Chinese Rocks *

According to an article in the latest Monthly Review, there is a resurgence of the Chinese left. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to impose a vicious and barbaric capitalism upon a people who up till then were steeped in egalitarian and class struggle ideology. Justifying the destruction of social services, the lack of trade unions, lousy wages and working conditions, environmental degradation and a level of economic inequality that makes the USA look anarcho-communist by comparison, has become an ever more difficult problem for the Chinese ruling class. Millions of Chinese compare the official ideology – which is still Maoism – with the actual daily practice. In the same way that American radicals compare the decentralist and anti-imperialist American Revolution with the present hyper-imperialist corporate state, so too the Chinese with their Revolution. Millions went through the Cultural Revolution, and while much was xenophobic and anti-cultural, some students and workers took Maoist rhetoric as a reality and tried to introduce self-management. 1. (Maoism had a rhetoric borrowed from populism and anarchism, which is why so many Western New Leftists were attracted to it ) Thus, a re-birth of Maoism is occurring, both inside the CPC and outside it. The horrors of present capitalist development should make these neo-Maoists intransigent about equality and class struggle

However, neo-Maoism is not the only ball game. There is also a middle class liberal left and a Chinese new left influenced by currents other than Marxist-Leninism. 2 For any successful anti-capitalist revolution the three groups will have to work together in some manner, even if not officially. Hard-line “Gang of Four” type Maoism will simply not do. For the Chinese left to be successful it will have to move in the same direction the rest of the worlds social movements are going, toward a non-sectarian, populist and decentralist politics.

A Third Revolution in China 3 would have devastating effects upon corporatism, perhaps even heralding the end of this modern form of feudalism. The Chinese hold a huge part of US debt and by cashing in their US dollars they could devastate the US economy. Nationalization, or better yet, socialization, of foreign corporate assets would be a terrible blow to the corporate capital which saw China as a safe place to invest. A Chinese Revolution that wasn't stridently old-fashioned Maoist would be a major ally of, and impetus for, the European social movements and the similar movements and revolutionary governments of Latin America

For more information see: http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606weil.htm

* A song by the New York Dolls. “Chinese rocks” referring to smack - a good metaphor for US dependence upon Chinese cheap labor made goods.

1. At this point, Mao shut down the Cultural Revolution.

2 Including anarchism. According to Wikipedia, “Libertarian socialist and Anarchist communist currents have been particularly strong in the anti-dictatorship movement and in China's underground Labor Movement. The best known of these in the Western world is the Autonomous Beijing group, one of several groups responsible for organizing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. More recently, the Associated press has reported the emergence of a distinctly anarchist labor movement in China's old industrial rust-belt...” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_anarchism

3. The first revolution that of 1911, when the Manchu Dynasty was overthrown, the second was the Maoist Revolution of 1949.

Green Hell Revisited.

A couple of days after posting “Green Hell” I got a newsletter in the mail called “Zero Waste” from the Regional District of Nanaimo. To my pleasant surprise, the entire newsletter is devoted to eliminating lawns and creating what they call “zero waste landscaping”. They include statistics. It turns out that Canadians spend $1.4 BILLION on lawns, which is double what they spent in the year 2000. (So the madness is spreading...) 50 MILLION KILOS of pesticides are used every year on these same lawns and mowing an average size lawn with a gas mower creates as much pollution as driving a car 200 miles. They list native spreading plants to use in place of grass and web sites about the subject. Their web site is www.rdn.bc.ca

Too Convenient?

Ah, the NeoConNazis are salivating over this one. The secret po-lice done found a buncha Ay-rab El Kay-dees makin a great big fertilizer bomb. Gonna blow up a MacDonalds and threaten the Amurrican, er the Canajun waya life!

