Anarchoblogs

On the evening of 29 August 1952 a crowd of avant-garde aficionados and local music enthusiasts filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing playing cards. After subdued applause, Tudor sat back down at the piano. He played pieces by Christian Wolff, an 18-year-old student of Cage’s, and by Morton Feldman, Cage’s friend; and thundered through Pierre Boulez’s fiendishly difficult first sonata. The penultimate piece on the programme was Cage’s latest, 4’33”. Tudor shut the piano and sat still. The wind rustled in the maples. Half a minute later he reopened the lid, then shut it. The summer rain could be heard falling on the Maverick’s wooden roof. Another couple of minutes – Tudor opened and shut the lid again – and muttering broke out in the hall. People began shuffling towards the exit. Four minutes and 33 seconds without a note played and Cage had stamped himself on music history with the most radical contribution of his generation. At the end of the concert, a local artist drew himself up and bellowed: ‘Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town.’

Let’s debate Afghanistan, but give us the facts first
Tom Hyland
The Age
August 29, 2010

Where there is no information, there is no hope of a meaningful discussion.

IT HAS taken nine years, the deaths of 21 Australian soldiers and a hung parliament, but now our politicians agree: they will have a debate on Afghanistan. The Greens have long called for one; so have former and serving soldiers. Now Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott reluctantly concur…

What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or authority?

You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.’ Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: ‘We’re working for the benefit of the people.’ The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who’s trying to bring freedom and justice to the world—and they probably all believe it. I’m not suggesting that they’re lying. There’s an array of routine justifications for whatever you’re doing. And it’s easy to believe them. It’s very hard to look into the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.’ It’s much easier to say, ‘That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it’s for the benefit of everyone.’

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. And that’s wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.

But, we don’t take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They’ll give you the same answers. But, we don’t take that seriously because they can know what they’re doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that’s their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that’s their choice. But it doesn’t change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It’s very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.

In fact, one of the—maybe the most—elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, if something’s right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It’s not even discussable. Because we don’t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘terror’ and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it’s considered highly moral; it’s considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that’s awful, and terrible, and so on.

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that’s accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.

…Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere—I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice—they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.

Brother Ali – Uncle Sam Goddamn
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Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's fantastic book, "The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic" is one of my favorite books of all time. That book, when combined with Linebaugh's excellent "The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century", offer two first-class and complimentary views on the violent imposition of capitalism on the English population and the rest of the then emerging colonial world. Naturally, people resisted this reorganization in all manner of ways.

Linebaugh's book in particular offers the reader not just a view of life before capitalism, but it also reveals the bloody battle that took place over the imposition of capitalist relations, centering on the hangings at the Tyburn gallows. On these gallows those poor in London, dispossessed of their commons and resisting or locked out of the new capitalist work regime, faced the grim, bloody justice of emerging capitalism, determined as it was to bring the English poor to heel before the new mode one way or another. Performed in public, before large crowds and en masse, the hangings amounted to mass state terrorism on the population. A warning of the most extreme kind: conform or die.

Itself often a point of violent contention, with mobs known to riot and rescue the judged from time to time, the hangings routinely involved those charged with stealing food and other minor offenses. The commodity form was just emerging and it was to be respected! This in an era of the mass dislocation of the enclosures gives a hint of the grand scale of the terror. Those lucky enough to escape the hanging tree suffered transportation to Europe's "New World" in bondage under harsh terms of indentured servitude. Thus it is from the resisting English working class, initially, that the colonial State got much of its settler masses.

In the "Many-Headed Hydra" Linebaugh and Rediker take time to point out as well, using the coastal Atlantic's sea-going working class as the example, the effects of the likewise emerging system of white supremacy. Sailors, a motley multi-racial bunch, routinely defied the new racial regulations of the day, bringing a working class wreck across racial lines to colonial society's elites, rioting and resisting their way from port to port. At the same time, these heterogeneous working class formations' contentions with colonial capitalism's racial forms and privileges also spurred the State to further regiment and formalize them. And as the settler State increasingly turned to chattel slavery kidnapped from Africa, the threat that faced the ruling English white elite in colonial America was always a tri-racial alliance of the emerging white working class, African slaves and indigenous tribes. It was this burning fuse that whiteness was constructed to douse. And it is this division that lives with us to this day.

