PROVIDENCE WORKERS DEFENSE

                    WELCOME TO PROVIDENCE WORKERS DEFENSE 

PROVIDENCE WORKERS DEFENSE  has come together to build working class power. There are those of us who may have come from other political backgrounds, communist, socialist, anarchist, or no political affiliation or tendencies at all. The basic agreement is: 1) Current conditions are intolerable for us not the elites. 2) Fascism is ascendent. 3) Only an organized working class can change things. At its heart, it doesn’t really matter what politics you bring to the table; what matters is in your heart. We also believe that there are no “pure movements”; that flexibility and being informed by our own people is the way to liberation. What worked in a different time and place can inform and inspire us, but is not a road map; what we are doing is uncharted territory. We believe that only a revolutionary movement is the best self defense, that organizing and building rebel working class power is the best defense against the war the ruling class wages against us. We intend to hold ourselves to 2 basic practices: First, our ability to communicate directly with each other. And secondly, that we care about each other, build each other up. 

It is with this that we hope that you are inspired and moved to join the fight for working class liberation and an end to oppression. Hopefully the following will answer some questions you may have, and that you join us directly, or spurs you and your friends to join the fight independently. Either way, welcome to the revolution! 

Without an underlying framework of ideas (theory), there can be no revolution or revolutionary action. These few words, hopefully, provide some ideas (theory) for thinking about where we are. It can be tempting to take action for action’s sake, but for durable and lasting change, we need ideas as well as action! 

A LITTLE HISTORY A LITTLE THEORY 

There are 2 distinct forces that have control over our daily lives, capitalism and the state, so we are going to look at each in some detail. This is not exhaustive or definitive; it is just our framework for looking at things as they are. 

CAPITALISM is the name given to the current economic order. The total goal of capitalism is, as its name says, the accumulation and creation of capital. Capitalism purposely is single minded, in that its ultimate goal is building capital, as we all see it does not care how our lands or our people are treated. Capital as a thing is represented by money property. It is capitalism that determines the way our society works and is the foundation of day to day life. 

This system did not just show up fully formed. Before capitalism there was another dominant social relationship called FEUDALISM, and under this system the ruling class simply took what was produced by workers by force. This system was simple on its face; it was justified by the state churches who got their 10% in tithes. The central feature of this was ownership of the land, and this is the shape of PRE-INDUSTRIAL productive property. 

The way CAPITALISM is now grew out of this system through experiments and reforms of the feudal system. Here in New England, the switch from feudalism, which the settlers brought with them and brutally imposed on indigenous people, to capitalism was very fast; in Europe and Asia, it was much slower. It was a change in production on steroids, fueled by enslaved African people and the ethnic cleansing of the land, and until the Civil War, it was a mix of both feudalism and capitalism. So let’s look at what capitalism is.

For capitalism to work society has to be organized in a specific way- this is called the SOCIAL RELATIONS of capitalism. Here is a list of what those social relationships look like. 

● Absolutely everything has a price and must be able to be bought and sold. 

● To get the necessities for life like food, clothing, housing, medical care, entertainment, etc., money is needed. For the working class, the only way to get money is by selling our work in return for wages. The working class have no, or very little, productive property that makes profit. Interest on savings or increases in personal home values are not profit. The interest you get on your home is just payment from capitalists to rent your money. The ups and downs of house values are a by-product on the economy caused by capitalists re-valuing resources. 

● The things we make either with our bodies or our brains are sold by employers for a profit. This profit has two sources: 1) Labour; the actual work needed to produce a profit, or 2) The market; being able to sell the product for a price that will ensure a profit. 

● PROFIT is stored as capital in the form of money or property. 

● As things that we produce as workers are sold for profit, it makes sense that we (wage earners) only receive a tiny part of the wealth that we produced in the first place. The people who get the profit are capitalists. IT’S A TRICK! The capital in capitalism comes from the work that the working class do. 

● It’s not enough to have the wealth we produced taken from us- capitalists take a second bite of the apple by selling the products we produce back to us. We have to pay for everything that we need to simply live. 

● Capitalists use many, many divisions to suppress wages and keep us divided. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia are the most successful ways capitalists keep wages low. 

● Capitalists compete with each other to make profit and to ultimately force their competition to go out of business. Monopoly and Monopsony are always the endgame of capitalists. 

● The most basic and central reasons for capitalism to exist are: 1) To continue to make profit in order to accumulate more capital. 2) To increase the rate of profit by any means possible. 

Thinking About Thinking

Hegel’s master-slave dialectic (or Lord-Bondsman dialectic) is the foundation for Marx’s model of class consciousness.

Fundamentally the dialectic is about how one arrives at self-consciousness. So what is self-consciousness? I would explain that it is becoming aware of the “I” or the self as a subject. Hegel claims that the awareness of one’s subjectivity can only be modelled in the Objectivity of recognition by another person. This relation of the subject recognizing itself in the object is dialectical in nature.

So what does this have to do with slaves? Initially the master is able to use force to subdue the slave. The master in this appears strong and powerful, his will able to project onto the slave. The master needs the slave to recognize him as such in their relation to have the power he craves. But upon this relationship, there is an inversion.  While it first appears that the master, with all his power, is the motive force in the relationship, he needs to be recognized as master by the slave. This turns out to be a contingency. In reality the slave is the one who holds the dialectical motor in the relationship. He is the one that produces what the master needs, and the master is actually the one who is dependent. In this the slave’s self-consciousness is the one that can achieve true freedom, as he is dependent on no one but himself. The relationship of mutual self-recognition is then sublated by the slave’s consciousness that he can be free at any time and it is only a faulty consciousness that makes him a slave.

This is a very good way to explain how class consciousness is a dialectical process. The working class is the only one that can achieve true self-aware freedom because it is the working class that produces their own means. The proletariat is not dependent on the bourgeoisie for its freedom to be actualized because it is in reality free of dependency.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CRIME 

When feudalism, which relied on brute force to accumulate land and wealth by stealing from peasants, had reached its limits and European kings were starting to really kill each other, the ruling class hit upon a new strategy to preserve wealth: IMPERIALISM. This is where the ruling class started to project power far away to take more things from people elsewhere. This required a way to get past the limits of huge store houses that physically held accumulated wealth. They needed a system of production where that wealth could be represented by money. The brutal conquest of Africa and Turtle Island by Spanish and Portuguese mercenaries is the first real experiment in modern capitalism. 

When it started, it was just the same old feudalism on the ground with kings and princes. Then a new group emerged–merchants–and they had big plans. First they had to get rid of weak, inbred, and stupid kings and royals. Then they had to make the state protect and lubricate their exploits to protect their quickly growing wealth. This is still the system in place now. This new economic order of imperialism, along with colonialism, did a bunch of specific things. 

● Enslaving vast numbers of Africans and Indigenous peoples to provide labor for the brutal extraction of wealth from the land and sea. 

● Turning fellow human beings into actual commodities for purchase or sale. 

● Violent theft of raw materials and farm goods like tea, coffee, rubber, gold, oil, etc. from native populations. Congo, Vietnam, and Colombia are all examples of this. 

● Making the colonies into closed markets where goods and services could be traded without external competition and to reduce surplus. The best example of this is the opium trade in China. 

SEXUALITY AND RACE 

This terrible history is ongoing and continues to be an obstacle in building working class unity. These are deep scars worthy of close attention and will be included in every discussion. Capitalism does not just make international divisions, it also affects our relationships to each other. Racism and sexism are not just because of simple bigotry, it is the product of capitalism. Capitalism needs to permanently divide the workforce . The racist and sexist division of workers fragments the working class, and justifies the SUPER EXPLOITATION of groups of workers like immigrants, Black workers, women, gay workers, and gender minorities. 

LET’S TALK ABOUT SEX! 

(a note: when talking about women, we mean all women) 

Cruelty and domination of women obviously predates capitalism, but the economic exploitation of women is a core function of capitalism. Earning less than men for the same work, and socially excluded from some jobs, the work that is offered women is often that which duplicates their unpaid work in the home: caring for the sick, raising children, serving food, cleaning, and sex work. These are not high status jobs and are often, even in working class circles, not given the full dignity and respect that any labor deserves. The unpaid service work women perform takes care of the needs of men to be workers, as well as raising up the next generation of workers. Today we see a push to drive women out of the workforce and deny bodily autonomy: women are to be reduced to the position of incubator. You don’t have to be Einstein to see how this benefits the capitalists. You have half the population which, if they work for a wage, can be paid less, as well as provide the unpaid recuperative and reproductive labor. It’s a shitty deal. 

We believe that the liberation of all women requires an end to capitalism, and a full accounting of the crimes against women will be central to our revolutionary struggle. 

STRIKE UP THE TRANS! 

Capitalism builds on the pre-existing condition of feudalism, with a rigid belief in hierarchies as ordained by god and the market. Maintenance of this hierarchy is central to the function of capitalism. That which challenges that hierarchy is in automatic and aggressive opposition. Expressions of fluidity in gender, though natural and universal, are seen as suspect at best, and antagonist at worst. Control of gender dissidents becomes vital to maintain systems of sexism and non-cis working class people face murder, sexual, violence, housing insecurity, and on the job harassment at rates far in excess of any other group of workers.

Because of this, this group of workers becomes particularly precious. Reactionary cis-men are drafted as soldiers on behalf of capitalist to directly oppress and harm our trans workers. The usurpation of gender roles shows that these roles are arbitrary, and serve no value to workers. Because of this, we believe that affirmations and welcomes to trans workers have to be expressed openly and loudly and often. With that, any attempt by the media, politicians, religious leaders, and capitalist to harm our gender-non-conforming workers will be met with our direct and aggressive solidarity. We believe that capitalism is incompatible with the free expression of gender, and therefore, must be ended. 

OFF TO THE RACE(IST)S 

In the bad old days, Black people were enslaved to build wealth for capitalists here. There are a lot of myths and tricks that today’s capitalists use to hide the depth and breadth of their crime. Among these is that this was a simple relationship, or that it has been outgrown, or that the industrial modern might of the north defeated slavery. None of this is true. If capital needs three things to exist– land, the means of production, and labor– Black people represent all three legs of capitalism’s shaky stool: labor, means of production, and land. Like women, generally, Black people are among the SUPER EXPLOITED– continually relegated to the role of reserve army of labor– paid less, first fired, last hired, most policed, and most imprisoned. It is on Black people’s bodies that capitalism plays out its greatest brutalities. 

In the uprisings of 2020 and earlier, the demand from Black workers has been for relief from the grinding oppression, which plays out from cradle to grave. Good jobs, good home, and a right to exist in peace with respect and dignity. These are things which, if won, would benefit the whole of society. Instead what was delivered was symbolic actions by corporations, an extension of the bad policies of government, and exploitation of divisive and opportunistic politicians attempting to divide the working class. 

We believe that as New England’s original and sole population expressly brought over in chains to be a working class, that any action taken by PWD be informed and centered on building up and liberation of Black life. We believe that Black liberation requires an end of capitalism and the just and right restoration of stolen lives and labor, and therefore any racist organization will be met with an uncompromising and united working class. 

The slogans “we are a nation of immigrants”, “a melting pot”, and “hate is not us” we call bullshit. The struggles that immigrants face here and the open cruelties committed against them put lie to the platitudes of the liberal and the conservative alike. Workers fleeing economic hardship or repression at home come here only to face discrimination, isolation, and attack. Lies get told about them and repeated in a collaborationist media and used by reactionary politicians to score points and win votes based on fear. That these people are used by capitalists as a disposable and cheap source of labor, who because of their status cannot complain or are harassed into silence, is immoral. Nativist sentiment is as American as baseball bats and is an unnatural and unwanted part of society. 

We believe that all workers are in community because of their relationship to capitalism and therefore are our community, indivisible. We will not tolerate any nationalist, nativist expression and will actively combat it where it arises, whether its ICE or a thug militia. To guarantee that all workers are welcome, we believe that capitalism must be ended.

HONESTY ABOUT TRADE UNIONS 

There is no denying the positive impacts the union movement has had here, from better hours and minimum wages to overtime and safety, there is a lot to be said that is positive. There are also distinct negatives that usually don’t get addressed. It is time for an honest analysis. Rough and ready early trade unionists were workers who fought (and, uniquely in the US, violently) for recognition and “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, and often won! However, racist exclusion and internal prejudices prevented the labor movement from reaching all workers. Leadership dynasties from when unions were segregated still exist and present an ongoing hurdle to growth and working class solidarity. In addition, the party line of “unions built the middle class” by definition means there is a working class below them. This is unacceptable. 

There is a failure of union leadership to meet this moment when now workers are calling out for representation. The professionalization and bureaucracies that have grown inside unions alienate rank-and-file workers from their own organizations and set up a service system instead of a solidarity system. This transactional relationship serves capitalist interests and becomes a 

legitimate grievance between organized workers and their unions. 

With capitalism consolidating, and a state hostile to unions, we believe that the current labor movement is incapable of coping with capitalism’s endless growth. Also, trade unions set up a system which pits one set of workers against another set of workers in the same industry, making defeat in wages and conditions inevitable. Trade unions also help capitalists by making workers believe that workers and capitalists have something in common..We don’t. 

We believe that the working class, organized industrially by sector, can lead to revolution. That every worker deserves the best in life, and should fully own not only the fruit of their labor, but the means of production itself. 

                                                             MILS 

                                   (Mom I’d Like to Save The Environment) 

At the start of capitalism, there was always an issue of waste and ecological degradation. The forests of Europe were logged nearly to extinction in the rush to exploit wealth in Africa, Asia, Turtle Island, and Polynesia. Nature was always seen not as part of us, which it is, but as separate from us; it was seen as an endless source of raw material even though 500 years ago, Europe saw virtually all of its trees cut down for ship building. With the start of the industrial age, we saw rivers choking with filth, shorelines desecrated, animal life destroyed, and the natural world reduced to a bank to take from and dump into. We are at a point where capitalism has made it so there is no fresh drinkable surface water on the entire continent of Turtle Island, the air unbreathable leading to premature death, and rising temperatures making life harder and harder for the working class. The capitalists, however, can always pay for clean air, clean water, and unspoiled lands; it’s the working class that have to suffer. It’s capitalist gain and worker pain. 

There have been attempts to shift the blame for our spoiled ecology to us, saying our behavior is to blame; it’s not. They are even trying to dump the guilt onto us. Green capitalism is a myth since the goal of capitalism is to accumulate wealth. If that accumulation is slowed by a corporation’s “green initiative”, you can guess what is going first, and it won’t be PROFIT. 

We believe that the land is the shared inheritance of workers who have a far greater stake in preserving, nurturing, and expanding the beauty of our world. We assert that it is every worker’s right to clean air and clean water, and that those companies that have spoiled this gift be brought low and made to pay for their damage. There can be no compromise in defense of our Earth! 

SELLING YOU THE NUTSHELL 

(a summary of capitalism) 

Lots of stuff has been left out mostly because either not enough current information or because we didn’t want to make a thousand page book. So here it is in a nutshell. 

● Capitalism is an economic system run purely for profit and in the interests of a small class, the capitalists, at the expense of the largest class, the working class. The whole of society is dominated by the needs of capitalism. 

● Our needs as workers cannot be met by capitalism. 

● Our worker-to-worker relationships are defined and dominated by the values and ideas of capitalism. 

● Capitalism is not a “natural system” governed by “natural laws” as some have suggested. It is a simple economic system run by human beings who compete ruthlessly with each other, can learn from its mistakes, and can sometimes plan ahead. 

● It is not a given that capitalism will collapse from its own weight; it will need a push. 

● What replaces capitalism is up to us. We believe that when Marx wrote, “From each according to their ability, and each according to their need” is as good a place as any to start. 

● Capitalism does not and won’t take into account human need or suffering or the limits of our Earth. 

● Capitalism doesn’t have a dogma or creed- unlike religion it can adapt. In a nutshell, it reduces all individuals and relationships into financial relationships with each other. 

● Everything: sex, rebellion, health, freedom, freetime has a price under capitalism. Everything can be bought and sold. 

PROVIDENCE WORKERS  DEFENSE 

PWD is not a party, but does seek to gain and ensure working class power, and be an organized defense in the class war. We welcome all workers to participate to the best of their abilities and the scope of their needs. But if you are a person who believes that struggle and defense is unnecessary, or that we live in a “classless” society, then this isn’t for you. We live in a society with sharp and widening class division. Any illusions about the need for militancy or attachment to horse race politics should be gone by now. Simply, we live in a society defined by class, where capitalism, the state, and the ruling class dominate us. So let’s define some terms.

CAPITALISM: Capitalism is an economic system run purely for profit in the interests of a tiny class – THE CAPITALISTS – at the expense of the largest class – THE WORKING CLASS. The entire scope of our society is geared to fill the ever growing needs of capitalism. It’s the mechanism by which we sell our work in exchange for money to buy goods and services we need, which, as the WORKING CLASS, we also produced in the first place! But we only get a small part of the wealth that our work produces; the rest goes to the capitalist as profit. This is foundational to capitalism; for it to work, the many have to produce wealth for the few. In the US, there is no such thing as a “free market”; all it means is that the bosses are “free” to exploit us. Capitalism has nothing whatsoever to offer us except WAR, INSECURITY, RECESSION, and UNEMPLOYMENT. It is not true that capitalism will simply fall apart because of its own failures; it could limp along for centuries, dragging us through one crisis to the next. For that reason, CAPITALISM MUST END. 

THE STATE: Even though CAPITALISM is the dominant order in terms of production, there are things it cannot do. Generally, it cannot provide the “social” organization of society; this gap is filled by the STATE. The STATE is the way a small group can control and dominate us in the interests of the ruling power in society – the CAPITALISTS. To give a sense of scale in the US, the bottom 50% of society controls just 2% of the wealth. 

The STATE is a set of institutions and groups that govern. These are the president, congress, churches, civil service, the police, courts, and schools. The goal of the government is to keep class conflict from boiling over and manage competition between capitalists, making sure of the smooth running of society. This is done by enforcing the laws of PRIVATE PROPERTY and the rights of the capitalist to buy and sell it. 

The STATE existed long before capitalism, it’s always been a form of control, and always acts in the interest of whatever ruling class is in power and whatever economic system is in fashion at the time. In the US we are given a “choice” every few years of whatever party we’d like to govern us. This “choice” like so many other “choices” it’s a false one, it’s a grift to fool us into thinking we can change things with our vote alone, it also allows us to focus our energies on figureheads and personalities to blame for our problems. 

The reality is the power of the STATE is with the CAPITALISTS alone, they pull the strings on their puppets. With power that concentrated, there is always a real risk of a small group of fascists seizing power.  

So because CAPITALISM represents exploitation and the STATE represents domination, it makes sense that the society they have made splits people into different groups or classes based on their relationship to the state.

THE RULING CLASS: The top 5% (or so) of the population. These are big corporations and those C-Suite occupants, large landowners, judges, chiefs of police, generals, and admirals.

There are two things that give you a place in the RULING CLASS, WEALTH and POWER, but they don’t directly govern. That is left to the STATE’S politicians and officials. The RULING CLASS doesn’t just sit around lounging with cigars and caviar scheming about how to oppress us, they don’t need to most of the time. So how do they rule? By the evergreen trick of divide and conquer, pitting white against Black, men against women, straight against gay, democrat against republican, worker against worker. This breaks down feelings of working class solidarity, working class identity, and working class unity, and without those things revolution is just a dream. 

THE MIDDLE CLASS: In the US, this is about 20% of the population. This is the professional and managerial group like lawyers, doctors, journalists, professors, military officers, priests, small business owners, small landlords, teachers, and NGO directors. Direct contact between the RULING CLASS and the WORKING CLASS is extremely unlikely. Almost all inter-class contact happens between the MIDDLE CLASS and the WORKING CLASS. The MIDDLE CLASS is layered with its own intra-class status system, all performing different and specialized tasks and jobs necessary for CAPITALIST society to work. Simply, the MIDDLE CLASS manages us in the interests of the RULING CLASS. 

The most obvious role of the MIDDLE CLASS is managing the economy: business management, factory management, accountants, and lawyers. These are the go to people and the highest earners of the MIDDLE CLASS because without them, capitalism would fall apart. 

CAPITALISM is by its nature ruthless and brutal and rife with inequality. If CAPITALISM was left to its own devices it would end in barbarism on an unlivable planet or in class revolution. Neither can be allowed because both choices are bad news for the RULING CLASS, so this is prevented by putting on a human face, the “caring side of capitalism”. A big section of the MIDDLE CLASS do this job. They clean up the victims and casualties of the class system, and provide a shield from class anger, sometimes redirecting it into minor tinkering and “reforms” around the edges of the system. They also do work that we need, but at a price- they end up with control over vast sections of our lives as workers. 

A less obvious role of the MIDDLE CLASS is to make intellectual and cultural content which serves the interests of the RULING CLASS and becomes part of our everyday thoughts. We’ve seen the endless repetition of some ideas, stereotypes, and myths to suppress and stifle our CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS and turn us into obedient and “model citizens”. These can be truly ugly and crude ideas like, “immigrants are lazy” and “trans people are deviants”, or well thought out like, “we live in a classless society” or “if you work hard, you too can be a billionaire”. The examples of this group are media companies, advertising, education, and religion. 

CAPITALISM needs raw materials to extract, and media and ideas are also that raw material. It also has to adapt to survive. MIDDLE CLASS intellectuals, researchers, think tanks, and NGOs provide the data to make this possible. This is true from universities to “green’ entrepreneurs.

There is almost always internal conflict and contradictions in the MIDDLE CLASS. When the CLASS WAR gets more heated, they will split ranks; they will have to take sides. The closer they are to the top the more likely they are to side with the top because they have the most to lose; the closer they are to the bottom they have the least to gain from loyalty to the RULING CLASS. We as the WORKING CLASS would have to set the terms, and admission to our ranks can only be as equals, and not in their usual MIDDLE CLASS role as leaders. 

THE WORKING CLASS (us): The easiest way to say this is the working class is everyone else. Not a joke! If you are not the RULING CLASS, or the MIDDLE CLASS and live by your work or your wits, and not by ownership of property that generates wealth, you are WORKING CLASS. WELCOME! 

Part of WORKING CLASS IDENTITY is “social power”. The WORKING CLASS do not have power; we are told what to do. We are made by our relationship to CAPITALISM not by what we do, but by what is done to us. This doesn’t mean we are powerless, not at all. The STATE spends unimaginable money, time, and energy to keep us in our place. Because our labor is at the heart of day to day practical economic activity, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that literally everything depends on whether we “play the game” or not. 

Class, as a subject, is argued about a lot. The RULING CLASS absolutely need to confuse the issue in order to survive. If a large enough group of us workers were to develop a clear idea on the workings of class society, social control would be impossible, and the RULING CLASS would be knocked down. 

As CAPITALISM matured and class society became part of our lives, the RULING CLASS needed to stifle class consciousness and get regular workers to identify with capitalism. A ton of stories and myths developed around “we are all middle class now”- these are unfortunately peddled by trade unions, and are cruel jokes when matched up against real life. There is the endless yapping in “think pieces”, social media, legacy newspapers, advertisers, and by politicians who want to pretend there are no class distinctions, and bullshit their way to say “we are all equal”. It’s one law for them, another for us. 

The pushing of the idea of the “consumer society” means nothing when even personal wealth as a worker does not mean increased social power. The minute you lose your job, have a sick child, or miss a payment, back to bottom you go. 

Ultimately the end of class society can only come about through working class organization and revolution. The WORKING CLASS is the only social group capable of such a massive transformation, because we are the overwhelming majority, we have a real stake, and we have the motivation and the actual ability to pull it off. 

CLASS STRUGGLE: We can see that ultimately capitalism simply can’t work; we don’t have enough planets to keep plundering, we are too poor, too tired, and too sick for things not to change. That gives us options.

1. Do nothing, because you believe you may someday be a member of the RULING CLASS, or are a member of that club. Or are MIDDLE CLASS and believe that you have too much to lose. 

2. Be cynical and believe that this is the way it has always been and the way it will always be. Bury your head in the sand. 

3. Or REVOLT! Know in your heart that things must change and that we have to agitate and organize to do it. 

There are choices in how we show we want the system to change. Maybe it’s voting. Great! Sports are fun! Just always recognize that ultimately you are voting to either expand or shrink the cage, not eliminate the cage. You could choose to drop out completely, that removes chances of mutual aid and community support, as well as the emotional and community bonds that are so necessary for survival. Or direct WORKING CLASS action against the tools that oppress us and keep us insecure, cold, and hungry. With that, PFD asks you to take part. 

PFD sees our community here in Providence as vitally important. We can’t be liberated without massive popular support. This means we are not utopian, nor do we promise a heaven on Earth. PFD recognizes the anti-social problems of sexism, racism, anti-blackism, transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia, and interpersonal crime. We just believe that these are problems best solved by us and not by an “expert” who will then use it to point to the pathologies of workers. We won’t expect someone to do it for us; we will do it ourselves. 

PFD will make no revolutionary demands without the full input and popular support of our community. PFD seeks WORKING CLASS unity and action. We don’t have all the answers because the answer is you. 

 Can It Change

Capitalism is inherently unstable. Capitalism needs not only a working class, and a super-exploited subset of the working class, it needs ups and downs re-valuing things to keep generating profit. We’ve lived through many, We will live through more, if we choose. So here, let’s take a look at some individual problems of capitalism. No system can fall on its own; for a bad thing to go away, it must be pushed away. 

Capitalism’s Problems.

(hint: they make it our problem)

PROFIT: Right now, we are watching a very small group of capitalists competing more and more aggressively with each other to gain an increasingly limited pool of markets. Because of this, the pool to draw profits from is also shrinking. The thing that is crazy about capital, is that it is completely useless unless it is used to create more profit that becomes more capital, and so on.  In physics, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. The capitalist has to put the capital to work forever? Before you know it, the capitalist starts to run out of ways to make a profit, and then enters into a crisis. Marx called this the CRISIS OF OVERPRODUCTION. This is what makes capitalism so unstable. The endless search to extract profit leads to trying to make more and more everyday things into places to get profit.

ECOLOGY: Our living world is being actively destroyed. Every, and we mean every, attempt to limit this destruction has been fought by capitalists. When a law gets passed to fix even small things, the capitalists and their politician mouthpieces fight tooth and nail to circumvent it, or shift the problem somewhere else further away. There are lakes and ponds where even touching the water will virtually guarantee cadmium poisoning, yet the capitalists that did the poisoning are never held accountable or imprisoned. When you put a price on everything, even the Amazon rainforest has a replacement value. The vital things we need are clean air and clean water. Our natural rights are secondary to the lust for profit. A tree has no value until it is cut down.

RESTRUCTURING: In the 1980s, there was a rush to restructure in the US, by moving factories overseas and privatising public services like school lunch services. There are a couple of reasons for this: 1) Breaking unions, which peaked at 35% of the workforce in the 1970s, which was also the period of lowest wealth inequality. 2) Extract public money as a new source of capital. 

