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In Memory of Tod
Fletcher and Susan Peabody
by Jeff Strahl
I am very sad to inform you all of the death of my
friend
and partner on this website Tod Fletcher and his wife Susan Peabody.
They both died late on September 29, 2014 via a double suicide. Susan
had been bed-ridden for some 28 years with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Tod has spent most of his time being her caregiver. Although she seemed
to undergo a noticeable improvement a year or so ago, after stopping
all her medications, she took a drastic turn for the worse in early
September. She had considered suicide several times, in fact tried it
10 years ago, was saved only because Tod found her and took her to the
emergency room. They were basically rendered indigent by the medical
expenses, and over the past several years had faced possible eviction
for not being able to come up with rent. A few friends came through
with help at critical times, but the situation kept worsening. Tod in
any event did not wish to live any longer without Susan, such was his
love for her, and he respected her wishes to no longer endure pain. It
is very sad to lose them. But do we have a right to force people to
continue to suffer pain and grinding poverty? A tough question.
Tod was a prominent member of the 9/11 Truth
Movement. He became a
member on 9/12/01, when he and i met as we had scheduled several days
earlier to discuss his pending article on the Genoa 6-7 summit (posted
on this site, under the name of Max Kolskegg). We of course discussed
the previous day’s events, and agreed that the whole thing had the
smell of an inside job. It took us a few months to fully grasp the
extent, but our intent was clear. Tod was a member of the 9/11
Consensus Panel, of which i’ve written several times over the past few
months. See this site. He also edited all but the first of the books of
the movement’s leading author, David Ray Griffin, to whom he was a
loyal and very crucial assistant, at times even stepping in to do
interviews when Griffin was unable to do so. He also authored several
articles about 9/11 and how it fitted the context of the global
capitalist crisis, and for a while had a show on Resistance Radio
concerning 9/11 and the global capitalist crisis, named “9/11 In
Context.” Episodes are linked, see the home page’s left sidebar. ...
Read more ...
The Pentagon
Attack in Context
by Tod Fletcher and
Timothy Eastman
Note: This article originally appeared as a letter
to The Journal of 9/11 Studies in November 2012. Listen to Tod Fletcher discuss the Pentagon attack
on the KPFA/WBAI radio show "Guns and
Butter" with Bonnie Faulkner from September 3, 2014.
Extensive research carried out on the physical
evidence from the WTC has established many important facts that must be
kept in mind when analyzing the Pentagon events. For example, the
diversionary use of aircraft strikes, definitively shown to have
occurred at the WTC, should be considered a possibility at the
Pentagon. The use of explosives, again clearly demonstrated at the WTC,
is accordingly a possibility at the Pentagon. The specific types of
aircraft diversions and the purposes for which explosives might have
been used may of course be different, but it is possible that the
perpetrators of the attacks used a limited set of highly reliable,
tried-and-tested methods in both locations. ...
Read more ...
Championing Truth
and Justice: Griffin on 9/11
by Tod Fletcher
Note: This article first appeared as a chapter in Reason and Reenchantment: the Philosophical,
Religious, and Political Thought of David Ray Griffin.
First, to show that an unprovoked attack on
noncombatants by government leaders would not be unthinkable, he
surveyed the history of modern false-flag operations, including
Operation Gladio in Western Europe, in which the US government was
responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people. Then, to
show that even an attack on US citizens would not be unthinkable, he
discussed Operation Northwoods, a plan put forward by the Pentagon’s
Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 to carry out a false-flag operation
providing the pretext for a US attack on Cuba – a plan that included a
scenario in which innocent US citizens would be killed.
In a line of evidence that Griffin was the first to investigate in
detail, he analyzed – in a chapter called “Explosive Testimony” - the
abundant testimony regarding explosions in the Twin Towers provided by
firefighters and other first responders. In another chapter, he
cataloged the many ways in which the collapses of the Twin Towers
exemplified classic features of controlled demolitions. Griffin then
argued that the case against the Bush/Cheney administration had
progressed from a prima facie case to a conclusive case, because it had
gone unrefuted by the 9/11 Commission.
Read more ...
What is
anti-industrialism and what does it want?
by Miguel Amorós
The Situationist-inspired website Not Bored has
published a new translation of a recent address given in Palma
de Majorca by Miguel Amorós on “anti-industrialism.” (The original
text, in Spanish, is available here. We commend its author and the
translator for making this important analysis more widely available.
Finally, someone has written an article which bridges the gap between
two forms of opposition to the global capitalist status quo. One form
is the traditional, Marx-informed critique of capitalism as a mode of
production defined by a particular set of social relations. The other
is a more recent type of critique of the industrial society which has
developed under capitalism, a critique informed by ecological science
and awareness of resource depletion.
Adherents of this newer approach have often couched their critique in
terms of humans in the abstract, as if the problems which are driving
human society and the entire planetary ecosystem over the edge are
simply the results of human behavior which is encoded in our genes, and
have nothing to do with the social system we live in. This has
generally been taken by advocates of the first approach as evidence
that all such critiques are politically reactionary and may divert
people from seeking the goal of socialist heaven. They maintain that
there is nothing wrong with mass industrial society that the abolition
of capitalism (commonly envisioned as control by a workers’ government
after taking state power, or less commonly, as collective
self-management by the world’s proletariat) cannot cure. But these
responses to ecological critiques of capitalism by more traditional
Marxians often uphold an entirely uncritical “productivism” that
imagines that there are no limits to how many people the planet can
sustain or to the growth of cities and industrial production.
We have long rejected this approach and are very glad to see this
article, written by someone who clearly has roots in a Marx-informed,
Situationist understanding of capital and yet refuses the promethean
take on Marx’s critique of capital. Miguel Amorós sees clearly that “The
world of the commodity can no longer be the object of a self-managing
project. It is impossible to humanize it; one must dismantle it,
instead.” He understands that when it comes to the forces
expressing opposition to the status quo, which he divides into
ideologues still pushing the fossilized vanguard political projects,
and those who work to channel opposition into working within the
existing structures of power to reform them, “They flee real
confrontation, given that they want, at any price, to render their
practices compatible with domination or to at least profit from its
shortcomings and failures, and thus subsist or coexist. They want to
manage abandoned places and to administrate the catastrophe, not
suppress it.”
Given the need for accuracy of analysis in this important matter, we
feel it necessary to express one minor, rather technical quibble with
the address, concerning its apparent lack of clarity over the nature of
capital and its crisis. While Amorós states that “Capitalism has
surpassed its structural limits or, phrased another way, it has reached
the ceiling,” in fact the fundamental structural limit of capital is
the value form, and that cannot be surpassed within capitalism, as it
defines capital, a sum of value which seeks expansion. His statement
that the crisis of capital is due to “internal [contradictions] that
cause severe social inequalities,” seems to imply that the current
global crisis is the result of insufficient consumption of the working
class due to its growing relative impoverishment. In other places
Amorós asserts the primacy of consumption over production in late
capitalism’s dynamic. But in fact the crucial internal contradiction of
capital is rooted, again, in value created during the production
process, and specifically the increasingly insufficient rate of surplus
value extraction from the world’s working populace. Marx’s insights are
still a necessary element of the critique of industrialism.
Jeff Strahl & Tod Fletcher, July 6, 2014.
