då, vad handlar den om? Jo, den handlar om samma tragedi som vänstergrupper alltid utsätter sig ifrån. Det finns en skarp, skoningslös kritik, förmodligen som ett resultat av en kamp om hela samhället. Det finns inte plats, känns det som, för viss taktik, vissa principer, etc.

Det är säkert sant. Men i mångt och mycket har vi blivit lamslagna. Vilka är det vi ska ha solidaritet med om inte andra människor i vänstern, vad de än kallar sig? Det är knappast så att vi kommer ha socialism imorgon och en kamp om maoism eller trotskistiska permanenta revolutioner.

Det är litet naivt att vädja till enhet bara som sådant. Det finns skäl varför vi inte har enhet i vänstern. De är inte alla dåliga, och alla argument är inte hemska. Men saken är, vi har lamslagit oss själva väldigt länge. Vi kan inte gå med på allas teoretiska fundament, men vi vet alla åt vilket håll vi vill gå. Den rätta metoden att tänka på sitt parti eller organisation är att det bara är en enda del av arbetarrörelsen, den organiserar en del av klasskampen. Det ger oss ett mindre parti-centriskt perspektiv. Våra fördomar bör sträcka sig till borgarna som är våra fiender - inte till våra allierade.