This disruption destroyed communities, made once good jobs into low paying jobs, and destabilized future union organization. The privatization (which was developed by the NAZI party- no kidding) made the services that were once part of the common good into services for profit; common good was not a good line item on a quarterly report. The add-on effect, also, was scouring the Earth to find a workforce that could be ruthlessly exploited, and an environment in which to dump waste.

CONSUMERISM: For at least 150 years, there has been advertising that pushes that “however you are is not quite enough, but buy this product and you will be complete”. In the last couple of decades, this push has become more and more aggressive, cruel, and crass. The working class has always also been a market for the products the working class produce, but this was not fast enough for capitalists. The extraction of raw material has become harder and harder, so getting their greedy hands into our pockets became a source of wealth extraction. The endless parade of “needed” products, or repurposing of industrial waste into consumer products to sell is how this is done. The capitalists have also gone so far as to directly extract our ideas, relationships, and art on their “social media” platforms. We are not only the labor which produces everything, we are the raw material, and we are the consumer. Marx wrote that, “the worker sinks to the level of commodity and is indeed the most wretched of commodities.” The problem is, when wages are kept low, and so many people are living in fear, the well quickly runs dry.

Revolutionary Class War

As we see it, the rapid destruction of the environment, the forcing us to be both product and market, the endless boom and bust cycle, and the destruction of communities for profit, are not only unsustainable, but absolutely horrible. Capitalism’s ability to adapt and capitalists’ ability to exist without any regard for society is not something that can go on. There is a saying that, “the rain falls on everyone the same”, but this isn’t true if one group can buy an umbrella and the other can’t. The capitalists are wholly insulated from the system-wide failures; they can segregate themselves from even witnessing the impacts of their choices. Parasites don’t only live on animals, they also live in country clubs. With temperatures rising along with the seas, we are seeing more and more working class people on the move globally, and in greater desperation. The capitalist will not ever be satisfied until no section of the world is free from their greed. We will end up in the barbarism of MAD MAX and they will still demand more. The choice is: Barbarism or Working Class Revolution. It is life and death.

STATE

(Or how to manage murder without really trying)

Capitalism can do a lot (of damage), but it can’t do everything. There is an issue among some resistance and revolutionary groups to criticize policies or personalities that represent the state as a thing that directly affects working class lives: a hesitancy of criticism that can slow or hinder the efforts to build working class power. The state isn’t simply the government, but the sum total of institutions that uphold and reinforce the dominant power structure; here it is capitalism. The state as a power center itself is far older than capitalism, and will exist in one form or another should capitalism fall. Looking at the institutions and practices that make up the state is necessary for working class liberation.

The state is the set of institutions and groups that govern. It is with the state that a small group can dominate and control the working class,  and carry out the will of the dominant power, capitalism. The governing institutions are things like: police, prisons, courts, social services, congress, city councils, schools, IRS, and a bunch more. It sounds far-fetched but the role of the government is to control and smooth over CLASS CONFLICT and regulate competition between capitalists to ensure and lubricate society. There is even a worshipped thinker who spelled it out.

The capitalist economist Adam Smith summed up the role of the modern state very well with the following quote: 

“Law and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination(organization) of the rich to oppress the poor the poor and to preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise soon be destroyed by the attacks of the poor,(workers) who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others(capitalists) to an equality with themselves by open violence.”

Smith nails it. The main job of the state under capitalism is to enforce the law of PRIVATE PROPERTY and the right of the capitalist to buy and sell it no matter the effects it has on us, the working class, or the Earth. In order to make up a reason for us to accept the way things are, it needs more than old Adam Smith. It needs an underpinning to support the hierarchy. These are cultural institutions like churches and media. Capitalists will always need a way to justify themselves because they know as well as we do that their power is illegitimate. Let’s look at the institutions that make up the state.

What are the jobs of the state under capitalism?

• Military force: The military provides protection for capitalist interests at home and in other countries. Capitalists don’t have armies, states do, although we have seen a blurring of the line with corporate mercenaries. The military also is a source of profit particularly here in Rhode Island, in the form of taxes paid by the working class to build weapons for profit. The military includes the army, navy, as well as secret police (FBI CIA), and the police forces generally. All hold or want to hold the monopoly of violence that the state requires.
• Political Stability: Preventing revolutionary criticism of the dominant power, by force if needed, the monumental efforts against early unions and the Black Panther Party are examples of this. This energy, though, has to go somewhere and gets channeled into petition drives, marches with permission, and elections.
• Education: This is always controversial because education is commodified. It has three main roles: 1) Encourage acceptance of the dominant social system. 2) To smoothly integrate young people into expected roles. 3) Supply a sufficiently knowledgeable workforce.
• Social Services: Capitalism only cares about the working class so long as they are a source of wealth. The others not so much. Social services provide some relief to the victims of capitalist excesses.
• Infrastructure: Roads, bridges, and communications needed for society to work.
• Law and Order (dun dun!): The legal framework of courts, police, judges, and prisons to protect the capitalists from the working class and continue exploitation.

The State: How It Actually Works.

There are really two parts to the state: the ones who are elected, and the ones who are not. Things like the DMV, SNAP office, Unemployment office, and police are a group of unelected bureaucrats who wield enormous control over our lives: Life and death in some instances. Then there are the politicians, and they compete with each other to control the state machinery and its managers. The politicians represent specific camps of competing capitalists. Anyone can be a politician, you just have to agree to the terms and conditions of capitalism.

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right of me.

( Here we are stuck in the middle)

We hear the platitudes and myths of the people’s control in a democracy, that every vote counts, and all this stuff that we know isn’t true. When asked, workers don’t want homelessness, think minimum wages should be higher, and clean air and water. If democracy were a real reflection of the will of the people, we would have those things. One of the roles of this so-called democracy is to redirect the anger and legitimate desires of the working class, and send it to the ballot box instead of the streets. The idea is that the state is controlled by the politicians we elect, but really, we elect the politicians that the capitalists present to us. Democrat, Republican- capitalism wins either way. 

Capitalists and the State

The relationship between capitalists and the state is not as simple as it seems at first glance. It is a relationship of push and pull between differing ruling class interests, each jockeying for advantage over the other, as well as managing class conflict through strategic reforms. Chambers of Commerce, Association of Manufacturers, Banks, Wall St, and similar use media and lobbying to influence, and then closely monitor the responses. If the needs of the capitalist are ignored or their policies are identified as being harmful, that individual is singled out for a smear campaign, primary challenge, and withdrawal of donations. We saw this with the Bernie campaign, and the progressives in congress. In Rhode Island, which is a single party state, working voices are sidelined and silenced. Politicians of both parties wholly rely on donations from the ruling class to survive. Because of this we believe there is no path to liberation through the electoral system.

The Police

The whole saying should be said when talking about the police: ”one bad apple spoils the bunch”. We believe that it’s the whole orchard that needs to be razed. The shortest way to say this is that the police are the internal armed wing of the state, and the state is the administrative wing of capitalists. You can know them by their actions, who they attack, and with what brutality. Historically the police were created officially to suppress uprisings of enslaved Black workers and newly industrialized white workers. During strikes the pigs protect scabs and assault strikers. If there is protest against the state, swift, aggressive cruelty is deployed. Abuse, murder, torture, and impunity are the hallmarks of the police in the US. Right now there are 2 million in prisons, and another 10 million in jails, under house arrest or direct supervision, and 79 million formerly incarcerated or touched by the criminal justice system: about 1 in 4. This is a police state. The pigs have no moral base and will view everyone they come into contact with with suspicion and ready violence. They can use any tool they want to trick you into betrayal including lies, sex, and violence. Under no condition can the pigs be trusted. Many police come from working class backgrounds and are class traitors. As such, we recognize that the police are of no service to the working class, that the brutality they perpetuate on super-exploited working class people has no place in a liberated future, and that the working class must be abolitionist in total.

The Military 

Despite all the words of defending democracy and other platitudes, the military here is a source of wealth extraction, taking the working class’s tax dollars and putting it into the hands of blood drenched capitalists. The military force of the state is used by capitalists in competition with each other to defend or further their own narrow need for profit. Politicians and state managers will also use the military to further their own ambitions, like Obama’s endless drone attacks. Whipping up nationalist fervor, capitalists and politicians use the working class soldiers as mere tools; once used up, they are thrown away. The US has an imperial army with bases in nearly every country acting as a global police force of unmatched lethality. However, with all this might, it has been simple working class people who have stopped the most murderous war machine in history. By exploiting poverty and desperation, limiting alternative options, the military fills its ranks with working class children, the poorer the better. The US has never in its history known a period of peace, nor has it ever wanted peace. To prevent workers from killing workers, we believe that the military represents a theft of money, lives, and hope for working class people globally. Because we are in the heart of the empire, it is our working class duty to oppose every effort to further the aims of the military. We specifically call upon veterans to join and support the movement for liberation. The capitalists and state have never cared for the ones who served, but we do.

Regulation

Sometimes capitalists will go too far for the people to bear, and the state will step in to put the brakes on a specific activity of the capitalists. Like bank regulation, you just can’t open a bank, because there was a time when you could, and the bankers just stole the money. For food, we have pasteurized milk because capitalists literally allowed maggots and lead in the milk. We can think of a whole host of other things like workplace safety and child labor laws, etc. These reforms exist to maintain control of both competition between capitalists and of the working class. It gives the illusion of improvement. Environmental laws for example are minimally enforced, not treated as crime, and usually allowed to continue poisoning working class children in another part of the country or world. Things we fought for as a class, like safety, are skirted and ridiculed in popular culture. More than 9,000 workers are killed directly on the job every year, and 2.6 million injured at work every year. This does not include the 63,000 that die of pollution every year. This is Class War. Trade unions play a role in maintaining these unacceptable conditions, through close partnership, bad tax deals, and suppression of sector wide organizing; they smooth the process. For this we believe that the penalty for harms against workers be determined by the working class itself. Capitalism cannot be reformed.

Nationalism

Nationalism is the way the ruling class tricks the working class to identify with state and capitalist values. This can run through both the conservative and liberal political parties. Liberals have tremendous love for state power and military adventures, romanticize the ability of the state to reform some parts of itself, and have an undying belief in capitalism. The conservative has a tremendous love of state power, military adventures, and an undying belief in capitalism. To get the working class to identify with the state, racism, religion, and gender expression are used as tools to divide. Nationalism is the state religion of the US. We believe that the working classes of all countries have no use for this artificial division and call for its end.

Management Of The State

The state is a massive machine with its parts touching nearly every aspect of our lives. The closer you are to the margins of society, the more the state can intervene in everyday life. Intrusive and cold, the state in the form of a gun and badge can destroy lives instantaneously, or through wild and contradictory paperwork, deny housing or food. The ruling class, of course, pay to have the state serve them and to keep us away. Elected politicians are a small number consumed by fundraising, PR, and electioneering. They are dependent on the advice of non-elected advisors who work for the state, or information delivered by highly paid lobbyists of capitalist interests. Even if a politician were to challenge this un-elected group, they would find that they are deeply entrenched and virtually impossible to unseat. 

In the real world, politicians, capitalists, and upper levels of bureaucracy share the same values and overall objectives. Often they went to the same schools, go to the same social clubs, and have a deep web of personal connections. In Rhode Island, it’s the “who you know” mentality we are all so familiar with. Together, they make up the ruling class and keep up with each other through both official and unofficial ways. Sometimes they are in conflict with each other, but this is usually handled through handshakes and agreements. Sometimes the disputes make it into the news or courts. The way it is now, democracy is an illusion; it tricks us into thinking that things can change through a vote. It also delivers figureheads or a party to blame. The goal of this is to help us tie up our identities into the state and its values, and move our anger into safe and legal ways to absorb our time and energy.

Like supporting a sports team and its seasons, elections are the same. New season, new veteran players, new rookies to support or decry. Our vision is different. We believe that working class people like us have the tools necessary to manage our own lives by relating to each other directly. It’s been done before in Haiti, Rojava, Spain and more. Occasionally a politician will emerge who says the words of liberation, and acts out the performance of rebellion. This is a false consciousness that saps movement energy and restores the years of state training. We reject this. The statehouse and congress are not the endpoint of power in this society. If the ruling class were actually threatened by this it wouldn’t be legal. Capitalists, politicians, and their managers are incredibly protective of their lives and power; they do not value ours.

Media

Having a coherent ideology is of no use to the ruling class unless it can be sold at every opportunity. This is one of the jobs of popular culture. The other job of popular culture is to spur more and more consumption (consumerism) in order to create more and more markets to make profit. Popular culture serves the need for us to rest and be distracted from the hardness of life. Capitalists know that the working class need recuperation and time to rest, after all, who works just to survive. The capitalists know that time not at work is also a market and place to get profit.

Popular culture is fed to us through social media, tv, radio, magazines, books, and some academic studies, and they subtly (and sometimes not subtly) maintain existing prejudices and political ideas (propaganda) that feed fears and ignorance. This sets up isolation and distrust of each other. It simply divides and conquers by creating smaller and smaller groups of workers to be alienated from each other. 

Popular culture is a massive industry employing millions. It includes advertising execs, psychologists, coders,  anthropologists, and educators, particularly higher education. This cultural middle class researches and experiments with new ideas and messaging to sell the status quo to the working class and maintain social control. 

There is no denying the influence of the media. There is no denying how fast it can respond to, and suppress, popular outrage and authentic demands of the working class. For example, during the BLM uprisings that contained so much promise for the super-exploited Black working class, much energy got derailed into professionalization and token efforts, placing Black faces in a limited number of upper echelon places. The symbolic is to be taken as true victory; it is not. In the quest for profit extraction, the media’s role is to use the most advanced accounting to splinter, factionalize, and demoralize the working class. We watch as movements are formed and turned into performance for views, likes, and clicks in a pavlovian dance. Not only is it against working class interests, it is a deadly, despair-inducing process that must end.

Ideology In Our Daily Life

Ideology isn’t an everyday thing, or more specifically, thinking about ideology isn’t a daily thing, but our experiences as workers are affected by it, as much as our class position and the economic system itself are. When we are small, we are taught to believe and do specific things, filling certain roles and ways of behaving; this process is “socialization”. We learn about sexual roles and behavior in our families. Parents are aggressively pressured to conform to ideas of normal parenting. The family is the basic social unit under capitalism, and it becomes more and more fragile as the decisions of the ruling class drag us from crisis to crisis. The pressure to instill the “right” values in our children is omnipresent. The family has been under serious assault since Reagan, with the breakdown of the family cited as the reason for social disorder by politicians. The truth of it is that no family can cope in a healthy way under capitalism, time pressure, money pressure, insecurity, a degraded environment, lack of non-commercial space, and the removal of amenities.These are the real reasons families fall apart. In our schools, this process is even more aggressive. We are taught obedience to institutions, oaths of loyalty, and are conditioned to accept and repeat the state and ruling class’s version of the world. As adults we are influenced by the media and politicians to put our faith in and even worship the ruling class. This is a way that ideology is part of our daily lives.

The End Of Ideology And Culture

Ideology and popular culture are not all-powerful. Inside the class system are all the necessary conditions for class struggle. The ruling class, and its agents in the middle class, know this all too well. Ideology cannot guarantee 100% allegiance from even the most reactionary members of the working class. Its main function is to stop or slow the development of working class consciousness- to find discontent and eliminate it. For us it is absolutely necessary to promote, strengthen, and expand working class culture and promote working class liberation. Our culture has to challenge and be in diametric opposition to ruling class ideologies of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackism, and nationalism. We will push our revolutionary agenda rooted in the working class struggle for demands that the ruling class cannot even contemplate, let alone fulfil.

Punishment & Reward

It’s not like with all the new industries and burgeoning service sector, it is absolutely necessary for capitalists to have self-motivated workers. Brutal coercion won’t write code, make new bombs, or move workers to deny claims. It can’t make a carpenter nail framing or a grip lift a sandbag. For capitalism to work, it needs workers to agree with the values of capitalists and the state. They must truly believe that they are involved in the process; without this agreement, we will not be motivated to work. These ideas and values are called “bourgeois ideology”, or “middle class values”, or “protestant work ethic”.

Pl

Popular culture is fed to us through social media, tv, radio, magazines, books, some academic studies, and they subtly (and sometimes nt subtly) maintain existing prejudices and political ideas (propaganda) that feed fears and ignorance. This sets up isolation and distrust of each other. It simply divides and conquers by creating smaller and smaller groups of workers to be alienated from each other. 

Popular culture is a massive industry employing millions, it includes advertising execs, psychologists, coders,  anthropologists, and educators, particularly higher education. This cultural middle class researches and experiments with new ideas and messaging to sell the status quo to the working class and maintain social control. 

The Reward

For us in the US, it’s easier to deliver rewards, because of the position of the US globally as an imperial power. Some working class people can do really well materially in kind of a random way- where you were born, where you live, etc. Some workers can end up in positions where they make more than their managers. Grindset, hustle, and personal branding are all ways a worker can move into higher paying positions, but not ruling class positions. Achieving some gains like homeownership and secure retirement helps some workers identify with the ruling class. We see this argument used by capitalists to blur the line.

Punishment

Coercive threats are always present, like you’ll get fired if you organize a union, or the squeaky wheel gets replaced. Stupid jobs, low pay, dangerous jobs, shitty hours are too much for you, then no work and no pay and the inevitable sliding down the social ladder to end up at the bottom. For capitalists to keep workers showing up in the morning, and to prevent workers at the bottom from rebelling, the state and capitalists have to fill up our minds with the correct ideas, and prevent ideas of revolution from taking root. Showing examples of rebel workers, either killed like Fred Hampton, imprisoned like Ray Luc Levassier, or co-opted like Martin Luther King are ways the RULING CLASS controls the narrative. The story is revolutionary change will end badly for those who challenge power. 

 The Current Moment

(It was the little mustache fans all along)

The US has always had moments and aspects of fascism- the treatment of Black people and Indigenous people come to mind. Today, we are living through an open move to fascism. The ingredients were always there, they just needed to be put into a pot. Fascism is the insurance policy for capitalism. Fascism is well described as a rabid version of capitalism, with social services gutted and privatized, increased military and police presence and action. Fascism is vengeance against the most rebellious sections of the working class, and the reordering of the competition between capitalists. Fascism is military adventurism in a rush for seizing raw materials. Fascism is a capitalist revolution. One thing though is that it is often misinterpreted to mean it is a fully centralized state; it is not. Fascism functions by devolving power down, getting the most reactionary elements of society to act on behalf of the state. Fascism is the result of competing interests inside of the capitalist system. Those interests can be worker vs. capitalist, capitalist vs. state, or capitalist vs. capitalist. Capitalism is always at the center of fascism.

Fascist Actors 

(No we don’t mean James Woods explicitly)

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution”

–George Jackson Black, Panther Party for Self Defense

The US has always had a white supremacy problem, from before the time the US was even a country. The start of reactionary paramilitary groups goes way back and is instructive in what the reason is and their rough structure. We get told a story of religious freedom and fleeing persecution in the home country; it’s a myth. In the beginning of the settlement of New England, the colonies were established as what are essentially modern corporations, with shareholders and officers in the home country. Each chartered colony had production quotas and lands that were expected to be taken. These early capitalists needed profit and that means labor. A ready source of labor were the recently landless, prisoners, sex workers, enslaved people, and others considered to be undesirable in New england. 

When they got here, these enslaved workers, poor workers, and women realized that there wasn’t really the same apparatus of the state with its prisons and guards or army, and they fled together. Joining with indigenous people, they started to establish their own communities of equals- a very different path. The loss of the labor force and looming production quotas made the managers (governors) of these corporate franchises establish harsher and harsher punishments for rebel workers, and the Native Nations that often sheltered them. With no real state and no real ability to police these workers, they deputized the men into a force to re-capture and punish these workers. It didn’t really work, but they hit upon an idea that if the groups are split and different punishments and rewards are given, it would motivate the indentured servant to betray the enslaved or indigenous. This is the beginning of reactionary non-state, or paramilitary, groups here. So here is a non-exhaustive list of the descendants of these colonial reactionary mobs.

The KKK: This terrorist group is the oldest, largest, and most deeply entrenched of the fascistic groups. With more than 8 million members at its peak carrying out tens of thousands of attacks, from lynching to blowing TV transmitter towers, they are so deeply a part of the fabric of the US that even congress has not designated them a terrorist organization. Founded explicitly to prevent Black efforts at political and economic power, they brutally attack(ed) any multi-racial organization and union organization attempt. They also are nativist and espoused “America First” as a platform in the early 20th century, and continue all the way to today. They have always been a tool to maintain the dominant power of capital and large landowners. They historically have been used as “shock troops” of the ruling class. They are still very much in operation today and have members, former members, or sympathizers at every level of state and capitalist power.

Patriot Front: Newcomers on the stage are following the same path as the Klan- masked reactionary militants, confrontation, and assault. The PF are particularly adept at online recruiting; they have received the explicit endorsement of the president. They take their marching orders from the larger conservative movement going from anti-Black violence, to anti-gay violence, to anti-trans violence and anti-immigrant violence. They are explicitly violent and carry the America First ideology of the Klan. There are about 24 known members in New England,including 3 in Rhode Island. 

NSC-13 (Nationalist Social Club): Founded by Zachary Brackett and Chris Hood of New Hampshire, this explicitly NAZI group focuses on direct assault and action. NSC-13 is responsible for attacking RED INK Community Library and harassing organizers in Providence. They vandalize public art, do banner drops, and other propaganda. More secretive than Patriot Front, they have members in law enforcement and public schools. 

PINE: PINE People’s Initiative of New England is the public facing arm of NSC-13. They attend conservative political rallies and endorse candidates. They advocate for New England to secede from the US and establish an ethnostate. They seek to “represent the region’s white super majority and founding stock”. In addition to racism, they also have a particular hatred of women, though they have many women members. They believe that women should be in silent and “traditional” roles. PINE poses a particular danger because of the mainstreaming of their ideology and apparent welcome in bourgeois party politics.

ROCKY POINT ATHLETIC CLUB: Athletic Clubs are present in every New England state. Rocky Point Athletic Club (RPAC) is an action oriented group. They focus on physical and weapons training for fascist members. RPAC was founded by Austin Conti (West Warwick), Chase Gilroy (Warwick), and Stephen Farera (Portsmouth). RPAC, besides focusing on training, is an active recruiter, often hiding their virulent strain of fascism and luring unsuspecting men into the fascist movement.

RESIST MARXISM: This group is the acceptable face of fascism in RI and New England in general, though lately their focus has shifted to Boston. They are an umbrella organization made up of members of the above groups, as well as mainstream politicians, media personalities, teachers, and business people. They are actively recruiting, and years of anti-socialist, anti-communist propaganda allows them quick entry into radicalization. They are exceedingly dangerous because of the respectability they present.

OTHER FASCIST GROUPS IN THE AREA

• CORR Citizens Organized to Restore Rights
• Massachusetts Family Institute
• Revolt Through Tradition
• Super Happy Fun America
• Marx Watch
• 3%ers
• American Guard
• Soldiers of Odin
• Back The Blue
• American Identity Movement
• Oath keepers

This is a focus on the more street gang elements of fascism. There are of course many, many other fascist or fascist adjacent organizations and state actors in Rhode Island with significant overlap with these scum, like RI Right To Life, ICE, FOP, Police, Prison Guard Association, and more. The size of the state makes deep interconnection between these groups,  and serves to amplify and increase their power. Make no mistake that the goal is elimination of what they consider disruptive or challenging to power. Fascists will not tolerate dissent of any kind and will move the goalpost of the acceptable.

Given the power and the scope of fascist and white supremacy here, there is a demoralizing aspect to believing in alternatives to the grinding brutality. It is part of the capitalist’s playbook, divide and divide and subdivided, producing a population of super exploited workers who can be lifted up as set dressing in one moment, and cast off as pariah in the next. Our individual and community identities are an immense power to the working class, otherwise they would not have to work so hard to destroy it. Today the fascist street gangs are more present because they recognize the moment. They are there to sow fear and break apart working class unity. Their actions are always guided by those in power. We will stop them where they are, but that is not enough; fascist thugs have to be prevented from participation in society and will not be welcome on any level. That means that as a working class, we must act swiftly and without thought to liberal platitudes of “free speech” or the pathology of non-violence. It is an honorable service that the working class destroy all monsters by any means necessary.

Poverty of the Heart

Real hunger, grinding want, and long hours aren’t the only things that we as the working class have to deal with. We live under a system that places maintaining its power above all else. We know that the capitalists will kill to survive, but they also want to kill the idea of revolution. In the capitalist’s world view, being the bully is a virtue, viewing human beings as tools; sharing, solidarity, and empathy are weaknesses. Their idea is that the tacky snob, the racist, and the homophobe are good. This has a grinding effect on our lives and communities. We get absolutely destroyed by the constantly enforced ideas of fear, mistrust, ignorance, and hatred that capitalists bring with them. This oozes into every aspect of working class life, from safe, high-paying jobs, to those at the bottom. 

Partner violence, sexual assault, drug abuse, drunkenness, racism, bigotry, misogyny, robbing each other, and snitching to the pigs are often pastimes for working people. We cannot pretend or lie about the condition we are in as a working class. The ruling class wants nothing more than for us to hide behind our locked doors, eyes glued to our media, living isolated and lonely lives fueled by the outrage machine into deep mistrust of our fellow workers. Our bellies may have food for the day, but we are starving for connection, community, and solidarity. We are dying because we need revolution.

We protect our morals with excuses like “he’ll probably spend it on drugs”. It’s no surprise that some of us give up hope and self-respect and turn to the bottle, the needle, swindling pastors, or even fascism. This is poverty of the spirit. It’s different but in every way as deadly dangerous as being broke. Put both together and things look grim.

Right now, our lives are falsely divided between work (or searching for it) and community (or lack of it). The days of mill housing are gone and we travel further and further for jobs. Because of this, there is really no connection between the two. On the one hand, you have your community which supposedly can be affected by a vote, and then you have job which is under the dictatorship of the boss. It is possible to remove that artificial barrier to the landscape of liberation and build a working class future where we decide our whole lives for ourselves. We want revolutionary self-determination.

CLASS CLASS

In the beginning parts of this, whatever this is, we did a very brief overview of CLASS, but didn’t explore it deeper. Here hopefully this will be more specific, but there are conditions we have to accept first, otherwise it’s just a waste of time: 1) we have to accept that there is a class system that rules our lives. 2) That class is defined by our relationship to the mode of production, capitalism. 3) That class rules are strictly enforced. 4) That though the working class does not have power now, we will. There really isn’t time for petty arguments, or distractions of identity. 

Identity and Class

Where the working class is always the exploited class, there are of course shades and hierarchies installed by the ruling class to create internal classes inside the class hierarchy itself. As workers, our identity is literally the thing that determines the communities we exist in, and are a strength in and off themselves. Our identities are weaponized against us by the political parties where, on the one side, you get outright hatred, which is worse, or you get alienation of identity from class, which creates the conditions for the outright hatred. 