Fighting 9/11
Disinformation the Easy Way
by Jeff Strahl
On May 15, 2014, news media reported the opening of
the National September 11 Memorial Museum, with every outlet across the
supposed political spectrum, from Pacifica Radio and The Nation
to Fox providing a description of 9/11 which was a verbatim recounting
of the official story, a ridiculous conspiracy myth concocted on
Madison Avenue by some of the industry’s worst charlatans. Such a
museum makes as much sense as would a “National Creation Science
Center.” Among the items in the museum are steel from the WTC towers
(the debris actually provided ample evidence of just how false the
official story is, provided one actually looked), and tapes of supposed
last minute phone calls from passengers to relatives, calls which were
initially reported as having been made on cell phones, but later (once
it was pointed out that cell phone calls were impossible at that time
from the heights they were allegedly made from) revised to having been
made from air phones (never mind that at least one account included the
caller’s cell phone number being displayed by the phone which received
it).
Read more ...
Ecocide on the
East Side
by Will Guest
The state-capitalist mode of accumulation which
first arose in the Soviet Union and then spread, in the name of
"socialism", to other parts of the world (China, Eastern Europe, Cuba,
etc.), was adopted because of the very significant advantages
centralized control provided the new class of capitalist bureaucrats.
Not the least of these has been totalitarian political structures which
have prevented the working class people in these countries from
expressing any criticism of state-imposed heavy industrial development.
People couldn't complain when they were moved off their lands and
turned into industrial or agricultural workers. They also didn't dare
respond to the signs of steadily worsening environmental conditions
around their workplaces and homes. The state's controls on information
and research made it impossible for people to know what was happening
to the air, lands and waters outside of their own locales. Increasingly
over time, however, the promised bounties of the industrial state were
seen to have been so many lies, and the destruction of public and
environmental health could no longer be tolerated in silence.
Over the last two decades information about environmental conditions
within the state-capitalist sphere has slowly leaked out to the West.
Now with glasnost, perestroika and the breakdown of Soviet hegemony in
Eastern Europe the leaks have turned into a flood. Environmental
destruction there is severe: massive air, water and soil pollution,
radioactive contamination of food, mysterious epidemics affecting whole
regions, dying lakes and rivers, extinctions of plants and animals, and
all the other forms of ecocide we are familiar with from other parts of
the world. People in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary
and elsewhere in the region are organizing militant responses to damage
and threats (in some cases much more militant than any that have ever
occurred in the U.S.). Their militancy over environmental and health
issues, in fact, is partly responsible for the major political changes
taking place there today, and holds much liberatory potential for the
future. They have seen through the industrial con act and won't be
silent just because the new managers are German, Japanese or American.
Here's a brief sampling of some of the worst environmental problems in
Eastern Europe and how people have responded. You'd be militant too!
Read more ...
Yuppies In
Moscow!?
by Jack Straw
[T]he Soviet Union never ceased to be a part of the
capitalist world. The 1917 Revolution ousted Czarist feudalism.
However, world conditions, especially the failure of the global
revolutionary wave, the relative underdevelopment of Russia, and the
Bolsheviks' warped view of what constitutes socialism meant that a
truly new social system could not be instituted. Lenin believed that
"Socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the
whole people" (Selected Works) This was to be done "with human
nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with
subordination, control and managers" (ibid.)
What resulted was naturally state capitalism. The state acted as the
abstract capitalist, controlling the means of production, and
exchanging wages with workers in return for their labor-power. The
consequence was (and is) the reproduction of the means as an expanding
value , a sum of money or its equivalent (i.e., the accumulation of
capital) This is the essence of capitalist society, not the private
ownership of property, or lack of planning, or any other superficial
criteria which the multitude of social democrats and leninists always
bat about. "Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labor
serves living labor as a means for new production. It consists in the
fact that living labor serves accumulated labor as a means of
preserving and multiplying its exchange value" (Wage-Labor and
Capital by Karl Marx, p. 30)
Soviet planners have always taken steps to ensure that their system as
a whole ran a profit, even though losing ventures were subsidized and
full employment maintained. And, as in the West, Soviet industrial
policy is growth for growth's sake, which entails massive ecological
destruction. Arguments to the effect that the Soviet Union is or ever
was socialist, or at least non-capitalist, have taken many ridiculous
turns through the years, including Stalin's arguments during the 30's
that capitalist production was still in force in the realm of consumer
goods, but not in producer goods.
Read more ...
Crisis in Ukraine
by Jeff Strahl
The crisis in Ukraine has drawn numerous
commentaries. Most of them have fallen into two camps. The mainstream
media in Europe and North America have largely made this conflict about
freedom fighters fighting off Putin, Europe’s new Hitler. Lots of the
items in the alternative/”progressive”/”left” media have taken the line
that the overthrow of the Yanukovych oligarchic regime was a coup
against a “democratic” government by neo-Nazi thugs and that the
oligarchic Putin regime has acted in the right in moving troops across
the border, allegedly to protect Russian speakers being threatened by
fascist storm troopers. This, while Putin himself denies that there are
any Russian troops in Crimea (all those people riding around in new
Russian armored vehicles are “local militia”!). Fortunately, there have
been other voices, including those from an anarchist/libertarian
communist perspective. The purpose of this post is to bring some of
these together in one central location. This list will be updated as
new accounts emerge, and will be complemented by some older analyses
that show that the former Soviet bloc was incorporated into the global
capitalist system long before its collapse in the late 1980s.
Ukraine is not simply a region, which the term “the Ukraine,” used
widely and ignorantly, implies. The term was meant to create this
misimpression by its originator, the Czarist empire, which about 300
years ago incorporated Ukraine within its dominions. Previously,
Ukraine had an independent existence, and continues to have a distinct
language and culture. Ukraine also has a history of anti-capitalist
politics, most notably with the Makhnovist movement of 1917-1921, which held off
both the Czarist White Army and the Bolshevik Red Army (while usually
aligned with the latter but never the former), only to be attacked and
overwhelmed by its ostensible ally after exhaustion. My sympathies are
with neither the Ukrainian capitalist elite, nor the Russian one, but
strictly with the working people in both nations and everywhere. The
only stance which makes sense to me is an internationalist perspective
against war between nation states and in favor of class war everywhere.
Read more ...
Runaway Planetary
Warming
by Will Barnes
Methane hydrates have been settling in the shallow
sea sediment in vast quantities since the late Pliocene (i.e., for well
over 2 million years) as ocean waters rapidly cooled. There have been
limited releases from 16,000 to 12,000 years ago, and from roughly
130,000 to 115,000, 250,000 to 245,000, 350,000 to 340,000, etc., i.e.,
during the rapidly warming phases of interglacials, over at least the
last 800,000 years. In these instances, the release has been a
consequence of cosmological determinism or orbital forcings (i.e., the
closer orbital position of the Earth to the sun). Their release has,
accordingly, been “slow” enough (and limited [enough]) that the methane
has been almost entirely oxidized.
Today, the situation is different, in fact unprecedented. First, if the
warming is rapid enough some (not all) of the clathrates will not form
the less deadly greenhouse gas CO2 (i.e., they will not be oxidized in
the water). Instead these will be released directly to the atmosphere
as methane. Occurring at 10,000 times the rate of an orbital forcing,
“anthropogenic warming,” i.e., warming induced by the movement of
capital, here and now we are witnessing a release in a contemporary
(not historical, and certainly not geological) time frame for which
there is no analog. Second, because these releases have been limited,
the quantities of clathrates have grown absolutely over geological time
and grown enormously.