What an interesting coincidence. The alleged bomb plot appears just when the Harpocrits need it. Makes one think of that other remarkable coincidence called 9-11. The secret police claim they spent two years setting up, oops, INVESTIGATING, the plot. Now I am not ABSOLUTELY sure this is a false flag op., but given the nature of secret police mentality my natural impulse is suspicion. “Intelligence” and what used to be called “the Red Squad” tends to attract nut cases, the sort who will go to any length to impose their right-wing paranoid viewpoint upon the world. As a case in point, the old RCMP Red Squad used to be full of look-out -for -the -commies-under-the-bed types. In the USA, James Jesus Angleton, head honcho of the CIA was such a loon that in 1966 he was claiming that the Sino-Soviet split was only an act to confuse gullible Westerners. There is no crime too vicious for our ruling classes in their psychopathic lust for power and wealth. As such we must take any pronouncements coming from their apparatus of repression with a few bags of salt.

No Particular Place To Go

The Nanaimo press has its shorts in a knot over the number of pan handlers, homeless, druggies, winos and hookers in the downtown area. True, it is a problem, there have been a number of break-ins in small businesses and more than a few people Joe and Jane Tourist might find scary are hanging around on street corners. The suggested solution, that of driving the underclass out of downtown, is no real solution. All it will do is push them into someone else's neighborhood, creating the situation anew. Nor will harsher laws help, as drug addiction is a social-medical problem and the legal approach does not and cannot succeed. I am pleased to see a fair number of Letters to the Editor, have pointed this out.

Homelessness really didn't exist 35 years ago – other than the real end-of-the-road winos – and the reason it didn't was the existence of many cheap rooming houses called “flop houses”. Anyone could panhandle the price of a room in one of these. Gentrification, by-laws and an insane rise in the price of real estate, wiped out the flops. Homeless people don't want to live in some rule-infested, or religion spouting shelter. Their last shred of dignity and humanity is that they live by their own rules. The flops had only two rules – don't start a fire and no serious fighting. The way to end homelessness is to create a contemporary version of the flop house. But I find that hard to imagine. The do-gooder types will want a great list of regulations, and there goes Mr. Homeless back to his park bench. Property-value obsessed middle class types won't want a flop in their neighborhood and the “small government for the poor, big government for the rich” pseudo-libertarians will howl about the tax-payer expense, if these should be built by the civic government.

Many of the people on the street in the past were institutionalized as mental patients. Right-wing governments closed mental hospital wards and dumped these unfortunates upon us. ( A legitimate response would be to close right-wing governments and dump THEIR occupants on the street.) I also find a certain irony that some folks demanding a “get tough” approach with the underclass, are the very ones who made the down town an ideal place for them. By imposing an “American model” on the city – gutting the downtown business district and moving everything to distant shopping malls – they took the life out of the place, and the losers naturally moved in. Now that an Arts District and an Old Town have been created to revitalize the downtown, the crackheads and crazies are underfoot.

Another problem is that all real solutions are long term. This doesn't help the book shop that just had its front window smashed by drunks. There should be a zone where the rejects are allowed to congregate, rather than pushing them about from neighborhood to neighborhood. We need a Red Light District or Tenderloin, at least until the long term solutions kick in. Creating this zone will of course, be a problem, as anyone residing there or with a business nearby will loudly object – all one needs to do is watch re-runs of DaVinci's City Hall to see the problems a government might encounter trying to set up a Red Light District. The old fashioned pay-off, long a feature of our politics, is in order here. Yes, paying-off the objectors is sleazy, but is probably the simplest method.

The most important of the long-term solutions, treating addiction as a medical, not a criminal problem, faces the most severe difficulty of all. Far too many powerful people benefit from the present barbarism. First off, those who benefit directly from drug illegality - the drug gangs, their “legitimate capitalist” investors and money launderers, corrupt right-wing politicians, and cops on the take. Then there are the even greater number who benefit indirectly. Treat addiction as a medical problem and put the addicts on support and they will no longer do B 'n E's and rob convenience stores. There goes maybe 50% of the crime rate. Many cops, prison guards and Just-Us officials will be left left pulling unemployment insurance. They, like all folks threatened with job loss, will fight to the bitter end, even though their jobs entail a kind of cannibalism. (1) And while our governments have gleefully tossed hospital employees and social service workers into the street, don't expect them to be so eager to try 'reforms' out on their forces of repression.