In our history here, class and race are intimately entwined. Enslaved Black people and Indigenous people were a population who were specifically used as capital, labor, and real estate. They are the only populations that are at once all aspects of the dominant mode of production. Further used as a reserve army of labor, as an underhoused and under employed underclass, which could be wielded as a weapon against the majority white population. In this, we see that as movements for Black Liberation or Indigenous Liberation grow from narrow identity politics and apply class politics to liberation, the state releases its greatest aggression. This is a SUPER EXPLOITATION process. The vast majority of women, woman-identified, queer, fluid, and other gender non-conforming population are working class, and they, too, have become super-exploited. Women, by their repression and limitation to unpaid recuperative labor, and by the lowest paying jobs in the “care economy”, and working class, LGBTQIA+ individuals, whose loud demands for equality are met with scorn and isolation, serve the ruling class as a wedge in working class communities, discourse, and life. There are of course deeper and better written pieces on this subject that fully deserve thorough exploration.

Whitism

Whiteness isn’t actually an identity, it’s an ideology. It is entrenched and misleading but ideology all the same. The ruling class believe in rigid and (un)natural hierarchy; they want to duplicate and enforce this ideology at every opportunity, and they have good reason to. Without it, their power would not last long. In the US, whitism has made white working class people do things that harm their own interests. Public swimming pools are an example of this. There were once free whites only public pools throughout the US. After desegregation, instead of including the Black population, they closed the pools, a loss for everyone. Working class liberation requires class consciousness in order to prevent the tendency of division and class self-harm. This has led to great mistrust of the role of white workers in liberation spaces. It is absolutely necessary that whitism be eradicated and replaced with our own working class culture and values, not the perverted and dangerous values of the ruling class.

The Ruling Class

Remembering that shit floats, it’s good to remember who is at the top. The ruling class are a tiny minority of the population. 

Size: about 1 million people.

Who: Ceos, presidents, members of cabinet, generals, big landowners, Upper level judges, Top cops. Particularly here there is a homegrown ruling class that has enormous influence over our daily lives like The Governor, CEO of CVS, Mayors, Landlords like Buff Chase, Presidents of Brown, RISD, PC, JW. Archbishop Henning, or Bob Bacon.

Job: To maintain their class’s dominance over society. The morals, rules, and laws of the ruling class do not apply to themselves, just to keeping the working class in its place, to compete with each other, and cause untold harm to the working class.

Origin: Old family money and legacy connections. Although some members of the ruling class are drawn from other classes, in general, it is a closed loop.

Favorite Tactic: Divide and Conquer. Their gods like J.P. Morgan summed up their tactics. “The working class? They’re no problem. I can buy one half to kill the other half.”

The Middle Class

This one is always a bone of contention because of propaganda from unions and media designed to confuse our relationship to production. The middle class is the management class of capitalism and the state, it is not defined by income. 

Size: About 76 million people.

Who: Professor, advertising execs, journalists, manufacturing managers, officers in the armed forces, congress persons, social workers, and priests.

Job: To manage the affairs of state and administer to the needs of capitalists. There is a specialized class who are specifically good at navigating systems and structures of the state. Provide intellectual cover for capitalist and state power, manufacture consent for military adventurism, and enact the capitalist tactic of divide and conquer.

Favorite Tactic: This group’s tactics are dictated and steered by the values of the ruling class. Inventing new distractions and hurdles for the working class are the main jobs. They are the intellectual force behind “culture wars”. They also act to divert power into harmless activities like electoralism.

The Working Class

By far the largest class. The Working Class are the literal producers of everything made, used, or provided as a service. They are, by definition, exploited by the ruling class and used by the middle class.

Size: About 263 million people.

Who: Everyone not in the middle or ruling class- it makes up farmers, clerks, mechanics, deckhands, servers, CNAs, and on and on.

Job: Be exploited and make everything, make it work, serve, teach, clean, film, and everything else.

Favorite Tactic: Historically, it has been the withdrawal of labor, like strikes, disruption of economic activity, armed rebellion, and civil disobedience. 

Difficult Question of Working Class Identity.

From the time we are born, we have our identity as workers questioned and attacked, until the time we die. Instead of our obvious and true identity, with the need for real mutual solidarity, we are offered a warped image of ourselves, simping for the rich, thoughtless patriotism, and the fanfare of the state. Our self confidence is stumped by education, media, and some religions. Stupid ideas and bigotry are encouraged at every moment.

The perpetrators of this garbage, the middle class, then act all shocked and complain about how bad working class behavior is, or about the “pathology” of poor workers. An example of this is young people are encouraged to be competitive and aggressive, join the military and fight for the empire, yet when they are home they are an “uncivilized mob”. 

The way the media sells it we have three permissible images, and we are encouraged to see ourselves in the following ways.

• Honest, loyal, good hearted, hard worker.
• Stupid and misguided (democrats love this one).
• And the rest of us: animals, predatory, scum. Who, when killed by pigs, we deserved it. Or live lives of desperation and are undeserving of help, and need to be taught our place.

This third category is fluid, but there are workers who are always in that category. Black workers are universally seen as animals. However, anyone who stands up will be in the third category. This is good company.

The ruling class determines what is ‘normal’. In this phony version of ‘normal’, what is offered is patriotism, but what it is is supplication to the ruling class. ‘Normal’ is having only concern for our small section of the world, discouraging looking at a bigger picture. ‘Normal’ is a false nostalgia for a country that never existed in the first place. Ignorance, bigotry, nativism are elevated to virtues. Even the way we talk is used to determine class.

Official Functions Of The Working Class

(jobs and more for everyone)

Exploitation: It’s our place as workers to make things by selling our labor for a wage and then buy back what we made in the first place. To act as producer and consumer, that is exploitation.

Domination: To be bossed around by cops and managers. To be targets of politicians hate campaigns. To be split by these same politicians and capitalists in ever smaller and ever more stupid groups.

Death: To be literal cannon fodder for the ambitions of politicians, or profit of the capitalists. To die in internal struggle fighting each other. Then they get to point to working class aggression; being oppressed does not automatically make you a nice person.

Basically

There are two main things that determine class: Wealth and Social power. If there is any doubt, figuring out social power is the key to determining class.

How You Slice It

Division is the rule, or the way the ruling class rule. Let’s look at why we don’t have power. The basic divisions of the working class come down to nationalism, racism (anti-blackism), sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. None of us were born for this bullshit. It’s a fake thing that we can overcome with effort. In fact, if we look at history when the working class were successful, it was because of unity, and when we failed it was always because of the above divisions. Anywhere we go, we see the same struggles, the same rip offs, the same brutality. It’s so obvious and achievable that solidarity and unity will win, that the ruling class will literally do anything to stop it.

The ruling class have used the same old tired bag of tricks since there was a ruling class, yet it seems we fall for it every generation, hmmmm. They use all the bigotries to get us to turn on each other. Education, religion, media, politics, and advertising are the disease vectors of these toxic ideas. As we get taught, we teach our kids. We don’t all get tricked by these bastards. Sometimes during the course of a strike or protest or wars we get to see what is really going on. This is what the ruling class hate. They know that ideas and solidarity are infectious. If unity weren’t so successful, they wouldn’t spend so much trying to fight it.

Serious About Racism

Throughout this, racism comes up again and again; there is a reason for that. Dividing us up by where we come from, how we got here, or the color of our skin has been truly effective at keeping the whole working class weak and on our knees. Racism doesn’t just try to make splits in the working class; its aim is to make white workers support, serve, and collaborate with the ruling class. Racism creates an illusion that there is some form of natural unity between white workers and the ruling class; it disguises the real nature of class conflict within capitalism.

In this way class consciousness is replaced by white identity (whitism). This is when the white working class can be hived off to believe they have more in common with the ruling class than their own class. Class issues get turned into race issues as the media, the state, and the ruling class scapegoat Black, Indigenous, and Immigrant sections of the working class and blame them for all social ills like unemployment, high taxes, and more. 

What the white working class gets out of racism is a sense of superiority and an honest hope of being treated better by the state and bosses. It’s a powerful illusion. There is no additional power for the white working class, but there is the feeling good about being able to shit on someone else, just like the bosses.

Sexism

This is the granddaddy of them all; a central feature of nearly every religion and state on earth. It is foundational in the way we think about class and hierarchies. So deeply entrenched, that real time and effort must be taken to address it seriously and with respect. Sexism is the pulling down and oppression of women all women because we are women. Sexism says women are automatically less than men. Every woman has experienced and will experience sexism. Even though sexism is far older than capitalism, it is of immense use to capitalists as both a source of profit and division. It’s gross, but true. Exploitation of women keeps the cost of reproducing new workers down by shifting the entire burden to women; it’s free child care and family maintenance. Capitalists also benefit directly from sexism by suppressing women’s wages, hours, and benefits. 

Bullshittery

Ok here it is, this is a tough one because some people will get angry, but here it goes. There are some in the movement who are middle class, which is great. Some sections of the middle class will read the writing on the wall and betray their class. WELCOME! But then there is a problem, being middle class come with a sense of entitlement, or knowledge, they come with social power, definitely more social power than a working class person. This power includes but is not limited to: Knowing how to ‘work the system’, a personal social network that gives access to money or work, and an attitude that can command or expect to be listened to. 

Poverty Is Fun! 

This attitude is really harmful and disgusting. This is just some noble savage shit and needs to go! This is so gross, I know you all know what this is, and is not worth writing about.

Subjective Class

(But I’m Middle Class)

Our job as revolutionaries is to get to the root of things, attempt to see and explain things as they really are. There is an attitude particularly among trade union members to believe they are not part of the working class. This is subjective class, or how we believe we fit in relation to production. This is the direct result of propaganda to further split the middle class. We saw this a lot in the Fight for 15 campaign where one set of workers said that another set of workers did not deserve $15, as though another set of workers getting a raise made you less than. In some ways, this is similar to racism and other bigotries, the idea that there needs to be someone beneath you. 

The End Of Class

(not yet but almost there)

• Class exists. Class exists because of capitalism. The edges of capitalism may be changed, like family leave or higher wages, but at the end of it, class exists.
• There are three classes that are part of the dominant mode of production: The ruling class, the middle class, and the working class.
• Class consciousness is vital to revolution.
• There is no secret society of capitalists or ruling class, they literally believe their own bullshit.
• The ruling class rule but don’t necessarily govern.
• In order for things to change, the class system must be abolished.

CLASS STRUGGLE

The End of the State

(really it’s the conclusion of this part)

The power of the state is in the hands of capitalists because they control it. The government exists to protect the dominant social order and class system. Because of this, the role of the state is to aggressively enforce property laws and protect the privileges that come with ownership. The freedoms that are endlessly repeated by the media and politicians is the freedom to buy and sell anything and everything, including your anger. If this scheme is threatened at any time by the working class, the state or its paramilitaries will not hesitate to kill. The state represents the dominant views and values of the ruling class, not individuals. 

Rope A Dope

( from struggle to revolution)

The conditions we face in this system are an all out war against the working class. This is intolerable and the war must be fought on our terms, not the ruling class’s.  If this society fails to produce what is needed for us to survive, for us to be able to face our children and build respect, we must fight back. In these times we really have no choice but to fight back against the vicious. We have been pushed to the brink; we have no choice. This is when we see “progressive” politicians emerge trying to divert our righteous anger into pointless personality election campaigns. And as long as we get misdirected into these energy sucking efforts, the ruling class will be safe.

What Is There To Win

The choices offered to us are stark, even through the media noises and hustle of our lives. We see poverty, insecurity, war, prisons, and insecurity; there is no rational way that this can go on. It can, though, unless we the working class intervene aggressively. So what do we want? Easy! Land, Bread, and Peace! The way we get there is by building the road together. We are not offering pat solutions or glib slogans. There is a reason behind this. Applying the theory and analysis we introduce here, centering on the most pressing needs affecting the most marginalized members of the working class, we organize around the slogan Land, Bread, Peace as intentional and revolutionary demands that touch every aspect of working class life, and demand that which the ruling class withhold from us.

Land

Good housing for all. Housing with enough space for a life of fulfillment and joy. A place of one’s own in community. Clean air and water, and soil to grow our own food, a bay where we can fish without fear of poisoning. Our ponds, rivers, and lakes polluted by centuries of capitalist greed, fully restored to health. We demand full unfettered access to the whole coastline and a restoration of full rights to land for the original inhabitants. 

Bread

There is a lot of work to be done to undo the damage of the capitalists. Our roads, bridges, schools, and buildings need repair. We demand full employment for all workers. We demand full autonomy for all workers. There is more than enough on this good Earth for all. We demand that it be accepted as a human right to all the things that sustain the working class. Food, medicine, education, and art. Turning our human rights into a commodity is a crime, and those who commit that crime (the capitalists) will be held to account.

Peace

We deserve and have a right to happiness, peace, and joy, secure in our persons and minds from the intrusions of the working class. We demand a literal end to the class war on the working class, and that end means total victory of the working class. We demand the full disarming of all police forces, and all class war prisoners be freed and returned to their families. We demand that those with trouble of the heart and mind be restored, through communities of care. We have full freedom of movement. The working class have suffered without peace for long and enough is enough. 

The Ruling Class Hate This One Little Trick

Here, our hyper militarized and fearful pigs will kill us without remorse, and particularly so for the super-exploited communities. So, state violence is not rare here. However if the capitalists and the state were to be lethal with say strikers or a large protest, things would be different. Capitalists know that they need a portion of the working class to fully adopt their twisted values, and that kind of mess would upset that. The capitalists know that this is a very delicate balance and if they go too far, lines will be drawn. 

To avoid this, they will use an escalating level of punishments for working class organizations that start to assert power. The history of the Black Panther Party and Earth First is a road map for what the capitalists will do. Economic pressure, isolation, and police aggression are used to tamp down revolt. For this to have a chance to work, the ruling class have to persuade the working class they have something in common with their rulers. Nationalism, religion, gender, racism, history, and even environmentalism are used against us as wedges. Central to tying all this together is respect for the legal power of the state.  So though the ruling class can and will use violence, they will always first use division, economic pressure, social pressure, and police to prevent a violent conflict with the working class.

The Bad Guys

From the 1980s on we have seen a more and more brutal practice of capitalism reaping greater and greater profit at the expense of our lives. The state facilitated and amplified the values of the capitalists more and more in a death spiral. We are reaching the limits of what can be ripped from the Earth, wages could not be kept lower, rents could not be higher, medical care could not be less accessible, etc. It was both parties of our duopoly that assisted in the accrual of wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Reagan with his assault on unions, Bush with needless wars, Clinton with vilifying the poor and further destroying unions, Bush 2 doing the same as Bush 1, Obama allowing banks to destroy the economy and reward big banks by further consolidating wealth, Trump doing all of the same with an added bonus of mismanaging a  pandemic. Biden forcing a union to end a strike with an order, assisting in a genocide and runaway inflation. 

In our state and city, we see all of the above, plus the underpaid, underhoused, undercared for, the high rates of maternal and infant mortality particularly for Black and Poor moms. An unaccountable police force despite good efforts at reform, a byzantine and arbitrary social service sector, and landlordism run amok. We are living through a new gilded age, and we believe that we should be organizing like in the gilded age. Talking one-on-one, building a working class movement rooted hard in our desires and dreams. Making no quarter for the ruling class or their bloody demands. We will not cede any power to politicians. We believe DIRECT ACTION gets the goods. They are ours for the taking. With all that, let’s talk tactics and strategy.

 The Good Guys! Other Revolutionary Groups

It would be the height of arrogance to think that all this is perfect and whole with no need of revision or edit. Honestly, this is one person’s contribution to working class politics and culture. There are of course many others, and since we cannot see the future, we won’t know if they are right, but they are absolutely pulling in the right direction. In the current state of things, it could be said that it is the time for a United Front of revolutionary groups, and as the great George Jackson said, “it’s time to settle our quarrels”.  We will not participate in any sectarian squabbles, nor will we take sides in intramural competition. What we know is this and support will be conditioned on this. The working class and working class organizations are the sole agents of revolution, and capitalism is incapable of reform. 

Tactics

The abandonment of civil disobedience coupled with the attachment to one movement’s tactic of creative non-violence is ahistorical and ineffective. It has allowed liberal voices to dominate and hinder rebellious organizations. Being civil without disobedience in a demonstration is a polite parade. Losing the creativity in non-violence is a pathological path to performative faux martyrdom. The moment of action, and the desired result, will inform the tactics. Capitalism values property far more than lives, since this is what capitalists love most, it should be directly under threat proportional to the threat the furthest margin of the working class experience everyday. Violence is denial of food, housing, and medicine, violence is the destruction of Earth, violence is charging children for eating in schools. Violence cannot be committed against property. We will not pass judgement on any organization or individual who acts in our self defense against the state or capital. There can be no compromise in the defense of the working class.

Being honest about the past victories of the working class from Haiti, Nat Turner, Mother Jones, Grace Lee Boggs (from S.Main St Providence), and so many more proves and lights the way to liberation. However, being truthful in the needs they met, the process they used, and the outcome are important. It is so important to not diminish our revolutionary forebears. But it is also important to take what works, and throw out what doesn’t. We are students of the working class revolution, but we are also the teachers. There is nothing wrong with treating politics, ideologies, strategies, and tactics as a buffet.

Lifestyle Choice

In the 70s and  80s after all the oil spills and stuff there was a real formation of a broad, popular ecological movement. Much of it was critical of the way big business dumped waste, there were crazy scandals like Ciba Geigy in Cranston, and Love Canal in upstate NY. These killed people, and there was a real call for reform and change. Business agreed to some demands but mostly they tried to shift the blame to the working class. Particularly working class parents whose disposable diapers were clogging the landfills. This led to the idea that the working class as “consumers” was responsible for the degradation of the Earth. This became commodified as green business or ethical consumption. Really this produced a judgment divide among workers and further drove a wedge. The reality is that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, the process exploits the working class on every level and harms the Earth. You are a worker regardless of where you choose to eat, or what clothes to wear. Lifestyle is selective and classist, at best it can lead to mild reform, at worst it is snobbish and mean.

Boycotts

Because of the age we live in and social media, we’ll see a lot of on-line campaigns with vague and opaque goals calling for short boycotts. I honestly don’t know who is organizing it or what the real goal is. There is a distinct contempt for the  working class in thinking that we can only sustain a short term “economic blackout”. History has taught us that boycotts can be really effective if they have a few things going for them. 

• Organized by the workers themselves. Like the Selma Bus Boycott, the UFW Grape Boycott, the ANC South Africa boycott, and the Palestinian Boycott of products of the occupying power named Israel.
• Demands that can be clearly stated. 
• They are combined with other actions by workers.
• Are not seen as an end to itself.

There are some who believe that these general vague calls for boycott are good entry points for workers to get greater involvement. But passive acts of short term boycotts really only serve to possibly alienate workers from the movement of working class liberation, by instead of being honest about participation and outcomes they just fade away. So we believe that targeted long term focused boycotts led by the working class itself, the current mode of social media performance boycotts are a waste of energy. We are better than that.

Mobilizations

This one is a tricky one. The inevitable comparisons get drawn to other countries with their mass and militant mobilizations like France. We are not France. Deep long term political education from radical workers parties make worker mobilization more aggressive. Other than the BLM protests and the WTO/A8 protests militancy is rare. The big coalitions that call for mass protest are often NGOs, bourgeois parties, and other “official” groups. There is precious little class analysis, and comrades who bring it up are often sidelined or singled out for arrest, even by the organizers. We see mass mobilization as good with the following conditions:

• Must be organized by the working class and our collective organizations.
• Not critical of militant tactics.
• Display true solidarity for the super-exploited.
• Have clear demands, and out comes. These could be outreach, building unity.
• Have a clear working class analysis.
• Move the revolution forward.

In the past couple of decades we have seen some of the largest mass mobilizations happen around the world, literally hundreds of millions taking to the streets. Against war, against austerity, against racism. Measurably war was not ended, social services did not become more generous, and the racism continues. The worship of private property, the cult of “order”, and the deference to authority have stopped the most effective economic disruptions from being complete. Workers who engage in militant tactics are derided, isolated, and imprisoned as political prisoners. We call for an end to this.

Pacifism

Dr. King, Father Berrigan and others practiced pacifism as part of their spiritual lives and this is so important to remember. Protest and pacifism were internal conversations they had, and we aren’t privileged to be part of. In the anti-militarism, and civil rights movement pacifism or more accurately creative non-violence were tactical choices. For the civil rights movement violence was a central part of their strategy, they planned on and needed the violence of the state and its non-state actors to react violently and highlight the difference between the activists and the Jim Crow. The state over the years have become wise to the strategy, in fact civil rights leaders themselves became politicians and informed the process. The appeal of non-violence is good and strong, but requires the worker to endure state violence. The successful divisions of the working class have made any appeal to conscience not happen, the media do not cover the actions as they did in the 50s,60s,70s. Arrests are considered violent by the activist, never considering the un-hinged violence of the police. Now the new fascist militias depend on non-violence to occupy space. They correctly see that the police will protect them and crack down on workers who stand up to them, and the media will portray it with the most both sides-ism they can muster. 

Non-violence is a tool and tactic, the workers themselves have to decide where and when to apply it. Also recognize that the system itself carries out social violence through its evictions, denial of medical care, prisons, and police.  That the physical property of capital is a legitimate target in the class war.

Sabotage

Sabotage is the intentional withdrawal of efficiency by the working class against the ruling class. YOU GO KING!

Strikes

This is by far the most effective action the working class can take. The larger and more durable the strike the greater the win. With this the more workers who can get involved in solidarity with strikers can increase the effectiveness of strikers. We believe that strikes should be militant and we will not judge the tactics that the striking workers develop. Of course sympathy strikes, and general strikes are illegal in the US (uniquely) but that doesn’t mean they can’t happen if we all want them to. At best though strikes with the current trade union structure at best reform the conditions of that particular shop, they do increase general worker militancy and skill in confronting capitalism.

Our Path

There is no magic here, no prophecy, no absolute program that if followed can’t fail. What exists are different approaches that treat revolution as a buffet- we’ll take what works and leave the rest. It’s a revolution with a Cranston accent, socialism holding a Del’s.  

At The Starting Line

Now is the time to think seriously about what liberation can look like. This is using imagination, our analysis, our hearts to build our future. We have spent the last bunch of pages on a lot of really bad stuff, capitalism, how it is just a completely cruel system, the state how it is a vicious attack dog in service to the ruling class. We looked at the unnatural and demoralizing features of the class system. The nazi scum, bad tactics. Now is the time to really bring it together with a vision of a world where the dominant system is led by the working class. Let’s take a look at what needs to go and why it’s good for it to go, and look at what a working class world can bring in! Yes this part is fun, but also totally incomplete because we need your vision to fill it out. Hopefully this part can inspire your imagination and desire to lose its chains.

Fake Divisions

What we leave behind. Racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia and the other isms that the ruling class use to divide us. During our liberation this parade of grotesques will be rooted out and hunted down. As workers we can see the new world and work to smash the fake divisions without mercy! This is America after all and we know that these things are deeply part of our working class culture. But as we wrote before these divisions are not real and forced on us by the ruling class, the state and its servants. Workers know best how to change their minds, we are practical and contain real wisdom in our ranks. We will draw on these strengths. There is a place for every worker in revolution no matter the identity we carry with us, that is our super power. We will keep repeating this until it takes!

What we get. Forced gender roles, racist stereotypes go. No more phony “role models” , no macho posing. No more assigning an individual with the burdens imposed by their identity. No more pecking order!

In Our Living Rooms

What we leave behind. Right now there is a wall between our homelife, community, and our work life. GONE!

We intend to take control of our workplaces and communities. As the working class we  know best how to do all the things necessary to maintain the things we need to survive. We recognize that in a revolutionary time new ways of organizing and putting things in order will emerge. We embrace this.

What we get. We won’t need to work for a capitalist to survive, we will work for each other in cooperation. The things we need, food, medicine, art will be for all to share. No more grinding hours taking us away from our families. We will recognize that the cleaner and plumber do as much(maybe) more for our health than a doctor. So equality!

Borders

What we leave behind. The phony lines on maps are just there to divide workers. This includes the borders that make empty houses unavailable, and lands and water we don’t get to share.  BYE FELICIA!

What we get. We believe that freedom of movement is our right as workers. Homes for those who need it, land back to the original peoples.

Class

What we leave behind. No more class system. Instead of the ruling class and middle class dominating our lives we will organize ourselves. No more politicians trying to divide us with fear or greed. No more snobs closing off schools to only the rich.

What we get. We see a society where everyone is fully valued in the whole of humanity. Where everyone shares in doing what is needed. We believe that a council and federal structure (more on this later). Where each worker has a full voice and vote in the management of society. We see this happen all the time in small ways when workers come together to solve problems. We are good at it.

Money

What we leave behind. “Money is the root of all evil” of course we dont believe that, but we do believe that after the revolution we can thrive without it. Through strikes, workers taking over their workplaces distribution will be easier and we can get all that we need .

Karl Marx identified the “cash nexus” which points out that all social and economic relations have a monetary foundation under this system. The worth of a human being is decided by how much they make, this leads to division in the working class. Money becomes the measure of the failure of the individual in society. It has to go!

What we get. An end to fees, taxes, rents, parking meter, mortgages, phone bills, electric bills, insurance premiums, and that is just the start. So much of our effort is spent performing bullshit tasks for the ruling class and the state, we want work to be meaningful and in service and benefit for all.

Pie In The Sky

“But but human nature”, “but you use a phone” Blah blah blah. We’ve all heard it before. At work and at home we share, show regular generosity. The idea that human beings are just this ruthless animal is projection by the ruling class. They act like heartless predators and they resent anyone who is not. Providence Worker Defense rejects this outright. We are workers who reject the “law of the jungle” that the bosses love so much. We say fuck the the grind-set, the hustle, the dog eat dog. We are better than that. We make the world, we can take the world.

It’s not just a dream, there are moments throughout history of workers and farmers forcing a new world to be born. We grow on this, we thrive on this. Hope our state’s motto is today a cruel irony, we will make it real. It’s not a dream though. Through building up our fellow workers to working class consciousness to liberation is laying the foundation for a new world. This will take work, discipline, set backs, and picking up. Most importantly it will take us deeply into our imagination and desire to imagine the world we want and make it happen. Yes we listed what goes, what we get, those are ideas and we left them short because it’s your vision needed to fill it out. LET’S GOOOO!

Are We Good Enough For You

Nope, but we want to be. Providence Worker Defense believes we have to earn your participation every day. We want you to participate to the level you can and stretch yourself and test yourself. We don’t have a formal leadership structure, like a pirate ship, leaders emerge, and leaders grow together. We celebrate our members taking seriously the ideas of everyone at our in person weekly meetings. It’s your words and your vision that will make the revolution happen. So we will try with all our heart to be good enough for you. It’s a quiet oath that old timers make to newcomers, that we will build each other up brick by brick till we all are the fearless revolutionaries that we are in our dreams. 