Read more ...
On Terrorism and the
State
by Gianfranco
Sanguinetti
"The first duty of all conscious
subversives is to pitilessly chase all illusions about terrorism from
the heads of those called to action."
Note: Gianfranco Sanguinetti
participated as a member of the Italian section of the Situationist
International until its dissolution in 1972, with a distinguished
history of collaborations and writings. His "On Terrorism and the
State", published in April 1979 in Italy, is a detailed analysis of the
long series of terror attacks in Italy, from the Piazza Fontana bombing
in December 1969 in Milan, to the kidnapping and execution of former
Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, which he concluded had been carried
out by the Italian intelligence agencies (aka "secret services"). His
conclusions have been confirmed by subsequent revelations: the Italian
intelligence agencies had been controlled and directed by the CIA and
FBI, working through NATO's "stay behind" armies, as the Italian
component of what has come to be called Operation Gladio. Sanguinetti's
analysis, written more than twenty years before 9/11, illuminates the
dark background of the attacks and their aftermath, as we demonstrate
by here presenting excerpts that are especially revealing with respect
to 9/11, the new global "Strategy of Tension", and their impacts on the
anti-capitalist movement. Our commentary follows the text, in numbered
notes to key passages. The complete text of Sanguinetti's historic
essay has been ably translated and annotated by Bill Brown and made
available at this link. All italics in original; our added
emphases in bold. Most of the short elements of text
inside [brackets] are by Brown; we have supplied a few others. -- Tod
Fletcher and Jeff Strahl
From the [bombing of the] Piazza Fontana to the
kidnapping of Moro, the only things that have changed are the
contingent objectives that this defensive terrorism has achieved, but the
goal of the defensive can never change. And the goal
from 12 December 1969 to 16 March 1978, and today, as well, has in fact
remained the same: to make the entire population, which had not
supported the State or had been struggling against it, believe that it at
least has an enemy in common with the State and that the State
will defend the population on the condition that no one questions it.
The population, which is generally hostile to terrorism, and not
without reason, must then agree that, at least in this instance,
it needs the State, to which it must delegate the most extensive powers
so that the State can vigorously confront the arduous task of the
common defense against an enemy that is obscure, mysterious,
perfidious, merciless and, in a word, illusory. Faced with a
terrorism that is always presented as the absolute evil, evil
in itself and by itself, all the other evils, which are much more real,
become secondary and must even be forgotten. Because the struggle
against terrorism coincides with the common interest, it is
already the general good, and the State that generously leads
that struggle is the good itself and by itself. Without the cruelty of
the devil, the infinite kindness of God cannot appear and be properly
appreciated.
The State, extremely weakened by all the attacks it has suffered every
day for ten years – attacks on its economy made by the proletariat, on
the one hand, and attacks on its power and prestige made by the
ineptitude of its managers, on the other – can thus [negate] both of
them by solemnly tasking itself with staging the spectacle of the
collective and sacrosanct defense [of all] against the monster of
terrorism and, in the name of this pious mission, it can take from all
of its subjects a supplementary portion of their already limited
freedom and thus reinforce the police-related control of the entire
population. “We are at war,” and war against an enemy that is so
powerful that any other discord or conflict is an act of sabotage or
desertion. It is only to protest against terrorism that one has the
right to the recourse of the general strike. Terrorism and “emergency,”
a state of emergency and perpetual “vigilance,” become the only
problems, at least the only ones with which it is permitted and
necessary for people to be occupied. All the rest doesn’t exist or
becomes forgotten, and in any case is shut up, banished, repressed into
the social unconscious because of the seriousness of the question of
“public order.” And confronted with the universal duty of its defense,
everyone is invited to become an informer, to be base and to become
fearful. For the first time in history, cowardice becomes a sublime
quality, fear is always justified, and the only form of “courage” that
is not contemptible is the one that approves and supports all the lies,
abuses and infamies of the State. Since the current crisis doesn’t
spare any country in the world, there are no geographical boundaries
between peace, war, freedom or truth. These borders pass through every
country, and each State arms itself and declares war on the truth.
Read more ...
Resistance is the Only
Ethical Response to Near-Term Extinction
by Jeff Strahl
The world today faces three deadly crises. They can
be analyzed separately but are interconnected and feed back and forth
in major ways. ... Global warming increases pressures upon dwindling
clean water sources, and requires more expenses on the part of states
which are already facing severe budget constraints. The economic crisis
makes investment in renewables increasingly problematic. Peak Oil means
the costs of producing oil are such that gas prices have to climb to
where they start choking off other spending. And so on. ... Clearly,
there is no way out which preserves capitalism. Indeed, there is no way
to preserve industrial society and the population levels it has
enabled, levels which are far beyond the capacity of the planet to
support. We would not be in this situation were it not for the
emergence of and global conquest by capitalism and its growth
imperative, but more needs to be shed than just the capitalist mode of
production. Near-term extinction appears to be almost inevitable. To
me, the main question right now is whether the extinction will come
first from a new global war, or from runaway climate destabilization.
...
Read more ...
Clean, Sober and
Obedient
by Jack Straw
Back in the Summer of '86, the system’s already
frenzied anti-drug campaign took on the aspect of a witch-hunt. At the
time, many commentators dismissed the spreading social purge as
election-year grandstanding, to be forgotten after Election Day. Boy,
were they wrong — or did they lie?
In fact, the level of attack has steadily increased. During the recent
residential presidential campaign, both parties identified themselves
with an assault on our already meager civil rights. Little need be said
about the Bush position, while the "liberal" Dukakis attempted to take
a stand to the right of his G.O.P. rival, even calling cops who kick
down doors looking for drugs "role models." With bipartisan support,
the House voted to suspend the Miranda ruling against illegal search
and seizure in drug cases, subject to the searchers' "good intentions.”
(The courts are weakening this ruling every year anyway.) The full
Congress ended up approving penalties of up to $10,000 for possession
of even a single joint, and a cutoff of most federal benefits to those
convicted of possession. Recently, courts have approved searches of
individuals based upon "suspicious looks", and the National Guard has
been recruited to search for drugs at the borders and other entry
points.
Read more ...
In the Wake of the
Exxon Valdez:
World Capitalism and Global Ecocide
by Will Guest
"[We] were soon steaming across the great sound in
warm sunshine...past islands and headlands, then over the immense
expanse of the open water with a circle of snowcapped mountains far off
along the horizon, then winding through arms and straits, close to the
tree-tufted islands and steep spruce-clad mountains...with glimpses of
open meadow-like glades among the trees....We were afloat in an
enchanted circle; we sailed over magic seas under magic skies; we
played hide and seek with winter in lucid sunshine over blue and
emerald waters—all the conditions, around, above, below us were most
fortunate."(1)
The wake has begun. People throughout North America are mourning the
loss of precious life in Prince William Sound. John Burroughs'
description of the sound at the turn of the century captured the
breathtaking quality of its beauty, a quality which by all accounts
lasted until March 24, 1989, when one oil-tanker too many tried to make
the passage with its dangerous cargo. Now the blue and emerald waters
are black with a thick, sticky crude oil.