While the obstacles are enormous, this doesn't mean that humane and rational solutions cannot eventually triumph. Europeans have already moved in that direction and in time Canada will as well, (in spite of the Harpocrits) but only if we put the maximum pressure on our Rulers to make these changes. And one way to do this is to de-legitimize the forces of the drug and poverty status quo. No more polite arguments, no more Mr. and Ms. Nice Guy – expose these people for what they are – corrupt or stupid.

1. The drug laws and the resulting police-prison industrial complex works exactly like the old Soviet Gulag system. People are persecuted, arrested and imprisoned, all suffer and many lives are shortened in the process, all for irrational reasons. Meanwhile, thousands of people make a living off this suffering and work hard to make sure the system remains in place. There ought to be Nuremberg-type trials for the fiends responsible for this situation.

Green Hell

I am trying to kill my lawn. All 7000 square feet of it. Few things are as stupid as being enslaved to the idea of having your yard look like the top of a billiard table. Perhaps the same sadists that invented the contemporary suburb also invented the lawn. Like the suburbs, where it proliferates like a noxious weed, the lawn serves no purpose, looks sterile, wastes labour and pollutes. Looking back on the history of lawns, it seems snobbery might well be the root cause of the malady. Two hundred years ago only the rich could afford a lawn, since cutting one was a laborious, and relatively costly procedure, involving someone highly skilled with a scythe. The wealthy enjoyed their lawns as both symbols of their wealth and their authoritarian passion for orderliness. Then, alas, in 1880 the lawnmower was invented and the middle classes, joyously emulating their masters, began replacing their back gardens with the Green Menace. I am attempting to eliminate the monstrosity that I have inherited when I bought my house and replace it with wild flowers, herbs, and fruit-bearing shrubs. But I am not alone in this endeavor.

Counterpunch ran an article on lawn elimination and there is even a

http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/edibleestates/main.html

Web Site web site devoted to the cause. Homeowners of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your lawns!

Contempt

Only a people filled with contempt for others could march in and seize a territory, then expel or Working people have died by the millions – and are still dying – in unsafe mines and factories and the boss-classes wars. Only rulers filled with contempt for working people could do such a thing. Of course, this contempt is rationalized with verbiage about “survival of the fittest”, “national interest” and self-aggrandizing prattle about “expertise” and “leadership.”

Latin America was pillaged first by British companies and now by US corporate and governmental interests, the latter with their death squads and torture schools having introduced an unprecedented level of sadism. For the Imperial Masters to commit such crimes, they must feel the deepest contempt for the people they persecute and exploit. All callously written off with, “Well, they are only Indians, anyway,” or they are “communists” or have “an inferior culture.”

For several thousand years (at least) women and children have been humiliated, degraded, abused, beaten and raped by patriarchal society. Only men (and female Quislings) full of contempt (self-contempt for the later) would treat their sisters, mothers, wives and offspring in this manner. All the silly self-serving rationalizations are trotted out - “women are less intelligent”, children are “ignorant”, “their place is to obey.”

The fact is, the folks held in contempt by the Masters are actually SUPERIOR to them, (1) and maintaining that contempt is an unending task. What a constant struggle it is to prop up this facade! In spite of “inferiority”, the “natives” know the country and teach the arrogant, stupid white man how to live there, the workers keep things running and produce the wealth, not their inept and parasitic bosses, Latin Americans possess a history and culture that makes the Gringos look like poor uncultured wretches, women are usually wiser than men and children easily see through the adult's childish ideologically-rooted obsessions.