BUT HOW DO WE DO IT?

It’s a good question and one that really can’t be answered in an honest way because we can’t see the future. What we can do by building a working class movement like PWD we can start to make structures and organization to help steer it. Working people make everything we see around us, organized with our numbers and potential power all that we have to do is fold our arms and a new world gets born. Of course it’s not that easy, and earlier in this document we have discussed some of the problems we face as well as the obstacles. What can we do? What can the future look like? Let’s start at the basics we already went over.

• The working class are not in power, but have the potential for the greatest power.
• The dominant system, capitalism only cares about capital not us.
• The state is the tool capitalists use to oppress us.
• Knowing ourselves and taking action based on our interests is central.
• We organize to take power.

COUNCILS

(Yes more meetings)

PWD believes a council model is the best way to ensure that the needs of working people are met. Easily understood, really it’s something we do as workers all the time, coming up with specific solutions at work often in spite of management. We get taught early on that democracy is best left to the experts as representatives, we believe that democracy is too precious to be left in the hands of people who look to feather their own nests. We also know that reams of academic papers and endless volumes on the subject of worker councils that go a long way to say a simple thing. Basically it is workplaces should be managed by the workers who work there, communities should be managed by those who live there, etc. That’s really it. Yes there is more to it but that is the bones. PWD believes that this is scalable and the most democratic and accessible process for a revolutionary Providence. So let’s look at the words we’ll be using.

• Workplace Council: A body of workers in a workplace making decisions about the operation of that workplace.
• Community Council: A body of workers who live in the same community, or share common interest or identity.
• School Council: A body of teachers and students making decisions about the operation and curricula of a school.
• Council Delegate: A worker from a council elected as delegate not representative to deliver communication and needs to a sector council or general council. A delegate can only act in a way expressly authorized by the council that elected them. A delegate is instantly recallable.
• Sector Council: A body made up of delegates from the various workplace councils.
• General Council: A body made up of delegates of all the councils of Providence.
• Council Chairs: A convening committee made up of single delegates from each council.

pretty simple

Imagination

Is it possible? Sure if we want it PWD makes no claim other than that the class system leads to misery and that the working class are the only ones who can liberate the working class. There is nothing here that is carved in granite, it is one proposal for our liberated future. It is easy to come up with roadblocks and allow our imaginations to catastrophize the possible, even look to examples of history on why this won’t work. Put that aside for a moment. We all work in one form or another, doing the things that make society run. From being a retiree available to babysit the grandkids so your kids can go to work. To working on a construction site and watching the work grind to halt when the GC shows up. Or a coffee shop where the owner never orders enough of the right cup.  The fact is it is a greater leap of imagination to think that it is the ruling class, and their politician friends who are needed. The plain truth is things run better when the boss isn’t there. So there you go. When you run out of something at work, you tell the boss, who calls a boss to tell a worker to fill the order, four steps when two would be fine. 

You pay your landlord, not talking about the carpenter with the triple decker, but the portfolio landlords with multiple properties. You pay that guy or company for them to relax and not do anything. You and the other people who live there know what improvements need to happen, know best the quirks of the place, who better to decide how the money is spent. If you have that little triple decker and rent out the space and have to find time to fix in between shifts, wouldn’t it be easier if your tenant had the same stake, and you didn’t have to chase down the rent or hand over your rent(mortgage) to the bank? Imagine that the neighborhood in council with each other makes decisions together about parks, infrastructure etc. It’s an opportunity for connection in this lonely and disconnected world.

So it’s a guess as to why it makes more sense the way things are with all the little takings, loss of dignity, fees, and instability, then a liberated way. Again there is no magic prescription, definitely no utopia, we are Rhode Islanders after all, we love to argue. But it is precisely that attitude that makes this possible. It is socialism with a cranston accent.

MEETINGS

(a model not a rule)

Some notes on meetings and nothing on process. We give up time to participate, our workdays are long and often dull or terrifying so being very respectful of each other’s time and presence is extremely important. We are competing with the tiny rage rectangle phones, and other distractions, so meetings should serve a social as well as political function. Maintaining high energy and delivering on questions is very important. The time setting the agenda for the meeting should be open to all workers to attend and contribute, this can build skill as well as tighten bonds. 

PWD MEETING AGENDA

1. Before introductions, a group activity like a clap to sync up?  A chant to get going. Volunteer to take the  stack.
2. Statement of values made by a member with the people responding enthusiastically. (break down self consciousness) also encouragement from more familiar members.
3. Introductions with a class  statement, with the last person picking the next introduction not in a line. 
4. Bad news, International news, national news, local news no politician names, always returning to class impacts
5. Good news, actions taken, not just a recitation of the action but a quick analysis of class dynamics at play. 1)Material Conditions, 2) Necessary Conditions, 3)Desired Outcome, 4) Resulting Conditions.
6. Actions to take. With  the above analysis. And values analysis.  
7. Closing question and answer. Like what does liberation look like to me?
8. General Meeting Closing “I am a revolutionary!”
9. Working Group Break out. (select facilitators).

APPENDIX

87 out of 125 Years Have Been In Financial Crisis

Capitalism is a story of periods of relative okayness, and absolute nightmare. Each crisis is defined more than the periods of non acute crisis. The reasons for the crisis are nearly rational but all of them predictable. The Tulip Bubble of the 1630s which is most like the housing crisis of 2008 a futures market, betting on futures, betting against futures, betting against a material item, in the Tulip Panic, in the Housing Crisis 2008 it was betting against loans,and more but here’s a list of the crisis of the  20th and 21st century. These crises are created by greed and shortsightedness but mostly greed. Oil, housing are simply things to move around to make more money, every choice they make destroys lives in the best of times, in the bad times that destruction is exponential on an already global scale of horror.

1. 1901 The Railroad Recession started with price fixing by the Great Northern Rail Company, a monopsony.
2. 1907 Bank Failure banks were making investments with the people’s money, which was once illegal, now legal.
3. 1910-1911 Panic
4. 1914 Crisis
5. WW1 Recession
6. Depression of 1920-1921
7. 1929 Wall St Crash
8. 1929-1939 Great Depression
9. 1937-38 Recession
10. 1949 Recession
11. 1953 Recession
12. 1958 Recession
13. 1960-61 Recession
14. 1969-70 Recession
15. 1970-73 Oil crisis
16. 1973-75 Recession
17. 1973-75 Banking Crisis
18. 1979 Oil Crisis
19. 1980 Recession
20. 1982 Bank Crisis
21. 1983 Bank Stock Crisis
22. 1987 Black Monday
23. 1986-1995 Savings and Loan Crisis
24. 1991 Recession
25. 1992 Black Wednesday
26. 2000 Recession dot Com Bubble
27. 2001 9/11 Recession
28. 2000-11 Great Recession
29. 2003-09 Oil Bubble
30. 2007-10 Subprime Mortgage Crisis
31. 2003-11 Housing Bubble
32. 2008-10 Automotive Industry Crisis
33. 2011 Black Monday
34. 2020 Stock Market Crash
35. 2020 ongoing Covid Recession

Hmmm I’m Seeing A Pattern Here

It’s every 4 years with a lot of overlap. This list is only the US, if we globalize it there are no gaps, it is a crisis all the time because it happens globally. Each one of the above years is the very real representation of destroyed lives, death, hunger, homelessness, misery. They don’t care, capitalists have one interest and that is capital. This behavior is logical if you are a capitalist, the crisis doesn’t matter who is harmed, how theEarth is harmed. Looking at the last big one (they are all big for us) the 2007-10 Crash. Now each one deserves a full explanation and thought focusing on one can help put it all together. First we have to remember a couple of things, capitalists care about capital alone, the working class are a source of labor making and servicing everything, the working class is also a source of money(capital) as consumers and “homeowners”. Also remember they are completely irrational, thinking of all that tulip mess.Having a home is central to living, a place of your own, a place for family and most importantly a place where the parasite capitalists can squeeze you with all their might, until you get declared indigent so you can afford a nursing home. Capitalism is capitalists competing with each other to steal your money and life, whichever gets to your pocketbook first wins and the other leeches copycatting heaping on to us. So starting from the beginning.

It’s A Trap!

The center of homeownership is the mortgage, the idea is that land and housing are extremely expensive and will take time to pay off. There is a dispute about the etymology of the word itself, it literally means death pledge. The basic idea is that you make a payment on the house to the bank, the bank buys the house from the seller, usually another bank. They charge interest from you over time, so its rent plus. At the end of it all you might be able to pay off the house, maybe or not depending on circumstances. When the mortgage bank has your house which they do, they may use it as an asset to secure or guarantee other loans. It’s a great deal for the bank. They sell what you own to themselves, in the form of collateral. So for a bank when people take out loans those promises to pay are guarantees on their future or unrealized capital. The bank can then use this unrealized capital (your home and mortgage)  to secure further funding or make large purchases if a bunch of homes and mortgages are combined into a collateralized debt obligation(a lot of homes and mortgages, sometimes thousands).

The House Always Wins (and by house we mean bank)

So we have it that the bank which gave you the mortgage on your home holds both the actual property, you just live there, and your commitment to pay for the value of the home and interest. The bank has now taken this real property and future money and bundled it. They have choices to make. They could 1) use the bundled value to reduce cost to the homeowner. 2) They could take out loans to acquire more property, or capital. 3) Sell the debt and real property to someone else. It is the third choice that causes trouble, well the last two of the three cause trouble. Say the bank has one hundred homes and mortgages each valued at $100,000 each, the home’s value is $100,000 and mortgage value is also $100,000 plus interest, this means each individual home is worth $200,000 in total. That is $20,000,000 in total capital assets for the bank. If they sell it the bank will gain more than $20,000,000 immediately, because it would be sold for a profit. Say the profit is $1,000,000 the bank will have made $21,000,000 on the sale of homes and mortgages. The buyer whose reason for buying may want to sell what they bought or hold on to it has to pass the cost of the purchase on to the home owners. The homeowners now have to pay a mortgage of $110,000 on the value of a $100,000 house, they are under water. Being underwater means that there is no way to access the value of their house and would have to sell at a loss. This happened to more than 9 million families. The higher the payment, which may initially be based on earnings from work, gets higher, harder to keep up.

PROTECT YER NECK

But it gets worse. Remember the 100 houses and mortgages sold are now worth $21,000,000. What if it was a bigger bundle? Banks, lenders and even the government got in on this in the name of spurring the economy after the recession following 9/11. Lawmakers worked hard to reduce regulation and allow banks to borrow beyond existing liabilities, cash on hand or on projection of collateralized debt obligations, and put a larger percentage of money in the stock market, which is just astrology for bros. As a casino Wall St sucks but it is a casino all the same, the more you put in the more you get out. So banks went on a lending spree forging millions of false mortgages, changing terms, delaying full ownership to the homeowner by selling “reverse mortgages”(a topic for another day). Now remember our original 100 homeowners who are now paying 10% more on a house that isnt worth as much? Now their homes and mortgages which have been bundled and sold once can get used as unrealized assets to purchase huge amounts of stocks, and the bundle of homes and mortgages can be sold again and again. Now because Wall St is a mood ring for sociopaths it will do things like drop on rainy days (for real look it up) do better on sunny days it is unreliable. It can have trends or move consistently sometimes but for the most part no. So our original 100 homes and mortgages are sold again this time for another $1,000,000 now the bundle’s value is $22,000,000 and the mortgage value is $120,000 but the home value remains the same $100,000. Lots and lots of  homeowners can’t bear it and start to default or delay repair or can’t get an equity loan on their mortgage.

When the defaults and repair delays happen there is a cascading effect. Abandonment and disrepair push down the value of real homes, so our $100,000 is now worth $90,000 putting remaining homeowners further under water with a $120,000 mortgage. With no repairs happening, carpenters and trades people of all kinds don’t get hired so can’t pay rents to landlords or afford their own homes. Here is the more fucked up thing. Capitalists being capitalists treat the working class like they treat the Earth, they will kill the goose with the  golden eggs. Our original hundred could afford the original price and the interest and taxes, and inflation (this is the simplest explanation, so those will have to for another day) but not the new price, but they’ll try. There is an additional capitalist parasite that shows up, well two actually but for now we’ll focus on one. Private Equity, these leeches are the worst of the worst, our old governor was one, they see all these cheap homes which were once worth more are now cheap. As Fred Flintstone said buy low sell high. They can split the mortgage debt and real homes into two separate “financial instruments” Obama called them innovative. These bastards now have 100 homes which were once worth $10,000,000 are now worth $9,000,000 which can be sold independently, and $11,000,000 in debt which can also be sold independently. The homeowner has no control over this.

Private equity firms are usually highly profitable and often traded as stock companies on Wall St. Now remember that banks can invest more in Wall St., and a capitalists only interest is in making more capital meaning the banks can’t help but to buy tons of private equity stock. Now mind you they no longer have homes or mortgages to use as unrealized assets anymore, but they do have cash, so they go on a buying spree. But there is a problem. I’m sure you can see it. As the mortgage bundle is sold over and over again and the value goes up the homeowners have to pay more and can’t afford more defaults, disrepair etc, plus unemployment is going up because all the trades people have no work. More vacant houses, the lower the value. Here is another trick and this one is particularly shady. The corporate tax rate in 2006 was 15% so a firm making $11,000,000 would pay $1,650,000 minus any losses, the value of the real houses lost $1,000,000 so they would have to pay $650,000 unless the value of the real homes fell further. A company with a low tax liability is more attractive on Wall St. so their stock will be valued higher, so more banks will buy stock. 

There of course was a limit to this, as there are all things. The instability of this system is a feature not a bug. The private equity firms realized where the money was and took the opportunity to buy up more houses and mortgages burying homeowners in full immiseration. They got to the point where the actual value of the home bundles was so low many firms got actual tax returns which is crazy. All the while communities across the country had their tax base eroded and unable to fund basic services making the homes in the area lose further value all the while the mortgages are being traded. Until they couldn’t. There was nothing left to take literally. The banks couldnt issue any more mortgage loans, because values dropped so low, and unemployment was getting so high. The equity firms were engaged in internal trading swapping mortgages and homes back and forth in between until they all tried to sell at the same time and the value of the mortgages bundles dropped to virtually nothing, what the homeowners pay did not change, and the value of the homes was at the bottom. Some heavily equity invested banks collapsed but got saved by the government.

Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program where the government bought all the toxic loans, mortgage bundles and returned them to Wall St as secured assets backed by the government. It cost almost $700,000,000,000. This stopped banks from inevitable collapse caused by their mismanagement. The term “too big to fail” was coined in reference to the banks and equity firms, and almost 9,000,000,000 ended up either underwater, in ridiculous debt or worse. As a result of this diseases of despair shot up nationally suicide, substance abuse, abandonment, child abuse all became the norm. We are still living with the after effects of these asshole parasites.

One thing was proven in all this mess. If you had a doubt about the motives of capitalism, or its reckless shortsightedness, or believed that politicians of either party cared about the pain of the working class in this period it would be cleared.

Last Thing Here Is The Wall Of Shame

• Wells Fargo
• Goldman Sachs
• Gina Raimondo
• George Bush
• Barack Obama
• Lehman Bros
• JP Morgan Chase
• Santander
• Dick Fuld
• Lloyd Blankfein
• Jamie Dimon
• Bank of America
• Ken Lewis
• Citigroup
• Vikram Pandit
• Merrill Lynch
• John Thain
• Stan O’Neal
• Bear Stearns
• Ian McArthy
• Beazer Homes
• Henry Paulson
• Ben Bernanke
• Timothy Geitner
• John Mack
• Kathleen Corbet
• Standard and Poor

Sources and Influence

(in no order)

• Engels and Marx- Communist Manifesto
• Marx -Kapital
• Kropotkin- Conquest of Bread
• IWW-Constitution and By-Laws
• Anton Pannekok- The Workers Way To Freedom
• Franz Fanon- Wretched of the Earth
•  adrienne maree brown- Emergent Strategies
• Ho Chi Minh – On Revolution 
• Immortal Technique- Revolutions Volumes 1 & 2
• Carlos Marighella – Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla
• Tom Vague- Televisionaries
• Rosa Luxemburg- Reform or Revolution

ESSAYS

BUILDERS AND FIGHTERS

The plate gets to the table, the nails go into the studs, the sheets get changed on grandma’s bed, babies get fed, floors get buffed, tomatoes get picked and sorted, windows cleaned, walls painted, lights go up on the soundstage. Workers make all of it, everything you see, you eat, where you live, what you wear, how you get heat. This is why I love being a worker, I love that in our hands is all the creative, motive, and beautiful force in the world. Even the palaces of the bosses are made by workers. I am hoping that you can feel love and revolutionary loyalty too. Celebrate and revel in our collective power. I want you to love that we are builders!

Waiting for the shelter to open, hoping the food bank has mac and cheese for the kids, standing at the intersection, maybe they’ll open a window today, getting your dose one day at a time, praying your tent is still there when you get back, hoping that you won’t get picked up today and your kids won’t come home to an empty house. This is us too. This is workers facing difficulty trying desperately to keep themselves alive and their families together. As us we need to find these workers and bring them home. With clear eyes we must welcome our family home. We are builders of families too.

We recreate the world everyday with our labor. We haul up the sunshine as builders. Today calls for something different from us as workers. The danger is real, the hunger and instability which was kept on the margins is closer than ever. Today we have to stop being builders and start being fighters. A real defense will need us to build things that we haven’t done in a long time but our grandparents, and great grandparents knew how and did. I will love us just as much when we become fighters!

LETTER TO A FRIEND

Dear Friend, 

First off let me thank you for taking the time to read this. I know focus can be hard in these trying times so taking a minute away from  the phone to read actual words on a printed page is no small thing. I’d like to introduce myself and the group I work with. My name is Mike and I’m proudly part of the Providence Worker Defense, we are a collective that is made up of union members, cooks, farmers, AV techs, carpenters, retirees, artists. Immigrants and others.We are just working class Rhode Islanders who wanted to face the current crisis head on with creativity, direct action and liberation. 

There is so much going on right now that hoping for more can seem so far away and impossible, that we are all stuck with this system and the best we can do is hope that the ruling class and politicians do the least harm. PWD believes that this isn’t good enough. Rights we thought were secure and safe are being swept away, our neighbors are being kidnapped to prison camps as close as Wyatt in Central Falls and as far away as El Salvador. We have watched in horror as bodily autonomy is stripped away and the politicians try to pass bills for genital inspection of children. Meanwhile rents soar, inflation is making our paychecks shrink, and our elders are thrown to the wolves. Really there is no reform strong enough to prevent this in time to save lives, or to fully prevent it from happening again.

With Providence Worker Defense we don’t believe reform will work, and history instructs us that. Throughout our history it was regular working class people who stood up and won so much of what we take for granted. From the direct actions of Nat Turner, and John Brown, to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Grace Lee Boggs (from S. Main St) to Ida B Wells it was the working people who made change, politicians and capitalists just  reluctantly accepted the reforms and watered them down. If we are honest with ourselves we know this in our hearts, and that the elections are reduced to who gets to manage the economy that year. PWD asks you to go further and to make our rights permanent through a revolutionary working class movement.

This current system cannot provide the basic means of survival for so many working class people. Nearly 3000 of our fellow workers are without homes, with uncounted thousands more housing insecure. Nearly 120,000 Rhode Islanders go hungry or skip meals, 30,000 of them our children. Our elders and veterans sometimes survive on a single peanut butter sandwich while enduring endless lines waiting for medicine. Our beautiful bay  still has long days of blackout preventing our fish workers from their livelihoods. All of that while we are drowning in fees and utility bills that seem to have no ceiling, it is good to remember that the Public Utilities Commission was a reform that is industry captured. If you are angry, imagine the rage felt at the bottom.

I am asking you to really think and ask the questions. Can you beat capitalism’s inevitable excesses with different capitalism? Can you have a politician that says on one side of their mouth war is bad while supporting increased lethality of our military and the militaries of our clients? Can dismissing the needs of those on the margins while touting being pro-labor? Can you reform a system that calls itself free but has 10 million in prison, jail and probation, with 78 million who have passed through the jail house doors?  It’s an endless spiraling contradiction that requires more and more of  your time and mind. The fact is, if we are being honest, no politician can do it, we have to do it ourselves.

I know that the words can be awkward and we are not used to using them in an earnest way. I am asking you to try, just try. We are working class because of the way capitalism treats us. We want liberation for all working people in Rhode Island to be free to exercise our human right to direct democracy in council. We are revolutionary because we have evidence of the failure of both capitalism and the phony democracy to provide for all working people. We are anti-capitalist because the future of our Earth requires it of us. 

Friend I know that this is a challenge but PWD believes that a movement should be worthy of the people, not the other way around. We need you and welcome you to participate in PWD Monday meetings to organize a militant and revolutionary working class movement here in Providence. Let go of the myths, and false hopes of the current system and be a revolutionary and in actual service to Rhode Island.

We meet as friends and leave as Comrades.

Yours for the future

PROVIDENCE WORKER DEFENSE    provworkerdefense@proton.me.

Providence Worker Defense

provworkerdefense@proton.me.

• The working class and the working class alone can win liberation.
• Houses for the un-housed.
• Food for the hungry.
• Workers in control of workplaces.
• Resident control of communities in council.
• Liberation of medical care.
• A life of dignity and security for our elders.
• Genocide is a non-negotiable.
• There can be no compromise in the protecting the Earth
• Safety, equality, and security for all our siblings.
• A right to bodily autonomy.
• Immediate end to the ripping of families apart.
• Disband and disarm ICE 
• End the occupation of our camps and communities by police.

If you agree with the above please come to the meeting on Monday at 6pm, ask the person who handed this to you for the location, or email us at :

provworkerdefense@proton.me

MORAL HYGIENE, FASCISM AND CONTRADICTION

Fascism and reactionary power come from the devolving of power, not from an all powerful state. Not meaning that the state doesn’t have enormous and all encompassing power, just that the power is dependent on small actors acting on behalf of the state, and the state supports the efforts. Fascism is a culture of snitches empowered to act with greater and greater violence until there is no significant opposition. Fascists and its supporters are wholly reliant on this perversion of people power. Importantly this allows the leader to either distance themselves or pull the action closer. We witness expressions of fascism as a matter of course. Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Penny for one example. For Kyle the state and business has an interest in maintaining an underclass of workers (employed or not) the state’s response is with massive militarized police presence with the potential to deny liberty and to take life, the state was prepared to do what Kyle in fact did and was rewarded for it. For Daniel public poverty and mental illness are largely illegal, the landlords and state are prepared to allow that person to die in anonymity on the outside of society, Daniel just speeded up the process and was rewarded for it. We witness fascism in the aggressive police response to union actions and the protection of strikebreakers. In short we witness the offset power of individuals (or groups) acting in service to state and capital.

So what is fascism  organized and in power? Our history books in school do not teach or go very deeply into it at all. In fact there is some obscurantism in the teaching, mostly that it is a mid 20th century phenomena that was handily defeated. It’s not. It’s best to explain what it isn’t. Fascism isn’t a power above class division, it is an elite structure in the clothing of the “regular people”. It’s not made up of small bosses over workers against big money, though it’s sold that way. Fascism is the power of big money to maintain power in turbulent times. It is organized violence, social or direct, against working people, particularly against those groups of workers who are most likely to show real organized resistance. In this country that is Black, Indigenous, union, and migrant, and intellectual workers. At its ugliest fascism is bestial hatred, organized and un organized violence against against an outgroup, that can act as its wedge first. 

Moral hygiene,contradiction, and fascism.  When we pass an unhoused person on the street we make a decision to either help or not, and sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t. Moral hygiene is how we explain it to ourselves. We decide if they are deserving, we judge what they will do with the money, this is how we can get through the day. Or we look at an extreme part of an out group and say how you wouldnt care if it wasn’t in your face, or wish they would act in the right way. This is a place where fascists can exploit us, we by determining who is in and who is out and the attendant responsibilities to each other becomes how if the out groups are publicly denigrated gives us permission to deepen our disconnect and relieves us of social accountability. We find ourselves in alignment with the fascists. It is an internalized divide and conquer, that makes natural expressions of solidarity suspect. The contractions we live with are very apparent all the time. We live in a free society, yet the prisons are full. We have the best medicine but can’t afford medical care and more. The fascists will promise to do nothing about those conditions except to point the finger at an outgroup and blame them for why the contradiction exists and to explain it away. 

Fascism preys upon our vulnerabilities as workers, it never promises a utopia, quite the opposite, it promises to not harm those who share identities with the in-group, and invites you to participate. It offers what at first blush is an immediate solution, “if we didn’t have trans kids your kids will do better at sports” when that exclusion is complete fascism moves on to the next group, “if we get rid of illegal you could afford a home”. A serious divisive tactic is having one outgroup betray another out group.  The thing is there is always an internal outgroup to collectively punish. This is all in service to the rich and their desires in direct conflict with the needs of working people. Fascism is the illusion of national cohesion but relies on division. We have to resist on the ground the place where fascism’s power is most apparent, in the local petty tyrants who would snitch, physically harm, and divide us. Uncompromising in our collective action we have to aggressively reject the predatory acts of those who act in accordance with the big money fascists before it’s too late.

Appeal to Reason

There is so much happening and so many different points of entry into a movement to oppose the current administration. First it is good to acknowledge that many things are different, but if we are honest many things are also the same. Medical care is deeply rationed, education is more segregated and incomplete, housing is untenable, utilities are overpriced etc. The list goes on. There have been reforms and each one is worth celebrating, but, and this is a big but, none of them are permanent. In fact some things we thought of as carved in granite turn out to be written in chalk. 

It is time though for a serious and honest conversation. I am asking that you reach into your heart and look at what we all have been told. 

With the pundits and talking heads endlessly blathering on about whatever bullshit of the day is supposed to whip us into a frenzy. I am asking that you take a moment to think about it. Really think about what it takes to change things to benefit the working class. How much effort it takes to convince even the “good guys” to do the right thing. So I have a few questions for you and I hope for good faith and honesty in answering.

• Can you name a politician that was the leader of a working class movement for change?
• Can you name a politician that stood on principles and working class values?
• Can you name a politician that was wholeheartedly against apartheid?
• Can you name a politician who stood against militarism/genocide?

I think you and I know the answers, we can’t. We can find some politicians who may have supported any one of those things for a time, but it was always transactional, a way to get votes and money. The fact is change, real change, permanent change happens when the largest class of people act together in solidarity. We are saying that we don’t need a middleman who will water down the righteous and worthy demands of working people. 

The thousands of unhoused and housing insecure while developers and landlords continue to profit without morals or ethics, it’s too much to bear, we need land reform in Rhode Island, not tinkering around the edges. It’s housing now, not after hearings, only for it to die in committee. This isn’t democracy.