The abundant birds, mammals and fish supported by the waters are now
dead or dying, their carcasses unrecognizable, so thick is the oil,
until the "rescue" crews scoop them up and probe to see what's at the
core of the goo. Two weeks after the spill, at the University of
California at Berkeley, a funereal procession of students, staff and
faculty, led by a single, slowly-sounding drum, quietly showed their
deep sense of loss and anger over the death of one of the world's
richest coastal ecosystems.
The earth is dying—it is being killed—and many of us sense it. The
cutting of the forests, accelerating extinctions of plants and animals,
destruction of the ozone layer, pollution of the oceans—the list seems
endless, frightening and demoralizing. Life goes on, but the problems
only get worse. People don't seem to be able to do much about them.
Perhaps we choose one issue and work to correct it—the "single-issue
approach"—while inevitably leaving the other problems for other people.
Many of us know that the real, underlying problem is a much larger one,
that all the forms and types of environmental destruction are related,
that they are caused by how we humans live on the earth, and that to
correct them we have to change our way of life. But a strange silence
reigns. Few people are talking about the basic problem or the basic
solution.
Read more ...
The Sick Planet
by Guy Debord
Today "pollution" is in fashion, exactly in the same
manner that revolution is:
it takes hold of the entire life of society, and it is illusorily
represented in
the spectacle. It is boring chatter in a plethora of erroneous and
mystifying
writings and discourses, and in reality [dans les faits] it gets
everyone in the
throat. It reveals itself everywhere as ideology and it gains on the
ground as
real process. These two [mutually] antagonistic movements -- the
supreme stage
of commodity production and the project of its total negation, equally
rich in
internal contradictions -- grow together. They are the two sides
through which a
single historical moment (long-awaited and often foreseen in inadequate
partial
figures) manifests itself: the impossibility of the continuation of the
functioning of capitalism.
The epoch that has all the technical means to absolutely alter the
conditions of
life of the entire Earth is also the epoch that, by the same separated
technical
and scientific development, disposes of all of the means of control and
indubitable, mathematical prediction to exactly measure in advance
where -- and
when -- the automatic increase in the alienated productive forces of
class-society will lead: that is to say, so as to measure the rapid
degradation
of the conditions for survival in the most general and trivial senses
of the
term.
Read more ...
Occupy Needs To Target
And Destroy The Ruling Money Fetish
by Jack Straw
After decades of passivity, the American
social/political landscape erupted last fall with the Occupy movement.
Suddenly it’s no longer hip to be square and apathetic. The deep global
economic crisis which started in 2007, the deepest such crisis since
the 1930s, has exacerbated the squeeze on the living standards of the
vast majority and widened the already massive gap between the richest
one percent and the rest of society to such an extent that an explosion
was all but inevitable. So far, to its credit, the Occupy movement has
successfully fought off attempts to incorporate it into the existing
political apparatus. Yet the question remains how much change it can
bring, in particular to the systemic dynamics which brought forth the
global crisis to begin with. Its actions have managed to stave off some
of the worst consequences for people, particularly by delaying or even
preventing foreclosures and home evictions, and have brought back to
the American public awareness the question of class. In shutting down the port of Oakland twice, the
movement also demonstrated the potential of collective action to bring
the present order to a halt. However, without challenging the very
basic features of capitalism, in particular capitalist social relations
and the fetishism of commodities which they are built upon, the
movement is unlikely to amount to anything except a rearguard reaction
which will fall by the wayside as it either gets destroyed and/or
co-opted by the forces supporting the continuation of the essential
features of the status quo.
Read more ...
The Trapping of Screw
Loose Change
by Jeff Strahl
In mid-October 2011, I posted a review of David Ray
Griffin's new book, 9/11 Ten Years Later -- When State Crimes
Against Democracy Succeed at Amazon, here.
This review drew comments from James B, one of the two top people at
Screw Loose Change, a leading "debunking" website used as a reference
by many an internet opponent of 9/11 truth. The result was a major
debunking of Screw Loose Change. This piece is intended to help those
who in the future will go up against the likes of Screw Loose Change,
since the trap's nature is both the content of the SLC argument as well
as its form. The focus of our exchange was the evidence regarding
events at the World Trade Center (WTC) on 9/11, where three steel frame
high-rises were destroyed. This is the part of my review which is
relevant to the debate:
Read more ...
Comment on "Too Big
Not to Fail"
by Jack Straw
"Too
Big Not to Fail" is an excerpt from Life Rules, a book by
Ellen LaConte. It examines the various factors behind the high
unlikelihood of a recovery from the present economic crisis in a manner
similar to the recovery from the 1930s Depression. I thought there were
certain shortcomings in the analysis, and wrote about this to the
author. We agreed that i should post these remarks as a friendly
addendum.
She writes: “Several once-in-an-Earthtime conditions permitted the boom
that followed that early 20th century bust. Among them were:
a war-driven, full-employment economy based on the production and
deployment of conventional (that is, non-nuclear, non-biological)
weaponry.”
The 1930s depression didn't really end till World War II, and this war,
the biggest so far in history, indeed involved the full marshaling of
productive resources and human labor power. This is what most people
think of in connection with the stimulus effect of war. Yet even more
importantly, World War II involved the massive destruction of
productive apparatus, indeed of much of the productive apparatus of the
world, with only the US and Canada amongst major industrial nations
emerging undamaged. This in itself directly resolved the problem of
overproduction which was a key symptom of the depression. It meant a
drastic devaluation of capital seeking profit, carrying out in one big
swoop what the recurring economic crises of the 19th Century used to do
in small bits (a dynamic analyzed very well by Marx). A similar
solution today is not viable, given the scale of destruction likely to
ensue from a contemporary global war, with the state-of-the-art weapons
of mass destruction
After the war, US factories went into overdrive rebuilding the global
productive apparatus. This was a huge aspect of the post WWII
prosperity. In addition, the global economic structure was
reconstructed with the US at its center, with global coordinating
bodies such as the IMF and World Bank, i.e. the structure was
rationalized. Of course, this factor is also unique, since there is
little left to rationalize regarding the global organization of
capital, unless all the ruling elites could be brought under one tent,
one global governing structure. This is highly unlikely given the
irreconcilable interests of these elites.
There was also widespread destruction due to World War I, but it took
place on a much smaller scale, limited to the immediate fighting zone
in northeastern France and Belgium and a bit in northern Italy. Air
raids still had very limited impact. There was also a global crisis
before that war, and the limited destruction did little to relieve it.
Prosperity in the 1920s (such as it was) was mostly limited to the US
and, to some extent, Japan and the UK, and by 1929 was over.