Now you might well ask that if contempt is a mask, a cover-up for exploitation and bullying, what is it about the dominators that makes them wish to commit these crimes? In part, we are dealing with deep-rooted insecurity. The need to trample over others to become “someone”, the overweening lust for power, all speak of people who need to bolster their egos in an obsessive manner. In reading the lives of the ruling classes, we often discover a family life of cold, distant parents and authoritarian schooling or upbringing. These are common roots of emotional insecurity.. We also read of the many “Little Caligulas”, the sociopathic spoiled brats of the ruling class. They have no empathy for the ordinary person, and if they have to kill a hundred thousand of them to pursue a political or economic goal, it is no more than stepping on a bug. Neurotics and sociopaths, our Masters are emotionally sick. Rather than, when the time comes, putting them up against the wall – as emotionally satisfying as that might be – they ought instead to be placed in institutions for the criminally insane.

1. True enough, during a class system's “Heroic Period” the rulers are quite often people of intelligence and character, however, during a time of decline, such as the present, the lesser types take charge. Compare Washington and Bush, Gladstone and Blair, and you get the idea.

The Myth Of Socialism As Statism

What did the original socialists envision to be the owner and controller of the economy? Did they think it ought to be the state? Did they favor nationalization? Or did they want something else entirely? Let’s have a look, going right back to the late 18^th Century, through the 19th and into the 20th, and see what important socialists and socialist organizations thought.

*Thomas Spence – farm land and industry owned by join stock companies, all farmers and workers as voting shareholders.

* St. Simon – a system of voluntary corporations

* Ricardian Socialists – worker coops

* Owen – industrial coops and cooperative intentional communities

* Fourier – the Phlanistery – an intentional community

* Cabet - industry owned by the municipality (“commune” in French, hence commune-ism)

* Flora Tristan – worker coops

* Proudhon – worker coops financed by Peoples Bank – a kind of credit union that issued money.

* Greene – mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.

* Lasalle – worker coops financed by the state – for which he was excoriated by Marx as a “state socialist”

* Marx – a “national system of cooperative production”

* Tucker - mutualist banking system allowing farmers and workers to own means of production.

* Dietzgen – cooperative production

* Knights of Labor – worker coops

* Parsons – workers ownership and control of production

* Vanderveldt – socialist society as a ‘giant cooperative”

* Socialist Labor Party – industry owned and run democratically thru the Socialist Industrial Unions

* Socialist Party USA – until late 1920’s emphasized workers control of production.

* CGT France, 1919 Program - mixed economy with large industry owned by stakeholder coops.

* IWW – democratically run through the industrial unions.

* Socialist Party of Canada, Socialist Party of Great Britain, 1904-05 program – common ownership, democratically run – both parties, to this very day, bitterly opposed to nationalization.

* SDP – Erfurt Program 1892 – Minimum program includes a mixed economy of state, cooperative and municipal industries. While often considered a state socialist document, in reality it does not give predominance to state ownership.

Well? Where’s the statism? All these socialisms have one thing in common, a desire to create an economy where everyone has a share and a say.

Why The Confusion

The state did play a role in the Marxist parties of the Second International. But its role was not to nationalize industry and create a vast bureaucratic state socialist economy. Put simply, the workers parties were to be elected to the national government, and backed by the trade unions, cooperative movement and other popular organizations, would expropriate the big capitalist enterprises. Three things would then happen: 1. The expropriated enterprises handed over to the workers organizations, coops and municipalities. 2, The army and police disbanded and replaced by worker and municipal militias. 3. Political power decentralized to the cantonal and

municipal level and direct democracy and federalism introduced. These three aspects are the famous “withering away of the state” that Marx and Engels talked about.

The first problem with this scenario was that the workers parties never got a majority in parliament. So they began to water-down their program and adopt a lot of the statist reformism of the liberal reformers. Due to the Iron Law of Oligarchy the parties themselves became sclerotic and conservative. Then WW1 intervened, splitting the workers parties into hostile factions. Finally, under the baleful influence of the Fabians, the Bolsheviks and the “success” of state capitalism in the belligerent nations, the definition of socialism began to change from one of democratic and worker ownership and control to nationalization and statism. The new post-war social democracy began to pretend that state ownership/control was economic democracy since the state was democratic. This, as we see from the list above, was not anything like the economic democracy envisaged by the previous generations of socialists and labor militants.