The fact is the system itself is the problem beyond any politician of either party. What was pointed out during the vital BLM uprising was that the system was working the way it was intended. So its not enough to beg politicians and courts to “save” a system rife with war, militarism, out of control police and rents, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. The politicians and the bosses should in a real democracy be begging us to relieve pressure. We should not have to vote “harm reduction” but organize for harm elimination.

This means copping to the fact that capitalism is the root cause of virtually all of our social problems. And that the politicians are in service to the capitalists, yes even the good ones. It’s us working people not the middlemen careerist pols that know what is right.

 Banks, Dominance, Stealing & Money

Friend, it’s what’s done to us that is the thing. The narrowing of choices, the closings that lead to the next thing. This leads to the next thing, and the next. But Comrade, I’m here to tell you that it’s not your fault. We are at the end of a long line of choices that were made for us. This is domination, a theft of consent, a thieving of autonomy, a larceny of life. We all live under a dominant system. That system is capitalism. I didn’t choose it. You didn’t choose it. If you are holding this paper chances are it wouldn’t be your first choice for a system to live under. But what is capitalism? As simply as I can say it, capitalism is a system whose only purpose is to get capital, money, dough, cash, land stuff. The thing is though to be a capitalist you have to have capital to start with, and we don’t. We weren’t born into money, don’t have contact lists with people willing to give us money to open a factory, or whatever. So you see that for capitalism to work you need to have one set of people who have stuff, and another who don’t. Capitalism needs 3 things, land, money, and labor. The capitalist has land, and or money, you have labor. For the capitalist to make money they have to take from you, pay you less than what you are earning them, take money in rents and mortgage payments, they take from all of us. The weird thing is we let them. Sometimes we try to push back a little, vote for a person who might promise better, or join a union to change the speed of the theft, but the conflict is that means we are agreeing to the theft. The only thing a capitalist wants is to take from you, they want your land, your time, your effort, they want to get their greasy paws into every part of your life in order to get more money from you. 

PROVIDENCE WORKER’S DEFENSE wants more for you. We want to be secure in our land, we want the peace of a secure future, and the sustenance of a community of workers organized to win, join us.

PWD BRISTOL SPEECH 

Comrades I am not here to lend support to a party or a candidate, to the contrary. I am not here to rally you or to lift you up. No, I am here because the opportunity presented itself through graceful invitation. 

My name is Mike Araujo. I am just another sailor, rigger, dad and organizer. I wear the uniform that was placed on me by birth. I am a worker.

Since I have the opportunity of this platform I am going to use it and I will not hold back. So I beg you your ears and time. I hope you listen with intent and introspection. 

With your permission I am going to challenge your articles of faith and comfort. Make you justify your presence in the struggle of late. 

These times call for a radical reframing, a deeper exploration because if we are going to get through this together as a people we have to be organized in active defense to prevent the possibility of it ever happening again. For this to happen radical honesty is needed. 

Comrades I need you to explore the why, truly look at what it is that brings you here. Here to the mockingly named “Independence Park” down the road from 417 Wood st where the mother AME church anchored the Goree community of free Blacks. They were hounded out and the Bristol Sports club rose from the ashes of the AME church.

We call out the hypocrisy and greed of our current regime while making protest signs in a park that was once an auction site for enslaved Pokanokoet and African people. Down the waterfront from a popular bar that keeps the name of the largest importer and enslaver of human beings in continental North america. The DeWolf auction house where once you could buy a child for $40 or a lobster roll for $34.

We cannot claim moral high ground when the soil we stand on is soaked in the tears of families torn apart, the blood of the whip and the chafe of the chain. 

How dare you. 

I propose that you do not seek justice, but you seek the comfort of civility, the comfort of a status quo that keeps the blood off the hem of your pants. 

We are in a radically different moment that requires a radically different solution, and radical honesty about where and how we live. 

These are the facts of the past, they are the material conditions that give context to today. There are names, children loved, elders cherished and lost to the greed of a population that turned its head away. 35% of Bristol residents owned a human being, more held bonds in  the early global capitalism of Bristol’s Cuban, and Caribbean death plantations.

This is capitalism in its modern form, shares, dividends and liability, spread out to a global capitalist class. This defines our relationship to the world. This is the dominant system and its bloody ideas are the dominant ideas. After all we wouldn’t keep Linden Place as a place of pride but as a site of shame, same with Dewolf tavern. That we tolerate it is an affront to the memories of the ancestors. 

For my community fascism and aristocratic arbitrariness are and always have been the norm. The threat of state violence is the background noise for working class Black people, white people, immigrants, and gender rebels. 

If even today we turn away from the truths of Rhode Island and the US with its endless war and war profiteering, its lust for mammon that are the status quo. 

We meet in the shadow of monumental evidence of crimes in the past but still do not seek justice. We can call out the individual, the DeWolf, the Trump, the Smiley, the Bradford but never address the system that produces these monsters. 

The ruthlessness and aggression in which Bristol’s Merchants carried out slavery with its global reach and vertical integration is modern capitalism. It is the commodification of life and the alienation of human beings from their inalienable rights of Peace Land and Bread. 

This lust for profit remains with us and informs our current conditions. Property relations and capital relations assign our place. Define who we are, it is not nation, it is nor state it capitalism as the dominant system.

The capitalism of DeWolf meant that if you were Black you were property, or the potential for property, if you were a white worker your place was to serve the interests of the DeWolfs, Colts, Browns, Bradfords, Smiths, Wilcoxes. 

The role of the government was to smooth the conflicts between these competing interests. Then as now the interests of the powerful, today’s Dewolfs who are Textron, grumman, etc

Bristol took in $152,000,000 a year from slavery in todays dollars. 

Marx said that to become a commodity is the most wretched condition. To be tools 

Our history is one of blood not hope, being truthful about why you are here and what was here is a necessary step in  the prophylaxis of anti-fascism. 

PWD CITY HALL SPEECH

Mike Araujo has been involved in class struggle in Providence for a long time. He is part of the Providence Workers Defense, founded on three premises:

1. Current conditions are intolerable for us, not for the elites.
2. Fascism is ascendant.
3. Only an organized working class can change things.

Mike Araujo: I’m going to switch up a little bit. We’ve been talking about housing, which is related to every aspect of our lives. We’ve been discussing who we can access as partners and friends. We talk about how we see each other as an ongoing thing. There’s one thing that unites us as poor people: we are at the mercy of the police. We’re at the mercy of landlords. We’re at the mercy of our bosses. We’re at the mercy of a state that doesn’t care about us. So we propose the most maximal plan, right? So I’m going to ask you to tell me. No justice?

Crowd: No peace!

Mike Araujo: That’s bullshit. And you know it’s bullshit. We say it at every march, ‘No justice, no peace.’ ‘Whose streets? Our streets.’ We lie every time we say it because we don’t take the streets, and we give them peace when we go home, when we have our parade on Saturday, hold up a sign, and give awards for the good signs and ominous signs and all that bullshit.

We have to be serious about what we’re doing, which means that when we’re saying things like ‘no justice, no peace,’ we have to be taking it into our hearts, that we don’t stop, that we give them no rest, that we give them no quarter. They show no mercy to us. So what do we show them?

Crowd: No mercy.

Mike Araujo: When we take it, we hold it, right? So whose streets? Our streets? Not yet, but they will be, right?

Right now, we live in fear of a carceral state, of schools that funnel us right into prison, of landlords that can put us on the street, and then we’re criminalized for being unhoused. If we’re hungry and we steal food, where do we go? We might be lucky, and we might be able to make it to a shelter. We might be lucky if the food and the good work they do are still being served at Mathewson. And we might be lucky to have a friend whose couch we can stay on for a couple of days. But that is unsustainable, right?

This whole system, this ugly system, depends on you as poor people, people in the margins, as queer people, as trans people, as Black people, as immigrants, to be on the bottom. It needs us on the bottom. But how many of us are there? It’s all of us. It’s all of us, all over the world. It’s not just Rhode Island, right? This struggle happens in London. This struggle happens in Hong Kong. This struggle happens in Paris, New York, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. It happens to them, too.

What do we have when we hear our siblings suffering in other cities? We have solidarity. What’s the best way to express solidarity? By taking the land that belongs to us back and holding it.

But it’s not just the land, it’s also where we work. Our bosses, right now, are at the mercy of. Not in my lifetime, unions made up 35% of the workforce. We could pretty much write our own ticket. Now we’re down to 6%. Is that labor power? We have to be honest about that. That’s not where the center of power lies anymore. It lies in you, all of you, every single person here. When we are serious and honest and say things like ‘no justice, no peace,’ we agree that we do not give them peace when they do not give us mercy. We do not give them mercy when it’s time to take the streets. We hold our streets. When it’s time to take our jobs, we don’t ask for recognition.

We might be able to organize a union, and we might be able to present a contract. But who runs the business? We do. I’m looking at the people who do the work. All of you, whether you’re retired, disabled, or unhoused, you are part of a workforce, you’re part of a class of people who consistently, globally, have suffered the worst excesses and brutalities that capitalism, imperialism, patriotism, chauvinism, and authoritarianism can inflict on our bodies.

We bear all the scars, every single one of us. We bear all the scars that this system could apply to our backs, limbs, and hearts. We get separated from our souls when we go out. We say it’s just a fucking job when we leave our kids at home, when we know we should be at home with our kids. We leave a sick parent and trust their care to somebody else, when we see that we’re the ones who could do it better, or do it with help, or do it with somebody else. We’re the people that do all the things, every building, every article of clothing, every meal, every IV that goes into an arm, every pill that gets delivered, that gives relief to somebody, every blanket, every single thing you see, every book, was made by people just like you—another worker who deserves the full fruit of their labor.

And that means that we acknowledge that the police should no longer be allowed to have power over us. The landlord should no longer be allowed to have power over us. It’s time to be serious. And on that note, I ask everybody to remember what brother George Jackson, of the Black Panther Party, said. This is so important. We need to hold this in our hearts and act on it. In Rhode Island, there are probably dozens of revolutionary groups, small, working hard, and doing good work. Each one of us is committed to moving our class and liberation forward.

We have all these little, sectarian differences that sometimes divide us and keep us from organizing closely. George Jackson said it is time to put those quarrels aside. Fascism is already here; it’s been here forever, so now we have to be serious. If you’re a part of a revolutionary movement, I am calling on you to send your leaders and your members to meet in congress and organize to take power. Do not ask for reform or beg for relief, but take the things that belong to us back. Take back the land, take the bread, and we will make the peace.

“A single spark can start a prairie fire”

-Mao Zedong

It is the job of a revolutionary to look at the current material conditions, and superimpose them on the necessary conditions for revolution. Mao noted correctly in the Chinese experience following occupation and civil war that the material conditions were correct, that a population radicalized by occupation and taught the language of liberation were present. The necessary conditions of a radicalized population and a disciplined and battle tested People’s Army were also present. There was virtually no contradiction between the material conditions and necessary conditions. This is what his quote is referring to, that there is a spark, in this case an organized and ready communist core, and dry grass, a receptive and knowledgeable mass of people. If there is no spark and grass is dry, the necessary conditions for revolution cannot be met and the opportunity lost. If there is a spark and the grass is wet the material conditions are not present and the launch of revolution is premature. As workers we know we cannot build without the right materials and skills, these are the conditions material and necessary.

As the working class we are at a unique moment in the imperial core. The traditional historic paths to revolutionary politics are no longer present, and the status quo reproducing check valves of the nonprofit industrial sector will not meet the moment. There is broad consensus on the failures of the 2- bourgeois party system, a lack of institutional trust, and a distrust of capitalist institutions. Wildly unpopular foreign military adventures, a veteran class fully disillusioned by their status as cannon fodder. All this followed a pandemic where workers were deemed existentially needed to serve a ruling and upper middle class who sat home largely untouched while being literally catered to. The movement for Black lives highlighted the brutal and arbitrary nature of the carceral state. The Standing rock protectors showed the disregard for indigenous rights and focused on the continued rape of the land. The housing bubble showed beyond doubt the fragility of the debt/work/home cycle. Exile of dissidents, rounding up of immigrants, babies in cages. These are the material conditions we find ourselves in. This is dry grass.

With this we see a change in the language that is more precise and fulsome than before. An infant language of class war emerged from the WTO protests like globalism, vulture capitalism. Katrinka granted us crisis and disaster capitalism, on the Occupy movement delivered on the  99% versus the 1%. This coupled with a de-stigmatizing of socialism, even as badly defined as it has been used is of the language now. A burgeoning labor movement growing out of the failures of business unionism has made organized workers more popular than at any time in the last 50 years. Now this is class consciousness, just without the coherent theory behind it, which leaves gaps for false consciousness and reactionary tendencies. The working class, more pressed than ever, is open to reaction, as well as revolutionary populism. It is up to a party or organization to produce leaders who can articulate with passion and conviction the current moment.

As revolutionaries we fall into patterns not entirely of our own choosing after all the dominant ideas will match the dominant system, but some of it is our fault. The stories of our comrades around the world and at home are beautiful and full and we share them with each other, and then we make it a jargon, impenetrable by all but the chosen. The comrades and more importantly the ideas that move us are appeals to the heart, recognitions of injustice that pull not the intellect but the soul, we must lean into this. Recognize that the relationship to build class and revolutionary consciousness is intimate, passionate, angry, loving, patient, and anxious all at once. I am very much not calling for an anti-intellectual push, I am calling for an approach that acknowledges that we are building a fire and need a spark. This is a call for a triple decker matriculation, jailhouse attorneys, and streetwise professors. A charismatic approach in the religious and secular sense. Amilcar Cabral said “always explain” never shy from the unselfconscious passionate word.

PROVIDENCE WORKER’S DEFENSE stands for the working class of Providence and the world. We recognize the right of all oppressed people to take up arms against their oppressors, and to gain liberation by any means necessary. This solidarity and position extends most fully to the workers of Gaza. In this we reject and oppose Mayor Brett Smiley’s propaganda trip to the zionist entity. His actions as a mouthpiece and supporter of genocide makes him complicit in crimes against the workers of Palestine. Just as we are the children and allies of the dispossessed, kidnapped, and murdered here in Providence we see the parallels in Mayor Smiley’s land grabs, camp raids and blindness to the need that surrounds him. 

• Mayor Smiley increased the already bloated police budget.
• The zionist entity has increased rates of incarceration of Palestinians by nearly 100%.
• In Providence the camps of the un-housed are raided without warning.
• The genocide of Gazans is a naked land grab, with land auctions happening in the US.
•  Homelessness in Providence has increased by 35%.
• The extermination of Gazans has displaced 90% of the Palestinian population there.
• 83% of the Black population of Rhode Island lives within 1.8 miles of each other, Providence is a ghetto.
• The Palestinians of Gaza live in the most densely populated place on Earth, Gaza is a ghetto.
• 48% of Black households, and 51% of latino households in Providence experience hunger.
• 93% of Gazans experience hunger.

PROVIDENCE WORKER’S DEFENSE says, no more occupation! Demands all stolen lands returned to the workers of those lands. Our suffering here is parallel and intertwined with the brutality experienced in Palestine. We call on Mayor Brett Smiley to step down and answer for the crime of being a propagandist for genocide. We demand LAND-PEACE-BREAD for the people of Palestine and will not stop until Palestine is free!

AS IF

In different times of our history the US has done terrible things, the more you uncover the uglier it gets. When the learning starts there is a process of mourning, real loss that can be keenly felt and naggingly persistant. There isn’t a shortcut to this process of loss mourning has to happen. The mythologies we all grow up with at home, repeated on TV, sold in the malls and supermarkets, as well as the propaganda of VOA that we aren’t allowed to hear. We grow with an intimate knowledge of our homeland, can recite the dates and events, to lose this is to lose a piece of identity. It’s not hyperbole to say that this can be deeply psychically disturbing, it’s a burial without a body, a wake without toasts. To mourn is to remember, to hold the truth. Mourning is usually contained inside us with our individual relationship informing its contours, but with mourning a national memory there is no intimacy. Denied the privacy of personal mourning, the loss still needs a stairway to take the steps. 

Mourning in our lives and families, because it’s a process of memory means we have to walk the mourning through the truth of who we mourn. It is an internal interrogation of our past with a person. In my life there are always complicated feelings of joy, anger, frustration, and sadness about the ones I have lost. Toggling through those feelings with each revived memory. Each person in my family works through this in much the same way, but experienced through their individual relationship with the departed. There is also mourning for the ones lost who are hated, a wish for saying, confronting the ones who cause pain. All this can be contained in one person. You still can’t leap past the steps of mourning. Each footfall has to land with intent if the mourning is to be honest and give peace.

There can be a shocking thing in loss, where someone else’s memory contradicts the memory you hold so close. A person may feel the need to jump to defend or real anger at the other for highlighting something you may know to be true, or at least possible. This is where we are at for large parts of the working class. This knowledge that there can be a truth and a “what you know”. Hope that the uglier parts are just one offs, or not definitional to the character of the lost. The more you hear or learn of the bad behavior the contradictions of loss can become harder to bear. So instead of taking the steps, it is easy to grab the railing and stay on the landing. But then knowing that it is possible that what you learned is true can lead to real anger that is colored by shame. The anger is not wanting anyone to speak ill of the dead, the shame is feeling tricked. With a person there can be relief at the death, that the harm is over, and that can allow you to get past the pain. A nation of myths cannot do that because the corpse never had life.

Denial and suddenness can make a person incredibly defensive. With our country that is a defining thing. Presented with the facts of history, which immediately contradict what you learned without fact, just assertions cannot be true.” The theft of land, poisoning, kidnapping of the people to take and take, couldn’t have happened the way you say.” “The breeding farms of the enslaved Black people didn’t exist.” If you are a liberal side, the denial takes the form of, “yes but it ended”, or tie it to the individual who committed the crime. For the conservative the denial comes as “it wasn’t as bad as you say”, or simply “didn’t happen”. The shock of the challenge, of breaking the icons of the myth, retrench both the conservative and the liberal alike. “That’s not really us”, is the refrain. All the while the outlines of the character emerge, and the denial becomes more difficult. In the shock and pushing back on what’s learned there is a choice to be made. There is always a choice to be made.

The pain of loss, the questions of what more could have been done, remain unasked, in national mourning it is different because you can push the pain to others. If only the voters behaved differently, (150 years ago). It’s the equivalent of the family of a cancer victim wishing for more exercise or less toxic addictions, the moment has passed when affirmative action could have been taken. Blame the region, blame the ethnic makeup, blame everything. The action needed though has not been taken. Guilt is part of this, shame of the failure to act. In myself I know this is unreasonable, the loss stays the pain dulls but sometimes the guilt rises like the stump of a broken tooth. Guilt and shame must be faced, but can only be faced if the first  shaky steps are taken as the mourning matures. The nation carries so much with it, and the pain was always present, and the shame hidden. Everytime the billy club comes down on  shockingly soft bone, the taser, the cell door ringing, the vote lost, the war started, triggers the pain, re-awakens the shame. Taking the pain of the lost myths, the mourning of a past and geography you never lived in and seeing it, acknowledging where action should have been taken and teaching yourself to not repeat the same mistakes is core to lessening the pain of mourning, an affirmative action of clear sight.

Getting stuck in anger of national myth mourning, the resentment of having old hurts and lies laid bare, the rage of seeing. Anger at not saying what needed saying. The unfairness. Again here lies choice. It’s possible to take the anger, the way of seeing and translate into aggressive action to prevent what has happened from ever happening, committing to total harm elimination letting fury take you in a  righteous way. Naming it, cataloging it, charting the past, making a map of atrocity. Or go back to step one and marry your anger to denial. Push back at all you learned and reframe the myths with more pathos and lies. Attack. The liberal will point with anger at those who opt for liberation rooted in fact and analysis, rage at the idea of alternatives. Treat any of the wide awake as traitors, with smears, and slanders. The conservative will yell with greater performance, in full knowledge of the parody, “just kidding”, “just asking questions”. It is total alignment. Anger is an energy that can move us, does move us, the revolutionary takes the anger and moves with it, flows with it, takes it as a necessary step. The revolutionary mourns too.

Because of growing and learning in an all encompassing myth, there is the instinct  to try to keep the body close, do anything to try and not let go. The moldering body wants to be buried once and for all, but the institutionalist will try. Pretend that parts of the body are rotten and starting to stink. The liberal will point to feckless parties, and weak institutions that always alienated working people as aspects that are worth saving, it can’t be done though. It’s a cannibalism of a national body. The conservative reactionary will build on the lies, making them machine. As with capitalism the dead lies can be used to activate hidden bigotries and fears to use to dissect the working class. No space for mourning, no room to find succor. For the liberal the parts still have life in spite of evidence, for the conservative the body is a tool. For the revolutionary there is a hunger to release the stench of death that surrounds the people.

All death means grief, even the deaths that are longed for. The death of a nation is  collective, and ongoing even if the country had been so poisoned from the start. Even struggling against its worst aspects and gaining small victories mean a loss of direction, a vacuum of identity. For those who embrace the ideas of reform really know that the wins will cover them in the stink. A depressive cycle of diminishing return. The lies are a friend who gives comfort, pretense  a pillow. The anger clings to some, who gets stuck on a step. Lashing out with an increasing arc of atrocity. Impotently the ones who get stuck in denial believe in an external rescue of the dead body next to them. Those who seek radical change without thought of what to do after the funeral, reawaken the national lies, leave space for a zombie to emerge. The revolutionary sees the depression, acknowledges the collective loss felt, and delivers the place setting for moving forward. Armed with the ideas and tools to keep the corpse from ever emerging again. The revolutionary lights a path away through the depression.

Acceptance, and hope is the penultimate flight of grief. As we see that the parts of the national body, its killing contradictions, its withered limbs and grasping hands always reaching out to take fall away. The lies that deliver blood to a heartless system cease to flow, show there is no CPR not extraordinary action to take because there was no artery strong enough. The abuses of the US and capitalism have rendered so much misery, with seemingly infinite creativity to hurt the working class more globally has never truly had life, because its myths that are the bones were brittle on easy examination. There are those of us who will get stuck in the denial, anger, and struggle against any new life that can emerge. And there are those who will get stuck in depression and bargaining to either lay paralyzed, or attempt to sever the limbs of the corpse they think did least harm. The acceptance that it was dead from the beginning means knowing that new life has to emerge, that the sticky lies must be cleaned away. An optimism of a eulogy, that confronts with honesty and also lights the pyre as a beacon.

It is not magic, or any specialness that allows some workers to see the truth of the dead, because we all know the body was animated by lies, even those who choose the path of liberalism or reaction. It is revolutionary to go through the stages of grief for a nation, see that for the pretty words on the county’s birth certificate were a burial shroud. The exceptional thing is to walk the funeral procession with our fellow workers and comfort their loss with vision. That they will need to process, like all of us, the stages of grief with varying speed. Losing the identity that comes with a nation is real loss, finding out that the mother of the motherland was never alive is a true grief that needs a place to go. It is comfort that is offered at a funeral, not a gloat, or “I told you so” at the moment. The people attending the funeral all including the ones who saw the truth of the lies need to go through all the stages before moving forward. The nation as a loved partner who abused you is a stark realization that carries shame and anger, both externally at those who point it at, and internally at self for believing it. See that, take that and move. Grief has stages just like revolution and each must be taken. Grieve and then sweep away the wreckage of the lying corpse and allow a new world to be born.

To wish impossible things

Capitalist realism, and bourgeois democracy realism. Timelines are a true and immutable thing, that no matter what we try are simply there. So looking at the real timelines and numbers is real. Starting on a baseline of need. There are 2000 children without homes in RI, there are almost 3000 of our neighbors sleeping in the cold. With many many more couch surfing, staying with family. 62,000 children get free or reduced price school lunch, nearly half of all of our students. 144,000 RI workers receive public assistance. 230,000 receive social security benefits. Almost 5000 RI workers apply for housing assistance. Every single shelter is at 100% capacity.  The rents are $22,800 a year, $11,280 in groceries, transportation costs add up to $15,170, $5,280 for electric and gas, $2000 for phone. This is $56,530 per year. This of course does not include copays, clothing, and any room for joy. The per capita income in Providence is $40,689. There is no way that this could work. This is a system that will build failure into a system. The average household debt held by the workers of Rhode Island is $58,580.  The bills have a timeline, we can’t pay it’s gone. 

Looking at reform, a person in Providence would have to make $4,710 a month just to barely keep their head above water. This is a $30/hour wage, just to survive. What is the honest likelihood that legislators would pass an increase in the wage, or a limit on rents, or price controls on groceries, or a limit on medical costs, phone, utilities. It’s zero. There is no way that three magic ghosts will visit each landlord or boss and scare them to reduce rents, or raise wages. It’s a pipe dream to think that any politician let alone a majority would ever center the needs of the vast majority people, the working class over that of the ruling class. 

The rate of exiling and sending working people to concentration camps overseas in increasing numbers. Since 2008 10.5 million have been exiled. With Biden either deporting or stopping 3,000 people per day. Trump is acting with greater brutality but family separation and deportation is always a brutal process that destroys families. The best reform could hope for is gentler expulsion, and that is a thing but it doesn’t end the root problem. The lack of due process really is not a thing when the process due a worker is cruelty. But the time spent in cells, the time worrying about whether you will come home or they will make it home. Yes it needs to be relieved, but the problem is now not a year, two years, four years from now.

The next congressional elections are in 2026, the next senate elections are 2031, the presidential election is 2028, and the supreme court has no election, but one member who will likely die in the next year or so. If the opposition party can win a majority they would have to agree and pass legislation against a hostile executive, so they would need a veto proof majority. And that is if the executive even accepts congressional power. And that is if the senate can reconcile any progressive bill. It is a fantasy.  The next closest elections are 208 days away, congress is 573 days away, senate, 1,668, president 1,303. If Trump hits the records of deportations that Obama or Biden had, look at the number, it’s 3000/day X 208=624,000 human beings. For congress it’s 1,719,000 people taken, for the president it’s 3,909,000,  for the senate it’s 5,004,000 workers. These are lives and families ripped apart, while trying to gain a super majority in the houses of congress. It is simply not reality. As a revolutionary I am asking you to be realistic. How many will be exiled, how many will be imprisoned?

What is the number of hungry days for our children, until the next election ? What is the number of exiled workers shunted to concentration camps, before a super majority is reached? How many cold nights without a home, while debating the palace intrigue of a party? What is your number? A person who calls for abolition is told they are unrealistic, dreamer, how “it would be nice” but. It is seen as wildly beyond to suggest that reform is not enough, even while pointing to history and numbers that back up the statement. It is the realm of dragons and wizards to believe that the supreme court will somehow become pro worker, or an entirely progressive super majority will be reached, with a compliant president. But we know that. 