In addition, i disagree with the analysis of American sociologist
Immanuel Wallerstein, who states “Thus it is that we can say that the
capitalist world-economy has now entered its terminal crisis, a crisis
that may last up to fifty years.” The ameliorative effects of World War
II and the postwar reorganization wore off and the terminal crisis
reappeared by around 1970. It was put off by massive debt expansion and
various waves of speculation bubbles, but these ran their course by the
'07 crash. Thus, i think Wallerstein's timetable is way too
"optimistic." I don't think global capitalism can hang on anywhere near
another half century. [April 4, 2011]
The Global Fascist
Terror State
by Tod Fletcher
The Global War on Terrorism that was launched by
9/11 has both an external purpose and an internal purpose. An external
purpose of waging war anywhere in the world for purposes of conquest,
conquest of resources, space, control, all of that, to govern the
“ungoverned spaces” that they’re worried about. But then internally as
well, a major focus of the false-flag attack of 9/11, in my view, was
to enable states to massively increase control of their domestic
populations. This is mainly what I want to talk about today. I have a
few more things to say about the external purposes, however, before I
go on to the internal ones. And they’re connected. The achievement of
both sets of these purposes, internal and external, will allow the
construction of this global control system, that I call a Global
Fascist Terror State.
My contention is that there is really only one enemy in the eyes of the
planners and propagandists and perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. And
that that enemy is the working class, the world’s population, basically.
Read more ...
Michael Hudson and
Webster Tarpley Disseminate Disinformation
by Jack Straw
In an interview broadcast June 16th, 2010, on the
Guns and Butter program on Pacifica Network’s Berkeley affiliate
station KPFA,
host Bonnie Faulkner interviewed Prof Michael Hudson of the University
of Missouri-Kansas City regarding the current economic crisis in the
U.S. and Europe. Hudson made two main points. He claimed that his
perspective is a Marxist one, carrying on the tradition of political
economy in contrast to most of the contemporary left. He also stated
that there really is no economic crisis per se, but rather a political
crisis resulting from the latest chapter of a centuries-long struggle
by financial interests to reverse historical gains by progressive
forces and regain power over the global economic/political structure.
He subsequently advanced a political program to counter this crisis.
A week later, Faulkner (who has done many excellent shows on 9/11)
interviewed author and 9/11 researcher Webster Tarpley, who made very
similar points, though he did not claim to be in Marx’s tradition.
Tarpley presented similar programatic suggestions to Hudson’s, having
to do with greater government regulation of finance and efforts aimed
at restoring economic growth. The host clearly did not have the
familiarity to detect their ugly distortions and serious errors (hard
to tell them apart), so it’s up to those of us who can do so to
evaluate their presentations and expose these distortions and errors.
Not only are their analyses wrong, but they also present prescriptions
for “what is to be done” which are so deceptive and pernicious as to
amount to outright disinformation. If their program were to be widely
accepted and implemented (very unlikely), the effects would harm our
species’ ability to survive. But even if it were not, the diversion of
attention and energy would be highly damaging.
Read more ...
Latest Chapter of
Anti-Racism: Tim Wise Defends Obama
by Jack Straw
Prominent “anti-racism” activist Tim Wise appeared
on the "Morning Show" of Pacifica’s Berkeley affiliate KPFA on March 1,
2010. During the show’s second hour, he asserted in an interview with
host Aimee Allison that the growing opposition movement to President
Obama, which he called the “Tea-bagger” movement, was essentially all
about racism, motivated by the fact that Obama is of African-American
background.
Wise provided an account of US history which focused entirely on race
relations. He described how the government seized the land which makes
up the US and gave it to “white people” through the Homestead Act. He
described the post-World-War-II expansion of suburbia as a government
affirmative action program on behalf of “whites.” And he essentially
described the basic social dynamic in the US as being about race.
The Daily Battle has previously dealt with the question of the
diversion of opposition to the dominant system into a perspective which
focuses almost entirely upon “racism”. I see little reason to rehash
what i discussed in that piece. However i would like to address the two
key points that Wise brought up.
Read more ...
The Working Class,
World Capitalism and Crisis
by Will Barnes
[This article by Will Barnes largely shares our
perspective. The breadth and scope of the analysis are quite unusual. I
have some disagreements with the piece. I do not feel that Barnes has
examined the full scope of the US aspect of the global proletarian
upsurge during the 1963-78 period aside from the 1977-8 coal miners’
strike, and thus passed over a period during which many young workers
challenged not only their working conditions, but the cooperation of
unions with management (much of the strike activity took the form of
wildcats) as well as cultural norms centered upon the work/consumption
cycle, wanting something more out of life than the American Dream.
I also believe Barnes is underestimating the speed at which global
climate change is occurring. He does not take into account that the
world’s output of oil is right now reaching its maximum and will
decline, a phenomenon known as peak oil. This will mean that the
present functioning of global capitalism will become increasingly
impossible. Nor is there an attempt to deal with the rapid depletion of
vital minerals and raw materials, of water, and of topsoil. He is thus
overestimating the ability of the system to just plod along for
decades.
Nonetheless, the overall thrust of this article is something with which
we strongly agree, in particular the politics expressed in it, opposing
both capital and the state, as well as the conclusion, that without
people acting to replace capitalism with communism, there will be no
positive outcome to this crisis. Do look at other items on the website,
where this article is available in document form. -- Jack Straw, 3/2/10]
Part I : Forms of the Contemporary Class Relation
with the United States
The declining rate of unionization of the industrial working class in
America in the last three decades has gone hand in hand with the
growing reduction in the numerical weight of industrial workers
relative to the total number of waged and salaried personnel as large
industrial capitals shifted their operations abroad. In fact, this
reduction in the numerical weight of the proletariat in the U.S.
economy is the other side of the emergence of vigorous centers of
industrially-based, capital accumulation in the world system, in part a
product of the flight of U.S. capital “offshore,” in the end though a
product of the very dynamics of capitalist development. Moreover, this
decline is not a temporary phenomenon: It is a product of the movement
of capital, of the new technical inputs mediated, truly astounding
productivity of abstract labor. For capital, such productivity, of
course poses the threat of a crisis of overproduction.
This decline in the rate of unionization is one feature, among others –
all interrelated, that characterize objective tendencies of a
development distinguishing the American working classes in the
contemporary period. These include formation of vast, new proletariat
made up of "contingent" or casualized laborers, much of its cast off in
the disintegration of the central core of mass production industries
and the permanent shrinking of the municipal proletariat; it includes
further the emergence of a low wage manufacturing proletariat;
inseparable from low waged manufacturing and casualized labor, the
growth of a massive layer of superexploited Latino labor paid at rates
far below prevailing wage scales; and, more and more, as casualized
labor becomes the predominant figure within the proletariat today, a
blurring of historically distinctive features of different strata
within and forming the waged relation. It is the emergence of this
figure, that of casualized labor, that I think is most significant for
what is really crucial, namely, the possibilities for consciousness
among workers. I shall return to this.
Read more ...
The Modern American
Left Doesn't Get Capitalism
by Jack Straw
In the midst of the biggest global economic crisis
since at least the 1930s, the vast majority of what passes for “the
left” in the US in 2010 is proving itself extremely incapable of
comprehending the reasons for this crisis as well as any possible
trajectories out of it. Much of this is tied to a complete
unwillingness by most contemporary American leftists to meaningfully
engage with Marx’s critique of capitalism. In fact, many of them have
taken to embracing notions coming straight out of orthodox capitalist
theory, notions which have repeatedly been proven false. This is a
clear recipe for failure of any possibility of transforming this
exploitative society and simultaneously avoiding an ecological disaster.
