Saturday, March 29, 2008

Attempting an alliance with the Spartacist League

The CP(F) has long made it clear that we like you, International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist). Sure, you can give us the brush-off, and spout about how we once had a wrong analysis of the Dergue or have a different position on age of consent laws. But we like you. And we want you to know it.

We like the name of your prison group- Partisan Defense Committee. That's such a damn good name, we wished we'ed thought it up first. It just sounds so bad-ass. We're thinking of starting a similar group, more appropriately named Puritan Defense Committee. But it just isn't the same. Besides, we wish we had had your foresight to take over Luxemburg's group's name, even though you're nothing like them.

And we like the way you get so militant around neo-fascist groups. When you shove them or spray them with paint, oh, what's that sensation we get? Is it hot and soft- or hard? Doesn't matter, that's just how you make us feel.

But most of all, we like your puritanism. Your articles are so polemically written, your narrow mindedness knows all bounds, and you've broken up more conferences, workshops and planning meetings than probably all of the East Coast FBI offices combined have in the past forty years.

Other leftists may call you an embarassment, but we know the truth. Y'see, the CP(F), like the Spartacist League, believes that rabid in-fighting is ultra-dialectical, and division has an ism at the end.

So, if you ever want, maybe we could go out sometime. Maybe find a nice proletarian pub, or lambast the ISO together. Or, it could be something more casual. We could just scoot our Workers Vampire newspaper-selling table at a college campus a little closer to your Workers Vanguard table. Think about it. Interested? Find us on San Francisco Craigslist's discreet encounters section.

Muah!

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008

UJP and SO!UTION Proposals for actions

Thanks to a three month dispute over the process on which our meetings would be held, and whether colons or semi-colons were more appropriate for the flyer sub-headlines, the UJP and SO!UTION anti-war coalitions had as yet not decided on a proposal for the next few days of protest on the fifth anniversary of this imperialist war against Iraq (which technically started back in 1991 and never ended, but that is beside the point). The final plan is as follows.

The Protest Old-Guard, a section of the UJP leadership which had organized large rallies for Western unilateral disarmament thirty years ago, has proposed the following: As the war approaches its sixth year, we suggest the anti-war movement take the lead of the LGBTTIAQ rights movement. Their most significant annual activity began a revolt, which indeed the anti-war movement can relate to on the first night of the invasion. It then became an annual protest march, which we have indeed carried out each year. And now it is a big, festive parade. We propose to line up corporate sponsors (putting the funds raised in our trust), call for revellers along the routes, and to hold celebratory anti-war parades with the co-sponsorship of all cities involved. In this way, we can become the mainstream, and as the Iraq war will clearly continue thanks to the inept policies of the current anti-war movement, we can build it up to a larger and more mainstream parade every year. We will know we have hit pay dirt when the local news media and municipal governments inflate rather than underestimate our numbers.

Unfortunately, the renegade faction SO!UTION has drawn out of this plan, and will be wrangling with municipal governments in their respective courts for downtown march permits that they should be allowed but will never get. The marches will occur whichever year there is finally a settlement.

And the youth movement Students for an Ontological Society will be organizing a feeder march to look for if there an anti-war movement even exists. Meanwhile, the Students for a Bolshevik Society will organize a hostile breakaway out of this feeder.

All comrades must boycott all other actions that are planned by any other anti-war coalitions, whose make-ups are not at all democratic and all-encompassing.

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Friday, March 14, 2008

The Fifth Anniversary of the Iraq War approaches

As the Fifth anniversary of the Iraq War approaches, inviting all of the expected hyperbole by our unimaginative brothers and sisters in the anti-imperialist and anti-militarist struggles here in the belly of the beast, our Troops Out Today Directorate wonders what lessons activists have learned from the past several years.

There certainly have been many of the greatest examples of factionalism on many sides of the conflict, from sectarian fighting in Iraq to break-ups of conservative counter-protester groups to, of course, splinters in the anti-war movement. Granted, UFPJ isn't sending suicide bombers to ANSWER rallies, and ANSWER in turn isn't assassinating Troops Out Now Coalition clerics. But both of these manifestations of opposition factionalism are very valuable to us indeed.