Thinking of these early rebels from the capitalist and racialized order is important, because it shows us not only an alternate history, but it also a hint of what we had and how we lost it. Relationships which perhaps seem normal enough to us now, like work or policing, seem quite the opposite when we look back and realize the sheer violence that the State was willing to use to impose and defend what were then new and generally unwelcome institutions for the extraction of profit and the preservation of power and privilege.

Returning now to the sailors, there was one particular kind of sailor that terrorized the elite like no other. For hundreds of years, but peaking perhaps in the early 18th century, pirates stirred the fearful imaginations of blue-blooded American aristocrats like none other save perhaps the slave insurrections of the South. Indeed, when the Amistad ship, famous for its mutiny and flight out of bondage, first appeared on the North Carolina horizon it was described in no uncertain terms as a pirate ship. The comparison was apt, not least of all because of the infamously defiant multi-racial characteristics of the sailor class and, in particular, the pirate hordes that plagued corporate shipping.

Pirates themselves defied not just the racial regulations of their time, but also the system of work under capitalism. Seizing and plundering, electing their own leaders, dividing up the loot in egalitarian ways and living in the moment all defined the pirate existence on the open sea. This stood in sharp contrast to a system increasingly regulated by the clock and the turning of gears inside the dank, repressive factory. Naturally, aside from the general miserable conditions of life under capitalism, the prime recruited for the pirate population was in fact the specific nature of life as a sailor. Life on a navy ship or merchant vessel was factory-like to the extreme. Many sailors served against their will and for little or no pay. It's easy to see how in these conditions questions of race and division can quickly fade away.

It's interesting to note that on the slave ships that navigated the Middle Passage with their stolen cargo, it wasn't uncommon for nets to stretch out from the ship out over the sea for some distance beyond the deck. Captured slaves it seems, would not infrequently attempt suicide by jumping into the sea when they had the opportunity, denying in essence the capitalist the value of their captured labor. In contemporary times, I'm reminded of the nets deployed around the FoxConn factories in China, meant to contain and nullify the wave of suicides afflicting the company and its workforce. Before the nets, many of those attempting self-liberation from Capital's undead grip took flight from the FoxConn factory roof itself, ending up a bloody mash on the sidewalk below. Capitalism lets nothing go without a fight, not even your own body.

So, its in this spirit that I post below two links to recent Marcus Rediker lectures both on piracy. The first, titled, "Black Pirates: The Curious Early History of the Amistad Rebellion" focuses on the framework of piracy as a way of looking at the Amistad rebellion. The second, "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean", was given in 2007 at the 2007 Bristol Radical History Week in the UK and goes over some of the history he uncovered while writing his book, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age". Check them out. They're both well worth your time.





Watch "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean" at the Bristol Radical History Group's webpage. Note that Rediker's lecture begins at the Tyburn tree. Many pirates likewise met their end there.

The term ‘September 11′ is now forever associated with the terrorist attacks upon New York and Washington in 2001; in 2000, however, ‘S11′ was the name given to ‘three days of protest + carnival’ against the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum, held at Crown Casino in Melbourne. (For others, ‘September 11′ will be remembered for other reasons.) EngageMedia is gonna throw up video in the weeks and months ahead, but you can also watch S11: This is What Democracy Looks Like (Actively Radical TV) online and the remnants of the S11-AWOL (Autonomous Web of Liberation) site may be found here. s11.org is archived at the NLA here.

S11 done got written about quite a bit at the time (including by myself, in a fairly cringe-worthy manner), and I’ll probably throw up moar links in future, but in the meantime it’s worth noting that it was only seven years later that Slater & Gordon (& Co.) were able to secure a fat payout for themselves — and as long as law-talking guys are happy, who could ask for anything moar? Well, apart from a whitewash, of course.

I keep getting hits to my blog from users either searching for the term ‘Paul Howes’ or clicking on a link from his Wikipedia entry. Both lead to a post dated February 1, 2008, and titled Would the real anarchists / Trotskyists… (Et cetera). It explores the wonderful world of radikal yoof: “If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head”. And so on and so forth, in a number of variations, and with various attributions. Visits spiked considerably when PM KRudd got knifed, and again, sharply, following the 2010 Australian federal election, and Howes’ profile on Australian Story earlier this week (with almost 300 visits to the page in question).