This article will not deal in detail with the
dominant left notion that what is currently a “correct” strategy is to
call for greater government regulation of business and even state
ownership, as well as greater spending by the government on social
programs. Nor will i tackle the left’s efforts to promote the “green
economy,” “green jobs,” “green energy”; this is a strategy whose mantra
is that shifting the economic activity towards supposedly more
environmentally friendly practices will solve both the economic crisis
and the growing threat of environmental catastrophe. I will restrict
this piece to examining the failure of leftists to even understand how
the present system functions.
A good place to start is a new article by someone
who considers himself a Marxist, John Bellamy Foster (“Why Ecological
Revolution?”, in Monthly Review, January 1, 2010). Foster
makes good points about the insufficiency of the mainstream approaches
to the global ecological crisis, including the critique put forth by
“greens.” But then he makes a really bad presentation of Marx's idea of
surplus value. “Any attempt to explain where surplus value or profits
comes from must penetrate beneath the exchange process and enter the
realm of labor and production. Here, [Foster is referring to Capital,
Volume 1 and The Grundrisse] Marx argues that value added in
the working day can be divided into two parts: (1) the part that
reproduces the value of labor power (i.e., the wages of the workers)
and thus constitutes necessary labor; and (2) the labor expended in the
remaining part of the working day, which can be regarded as surplus
labor, and which generates surplus value (or gross profits) for the
capitalist. Profits are thus to be regarded as residual, consisting of
what is left over after wages are paid out — something that every
businessperson instinctively understands. The ratio of surplus (i.e.,
unpaid) labor to necessary (paid) labor in the working day is, for
Marx, the rate of exploitation.”
Read more ...
The Crisis of Value
by Sander, Internationalist Perspective
There’s no need to repeat that we are in the midst
of the worst crisis of capitalism since the 1930’s: even in the mass
media this has become a mantra. But why are we in this mess? The course
of action (or inaction) that is advocated depends on the answer to this
question. Already, the way in which the crisis is portrayed implies an
answer. The mass media has inundated us with stories of greed, stories
of mismanagement and of lack of regulation. The “Anglo- Saxon,”
“neo-liberal” model of unbridled free markets has been thoroughly
discredited, the economic heroes of the right have fallen from their
pedestals, and good old Keynes is back in fashion. The new consensus
favors more regulation, more state-intervention, and more debt creation
by the state in order to counter-act the deflationary pull that is
contracting the economy. The debate is only about how much. That is a
debate that, by its nature, is waged within the left of the capitalist
political spectrum. It pits those who believe that fine-tuning the
symbiosis between the state and private capital leads to the best of
all possible worlds, against those who hallucinate that, through
gradual statification of the economy, they will ease capitalist society
into socialism. But the latter support the first in their narrative of
the crisis as a result of greed, mismanagement and deregulation. They
both critique capitalism, to various degrees, but their critique is a
positive one. They share and propagate the belief that capitalism can
be improved upon. That makes them the most crucial defenders of
capitalism today.... In contrast to the left, the pro-revolutionary
critique of capitalism is a negative one. It claims that the current
crisis will worsen, whatever measures are taken. At best, these
measures will slow its acceleration, but any reflation will be a
reflation of the bubble; because the bubble is not only in real estate
and in finance. The world economy as a whole is a bubble that must
explode or deflate, with terrible consequences for the vast majority of
humanity, regardless of how and by whom this is managed. ... there is
no other higher power that can come to the rescue. Capitalism becomes
the most dangerous when the flight forward is the only alternative
left. The negative critique of capitalism claims that it can’t be
repaired because the crisis is the direct result of the historic
over-ripeness of its very foundation: the value-form."
Read more ...
Transcript of
9/11 In Context:
the Strategy of Tension Gone Global
Guns and Butter,
January 24, 2007
BF: This is Guns and Butter. I'm Bonnie
Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter: Tod Fletcher. Today's show: "9/11
In Context: the Strategy of Tension Gone Global." Tod Fletcher is a
9/11 researcher and writer. Under the pen-name Max Kolskegg he has
posted online a three-part series of articles on 9/11 in its historical
and political-economic context: After
Genoa:
Reform or Revolution?, 9/11:
A Desperate Provocation by U.S. Capitalism and 9/11
In Context: Plans and Counterplans.
BF: Tod Fletcher — welcome.
TF: Thank you very much, Bonnie.
BF: You wrote a series of long articles, one
before the September 11, 2001 events, and several in the year after. In
your article written before September 11, "After Genoa: Reform or
Revolution?", you saw events taking place in Genoa, Italy foreshadowing
great struggles to come. What went on during the time of the G8
conference in Genoa, in July of 2001, that so alarmed you? .
TF: Well, it was an outbreak of what can only
be called fascist attack on the protestors at the G8 meetings, and it
was complicated and it was very bloody, and it included the killing of
a protestor, Carlo Giuliani by the police, and he was the first
protestor in any of the anti-globalization protests that had been
happening in cities around the world for several years to be killed,
directly like that. And there were reports of other deaths there, but
nobody had it on camera like they did with Carlo Giuliani. So that was
one thing. Genoa was a meeting of the G8, George Bush was there. The G8
is the seven biggest industrial countries in the world, plus Russia,
which is allowed to join with them, sort of out of a courtesy because
of its former significance, I guess, economically. And this was a very
large meeting. There were over 300,000 people there. It was the largest
of the series of meetings. There had been a first major one in Seattle
in 1999, and I believe you were there, were you not, Bonnie?
BF: I was indeed. On behalf of Project
Censored, by the way.
TF: From there the contestation took off, and
there was a long string of meetings. Every time the major economic
institutions would try to meet, people would meet out in the streets
with them — Quebec, Prague, Gotheburg and Genoa — and Genoa was the
biggest. Bush was there, and Blair, and all the heads of state of these
eight nations. Most of them were staying in the Ducal Palace, on land,
but Bush was on a ship, a U.S. naval vessel out in the harbor, because
they didn't consider the security on land adequate for someone like
George Bush. The security that was put in place prior to the beginning
of the meetings and before any of the demonstrators arrived was very
extreme, including [ground to air] missile batteries on the roofs of
the buildings around the Ducal Palace, because they feared that Islamic
Fundamentalist Terrorists might hijack a plane and crash it into the
Ducal Palace while the heads of state were having dinner sometime.
There was a lot of press buildup, and a lot of attention to these
security precautions, and they sort of dared the protestors to come on.
And so the protestors came from all over the world, hundreds of
thousands of them. These are complex demonstrations, involving people
from all walks of life, not just entirely industrial proletarians by
any means, but environmental activists, people concerned about the
terrible conditions in the Global South, anarchists, Marxists, and
grandmothers, and all kinds of people who are concerned about what is
happening globally — part of this movement that's been called the
"anti-globalization movement."
Read more ...
Retort's Response:
Intellectual Dishonesty
by Jack Straw
The night of May 26th, i went to Black
Oak Books in Berkeley to hear the presentation by members of the San
Francisco Bay Area group Retort regarding their new book, "Afflicted
Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War" . The writers are
Iain Boal, TJ Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts, all associated
with UC Berkeley in one form or another, and they claim "situationist"
politics. They contend that 9/11 was an effective attack on the empire
and the Spectacle, with airliners "detourned" into bombers, as one
asserted during the presentation. A close friend of mine asked the
first question, brought up the work by situationists Sanguinetti and
Debord in exposing Italian state terrorism in the '70s, including "On
Terrorism and the State". He pointed out some evidence re 9/11 being an
inside job, such as "suicide hijackers" who are still alive, people
standing in the WTC North Tower impact zone, where supposedly fires
were melting steel, the relatively low temperatures of these fires as
noted by the government's own reports, and asked why they accept the
official story. (A discussion of such evidence can be found in my last
article, "Left Denial on 9/11 Turns Irrational", posted here.