The rational thing is to accept that the miracle alchemy of electoralism is at best an occasional benefit, usually with a lot of downsides. That the right personality emerges, the right politician with the least amount of compromise you can bear gets elected, then what? Do they have a caucus, can they get a bill passed? Or will you have to wait and hope that after 3,4,5 terms or more for them to accrue enough juice to move? Do you hope that no capitalist lobbyist will intervene? That the governor, or president won’t veto? Will the courts with all their well heeled and well funded not overturn what you worked so hard for? How many days in between now and then? How many lives? Did you vote hard enough? Or will it be revolution? Because revolution makes the numbers work.

DISINTEGRATION

They had worked so hard to save the pictures and papers of their lives, the wedding, grandma in the kitchen smiling, first bike ride. After he got hurt they struggled to keep things together, her hours kept getting cut because the car was unreliable, and couldn’t carpool because the hours at the warehouse shifted week to week. The roof leaked, Rhode Island Energy cut off electric months before. The cold, the wet, the growing mold and finally the sheriffs with the condemnation notice. Their home was sold at auction, the bidders were the usual gang, Residential properties, Armory, some fund in Brooklyn, the auction lasted less than five minutes, and their home was completely and irrevocably gone. The 30 yard dumpster and the crew of underpaid day laborers throwing a lifetime of stuff away. Things that made comfort and shared time and things that were loved. Gone. Now just a couple of pictures, wedding licence, birth certificate, one was lost, all neatly kept in crinkled and worn zip-lock bags, stowed neatly in the back wall of the framed hiking pack he had found. 

She stopped talking, and the first few months in the rough had shown up on her face, the lines deeper and more severe, a mean downturn in the sides of her mouth. The tent under the 6-10 connector bridge was big for a tent. He would go out to try to find something, they both would a couple of times they got hired to throw stuff out of another person’s house, their lives so like their own. Before the heavy stuff like beds and couches you take out the small stuff, pots and pans, lamps, pictures. Sometimes they would stop and call over to just look at a thing that was so familiar, or something they could use. The stuff they could use would stash off to the side near bushes, hoping the others on the crew didn’t see it, take it or throw it out. Hoping there are bikes in the garage, or sturdy bags. 

They were surprised even though they didn’t say it out loud. The discovery that some milk crates were better than others for the sleeping pads. Getting used to the grit that invaded everything, that used to make it hard to sleep but now is just there. The fights, without talking. Panhandling and taking the first few dollars to get fireball nips to help sleep, or have something to share. In their old life they were generous, and some of that carried over, but mostly it left. Meeting others in the camps that would prey and take, definitely staying. Everything hurt the heart. They had stopped trying to make it to shelters, the wicked early wakeups, and the wicked early locked doors made it more work than it was worth. The food stamps didn’t help because they had no place to cook. It was grinding the soul. 

In the camp they still shared when they could, moments of laughter, bundled up and with sad eyes. The passed handle of booze, that did more than just intoxicate, it was escape. She didn’t plan it, he didn’t see it happen. It was slow. She took a pill, and another, found others. Her quiet became an active silence, and back to the tent later and later. He wanted to grab her, but the touch which was tender in the old life changed to restraint. Then she was gone. He would see her with others, nodding out. He would walk up try to get up the courage to say he missed her, and it was harder to watch their stuff without her. Even though the silence inside the nylon walls was sometimes overwhelming, the sound of her breath brought a little comfort, and just her body made the tent warmer. 

It became harder to leave the camp. Hunger could wait, or maybe someone would bring something to share. A nip for sleep, a toke to calm. The talk was that camps were being raided again. In North Providence and near the empty store by the river. The camp was busier during the day. Talk about where to go, maybe Harrington Hall, but they would have to leave stuff behind. Cousins in other states, friends in Florida, but getting there when $5 is the same as $50, and $50 might as well be a million. He was tied to the camp now, to the land that his little tent sat on, afraid to leave. He would defend his nylon and fiberglass home, just by being in it. 

Because more people in the camp had the same fear, more stayed close. Afraid to go to further intersections to beg, the competition for what was close became more acute, often descending into fights. They were all tied to the land under the 6-10 connector. Hungrier, colder, more anxious, angrier. He knew that it would happen, the bravado with the fireballs, the opposite of the grinding and painful fear in the pit of his stomach. Maybe jail would be a relief, but he wouldn’t go to jail for more than a night. The shuffle from shelter to shelter was too much, they were already full, and at best he would get a chair to sleep in, the aches from the broken bones from work made the walks and waits hard on his body. He wished she was here, even in silence they could share. He longed to share.

The sound of the diesels, the squeak of the brakes, the purposely disorienting party strobes on the police cars. The guy in the white shirt, the men in tyvek suits, the men with guns. The shovels, the boots, the garbage bags, the flashlights. The barking, not of dogs but of the men with guns. The early morning light makes the flashlights shining through the thin fabric walls somehow brighter and tinted to the colors of the nylon. The boots stomping over and through the tent lines, collapsing the delicate homes onto the residents. Scrambling to unzip the tent fly he jumps out seeing the lights each flash a physical impact the din of the bobcat loader diesel revving, the constant beep of the familiar 30 yard dumpster coming off the truck. A symphony of fear, in the early morning drizzle.

STAND HERE! NO YOU CAN’T GO THERE! I DON’T KNOW I’M JUST HERE CUZ I HAVE TO BE! ASK THE SUPERVISOR! He sees a quiet man get cuffed hand on the nape of his neck as he is led to a cop car. Men in Tyvek suits, gloves and boots, like they were encountering a disease, start pulling things out of tents. He starts to run back to his tent, a hand on his chest stopping him.  He sees the contents of the tents being thrown onto the ground, small plates and forks, clothes, good shoes. His heart rises in his throat. Whats left of his old life is in there. The documents prove he exists, that she exists. Proof of life. All the tents have a version of this, besides the dirty warm clothes, the sleeping bags are papers, lots of papers, torn ziplock bags.

Shovels.

A new sound, higher pitched angrier, the wood chipper starts. Originally built to destroy the natural process of life and grind it down to something manageable and dead. The wild plants and insistent trees fill every crack, defying concrete, and all construction, the chipper takes and breaks the unruly, the ungovernable forces of life. The chipper flattens and destroys the proof of life. This morning it does its job again as the men in tyvek suits guarded by men with guns and blinged out uniforms feed the tents, the boots, the clothes, and most importantly the papers of the camp. All proof of life gone. Welcome to Providence the Creative Capital. 

2

It was 75 years ago she was moved to the camp, she was a little girl and she could remember the tears. Her parents rushed to load the cart with what they thought was important. A load of family history that spanned centuries that was in a lovely but worn house that was built before memory. That load fits into a 6’x 4” hand pulled cart. She was told that she could only pack clothes, but she took a doll and a book, hiding it in the bottom of the old stickered cardboard suitcase. Her dad would get mad when he found out but now he was worriedly talking to his neighbors in rushed voices, tears on everyone’s cheeks, flinching at the occasional carbine fire from the angry men with guns. Her grandmother carefully tied a key to her little neck with an impenetrable lover’s knot. “Do not lose this, I know you will keep it close.” The heavy key baning on her chest as they started to walk. 

They started to walk south, filling the road with what seemed like everybody in the world. Her feet hurt and the sun hurt. Every once in a while a jeep would come scrambling up the road filled with men in tan uniforms smiling, splitting the line and toppling the carts. Whole lives spilled into the wet ditches next to the road. At first people would reload the carts, push them back on the road and keep going. Her mom and dad were trying to keep close to the roadside but not too close so when the men with guns came recklessly driving through they wouldn’t get hit by the jeep or pushed into a trench. It was so hard to keep walking, sometimes she would have to help push the cart or get rocks out of the way of the wheels, running to keep ahead. 

The first night she curled up with her brother and sister, mom and dad on the outside of the little bundle of people. She didn’t sleep, no one did, the constant sounds of prayers and tears, tears and prayers they were the same. The punctuation of machine gunfire didn’t make sleep easier. Waking up with the sun not enough water to clean her face or hands, flies started to accumulate on the dirty clothes. Her mom who was like a princess looking more tired and scared, unable to swat at the flies because she has to pull the cart with dad. Like a single animal the ramshackle parade starts again. 

Running ahead to help her little sister change her wet clothes she see the rash blooming on her tender skin. Unable to stifle the cries, she knows it hurts to pull the wet clothes off, and she knows it hurts to be half naked in the sun. She tries to calm her cries for mom, the little body with wracking sobs. She starts to cry too, she doesn’t want this. Where is mom? They had to run so far ahead because the line can’t stop, she needs it to stop. They are both thirsty, dirty and hungry. She only brought clean underwear for her sister, not a full set of clothes, she wrestles them on her but the sweat and dust just make it hurt more. She leaves the dirt underwear in the ditch awkwardly picks up her sister and starts to run to catch up her sister heavy on her back. The steady run turns to a jog, looking at the faces of the cart pullers she doesn’t see mom or dad. Does Not recognize the carts, they are all the same. 

Men in khaki, men with guns line the road more and more. It has been 3 days and she and her sister haven’t found her parents. Curling up where they can, getting food and water where they can. Her little sister just cries quietly now. The rash has changed, the skin has broken, it hurts to be carried, it hurts to walk. Her little sister’s eyes seem to have gone back further in her head. Their little legs try to keep up but it is so hard. The sides of the road are now littered with broken carts, the contents spilled, laughing men with guns picking through lives. At first people would shout at them, now just walk past with exhaustion, eyes averted. How much longer? The muttering men say they are almost there, A ball of falafel each, not cooked, just roughly mixed with water, and a few sips of muddy water and walk. Her little sister is always wet  now, her little legs reddened with rash, and she no longer just smells of piss and shit, there is a new smell. 

Her sister can’t walk, so she props her up against a tree, tells her to wait while she tries to find help. Most of the line has passed, they are near the end and a line of men with guns stretched out across the road walking slowly and inevitably forward. She knew they wouldn’t help. She runs ahead asking if someone could help carry her sister. She was also afraid of what mom and dad would say if they knew she left her. Running through the tangle of walkers shouting for help, some stoop down to help or press food into her hand, but they are all scared and afraid to go back to the tree near the soldiers. Finally a couple of men agree to go, they run back to the tree, but her sister is gone. She is frantic now, the men try to comfort her and urge her to keep walking. She doesn’t cry.

One shoe fell apart a day ago, she tried walking with one shoe but that just made a blister on her foot with the shoe. The pointy rocks of the road hurt a lot but what could she do, she had to keep up. There were almost no carts anymore, most had broken down or got too heavy or the road too crowded. Thighs and arms too tired to keep pulling the contents of their houses. The soldiers would tear through the remains taking what they thought was worth something, sometimes pulling it out of the arms of the crying. She had her key, just like the others, when she slept she clutched it. Even though it banged on the bones on her chest it was a comfort. Her clothes torn, shoeless she stopped thinking about mom, dad, her sister, her brother, grandma, home, her book, just walking, keeping up on little legs. Just crying at night.

She saw the gate, the huge fence wide open, a sea of tents. WELCOME TO GAZA.

Tactics And Strategy

Tactics and strategy. These are words that get thrown around a lot. Often we only use the word tactic, this betrays a lack of strategy. Strategy is informed by theory, and tactics serve strategy. These are the defining features of an authentic revolutionary organization. A good example of this is the Red Army Faction movement in Europe and Asia in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s. The goal was to bring about a communist revolution and build enduring links to 3rd world struggles, particularly Palestine and the african Portuguese and French colonies. The theories that undergird the goal were of course Marx, Mao, Minh, Castro, and Cabral. Insurgent agrarian oriented communism, partially rejecting Lenin and some of Marx because the conditions as they saw them were post-industrial, and early consumerist. The strategy would be a relentless series of bombings, assassinations, and bank robberies that would be irresistible to mainstream media. As someone said “they were televisionaries”. Targeted to build a what is essentially narrative arc, telling the story of the  atrocities of capitalism and imperialism. The selection of the targets were tactical. “Which industrialist is the best representative of the ruling class?” This is an accelerationist strategy. Unlike the IRA who used a similar strategy in a guerrilla war of national liberation. The goal was/is national reunification of Ireland, removal of british occupying forces, freedom of political prisoners. The strategies of assassination and bombings irresistible to the media were to instill fear in the British public, inspire Irish patriots, and cost England a lot of money. The tactics used were some high profile assassinations but many were targeted against british soldiers, again fear is strategic, bombing is the tactic. 

Here of course the current conditions are different and the contexts are different. Though the underlying problems of capitalism, imperialism, and state repression remain. The media has learned to resist what was irresistible, so they cannot be part of a meaningful strategy, or used tactically unless it is in the moment. The theories that are the foundation of Providence Workers Defense are of course Marx, and friends. The goal is to build a class conscious working class in Providence, more militant, confrontational, and victorious. The strategy is direct action to inspire and challenge, direct worker to worker communication, and cross organization solidarity through incrementally more spectacular and escalating action. The tactics used must serve this goal and the question must be repeatedly asked: Does this serve (in order) the short term tactics, the long term strategy, the overall goal? Rejection of the ineffective tactics of other organizations to build a permission structure to allow them to also act with a freer hand and break the parade/marshall/control paradigm is also a strategic goal. 

Diversity of tactics are decided action by action, it is the demand we put on other organizations following the service question structure. Diversity of tactics is a necessary factor of worker self defense. It is an organizational agreement to not cut comrades out and leave them exposed to police, or movement alienation. It can be a challenge to negotiate internally what the specific tactics to be used are. The various identities we carry can serve as barriers to understanding the motivation of some actions/slogans. It is incumbent on us as revolutionaries and comrades that we access our core identity as working class to find deeper understanding on the question that the challenge holds. Age, race, gender, language, facility all make for different and vital perspectives to how to win liberation, and what that liberation will look like. It is an allowance to see that in any given issue or action internally there will be opportunity for conflict. As comrades and friends we have the chance to welcome conflict as an opportunity to test our ability as revolutionaries to navigate with open hearts, reject the transactional and internalize the conflict as transformational.  PWD will not police comrades, nor will we put comrades in a position to police. Truly know that good faith and good will move us as a collective, and we reserve those things for our tender and close comrades of PWD.

One last thing. Values. Our values are the motive force each of us has internally. No one can define those for you, nor can anyone truly alienate you from them. For me I value the intrinsic worth of human beings, rejecting instrumentality. I value my blood and chosen family, and their happiness and a couple other things. The values that you have as a comrade are what brought you to PWD, share them, give them shape, articulate the why. As workers we are bound by the borders of capitalism and the state that serves it. As revolutionaries we are bound in joyful struggle against the forces of reaction. Toward each other PWD commits to the gentle, the open, the inspirational, toward our class enemies we offer the diametric opposite.

There is no If

What is it that we hold as an article of faith? What are the things that we draw a line at, that we can’t question? Can we identify the ideas or concepts that are beyond reach of doubt or question? We grow up with a lot of them and some of them are simply biases and bigotries passed down, but some are constantly reinforced. When you are on the outside of power, or see that you exist on the outside of power the questions become different. The backups and the relentless re-education by the  dominant power, which today is capitalism, is everywhere. Consuming more will make you prettier, more loved, happier, and working harder will lift you up, that effort is commensurate with wealth, or that wealth is a reflection of good behavior. All evidence to the contrary.

It becomes more complicated when we look at what it takes to change the current conditions. We have lessons from the past, but it is nearly always an incomplete education. The reframing of popular struggles to ones that happen in the halls of power. It is difficult to manage and weave through the chaff to get to the wheat. Even the language that we developed as revolutionaries gets co-opted and commodified by those in power, to be redirected as weapons against those who seek more. These are barriers to liberatory struggle. That with the intentional omission of context and facts is a theft of working class history, our history. Over time though this becomes the doctrinal words and canon, a faith.

The latin core of the word radical is root, the way we think about being radical is to grab by the roots. That means we have to be intentional in how we approach things we take on faith without exploration, because to not do it, is to not be radical. The initial process of removal of history and replacing it with a thing that happens to line up with desires of the ruling class is in its nature a violent one. It can mean the literal removal of the living reminders of history, by exile, verdict, or bullet. The process of relearning, taking out the policeman in our heads is equally violent. We know that and twist our memory to accommodate the narrative of the bosses and the politicians, looking for a soft landing for a troubled and conflicted past.

So let’s look at voting as an article of faith. This is a blasphemy, to suggest that it is not enough, or even that voting is worth looking at its actual wins and losses. To even suggest that there is projection in dismissing the idea that people who don’t vote are apathetic or misinformed. The quick response is to point to the struggle to vote by Black workers and farmers in the south. As though the vote were the end unto itself. This removes the history of things. This is a violent erasure. The removal of the context that the vote was part of a tool of defense, not the only tool but just one tool. The fight was for humanity and self determination, a vote was a small part of it. Being armed, organized, and educated were of primary importance. The vote was a tool to defend the gains won on the ground often through direct armed struggle, not a replacement for the struggle. The vote itself becomes a secondary order need. With that we can I hope agree that voting is a tactical not a strategic choice.

This might be the hardest article of faith of all to challenge, or question and that is non-violence. I can practically hear the immediate objections. It is so weighty and fraught and removed from context and history. The hardest thing is an honest assessment of violence. The discourse puts us of two minds almost immediately. We have so many heroes who have acted and used violence that are fully worthy of admiration, respect, and even emulation, and those who were non-violent as a matter of principle who too deserve the same. There are thought killing statements about violence like “violence never achieved anything” while sitting on land stolen by violence, so it did achieve something. Or the slave master with their whip knows that the whip can produce obedience or revolt, violence is in fact productive. Or the phrase “we become as bad as them”. This does actual harm to those who fought back like Nat Turner, DeSalines, Mordechai Anielewicz, Esther Raab, Ba Trieu Trung, Vo Thi Thang Trung. Their resistance was violent and necessary. No one would tell Mordechai that he was as bad as the NAZIs for the ghetto uprising, that would be immoral in the extreme. Honesty is knowing that as a matter of personal values Dr. King, and Gandhi had true personal and spiritual reasons for individual non-violence, however they also depended on violence to get their point across. They needed the state to act in the greatest brutality, a willingness to have in the US thousands jailed, and beaten, in India hundreds of thousands beaten. This is non-violence as a strategic choice. It is also making human beings instruments instead of actors. There is more to it though.

It’s the context that makes the faith shallow. The context of Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement was that following a literal world war, the UK could no longer afford to maintain its far flung colonies.  Gandhi correctly read the moment and worked in conjunction with armed independence groups to assert independence on a war-weary England. The context is that Satyagraha required a full spectrum of tactics of which non-violence was a part. With the civil rights movement long and in depth conversations about appropriateness, what would appeal not to a US audience but an international audience. The presence of cameras and a larger audience moved the movement. In the case of India you are dealing with a majority occupied people, in the US you are dealing with an internally suppressed nation of people. The images of children being beaten by the state and authorized agents of the state made the international community, particularly the Soviet Union, make an end of Jim Crow a must-negotiated item in all detente. The beatings worked in that moment, it was a tactic not a center of strategy or an end unto itself.

The times are different and all tactics to resist must be embraced, not as individuals, but as a movement. Public criticism by fellow travelers in the movement must be couched in an analysis of success and failure. In the planning an approach of what are the conditions, and what is needed to achieve whatever the outcome that is desired. Examine our “articles of faith” and make sure we understand the full context of the choices our ancestor movement comrades made. When we ask people to be mobilized to support voting, it should be in the realistic context of the time taken for an elected candidate to take office and then write and pass the legislation needed for the working class. If it works it could take years, and if we are in agreement that lives are at stake, immediate lifesaving measures must be taken. It can be that mobilizing is an opportunity for a mass to be heard and that is valuable, and should be clear that that is the desired outcome. Maybe though it is direct action that is needed at the moment, to break the seal and build a larger permission structure for more militant action. Militancy can  take any form however the point is always to make the current system bend against its will to the needs of the working class. How we do that should be determined by the likelihood of success, not nostalgia or false morality. 

If both the candle and the torch are to be snuffed out I choose to be the torch.

I Love Lucy May 1

May 1 International Workers Day is celebrated by proletarians around the world. May 1 is a global expression of internationalism, solidarity and militancy. Here in Rhode Island, like in the rest of the US, May 1 is seen as a foreign celebration, but its history is closer to home, and very old. May 1 goes so far and so deep that even our sleep patterns are shaped by it. So significant is the movement that spawned May 1 it can be hard to grasp, so let’s go back. May 1 has its start in the 8 hour movement back in 1817, culminating in the Chicago HAYMARKET AFFAIR of 1886 where police rioted and detonated a bomb during a workers demonstration for the 8 hour day. Some of the organizers were targeted and framed using anti-immigrant, anti-semitic, and anti-Black media and legal campaigns. The martyrs were Albert Parsons, August Spies, Louis Lingg, Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, and George Engle, all sentenced to death, with one more Oscar Neebe given 15 years in prison. On the day Albert Parsons was hung he said, “If you think by hanging us, you can stamp out the labor movement … the movement from which the downtrodden millions, the millions who toil in want and misery expect salvation – if this is your opinion, then hang us!  Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in front of you, and everywhere, flames blaze up.  It is a subterranean fire.  You cannot put it out.”

One other organizer was left out, Lucy Parsons, Albert’s wife, she was born to  enslaved parents, sexism, and racism ironically saving her from the hangman’s noose. The ruling class simply couldn’t believe a woman, let alone a Black woman could organize and move so many, (they would come to regret this decision).  Ultimately Albert, Adolph, and George were hanged, Lucy led the charge for a re-trial of the remaining men, and to commemorate their martyrdom. 

Lucy’s refusal to let the world forget the cause or the working class people of the Haymarket police riot. Her efforts to galvanize support around the world were successful. Protests of commemoration started happening literally everywhere. Building militancy and taking the class war to the bosses. These socialists, and anarchists of the 1880s demanded more than the initial reforms of the 8 hour day movement, but to total abolition of the wage system, a call to end racism, sexism, nativism, and total abolition of capitalism.. Tying local struggles to a global proletariat in shared struggle. Never allowing for a moment the ruling class to forget that by the working class simply folding their arms in refusal the whole rotten system collapses. 

Globally May 1 is both an official and unofficial holiday. Much has been done here in the US to separate the working class and revolutionary ideals of May 1, erasing Lucy and the martyrs from the story. Business unions here make little nods at May 1, but are quick to shy away from anything that smacks of power building. There is no understating the role of May 1 and Lucy Parsons. Her contributions in particular are as permanent as her determination. She is responsible for or directly contributed to our modern concept of free speech, public protest, the ACLU, the Communist Party USA (oldest communist party in the world), the Industrial Workers of the World, the Socialist Party, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and more.  

PROVIDENCE WORKER’S DEFENSE carries Lucy’s revolutionary spirit forward, striving to live up to the challenge of those long ago martyrs. We hold in our hearts Lucy Parsons as the model of uncompromising revolutionary leadership. Just think for a moment a formerly enslaved Black southern woman being honored by billions all over the world. Join us in carrying her legacy this May 1 and move the revolution forward!

Charging rent on our future 

The little but persistent loss of dignity, the fees, endless fees for everything, the empty supermarket shelves. Distant owners gouging us on heat and light. Grinding hours at multiple jobs, or no work at all and the demeaning on-line applications. No person to talk to, no one accountable, not one moment of satisfaction. Fast food and grocery stores floating the idea of individualized pricing. Formula locked up behind bars. Our children at school charged money to eat even though the food is the same as prison food and like prisoners are legally obliged to be there. As Rhode Islanders we have a right to harvest from the bay but no place to park. The cops drive on the sidewalks to keep you moving. We are worthy of better. It’s been said that the comforts of the rich come at the cost of the discomfort of the worker. I’m going to add to this and say the privacy, security, and dignity of the rich come at the self same loss for workers. 

It’s not good enough! You and I know that it doesn’t have to be this way. We also know that if you fix one thing another will pop up, that the endless demoralizing greed will find another way to get into your wallet. The policy you rightly back to ease a burden will leave another opening for the rich to add another weight to our already strained shoulders. The politician who makes the right sounds will still make you do all the lifting, only to find the rope has no end. While the “progressive” politicians hem and haw about making statements condemning the genocide of workers in other countries, or the disappearing of rebel workers in our own, we continue to ask. 

The brutal violence of being unhoused, denied medicine, blacklisted from jobs, imprisoned, or disappeared for speaking out is prolific and prosaic. It is an atrocity that begs an answer. The violence of erasure, of silence, of being told to ask the right way, or to wait is not endurable and has a limit. Our children deserve better. The violence of wanton destruction of our lands, all the while fenced out, and penned in, is no way for us to live. The violence of contingent rights, knowing that contingency means there were no rights to begin with. The violence of a gauntlet of armed men as we ask the state for bread, as though we weren’t shamed enough. They don’t care, no matter what we tell ourselves they don’t care.

In conflict different strategies and tactics are tried and abandoned, based on success or failure and good analysis of each. Effort must be made to examine the time and the context that we find ourselves and apply our minds as well as our hearts to the task at hand. Like Amilcar Cabral said; “Claim no easy victories and tell no lies”. This is difficult because of the nostalgia and creation of movement heroes. This can blind us to a couple of things, first not closely looking at the conditions that led to a specific action, and what was the ultimate outcome of the action. It can be difficult but hold onto the sentimentality of our hearts, while keeping clear headed while interrogating past actions. Honesty is the key. 

SPEAK MY LANGUAGE

The cult of civility is a death cult. This idea that we somehow owe respect or decency to those who harm the environment, poison our bodies, commit murder by denying life needs to working people is insane. Cool and distanced agreements done in all seriousness may have negotiations and even serious disagreements, but end with handshakes, photo ops and contracts. Then we are to argue about the men and women, what they wore, backroom talks, side channels and how they got there. Turning us all into court mandarins granting respect to people who not only have not earned any respect but indeed deserve scorn in the best circumstance and imprisonment in the worst. Yet when we look at their decisions, which we know cause damage to our class, we are outsourcing our fight, and taking on the mantle of courtesy policeman. Don’t ask too much, too loudly, disrupt the day. There is a better way, after all it’s the best system ever, and you should respect the process.

Decorum, politeness, and respect are a one way valve under capitalism. We are supposed to look to our betters as not only economically superior, but also superior in moral value. Our rulers obtained their lofty stations solely by luck or birth; it doesn’t matter, they are gifted and owed your deference. It makes no matter what their actual actions are, the demand is that you peasant, you lowly prole should bow and only approach on their terms. The price for a ticket is how much you can play by their rules. Yet their rules are always shifting. It may not be intentional, like it could be a matter of courtly fashion, who is to be appealed to, how they are to be approached. Here is the thing, if the rules are arbitrary then they aren’t rules. Time and energy that could be better placed in actual organizing instead gets devoted to parsing out the desires of the ruling class.