After drawing the short straw and fronting ABC’s Lateline in June in order to effectively assume, on behalf of the Labor Right, credit for Julia Gillard’s coup (“Boo! Hiss!”), Howes was the subject of Australian Story: one called, appropriately enough, ‘Labor of Love’. It aired just one week after the same show done a piece on Van Rudd, the Social Revolutionary Revolutionary Socialist Party member, artiste, and ‘nephew to the stars’. The RSP being, of course, the recent (2008) split from the Leninist party which Howes joined as a teenager, and which helped both introduce him to the wonders of Castro’s Cuba and to thereby deprive him of his illusions:

I attended a 3 hour speech from Fidel whilst there – it played a key part in my decision to become an avowed anti-communist.

Having watched the Lovely story of Howes’ transformation from homeless-teenage-Trotskyite to youngest-boss-of-Australia’s-oldest-and-arguably-worst-Union, I don’t know that it contained any revelations. The question was asked how is it that someone so young so-young-and-so-gone, let’s-chase-the-dragon, oh could assume a position of such authority. But if the trade union movement is understood to be the property of the ALP — and it is — then the answer is not very hard to find.

The disavowal of political ambitions at the end of the piece was an especially nice, comic touch.

Beyond this, the irony in Howes’ recent scribblings on the threat posed to Australia by watermelons is made rather obvious by his own dilly-dallying with the DSP. It also demonstrates a central political weakness. After all, the ALP remains, formally at least, committed to ‘democratic socialism’. “The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.”

LOL.

In eulogising Laurie Short, another former-Trotskyist-turned-Labor-icon, Howes writes: “Though there may be many generations between me and Laurie I feel great affinity with him, not least because we have held the same office but because we both began our political lives on the far-Left and ended as committed democrats – hostile to the authoritarian Stalinist model which dominated the communist ideal.” Billionaire amateur Marxologist Clive Palmer argued in relation to the KRudd Government’s Resource Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Profit Tax (a tax which Howes, on behalf of the AWU/ALP, was highly vocal in supporting): “I think it comes from Das Kapital in 1868. The super tax comes about by Marx and Engels and their famous work which inspired the Russian Revolution.”

The political potential/threat of Fabianism may only be taken seriously by billionaires, Fabians, and other members of the chattering classes, but conflating it — and the redistributive effects of a tax increase on mining super-profits — with the various ‘Stalinist’ regimes that were the end-products of Bolshevism, is a bit silly. Further, it’s worth recalling that resistance to state tyranny has been a part of Western workers’ movements since their inception, and that the authoritarian models which have dominated the communist ideal have also generated moar radical, libertarian forms of opposition to this domination. In other words, Howes’ argument that the consumer/citizen has only two choices — Coke or Pepsi, Democracy or Communism — is mistaken. As a keen student of history, Howes would know this.

The terminology of political and social discourse is vague and imprecise, and constantly debased by the contributions of ideologists of one or another stripe. Still, these terms have at least some residue of meaning. Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, “this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie,” but can only be “realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

As for stories of radical sons and daughters… they are indeed numerous. By way of explanation, I prefer the crass, the gross and the vulgar, material explanations to be found in any Economics 101 class.

And Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.

See also : Who Are They? Jenny Turner reports from the Battle of Ideas, London Review of Books, Vol.32, No.13, July 8, 2010.

…results…

Well. Looks like Australian authorities are following the lead of foreign states, and attempting to eliminate support for terrorism. Today: “The Australian Federal Police (AFP) carried out raids across [Melbourne]’s north and south-east, as part of an investigation into the funding of terrorism.” No, the AFP weren’t raiding foreign Embassies, Government offices, or those belonging to TNCs, but rather [...]

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On Tuesday, August 3, 2010, long-time political prisoner and acclaimed poet and translator Marilyn Buck, 62, passed peacefully at her home in Brooklyn, New York.

See also : Warrior-Poet Marilyn Buck : No Wall Too Tall, The Rag Blog, May 22, 2010.

     

The soundtrack for this post is the song ‘Fish F***’ by Little Johnny Roskam and the Institute of Destruction:

Victoria: the left-leaning state Melissa Fyfe The Age August 8, 2010 Victoria, once the jewel in the Liberal crown, may be the saviour of the Labor government, writes Melissa Fyfe. Uh-huh. Well yeah, maybe: where ‘left-leaning’ = ‘a tendency to preference Labor [...]

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