Joe Matthews simply said "Because it's true", drawing some laughs from
the audience, and went on to the next question.
Several questions all followed, none
challenging the team in any way, it seemed like the audience was for
the most part made up of academic and political friends of theirs. Then
another 9/11 activist whom i know asked some more questions about the
physical evidence, and was told to talk to my friend, chuckle chuckle,
on to the next question. He, my friend and i tried shouting about the
questions not being answered but were ignored. No one really wanted to
discuss the matter, it seemed. And several people in the audience who i
know think like us stayed silent.
Read more ...
Left Denial on 9/11
Turns Irrational
by Jack Straw
Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and
even ultra-Left have been downright fanatical in combating notions that
the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks or at least had
foreknowledge of the events. Lately, this stance has taken a turn
towards the irrational.
In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky has made an
incredible assertion: "There's by now a small industry on the
thesis that the administration had something to do with 9-11. I've
looked at some of it, and have often been asked. There's a weak thesis
that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong
thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they
knew about it and didn't try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they
were actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my
opinion, based on a failure to understand properly what evidence is.
Even in controlled scientific experiments one finds all sorts of
unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, loose ends, apparent
contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science journals and
you'll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is
overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they'd have
had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to
involve a large number of people, something would be very likely to
leak, pretty quickly, they'd all be lined up before firing squads and
the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have happened
whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best a long shot;
it would have been extremely hard to predict what would happen."
More recently, Ward Churchill, under fire for his
comments following the 9/11 attacks comparing the people in the WTC
towers to “little Eichmanns”, took a somewhat different turn to the
irrational. This comes via an email from a friend. "I went to the
Friday (3/25/05) night event which was organized by the so-called
'anarchist' AK Press people who in 'true anarchist spirit' only allowed
written questions which they selected (i.e. censored) and handed to
Churchill to read one by one. Needless to say my question as to how he
reconciles the fact that his 'roosting chickens' thesis is consistent
with the 'war on terror' mythology was not asked. A badly phrased 9-11
question did get through. He first said "as to what actually happened
on 9-11, I'm open to different theories, I have not seen any evidence"
(to which I would of course say - well look at it you idiot!) - or
something to that effect - at this point there was scattered clapping -
and then he added "But, the problem with the idea that it was an inside
job is that it suggests that brown people are not capable of such feats
and gives all the credit to the white man, another master race
fantasy". Many people seemed to like this silly analysis - although a
couple of people shouted loudly "that's ridiculous!". Anyway he clearly
illustrated what a dolt he is, his past work notwithstanding."
This happened in Oakland. The following day, while
Churchill was speaking at the Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco,
someone yelled out to the effect that the people who are after
Churchill are also the real perpetrators of 9/11. He paused for maybe
two seconds, and responded to the effect that this was the same racist
crap about brown people not being able to defend themselves. The
audience gave him a standing ovation.
Read more ...
9/11 In Context: Plans
and Counterplans
by Max Kolskegg
It is time to have a hard, clear-eyed look at our
situation here in this post-September 11 "brave new world order", on
the brink of a huge conflagration in the Middle East, with endless war
beyond. The Global Fascist Terror State has arrived, the fruit of
decades of planning, propaganda and provocation. September 11 was its
coming-out party, and for us, the last wake-up call. So now let's face
the facts. No more self-delusion, no more easy roads. The reality is
plain as day, and so therefore is our task.
The rapidly-building worldwide anticapitalist
movement (called the "antiglobalization movement" by its enemies both
right and left) has forced the planners of capital's predations to
abandon all caution and launch, through provocation, a new phase of the
global class war. The worldwide revolt against capitalism and the
state, increasing inexorably year by year over the last decade, and
exemplified most visibly in Seattle, Prague and Genoa, added a final
intolerable pressure to the already dismal condition of world
capitalism. With profits collapsing, ever-worsening environmental
destruction, and looming resource (especially oil) depletion, capital's
prospects were poor in any case. Add in mounting autonomous resistance
throughout the world, highly conscious of the underlying cause of the
planet's many agonies and who is responsible, and suddenly the whole
structure is on the brink of collapse.
Provocation and Fake Terror
Provocation and fake terror as the pretext for a new
assault on capital's enemy, the working people of the world, is nothing
new; most wars of the last hundred years have started this way. (Wars
are, above all things, attacks on working people — who fight them and
die in battle, and are the vast bulk of the "collateral damage" as
well. In the last analysis, all wars are class wars.) By "provocation"
is meant the action of an agent provocateur, on any scale: against a
cop, or against a country. The purpose is to provide an attack that
legitimizes an aggressive response, an attack that otherwise would not
occur. When a cop dressed up as a black blocker throws a stone or
molotov cocktail at the police phalanx, he provides the pretext they
wait for to rush and crush the crowd. "Fake terror" is a type of
provocation which selects the innocent, defenseless public as the
specific victim of the attack, to wreak maximum psychological damage on
the population and render them as putty in the state's hands.
Read more ...
Established Left as
Ideology Police
by Jack Straw
Amongst the stranger phenomena observed in the wake
of revelations about U.S. government foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks,
we see the established Left launch a coordinated attack against those
who maintain that there is a lot more to the story than mere government
foreknowledge. Norman Solomon, Ed Herman, David Corn, Martin Lee,
ChuckO of Infoshop, Chip Berlet, Mike Albert, Seymour Hersh, and others
with similar politics, have all written articles for the usual Left
magazines and websites, or have appeared on radio shows, warning their
loyal flock against pursuing such lines of inquiry, and asserting that
this could divert the Left from the real work that needs to be done.
This has involved increasingly nasty personal attacks on those who do
indeed pursue such inquiries, such as Michael Ruppert.
Like a chorus, all these supposed critics of the status-quo chime in
that the Bush administration and its various agents are simply
incompetent: nothing more, nothing less. It would be ridiculous, they
say, to think that the administration is even capable of willful
negligence in 9/11, i.e. knowing of the attacks but letting them happen
so it could implement its policy of military interventions and domestic
repression. And active complicity? Forget it. They uniformly voice
their disbelief that any American president could be so callous about
such mass loss of innocent American lives. More fundamentally, they
assert that spending time trying to figure out the extent of U.S.
government foreknowledge or complicity amounts to a surrender to
"conspiracy theory", a method that overemphasizes bad deeds by bad
people, and ignores systemic causes for events and policies. Thus,
activists are diverted from the real task at hand, a challenge to the
system's core structures.("Structuralism" is what they call their
method.) I won't deal here with these individuals as such; others have
done a great job compiling the articles and their critiques (see "The
Magic Bullet Dissidents" feature section at
www.questionsquestions.net). Instead, I'll focus on why I think this
organized attack is happening.