Byzantine is a word for a magical place where bureaucracy and court rules are so complicated so as not to function. A shifting ground with no footing. We all experience the dread of any state bureaucracy when we have to engage with it, or if the business is big enough an HR dept that has all these secret hoops. Even in revolutionary organizations the jargon and nomenclature acts as solidly as a gate and the above. The proper form, going to the proper forum, the proper channels, run up the chain of command, and so many more momentum-sapping words and practices are as complex as any esoterica the oldest religions practice. These are the rites of civility. The genuflections and offerings required to simply meet, let alone get a real hearing on any specific issue a worker has. Lifetimes have been spent in exclusive schools gaining entry into the cult. This is a matter of course for the ruling class. Those in the middle class strata it is expected that a person joins the cult. Get into a good school, intern, low level, middle, upper, these are the stations of a priesthood. Once there the priests resent and prevent anyone who tries to by-pass the steps they took.

The traditions of the cult are where we the workers ourselves adopt the precepts of the religion without thought, an automatic shortcut that too is as firm a barrier as any police line or wall. Our elders (of which I may well be one now) will talk of victories that were never complete but counted all the same. The practices that may have worked in the moment, or had traction 20, 30, 40, 60, 100 years ago and that becomes the only way to practice liberation. Showing the pictures of quiet dignity, never showing the frame before or after, the arguments, expulsions, strategies debated, tactics approved, or most importantly what the immediate outcome was supposed to be. The demand for conforming to tradition comes out as “we tried that”, or “X would never have been that aggressive”. And other more damning and momentum sapping dismissals of what the current phase of revolution is.

What does not offend the civility and decorum of our masters is the pain, hunger, homelessness, lack of medicine, the cold. Low wages, crappy work and injury don’t harm their delicate sensibilities. In an inverted morality the values of the boardroom, exclusive classroom, gated home high on a hill find offense when they are approached in any way besides the ways they dictate. Blithely the rulers and their servants can debate with mock shock and horror at the hunger, and death by exposure, and yet the cure is in their withheld wealth and stolen wages. They can make a speech, or hire a manager to “provide service”. They can even elevate a single compliant worker or two to advocate, and pat themselves on the back for their inclusivity. While people die. 

The rites, traditions, and respectability are trash. There is zero value to joining the cult of civility. The ruling class can deny medicine, foreclose homes, evict, fire, and police the working class in an anti-life effort to maintain appearances, no thought to the real harm done. Or worse understanding the harm but pushing it down the road to a more opportune moment. So what do you say to the worker in the meantime, please die quieter? By their lack of respect for the needs and lives of working people they deserve absolutely none in return. As the working class we do not owe them a damned thing, it is they who owe. There is no polite way to put out a fire. There is no civility in interrupting a murder. There is no place for respect to the home invader. Scorn, they have earned scorn. If we are to win liberation we must abandon once and for all the trappings of this cult, mock any attempts at asserting it, and demean its priests. After all, how do you treat a thief?

Back To Basics

This group Providence Worker Defense  has come together to build working class power. There are those of us who may have come from other political backgrounds, communist, socialist, anarchist, or no political affiliation or tendencies at all. The basic agreement is: 1) Current conditions are intolerable for us not the elites. 2) Fascism is ascendent. 3) Only an organized working class can change things. At its heart, it doesn’t really matter what politics you bring to the table; what matters is in your heart. We also believe that there are no “pure movements”; that flexibility and being informed by our own people is the way to liberation. What worked in a different time and place can inform and inspire us, but is not a road map; what we are doing is uncharted territory. We believe that only a revolutionary movement is the best self defense, that organizing and building rebel working class power is the best defense against the war the ruling class wages against us. We intend to hold ourselves to 2 basic practices: First, our ability to communicate directly with each other. And secondly, that we care about each other, build each other up. 

What We Believe

• The working class have earned the right to live secure lives of our own choice in community with each other.
• We believe in building worker power. With that we assert the right to organize independent liberated communities.
• Working class interests are our primary focus.
• We believe in the total liberation of the working class, organizing around the most exploited first.
•  The political parties will not and cannot serve the interests of the working class.
• Land: A good safe home for all working class people.
• Bread: Full access for all that sustains the working class, food, education, and art.
• Peace: An immediate disarmament and disbanding of all state military forces including the police. Immediate release of all prisoners of the class war.

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Why cant  I be you

The first leap a person can take into the revolution is to see what the material conditions actually are. Building up an internal courage to stare squarely at the real. It becomes harder and harder to look away. One does not have to form coherent arguments, yet, but can start to make out the outlines of a different topography. It’s a radical act to dig into the whats, and whys. There is a real downside though. You cannot unsee anything. It is in these early moments as a budding revolutionary worker that you are vulnerable to the mysticism and false logic of race and nation, but you can see through it. Not be tempted by the easy and pat answers for your present state, in the smooth bullshit of the conspiracy peddlers. That way lies madness. Leaping past the distraction and focusing with intention is revolutionary.

 As workers much of our lives are obscured. We pay rents but don’t see where our money goes. We toil at our jobs but never see how the profit made for our labor is spent. We get our utility bills with pages of inexplicable fees and charges. In housing or transportation perhaps we need a loan, yet the approval process is opaque and seemingly involves some arcane and mystical process. Secrets wrapped in mysteries, contained in riddles. None of it appears to make sense, let alone common sense. But as workers our lives are laid bare for every boss, landlord, banker, probation officer, cop,  social service person to see. The secrets only run in one direction. And yet, the bosses encourage us to keep secrets from each other, which we often do. Our pay, our rent, our bills we often hold close as state secrets. The ruling class knows if it were to be widely shared their monopoly on the hidden goes away. This isn’t to say put your shit on the street, but is a call to ask why?

I met an old VietNam veteran at the bus stop. He hadn’t had a significant meal in days and had been without a stable house for decades. With arthritis wracked hands, and a shaky voice he told me about how there was no person to talk to to get his benefits or many doctor appointments, it was always a machine. “If I could just talk to someone, I could get what I need, but all I get is machines.” The wall of secrecy between him and what he needs is real. It is revolutionary to put cracks in the wall to let light in. The question that needs to be asked is who? Who is in charge of the machine that makes getting a meal hard for the veteran? Who is it that owns the mortgage, that denies the loan or medical care. Who is harmed? Who benefits?

Boys Don’t Cry

There is a paralysis that happens to me when faced with everything. Even in normal times the feeling of absolute hopelessness. Trying to shake the feeling when I know that immobility doesn’t help anyone particularly myself. Lingering doubts and ongoing sadness when I see the effects of capitalism on the Earth. Or when I talk to former comrades who have given up, shrunk into apartments faces lit by the rage machine of our screens. Impotent horror at the slaughter of innocents, unable to separate the faces of frightened children from my own. It is hard to examine my own life, when bosses and politicians make the value of life so cheap. Holding the kids closer, claiming the moments when the world can get pushed further away. It’s a longing for flight. 

The thing is I know that though the feelings might be real they are not automatically true. It can be a struggle to parse the true thing through the noise, but it’s a good exercise and worth the effort. Pushing to think through the feelings and try to transform them. Not ignore or push down, but to examine what and where the feelings are coming from. Sort the real and true, where the physical manifestation of fear and insecurity show up as tense jaws, and cramped stomachs. It’s so complete and consuming, and exhausting. Having to think through what it is that my body and my mind needs is ongoing and true real effort. 

The instinct to pull close and close the blinds, shutter myself away is actually good. Being in a closer relationship with my family and friends in spite of the creeping darkness. Going to kids games, watching a movie, videos of funny accidents is everything in its own way. But that presents another feeling, resentment and anger at the people who would make these moments precarious. In trying to examine my feelings I try to place them, sometimes I do it alone, and sometimes I ask for help. I realize that it is not so much the internal work I always have to do, but that there are external factors that get to play with my emotional state. Not just the prosaic ones like small family arguments, or whether the kids’ rooms are clean, but larger and somehow more specific ones that are somehow deeply entwined in our current system. There is a loneliness built into the structures I live under. Every bit as oppressive and grinding as clubs and cuffs.

Remembering when my son was born and holding him, in awe of the hands, the tiny feet, the little scrunched up face. The days, which felt so long and the weeks and months flying by. The holding, changing, would be short lived. I remember coming home from work long day and night pulling ropes, lifting motors, covered in grease. I quietly come home to a house with the soft sounds of sleep. I knew little X would wake when he heard me shower to get the thick chain grease off my body. I softly picked him up and at once became hyper aware of how rough my hands were, that my callouses that pulled at the threads of my shirt would feel so rough on his delicate and new skin. That my touch, the thing I wanted and he wanted more than anything would scratch him. Trying to use the back of my hand and my forearm, the softer skin to stroke his back. Tears burning down my cheeks at the thought that I couldn’t touch my son.

The loneliness of those moments need to be addressed, the aching sadness that labor, that we may even love, can cause harm. What a price to put on myself. The feelings of failure, as a dropout never having a softer job, but destined to a life of hard labor. Even though I had participated as a radical for most of my life I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was personally responsible for this lack. Even though as a union organizer I talked about the dignity of work, the root value of knowing your worth. This led me to another jag of sadness. Am I lying? Is this basically dishonest to say that there is value in work when you are afraid of holding your own child. Where is the dignity in that? 

In the end though it is not a lie. All work has dignity and value, as does every worker. That this internal pain that I have felt is duplicated over and over, rough hands, dirty clothes and all. That the care that I need to offer to family and friends is of greater weight than the weight of work. The real sadness in my heart is the sadness of not sharing it, building a community around it, nurturing it until the sadness can transform. This is the role of revolution, and the revolutionary. Re-integrate the individual pain, loneliness, loss, and sadness into the love of recognition for those who suffer with you. Re-transform this into the shared struggle of connection through. Then as a worker alter it one more time into liberation. 

So with all this I am asking you to take the pain and reach out with it as a guide. I am hoping you can remember those moments where you were made small by choices you had to make, and put it into the world. The doubt you feel and share it. This is your first act as a revolutionary. The lonely times and the hopeless times are there and they are real, but they are also the fuel for the fire for better that burns in all of us. As a revolutionary a vision of a shared future can remain in the future, and will stay there until we make practice the act of sharing what we once kept as close and jealous possessions. Unlike the bosses and politicians I refuse to see myself in the cell of a spreadsheet, I ask you not to as well.  Together we can take our burdens and share them in defiance of the accountant and poll.

We may carry our pains as Islands but we can see that our island is one in an archipelago of suffering. That my pains and your pains have so much in common. We have all felt loss, isolation, individually but also as workers. The pain is unique to us as workers in declaration and manifestation. This sadness can transform to anger and rage, let it. It is unfair, it is wrong. Acknowledge that our shared mourning is worth all the effort to comfort.  The liberation of our work, and our lands is also a liberation of our battered hearts. The tears that burned lines into our cheeks are the medals of revolutionaries. That when we liberate and share the closely held hurts and make them our anthology of struggle we move the revolution forward. Through our tears we will sing the anthems of our victory.

Anger Means

Where were you friend when it all happened? When that girl was snatched by ICE. Were you arguing about the text messages, were you in awe of the long talking senator? Will you say at the bar years from now how hard you fought while glued to your screen, that you voted harder? What was it that hit your conscience as you argued about the strategies of the elites as a man died from exposure in the lee of the statehouse? Do you remember how calls to defund the police and abolish ICE were answered by you with “that goes to far”? Did the guy you voted for do all the things? Or did you have to get your neighbors to march to get him to hold up his promises? Did you get freer? Did it work? Did you help build the barricade around the company that makes the missiles that shred the children in a genocide? Or did you say that the politician almost said he would stop sending as many missiles and bullets? Did you truly believe that the colleges and schools were liberal bastions who support the free speech you cite so often yet never use? Are you busy looking at their faces so you never see what their hands are doing?

It is time to be frank, open, and honest. We are in a real existential crisis, actually multiple crises. Each one dire and taxing as large as the next, but we have become accustomed to being untruthful about it. We say we want to resist the 1984 2+2=5 yet we do that, and have been doing that. We see the burned children, the maimed mothers crawling through the rubble of cities lain waste, and get told not to think about that but the price of eggs instead. As if genocide is an afterthought. What lies will we tell ourselves in the future about how hard we fought clicking likes on memes that really spoke to you? The facts are that this country has been an ostensible democracy only since the voting rights act took majority effect in 1973, that is 52 years of democracy, it’s younger than me. But we tell ourselves mindlessly repeating the myths and lore of a past democracy that did not exist, and never wanted to be born. 

We repeat how “it’s like Germany in the 30s” when the truth is, it is like Alabama in the 70s, Kenosha in the 2020s. Our experience of fascism is home grown but it is easier to look elsewhere to clear our conscience. If we had to look at the red-lined, red-baited, and red-fanged history of here we could fight the coming menace more effectively. Just look at the congressional eugenics map of 1935. The program of forced sterilization that started in 1909 and continued to 1979, with judges even today making sterilization a function of sentencing. ⅓ of women in the colony of Puerto Rico were sterilized between 1950 and 1979. The legal Jim Crow laws made a continuation of slavery a guarantee, which continues today with slavery as legal punishment. It’s easy to say we hit the NAZIs before and we can do it again leaving out the segregated army and concentration camps full of Japanese families. How many tortured confessions by police, yet we say it was Germany. How?

So where were you my friend? Can I count on you in the future? There will be no promise of safety, and I can assure you it might be uncomfortable, but history requires us to act, our mirrors require us to act. Voting never worked, that is to say if voting worked we wouldn’t be in this mess. If the will of working people were made real utilities would be public, the air and water clean, we would have safe homes and good paychecks. But we don’t, and as long as we are in thrall to the myths and phony history it will get worse. Rooting our solidarity in our shared identity as workers can, if you want it. Remembering that it was strikes, sit ins, sabotage, resistance armed and otherwise that does work. We need honesty about that too.

So where are you friend? Will I find you defending a face over defending our people?  Can we count on you to act with the same determination that the parties beg for your money? Will I find you explaining why cutting certain people out is ok for the moment, or actively on the front lines of the class war doing what needs doing? Is your idea of liberation talking about how glad you are “you don’t live there” ignoring the darkness that gathers around us? I know when asked you will answer, because you know that this world has to change, that the choice is revolution or barbarity. When asked what you did when it all fell apart you can answer I did everything I could.

Here you are friend, I knew you’d come. 

Lenin

As I awake to go to work, getting ready to climb in the steel and make a living for myself and make a millionaire of someone else, I think to the possible. I invite you comrade to join me in commemoration of Vladimir IIyich Lenin’s birth 154 years ago. I am not writing this to celebrate a god, or to praise in worship a man, but to visit his place in my life. As a lower case communist, my experience with Lenin is of the heroic, the champion of the world altering Russian revolution and foundation of the U.S.S.R. As a Communist Party member Lenin means something else, that is what I will be writing about.

Right now we are watching a world in crisis, much as we did in the time of Lenin, old order is de-stabilized once hegemonies which were taken as an article of faith are shifting. Capitalism as an order is resorting to more and more extreme tactics of control and repression. Many of our Comrades have faced and are facing the brutalities of ancient superstitions, and current shackles that debt, fear, and the cruelties of our bosses. Recognizing this Lenin has presentented us with two distinct paths resignation, or struggle. As Communists we must fight the former and commit to the latter.

The most vital lesson of Lenin is unwavering commitment to the goal, practical understanding of the moment, and absolute resolution to socialism. Imagine with me Lenin sits with you over tea, he listens to your complaint and responds “What needs to be done?”. A question I have asked after I hear my coworkers complain (rightly) about the abuses of our bosses. This is our daily mission, what to do? How can I serve better the cause of revolution? How can I build a movement that is as resilient, flexible, and clear eyed as Lenin had? I guess what I am asking is that we look to the work of Lenin, apply our most critical mind, rigorously look at historical context, and then act.

Lenin worked through the chaff and distraction of palace intrigue and charted a course that was guided by a vision of the world that included the humble, the beleaguered worker, those engaged in the uncompensated reproductive, and recuperative work of care. This is the revolution, a revolution of the imagination, a revolution of the possible, a total upheaval of the existing order. Is the analysis dry? Is it tedious to discuss on end the minutiae of our shared responsibilities to the future? NO! 

In closing I offer this. We are the inheritors of Lenin, we are the children of the world up-ending Russian revolution. Like Lenin it is a luxury to wait for the moment, we must make the moment. We must hold the red banner high for all to rally. We must offer the gift of an unfettered imagination to the world of a shared future. The question posed by Lenin “What Is To Be Done” be amended to who is going to do it? For that to happen we must liberate our imagination, be clear about what we witness, act to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. We, my beloved comrades, are the ones who must. Charge through the false ideologies, center our actions, draw upon the lessons of the revolutions of the world and act. If some aren’t ready, make them ready, if some are scared, make them brave, if there is doubt, crush it with analysis. We will win because we must. We will win because Lenin asked us to. 

“Lenin walks around the world.

Frontiers cannot bar him.”

-Lanston Hughes LENIN. 

General Strike

Learned Helplessness

Fellow workers and friends let’s talk about the General Strike as the most effective tool of the working class. Now I’m not going to pretend that I am an expert in all revolutionary or economic theory, the names and stuff. I’m also not going to pretend that our intellectual foreparents don’t inform or provide the language we need. I know you have the depth and experience to not only understand but to make those words real.  I’m not writing to present theory or present abstract ideas but to get to the real, the obstacles, and opportunities. I’m writing to get to the meat of whether the General Strike is the most effective weapon for us as workers.

The Obstacles As I See It

Let’s start with the most impactful, the bosses. Our bosses absolutely despise the idea of any job action, completely.  A strike disrupts the core social order of work. It unseats the boss as the total and final word about work, pay, conditions, and more. A strike takes power, the boss will try everything to stop one. In the old days in the US that included everything up and including lynching. Today the boss will appeal to friendship, “but we’re a family” or “I thought we got along”, moving on to threats both physical and economic. We hear excuses of not being able to pay or improve because it will hurt the “bottom line”. The boss is asking that you put their needs above you and your family’s. Don’t be fooled.  But if it’s a small shop it’s in the boss’s interest to join the strike. The small boss not only will build goodwill, they could see an improved work life with better conditions for all. The small boss can’t afford the legal cost and endure the potential of a boycott to sustain themselves. It’s just better that they go along, after all we have to think about our bottom line.

Parasites

Now let’s talk about the parasites, Politicians. They will come in 2 flavors, but they will be the same person. There will be the politician that wants to address the workers, will speak the language, even walk a line, but then in the committee room, or with donors it will be anything but. They will try to dissuade by suggesting that they will act on your behalf, or that they are “really listening”. They are, and not to your benefit. The high flown words of service just mask narcissism. If you look at what we want which can be to re-humanize our work life all the way to owning the workplace, versus what they want which is to get re-elected means that they do not see you as power, but as a path to power. They want to act as mediary a thing we don’t need or desire, a strike is the direct democratic will of the workers, no interpretation needed.

Know Thyself

As a worker the first obstacle is a sense of place. The trade unions have done a huge disservice to us by giving a false sense of identity. Slogans about “we built the middle class” or our leaders talking about our “middle class” jobs purposely masks who we are to our detriment. We as workers are not the bulwark protecting the bosses like the actual middle class, we are workers, not gate keepers or enforcers of the system. Our needs must be absolute and the need to meet them non-negotiable. 

The Same Deep Water As You

Be selfish, jealously guard your family, your love, your people. Be bloody minded in the care you give, allowing no one to be a barrier. Take and  completely own your precious dignity. Be uncompromising in demands for respect. Only allowing yourself to be moved with only your consent. Leave no room for those who would wreck and disturb your worthy and diligent efforts to build a life. Any encroachment on your heart is unbearable. Build a wall to protect your heart and the hearts of the ones you love. Guarding always guarding against real and ongoing losses to soul and spirit. Over and over reminded yourself how fragile you and your community really are. This delicate heart of yours, the sacred bubble of family and friends, these are the things you value. We wouldn’t trade it for the world. These are our shared values.

In some ways our values choose us. We laugh easily with friends, and children, this means we value our families happiness. Taking a  sick day or pto to see a movie, read, or scroll means we value time. Proud that we can pack our things into a couple of bags and be ready to go means we value organization. Making a fancy date night dinner, because you value the love of your partner. There are so many things that have a true and deep place in our psyche and hearts. Our values make us do things we find difficult, like having a hard conversation with a partner, it’s also our values that make us listen. I’m not talking about the largely artificial rules some religions apply to us, those just graft onto our existing values. We appreciate when the bully gets knocked out because we value justice. 

When things are going good, the bills paid, kids fed, no one is sick, we express our values more generously. This is being in alignment with our values. This is the goal, the beginning of vacation friends on the beach put work a million miles away. The easy laughter and smiles, little hand holding, little kisses, it really doesn’t get better. We can live our values of love, full bellies, and happiness in those short moments. Then there is the insecurity, having to work more hours to pay an unexpected bill, and illness which becomes a time to express love, also becomes a moment to feel deep anxiety of loss, and insecurity. The rent may go up, a bus line may change, this all threatens our values. Forces us to make compromises on the things we truly care about. More work=less time with family and friends, less pay, or higher bills=less money for food, insecure transportation=less stability. These things take our values  out of alignment. When we choose to really look at it, material improvements like higher pay, lower rents, cheaper food are inextricably linked to our values. 

The capitalist values profit above all other things. Of course they have families, and loves of their own, but they believe what they value is more important that what you value. It is impossible to extract labor, or rents from someone and value their time or effort. The capitalist has to put themselves above all. It doesn’t matter what you need to keep your life together. Your values are not a line on a spreadsheet. The capitalist (or the little aspiring capitalist) practices a version of dictatorship where everything serves their interest. We might win small gains, like sick days, or vacation but generally these are fought by the capitalist and their mouthpieces in middle management, and media. We can take pride in our work, striving to do the best, but if our pride eats into profit, quality goes. If we have illness in our family, that requires our presence or are tired from caring for others, we are lazy. The list of ways the capitalist takes from our core values is endless and difficult. 

To selfishly guard our hearts, souls, and families we have to project out our values. Push what we believe is important out into the world. An act of vulnerability that can be challenging, but we know after the first word spoken it is shared. Love of family, respect, time, security, pride, and care are what we have. Everyday we live our values and struggle to keep them lined up with our lives. We know that our neighbors, friends and co-workers share so much, we hold our babies, we keep what we need and we share when we can. I’m not saying that as workers we are saints or angels, or the opposite. We are human and sharing our core values is a basis for solidarity, shared struggle and liberation. I know that in the grocery store we are all looking at the prices together. I know that when we go to the doctor for an aging parent we can feel so small. That the bills, fees, and taxes fall on all of us together. The boss knows this too, knows that by disrupting our values we are more docile, scared and compliant. They try to sell our values back to us through snakeoil, and “magic apps” that promise to keep us together when really they tear us apart.

By pushing our values into the world we get to see that workers all over the world share these core things. Whether in Pretoria or Providence, we all love in much the same way, we take pride in the same way, want time and security in the same way. We get to see that those who struggle on the margins of society too want the same things. The phony divisions and false consciousness like homophobia, ableism, racism, and all the biases presented to us to instill the bosses values on us have to be rejected outright, with the solidarity of our values. To get there first we need to recognize who we are. We are workers whose value to the bosses is only how much they can make from us. Recognize that as workers we share values, not what we can get from someone. That the things that take us away from our values is a struggle. That we can make it better.

To assert our values together as a working class is a revolutionary act. To take something so intimate as the pride of our lives, whatever that may be and share it, is the mortar that holds the bricks. It is a values revolution where we say together that family in whatever form that takes, time to live as we see fit, that no-one is pushed away is a social revolution rooted in the solidarity and struggle of our enmeshed lives. We will talk one by one root ourselves in our shared lives, brick by brick with the mortar of solidarity binding us together.  It’s past time to assert our values as life needs, and not a commodity. That it is transformation, not the vulgar transaction that gives life worth. That we come to recognize through this collective organization that for once and all time. An injury to one, is an injury to all.

Plainsong

I hand her the paper and she sits down next to me. It’s sunny and Kennedy Plaza is bustling with happy sounds. She has a backpack on her back, a child’s backpack on her front and groceries for the day. She is carrying so much. It’s a welcome minute to share a cigarette and just talk. She has some time to kill before the bus takes her to the family shelter. I perk up when I hear this, family shelter, there aren’t a lot of beds or space for families in the rough. Her husband is watching their 7 year old, he has applied for a job in Westerly, and is worried about keeping their spot. The job is 2nd shift and he’ll have to sleep out when the work ends. There is a curfew at the shelter and he won’t be back in time. She is working so hard to keep her family together. Real fear about how to save for a place, it could take months to get enough for a security deposit and rent. That and worried about her husband who will have to sleep out in Westerly because the buses stop running. 

Two children trying to speak through their tears, the community offering words of support as their voices choked by sorrow. Their father was ripped away from them by the modern slave catchers of ICE. In the shadow of the for profit exile transit camp, Wyatt Detention Facility, the ones trapped inside pound on the windows, their father among them. Their mother expressed love and determination through her powerful voice. WE FUCKING LOVE YOU, WE NEED YOU HOME! The insecurity  and shaking disruption felt by everyone present. Determined face knowing that this time it is different. The community organizers and those present with tear stained cheeks holding witness and encouraging joy in the face of atrocity.

A Vietnam veteran with a broad smiling face stops to talk with me about what’s going on. The recent cuts have hit him hard. He hasn’t had more than one peanut butter sandwich to eat in the last three days. He smiles to keep from crying, he says. Trying not to let the despair get to him. So many of his friends are gone from death by mental illness. He is determined to survive in spite of all the hurdles and cruelty. The VA has a long long wait and he needs his medicine, but he also knows he can’t take his medicine on an empty stomach. So maybe the waiting isn’t so bad. He will go back to the shelter and try not to think about the pain of hunger, or that he doesn’t have what he needs.  He tells me he is happy to sleep in a chair to give the bed to someone who needs it. Generosity in defiance of need.

Drawing out the picket line sign, excited chatter for the coming action. This time the message will come out. Harassed for years by employers for simply asking for conditions and wages to be better. He has been doing this since highschool. A pain in the ass and a knack for bringing people together with focus and militancy. He joins the proud ranks of union organizers before him and is proud to extend the tradition. Driving his partner to work in the flower fields of Washington pulled over windows smashed and yoked up, disappeared. The bosses he was struggling with breathe a sigh of relief. 

Blinded by a childhood illness, his beat up cane scraping the ground, he was put out of the shelter for the day, no thought to his safety. Unsteadily walking among the crowds of teenagers and business people who don’t even look up. His presence and need is just an obstacle to the day. Another old man weighed down by his own bags takes his arm and leads him to the right stop. A gentle expression of care in the middle of the day. The two old men shuffle to the benches. Just a moment of setting before the winding bus routes to the open places on a cold day, the times a jumble of overlaps and missed transfers. The cruelty of a scarcity of transportation. 