As the Troops Out Today Directorate, in collaboration with SO!UTION (Stop Occupations! United To Implode Oppression Network) and the Union for Justice with Peace (UJP), was the initial callers for demonstrations on March 19th and 20th (by getting the ball rolling a full twenty months ago), we are excited to see separate protest rallies and marches will be held in many cities, but frustrated that some of the other, albeit more reformist anti-war coalitions are actually working collaboratively, a travesty if ever there was one. When demonstrations are separate, it allows the news media to better establish which anti-war coalitions are strongest. Irregardless, SO!UTION and UJP expect to hold a rally in Los Angeles with forty thousand participants, and a simultaneous one in New York's Staten Island borough with ninety thousand attendees.

And there are also great developments in the CP(F) efforts to usurp Iraq Veterans Against the War and related groups to our own ends (namely, more factionalism), though we are finding stiff competition for these exact same aims from the International Socialist Organization. Why can't they understand that we are simply better usurpers and factionalizers than they are?

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Tuesday, March 04, 2008

On the Historical Revisionism of Anarchists and Leninists

One of the greatest crimes of capitalism, and indeed any system of exploitation, is the absolute domination of history it maintains. But what happens with those in opposition to that very system are guilty of the same sin? It is no more justifiable! Know truth and truth shall set ye free!

So let's shed some light on historical revisionism. In the years 1918 through 1921, industrial parts of Italy underwent the Biennio Rosso, in which the possibility for a social revolution was very real. Among the top signs was a powerful factory occupation movement. Let's see how our alleged comrades of today discuss this period.

First, the anarchists of the site libcom.org (Liberal Communists or something) have a page dedicated to the Biennio Rosso. This page is wonderful in that it unabashedly wallows in the kind of factionalism we seek to promote. How does it do this? By completely omitting the large role played by the non-anarchist Marxists in the struggles. Whenever an action or thought can be attributed to anarchists, they endlessly mention the word. Whenever one should be attributed to non-anarchist
Marxists, they simply drop ideological adjectives and act as if the workers acted completely without political philosophy. And there are some other glaring omissions too. The writer mentions how European working class movements became larger and more militant after World War I, but no where is mentioned the role that the new existence of the Soviet Union played in inspiring them, and whatever you think of the Soviet Union, on that note there is no debate. And after going out of their way not to put non-anarchist Marxists in a positive light, they then attack Italian Marxists and socialists at the end. It is really a delightful read, though just a simple example of how we Leftists consider each other greater enemies than the capitalist class. Why are we angry with the article? We'll get to that.

Now
rightists and bourgeois historians like to blame this period for the next period, the Biennio Negri, when the fascists took power, but that's like blaming a man who talked back to verbal police harassment for the beating that then takes place. A person or a people have a right to resist, and the repression that occurs later is not to be blamed on them.

Similarly to LibCom, the english-language wikipedia, though extremely brief, paints the picture as anarchist. But move to the Italian wikipedia, and the article is devoid of any reference to anarchists, placing the significance on the inspiration of the Russian Revolutions, and the Italian (non-anarchist) Marxist movements, never once mentioning anarchism.

And while some (non-anarchist) Marixist accounts have simply given their anti-authoritarian would-be comrades their due, fortunately many others continue the line of the Italian wikipedia and the converse of the anarchist version. It's as if a fuller picture requires reading both, skipping past the anarchist attacks on the Leninists. But all of this revisionism is greatly in the interest of the factionalism, comrades.

Of course, both accounts are quite false. The truth goes something more like this:

Biennio Rosso

Back in 1915, Segretario Generale-Capo (a cousin twice-removed of our own venerable GSC) joined the anti-imperialist defeatists at the Zimmerwald Conference, specifically calling for the reclamation of the forces of production while the national militaries were away.

Generale-Capo then sent his small circle of comrades into the factories and warehouses of Torino, where they quietly agitated until they began defenestrating bosses from windows in 1918. Of course, thanks to the Mediterranean Free Trade Agreement, jobs were quickly depleting from northern Italy to Albania, and while shifting the blame from a racist attack on Albanians to one against the boss class, Generale-Capo launched a factory occupation movement like the world had never seen.

All was preceding gloriously, when anarchist ultra-leftists who desired to 'abolish work' began throwing fist fights with the Faccionalisti workers, and PSI bureaucrats called for everyone to 'Stop the Violence,' 'Save the Children,' and 'Keep Hope Alive.'

Both those with infantile and elderly disorders were, in actuality, agents of Mussolini which led eventually to his March on Rome. While Generale-Capo languished in a Neopolitano prison, his movement split between Trotsky and Stalin. And, well, that's really what happened.

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