The dichotomy which these so-called leftists assert exists pretty much
only in their heads. No doubt, the capitalist system is what sets the
context for all the actions of the state/corporate apparatus. Capital
accumulation (curiously enough, this is left
out of their "structuralism," as they have all abandoned a rigorous
understanding of capitalism) has to be facilitated, for it is a process
that always faces problems, and these problems mount as the
accumulation proceeds to ever-larger levels. At the same time, the
system must be legitimated. It isn't a very easy thing to convince the
vast majority of humanity to go along with a social set-up which is
based upon its own dispossession and exploitation so as to make a tiny
shrinking minority ever richer, and upon the ever-wider destruction of
the world's eco-system and its various human communities. The system's
managers are thus obeying an objective imperative, and are not simply
evil people who are out mucking up a basically good set-up. But all
this involves decisions made by actual human beings, working within
specific institutions whose aim is the perpetuation and expansion of
world capitalism, or at least the well-being of their personal empires
within that global mechanism. Capital in the abstract and institutions
in the abstract only explain generalities or tendencies within which
human actors have a range of choices, including criminal behavior.
Pretending otherwise, taking what is sometimes a useful conceptual and
rhetorical tool and making it into a material reality -- in fact a
persona which makes conscious decisions -- amounts to understanding
nothing.
Read more ...
Henry the Great on
September 11
by I. Berg
Reprinted below is a remarkable text by that
remarkable man, Henry Kissinger. It was posted online at
washingtonpost.com not much more than twelve hours after the first
airliner struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. The text is
notable for a number of reasons, but has gone largely unnoted to date.
It seems to express the measured, even reassuring, view of a major,
widely (not universally!) respected statesman, calling for a new
approach to the threat of terrorism, reassessed in the light of the
morning¹s events. Its publication didn¹t elicit much comment it was
just a drop in a mass media tidal wave.
Since September 11, however, a long list of
unanswered questions and suspicions have floated to the surface. The
unrelenting media flood still serves to distract most people, but many
are starting to wonder. Coming out of a state of shock as time has
passed, with difficulty shaking off the mesmerism induced by television
and corporate newspapers, a growing number of people are starting to
look more carefully at the situation we find ourselves in. As part of
this process, I'd like to look more closely at this short utterance of
Henry Kissinger, posted at 9:04 pm on September 11.
A quite extraordinary aspect of the text is its
succinct expression, before Pres. Bush had collected his breath after
his day's extensive travels, of the entire "anti-terror" battle plan.
With no time for the many experts on terror in the many branches of the
federal government to discuss what had happened, let alone what to do,
with Bush back in DC for just a couple of hours, Cheney hunkered in a
bunker somewhere, and everyone presumably in a state of shock at the
unexpected calamity, Henry Kissinger is able to articulate in careful,
composed tones the overall structure of the US response, from which
there has been no official deviation since: a war on the terrorists
wherever they lurk, including attacks on "any government that shelters"
them. It's as if Henry had won the lottery. Good guess, big guy!
Read more ...
9/11: A Desperate
Provocation by US Capitalism
by Max Kolskegg
The "War on Terrorism" is indeed a fraud, as
Australian film and print journalist John Pilger has
repeatedly pointed out. "Terrorism" is simply taking the place of
"Communism" during the Cold War as the propaganda line spewed by the
state and the corporate media to rally a confused and fearful
population against "enemies" who supposedly threaten them. This most
effective form of social control was recommended by Hitler's chief
propagandist, Josef Goebbels. The purpose of the "War on Terrorism"
is to maintain carte blanche for the ever more desperate agenda of
American capital: the domination of the continent of Eurasia (the
critical sector of which is Central Asia, precisely where the "War on
Terrorism" just happens to have begun), and the crushing of the Left
worldwide, especially its explicitly anti-capitalist core.
In the face of this juggernaut the Left has shown a
potentially
fatal lack of intellectual rigor as well as nerve. The evidence that
the attacks on September 11 were in all likelihood a black operation
of the US intelligence services, a state "provocation" designed as a
pretext to launch the global "War on Terrorism", is very substantial.
It is also painful to consider, but the task must not be shirked. The
purpose of this essay is to consider its relevance to the future of
the only force which holds any hope of saving humanity and the planet
from the megadeath capital is preparing, the anti-capitalist
Left.
Shock, Propaganda And Paralysis
Four months after September 11, it appears that most
of the Left
is asleep at the switch. Just about the only response has been the
"anti-war movement", which has been weak, especially in the U.S.,
where the propaganda barrage has successfully marshalled the bulk of
the population, including many leftists, into lockstep with their
masters' plans. In any case the movement hasn't stopped the "war" in
Afghanistan (really a one-sided attack against an essentially
defenseless target, not a war). Nor is there any reason to imagine
that it has frightened the Bush cabal from implementing plans to
unleash its death machine on any number of additional targets in the
future. US troops are massing in Kuwait and Qatar, in preparation for
an attack on Iraq, and "special operations" are underway already in
Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines and perhaps Sudan. Then there's
Colombia. . .Venezuela. . .Bolivia. . .Mexico, and these are just the
most obvious near-term objects of attention from the Sickos in
command.
Read more ...
After Genoa: Reform or
Revolution?
by Max Kolskegg
It would be hard to deny that the events in Genoa
were, as Starhawk
has said, a major watershed in the history of the movement to create a
livable world. The repressive forces of capitalism were in full
display, so that even the most pacific of pacifists received a salutary
shock and have been forced to reevaluate the rationality, if not the
righteousness, of their strategy for social change. The near-murderous
assault on the sleeping place of the Genoa Social Forum and the
Independent Media Center on the 21st of July will go down in infamy.
The skulls cracked there may change more than a few minds about who and
what we're dealing with, and how best to proceed.
Useful analysis of the crackdown in Genoa by Starhawk, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin and others has pointed to
some of the lessons that need to be learned. The capitalist class has
shown remarkable solidarity and class consciousness in developing a
strategy to repress the "anti-globalization" movement, both by force
and by trying to split the movement where it is weakest, the division
between its revolutionary and reformist wings. Some revolutionaries are
pacifists, and the events in Genoa are not likely to turn them into
reformists (although they may kiss their pacifism goodbye). But the
main efforts expended by the police, politicians and media have been
directed to splitting the reformists away from the revolutionaries by
literally creating an image of violent, out of control "anarchists" who
are ruining the party for everybody and should be shunned or
constrained. And their strategy is a good one, as shown by the numerous
calls for "self-discipline" from self-appointed leaders of the
reformist wing like Kevin
Danaher of Global Exchange. The fact is that a significant part of
the movement is composed of people who seek to be recognized as leaders
and spokespeople of various segments of the lower orders; by
threatening to "put the masses in the streets" and make business as
usual impossible until their demands are met, they hope to get a place
among the powerful.
But then there are the revolutionaries as well.
Although at present they are fewer in number than the reformists, it's
just possible that they have a better understanding of the nature of
the situation we're in and what we're up against, and a better idea of
the appropriate strategies to pursue: strategies to destroy capitalism,
not reform it, because it cannot be reformed. For the movement to go
forward, it must remain united as one solid force opposed to capital's
plans. Capital wants to split it and conquer it by division, it's
age-old method. The solution? The reformist wing of the movement needs
to recognize the futility of reform, throw off its leaders with their
aspirations for power and prestige, and become revolutionary itself.
Read more ...
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