She retired years ago, then she pauses, well she wanted to retire years ago but you know life. Her rent went up almost 40% and she can’t afford not to work. The bills are higher and higher without explanation, and less service. She talks like it is normal to skip a meal, or never turn on your stove to cook. These are the things we do automatically. She knows and shares that things are going to have to change or she doesn’t know what will happen. Resigned to working to death and unable to have time to rest. Or knowing she will end up indigent in a nursing home, possibly unvisited and unloved. 

I had met him before and he admitted he couldn’t read and talked about how he has a roof today but doesn’t know about tomorrow. I find him again at the bus stop to continue the conversation.  I offer to read what is on our paper. I tell him I don’t care if he can’t read. We can read it together. I read to him that all this that is happening is a war on working people, and that it won’t end unless we get together. We talk about how we are working class and all the other stuff just gets in the way. He tells me how he wishes that they would talk to him, not continually send him to a website he can’t read. He misses his family.

All these things can seem disconnected, and often we organize around these specific issues which are good and necessary. But we also have to recognize that this is a class war on all fronts, a total war against the working class. The veteran, the unhoused, the union organizer, the child, the disabled, the forgotten are workers, all of us. The endless cruelties and murderous heartlessness. The father in Wyatt is connected to the VietNam veteran intimately, both victims of capitalist imperialism, the elder struggling in need of comfort and service is a choice that capitalists and their politician servants about his worth and whether he deserves. As revolutionaries we demand an end to the conscription of the working class into misery’s army. That it is not enough to reform a system whose own inertia can only crush workers here in Providence or overseas. A revolutionary end to a system where genocide is normal. No politician can do it, they can just delay. Only us, it’s only us as the working class that can do it. This is a call for all workers to engage in unrelenting and unapologetic struggle against those who collect a dollar on destroying lives. 

  Show Me

Comrades, there are times when the scale of things can feel beyond the possible. That dreams of better, or more shared, get further away. The news is so bad and seems to get worse in ways that are at once of a piece but also scattered. It is easy to fall into despair and withdraw bear witness, which is a thing but also relieve yourself of the responsibility of taking affirmative action. You can watch as working people and dissidents are disappeared or are exiled to concentration camps. It’s not a surprise that we all have these moments. I certainly have and live with these ideas, and I fight them but sometimes the darkness can come close to winning. I hope, and hope for the feelings to pass, wishing for a reset. Wondering if these images of futility that can clog my neurons will take a kind of root, becoming a cynical part of my personality as an auto immune defense. Comrade I don’t know if you get these feelings as well, but if you do we will share more than just barricades.

There is more, so much more. Last night I got to witness a glimpse of what it can be. I was gifted with witness. Last night a thing happened that holds all the promises that before were never made. A harvest of the sleepy crust clouding my eyes. Oh comrade it was so much to take in. It wasn’t a pitched battle with the police. It wasn’t the presentation of macho militarism in street battle against the fascist gangs. No comrade, there were no water cannons, tear gas or rubber bullets but it was a thing every bit as important and life changing. There were no inspiring speeches(sort of) but I was moved. It was an intimate moment nervously finding its feet, then holding hands and running. It was also a thing that proletarians just like us are doing all around the world, a meeting.

The workers who came devoted, and generously shared their most powerful minds and words. Comrade we were so amply full in our hearts that the little room could not contain us. Unemployed, retired, parents, abled, dis-abled, new faces, old faces. Our multiplicity of identities coalesces into recognition of each other and building each other. Each worker present, and presents. The fears of not knowing enough swept away with sharing once esoteric ideas and theory become a familiar shared language. No this isn’t a simple thing: the breaking of internal barriers and social norms, creating a familiarity that hadn’t been present at the start, but comfort took command. No comrade this was different.

Processes can be difficult, facilitation, stacking and accurately recording the important words can be seen as a burden, as I’m sure you know comrade, but not last night. Agreed accommodations made for individual workers, while maintaining the collective’s spirit. There were disagreements and potential mis-steps all pushed back on with solidarity and inclusion. 

Excited talk with collaborative overlapping building and building. Hours of effort given with kindness and generosity. The older comrades, some previously burned out, found new light. Comrade, listening with eager ears as expressions of solidarity are made for workers in far away places who are facing horrors heaped on horrors, a cozy internationalism of a kind I imagine we both have dreamt of.

We spoke of risk, and confrontation in a way I haven’t heard except in small action groups. The workers pledged commitment to laying the bricks of class consciousness, to the bricks of class solidarity, to the bricks of class struggle, to build working class liberation. Nothing was going to be enough, because lives are at stake here in Providence, but Gaza, and the labor camp of El Salvador. There were no idle dreams as the comrades spoke, they spoke of the personal harms they experienced, they naturally placed those harms into each other’s hands in an act of trust and hope.  Last night we chose our children, we chose the Earth, we chose revolution. Honest talk dispensing with the sacredness that some organizations are held, but with total respect and no dismissiveness. There was talk of action, but not for the sake of action, but rooted to show the contradictions of capitalism. Deep analysis done with grace and care measuring effectiveness and paths to escalation, and to victory.

Comrade, I know that there are meetings like this happening all around the world, and last night I know the workers who were there would be welcomed as true revolutionaries at any of those far flung meetings, as I know that any comrade would be a happy addition here. We learned to speak not as the initial cry of the infant, but with the clear voice of the  veteran. There was anger, resentment, absolutely, but it was placed into the laps of those who harm us, threaten us.There was joy and laughter even though we know the path will be long and difficult. Comrade, last night workers arrived as strangers, spoke as comrades, and left as friends. This was as revolutionary a moment as has ever existed.

Pictures of You

 The story of capitalism is the story of taking us away, removal, distancing, isolating. This is called by Engels and Marx alienation. As workers we are alienated from what we produce, we give over our labor, our time, our bodies, our minds and we only take home a tiny fraction of the money we made from all that total effort. We also get alienated from our homelife, taken away from our children, our expression, our partners, gardens, art, that takes a psychic toll. We are all familiar with that. We get addicted to drugs and drink, which alienates us from our own feelings and trauma. This separation makes children strangers, partners lonely for the person they fell in love with. The alienation takes love away. 

There is even more to it. The years of capitalism have destroyed our Earth not just by the literal poisoning of the land, air, and water. Like Mashapaug Pond, a once rich and healthy vital part of Pokanoket and Narragansett nations, now so polluted by Gorham Silver with cadmium that to even touch the water with bare skin can make you sick.That is an alienation that takes our water away, it also denies our people of food. What happens when we are physically separated from the land? When we learn that what has the appearance of health like Mashapaug Pond but can kill you? Nature itself becomes what can do harm. We get alienated from the truth.

As workers we are taught about nature, its magic diversity, beauty and all that. We get the national geographics all sponsored by Shell, Sunoco, and other monsters who intersperse the magazine with cool pictures of oil rigs, and stories of huge pictures of mines, it’s a magazine that is just one big contradiction. What we are really taught is that nature is over there, not here, but out there. Nature is a thing to visit, maybe. As we learn this we want to see it, daydream about it, the whales, the massive cliffs. We get alienated from nature.

The emotional alienation from connection to our families, our loves, our restless minds is an opportunity for the capitalist. Our desire as workers endlessly remains out of reach, leaving emptiness that can only be filled by anything to bring us joy. Often those things are just that. We are bombarded with a new product to fill the desire to be soothed. We are sold things over and over again to make us feel better, and it may for a moment, but we know it’s hollow. We know we don’t need a new app to help us with our laundry, but for a little while we use it and its little tasks and inputs make us feel a little in control, knowing we’re not. Even in community we get commodified, the social apps becoming the middleman in relationships that were once one on one.  We get alienated from our desire.

The biggest psychic, and emotional harm is this ideology of alienation that is intrinsic to capitalism is that we are somehow not connected. Our minds, bodies, and hearts long for connection. As workers we try to claw back little bits of time, but these little fight backs are fleeting as good as they are. We spend a little more time at the bar or stay up too late, in a kind of spiteful act against the sleep you MUST have for work. Even alienated from our natural sleep wake pattern. The cries of our children begging us to stay home, or walk them to school. Worried our calloused hands are too rough for our partners skin. Alienated from life.

The weirdest thing is that wanting a working class social revolution is to remove the alienation. The Earth cannot bear our separation from her, our hearts cannot bear separation from each other. Our bodies, lives, and minds ache for reconnection. How can we love fully if we are so exhausted, or anxious that we cannot be in harmony? How can we restore relationships with our children when so much of our lives get devoted to work? We cannot raise strangers. A worker’s revolutionary goal is to build a system that can provide for all. Not just the immediate material needs but maybe inadvertently provide for the emotional and connected life. Revolution is the realization that the working class is nature, there is no outside, there is no visit. The same way we may see our cities as grey and unhappy places, there are also moments of beauty. We too are not always beautiful, but we have our moments. As revolutionaries we value Earth because we are Earth, each worker is precious as a clean Earth is precious. There can be no compromise in defense of the Earth or in defense of the working class.

Risky Business

The hits keep coming, it’s almost impossible to avoid because of the scale and breadth of the crimes the state is commiting. It’s important to acknowledge that it is the state that is capable of this. We the working class have revolutionary potential, the state carries fascist potential. Now we are seeing the state doing all the things it always had the potential for and occasionally carried out in the past. The gagging of Black Panthers in court, the killing of Black student protesters, convict leasing, the Patriot act are all expressions of fascism. A perfect example of this is liberal and intellectual withdrawal of support for the Black Live Matter uprisings. Many are still in prison like Khalif Miller, or the 14,000+ exposed to the carceral system. Khalif said “ I see what they’re trying to use my incarceration to stop other people from protesting”. Or Mumia Abu Jamal, Ray Luc Levasseur. The disappeared. 

It is a false consciousness to believe that this is a “nation of laws”, it’s a fantasy that gets told to re-enforce the hyper draconian punishment system. The point of this is to dissuade protest or allow resistance to develop. Momodou Taal, Mahmoud Khalil, Dr. Rasha Alawieh has stood up for working class people in occupied lands, their words are their crimes. Just like the Los Angeles 8 who fought for Palestinian liberation and faced exile 14 years ago. This is all to say that our legal rights are non-existent. Organizing a union, standing up to police, demanding accountability, anything that challenges capitalism, builds working class solidarity, fights against imperialism puts a target on you. The state and capital will use all of its considerable power to destroy lives, particularly because the state and capital do not see us as people, but only as tools for labor, or wealth extraction.

Malcolm X, also a victim of state violence, correctly identified that Black people were an internal colonized population in the US, and that there was a link to anti imperial movements around the world. When Malcolm X visited Gaza in 1964 he said of  Palestine and Gaza in particular “The Palestinian struggle is not just a cry for justice. It’s a blistering cry for the most fundamental human rights”. The fearlessness of all the above have paid with lives, freedom and stability. One thing it is important to remember is that with all this suffering, oppression and death is that their voices, their speech is intrinsic to their humanity. Their words and their organizing is carried out “as if “ we had freedom, organizing as if we are capable. They spoke and spoke without apparent care for consequence, a necessary condition of free speech. 

One thing that is important to hold onto is they all acted knowing that they challenged the entire relationship of capitalism, imperialism, and militarism to working people. That decorum and civility had to be secondary to the primary focus of stopping the relentless death drive of the capitalist system. The polite class, the middle class of pundits and politicians are quick to shout down aggressively anything that violates their sense of decorum. This civility is a check on speech. The middle class uses its media and academic tools to silence, stifle, or isolate any push back. Risk all of it takes being at risk and that is the center of it. 

As revolutionaries we do not have time to accept bourgeois illusions of “freedom” we have to recognize that these pretty words are just flowers hiding the chains. Being kind, loving, and free with our fellow workers is central to our liberation. But this is a thing reserved for our fellow workers alone and not for the genocidal maniacs who are the ruling class. They can take their handcuffs off “civility” and shove it. There is no “correct” way for the working class to use our voice, there is no palatable way to stop atrocity. There is no gentle end to genocide.

Though we may try to mitigate it, there will be risk, there has to be. If our demand is a social revolution and a rebuilding of society to one where the working class is the dominant class we must accept the burden of risk. Even genteel academic speech can render a comrade to a blacklist or black site. So if we are being truthful about the threat that state and capitalists pose, we recognize that it is existential, lives are at stake, then we have to acknowledge then that it is our duty as revolutionaries to stop it by any means necessary. There will be confrontation, we will have to disrupt, heighten the contradictions, be midwives to the world that aches to be born.

 There is a future to win this is risky business.

We Can Be Experts

I don’t care if you don’t know how, I don’t care if it’s your first time. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how, I don’t know either. You know that you have to do something, I know you are scared, I’m scared too. There is so much and the darkness at the edges is real and our fear for ourselves, the integrity of our family, our jobs, homes, even our minds. The anxiety of not knowing, the very ground becoming unstable. The sadness of our future that once was long and now to have long dreams is a decadent luxury when it is the coming morning that dictates the limits of our imagination. 

We make and continue to make the things that build our world and our access to it was always limited, now more so. A harder world. A colder world. A darker world. The constant guard against the moral harms of engaging closer to the hardness, knowing that it might ease a burden. There is no promise we now realize, there never was. The pained laugh of witnessing cruelty to get by. We both know it was supposed to be better. But we are the ones who make things, with our hands and minds.

The scolding experts create new hierarchies in places that promise liberation. If you do it, you will do it wrong. The constant barrage of words and images lying in their reminders of the petty differences that give us identity. Will you use the wrong words? Yes. Will you know who wrote the book? No. Will you be uncomfortable? Yes. We haven’t written the dictionary of our liberation yet, the revolutionary biographies haven’t been written yet, the shelter of solidarity hasn’t been built yet. The encouraged silence, and learned difference to the expert paralyzes us when we meet together. 

No one prepared us for when we slip into totalitarianism that it would be dull. Yes the news and feeds shout and cry demanding attention, but we’ve heard it before. No school taught us of the grey slog that life like this would be. Even the victors seem dulled and dour. We can fill our days with work, sleep, work but there is a longing inside us, an ache and hunger for more. It’s time to satisfy those pangs. 

We may not have the answers, and we may not know exactly where we are going. No matter what, we are going together. The feeling that there is more, more for all of us is a real feeling and should be embraced. The options present to us are either more of this terribleness, restoration of the previous badness, or liberation. Too many lives are at stake to accept the first, the second delays the inevitable, but the third offers a chance to reset the relationships, try and ensure that society has room for all and a cleaner brighter future. But for that to happen we do have to let go of somethings and step up. 

Poverty of the Spirit

Real hunger, grinding want, and long hours aren’t the only things that we as the working class have to deal with. We live under a system that places maintaining its power above all else. We know that the capitalists will kill to survive, but they also want to kill the idea of revolution. In the capitalist’s world view being the bully is a virtue, viewing human beings as tools, sharing, solidarity, and empathy are weaknesses. Their idea that the tacky snob, the racist, the homophobe are good. This has a grinding effect on our lives and communities. We get absolutely destroyed by the constant enforced ideas of  fear, mistrust, ignorance and hatred that  capitalists bring with them. This oozes into every aspect of working class life, from safe high paying jobs and those at the bottom. 

Partner violence, sexual assault, drug abuse, drunkenness, racism, bigotry, misogyny, robbing each other and snitching to the pigs are often pastimes for working people. We cannot pretend or lie about the condition we are in as a working class. The ruling class wants nothing more than for us to hide behind our locked doors eyes glued to our media, living isolated and lonely lives fueled by the outrage machine into deep mistrust of our fellow workers. Our bellies may have food for the day but we are starving for connection, community and solidarity. We are dying because we need revolution.

We protect our morals with excuses like “he’ll probably spend it on drugs”. Its no surprise that some of us give up hope and self respect and turn to the bottle, the needle, swindling pastors, or even fascism. This is poverty of the spirit. It’s different but in every way as deadly dangerous as being broke. Put both together and things look grim.

Right now our lives are falsely divided. Work (or searching for it) and community (or lack of it). The days of mill housing are gone and we travel further and further for jobs, because of this there is really no connection between the two. On the one hand you have your community which supposedly can be affected by a vote, and then you have job which is under the dictatorship of the boss. It is possible to remove that artificial barrier to the landscape of liberation and build a working class future where we decide our whole lives for ourselves. We want self determination.

Love  Song

This is a love song. It’s a song sung everyday. Sometimes it’s a blues, a march, or melody happily resting on our lips. Its rhythm constant and shared, its words sometimes shouted in rage or sweetly sung to rest weary arms and legs. The notes picked out with the staccato clinks of the cans from the bin into the bags strapped to the liberated shopping cart.  The beat is each footstep in the fulfillment centers, and back of house tanks. It’s the happy comic opera in the coffee-break room. The harmonies of laughter, angry shouts, serious whispers, and excited words soaring out of our chorus. Each of us lending our ears, and voices, each one of us adding new bars and libretto. Our love song is ancient and will go on.

We hear her stirring in the crib, knowing that this added sound, new sound has made you so happy. This verse has two parts: joy and fear. This delicate soft warm body with cries that belie their size. The lullaby is triumphant as the most pompous austrian. Knowing that those soothing words are an endless chant that was sung by your dad, his dad, his dad. The soft song is sung to soothe yourself as you imagine the possible.

The arias of mothers of children taken too soon by the greedy, and bloody. All eyes damp our voices cracking as we sing out the names of the dead. Ahmad Arbery! Tamir! The pain in the words as the solo becomes a chorale refrain. 16 bars on the jail cell door, the words sometimes mumbled, sometimes clear as Rakim. The clicks of the cuff, the rip of the zip tie, the pounding of the gavel a quickstep march in counterpoint to the slow requiem of lives lost or exiled to our archipelago of prisons.

We hear the pop, pop, pop of the nail gun on the roof, the shouted songs of calling for more shingles. Balancing on the pitch, hats shielding from the sun, calling out in harmony for more and faster punctuated by the paradiddle of the compressor starting. These words, their part has to be done because the faster the tempo the more they will make. This piece is paid by the piece. 

The false finale of the bus tub being dumped into the scrub sink, waiting for the tempo to slow. The moment will come when the line will join in your part when the clang of the hobart rings out. These are songs of hope, its words ring with the dirty silverware, the hope for more hours, hope of the promise your friend made about the new place that will be great. Hope that the rush ends soon.

The bass rumble of the diesel spooling up, the great black puffs of smoke add stage effect to this boast. It’s all of it the puffed out pride of knowing you move it all, love on your part. Not all the words are proud, some of the words lonely, a song of weariness, a song of a home so far away. Every day a new stop adds a new voice to a longer day. 

Sweet sounds of the liftgates dropping, this verse faster and faster. The steward calling and the crew responding. POINT READY! The riggers above booming, the pushers below HAUL AWAY! A hundred times over. Singing out little fights, an improvisation of new insults and jabs, all lovingly sung out. If we can make this verse faster we can get paid for eight and work five. LET’S GO! The steward calls out as it starts again. The singers have to go home but want these lines to repeat in the parking lot laughing over beer and story.

Echoing sadly under the bridge, the cold biting through the dirty coat. The last of the fireball nip a chaser to a hungry stomach. Singing sadly, words of remembering. Recalling the soft touch once felt, the hard pavement you now feel. Singing of your triumphs, words only you know. The lonely words hoping to be a duet. The words come slower as the shivering overtakes. Singing a duet alone as it becomes harder to find the breath. Singing through the tears as realization that these are the last words and the cold will add the coda. 

This is a love song to us, to our work. This is a love song to what we make, how we share. It’s our song. We are told that the words are obscene, too loud or it’s the wrong time to sing.  The people who have no right to hear it, the cruel, the heartless who only see a “human resource”, they have no right to our song because we are a choir of soloists of cozy virtuosi, not a resource. Sometimes discordant, but always singing, waiting and working for when the full harmonies begin. And when that happens we’ll be singing when we’re winning. This is a love song to us.

LANDED

A place of your own, a warm place to sit and shake off the day home. Raking the quahogs, pouring the customer’s coffee all these things require land. Land can be thought of as more than the dirt under our feet. Land is the very underpinning of how our society is arranged. Not in an abstract way but in a practical and real way. Where we go, how we are allowed to go, travel and all of that is our relationship to land. A long time ago before settlers came most land was held in common, shared and worked together, as was the shoreline and forests. Throughout most of human history land was our common wealth. As with most things harmful it was England that developed the “Enclosure Acts” in the 1600s. This closed off common land and established private ownership of the land. This was an exceedingly violent process, as it was throughout europe.

The process of privatizing the land wasn’t completed until really the late 19th century. Every place the enclosure happened was brutally violent. The word “villain” comes from the word villager to describe a person who attacks the new “landlords”. Robin Hood is one such villain. This privatization of a common good resulted in scarcity, speculation, homelessness and the most brutal violence. Enclosure is one of the processes for the genocide here, and a motivator for slavery, and an end to growing food as collective effort, now it was for money.  New laws of vagrancy, trespassing, and poaching filled prisons, slave ledgers, and workhouses. Enclosure ended the practice of working the land and it now became another degraded thing to exploit.

It gets even grosser the more this new system is practiced. It causes the beginning of the wage system, the debt system, and large-scale policing. The destabilization of the millenia old system of sharing forced millions into debt bondage, and starvation, the Potato Famine was a result of forcing farmers to grow cash crops instead of the traditional life sustaining foods. Closing off shorelines prevented fishermen from feeding their communities and so much worse. The mortgage system which applied to enslaved African workers as well as the land, both were considered “real” estate, a telling phrase. 

I accuse!

I accuse this country of being a death cult. A country with a distinctly eroticized love of guns and blood. A country whose foundational myths are rooted in terrorism and genocide. I accuse the liberal for remaining at home in comfort as blood is spilled from Kenosha to Kurdistan, whose feeble cries of reform are drowned out by the sound of rockets hitting homes, and billy clubs hitting heads. I accuse labor for trading in narrow comfort while ignoring the broad suffering, all the while shouting about being middle class ignoring the fact that we are working class. I accuse politicians whose self interest and duplicity sacrifice our lives, spill our blood and say our rage should be reserved for the ballot box. I accuse progressives for not fighting hard enough. Progressives who gentrified our homes jack up our rents, until they have children, then they leave the  inflated rents behind. Never once considering that eviction, denial, and removal are violence. I accuse the pragmatist who only sees the material, never the people. I accuse Black leadership who have steered our people away from revolution, who tell us to be satisfied with Black faces in high places. I accuse the churches for keeping doors and minds closed, where there flocks are led to act against our sisters as they rape our children. I accuse the schools where we are taught conformity and white supremacy, where there are more secrets and myths than facts. I accuse our prisons whose very existence is a shame and a blight on our nation. I accuse those who see the flag and whose pulse quickens when they see a ribbon bedecked uniform and race to tongue the boot all the while ignoring the soldier veteran. I accuse those who believe in revolution of only believing in tactics, never in the work, the actual work of revolution.

I offer no solution, I offer no place for comfort, I offer no solidarity, I offer only a mirror. I offer that there is no memory for America, there is no truth offered, only lies. Lies that start from the tea party where whites donned brown face to start a war. Lies like the red white and blue represent freedom but was a flag of slavery for far longer than the stars and bars. No memory of the uncounted millions of native peoples, including natives of African nations who were killed for land and money, who are still enslaved for your chocolate, and lithium.  No names of the families who occupied the land you are reading this on, while plaques celebrating the gangsters are on the great houses. You enjoy your meals with no thought to the mines and unexploded bombs in S.E. Asia. You sit without knowing of the eliminationist war on the Filipino people. The death squads in Central America who were trained right here in Georgia barely cause a stir. Ken Saro Wiwa swings from a noose on an oil derrick while you commute. 

However, the people ‘s memories are long.

 As I write

Dear Comrade,

As I rush to put words on a page, the thoughts run and hit each other like so many bumper boats. Getting clear ideas together and in a form that makes sense to me can be a struggle and tangent on tangent can make getting to the root of what I’m trying to say difficult. So I ask for patience, but I also ask that you read generously, and give me some grace.

In me and how I see myself is as an organizer, well that is one aspect, but it is core to my identity. With that is a sense of ongoing disappointment in any accomplishment I get to be part of. Sometimes I blame others for not seeing the next horizon as it seems so clear to me. Completely forgetting my own struggle to make ideas makes sense to me. It’s no one’s fault but my own. I experience society the same way we all do. I’m bombarded with the same concepts and images that can make us feel so isolated.  I am not special in the least.

Serious mistakes and failures, the memory of each sit with me and keep me awake many nights. The friendships I treated too lightly, loves I took for granted, all the while doubting my worthiness of love. Giving grace and forgiveness to others as I stubbornly refuse to extend the same courtesy to myself. I can organize everything except myself. Fear of failure, fear of reprimand, terror at the start. Hearing so clear the voices saying why it’s not possible or that this could be dangerous or harmful. 

Trying to build a movement means going against the grain, getting used to the negativity both externally and internally. There is no secret, but maybe it is a way of seeing that is different than what it is now. Hoping that the evangelical, the mystical, is not  part of or seen as the politics of revolution, yet still make it beautiful. Heroes yes, saints and gods no.  Performing a constant gut check to make sure I’m not falling into the counter revolutionary garb of a priest, or inviting people to walk into a personality trap. It’s not a revelation, it’s learned, it’s not divine, it’s so human to want to be free.

A regular life with happiness and contentment is what I want, but it’s also what I want with you. I don’t want my struggle to make rent, or feed my kids to be shifted to someone else. I need the hard burdens relieved for myself and for you. You and I can spend our lives pushing the rock up the hill, always pushing, never seeing that there’s only so much room at the summit. Let’s stop pushing  the rock together. All the hours of doubt, and self interrogation are worth the moments of connection, each instance of liberation with you.

Yours With Love At The Barricade

Mike Araujo

Lifting The Veil

One thing that is honestly good about right now is that the veil has been lifted. No longer can any of us say things are working as planned or hoped. Gone are the sweet days of looking at a candidate and thinking they will bring real change. The sweeping and swift radical change that the trumpistas have done puts paid to the idea of incremental change or patience. It all could have happened if. Waiting may have been excused because we were under the thrall of a politician or party, maybe it made sense because of what our leaders said, maybe in earnest, that we would get there just hold on and trust me. Not any more.

If you voted for “harm reduction” the question that gets begged is; how come we didn’t act for “harm elimination”. The supposed reform party has proved feckless in the extreme, after screaming that “this is the end of democracy” while begging for money and then sitting arm in arm with the threat personified is not opposition, its not resistance, its collaboration. Simply they lied, just like the other side. Now we can see that they are both bosses’ parties , and you are just an instrument of their power.

You can see that machinery of state comes down to just brutality without end, you may not be on the receiving end today but you may be some day. You can see clearly. Drowning in fees and little liftings from our wallets is exhausting and demoralizing, makes you feel like all you are is a thing to be taken advantage of, an object. You take your family to the beach only to find your pockets $100 lighter after all the parking concessions etc. Now you can see that you are the mark and it sucks to be played.

I’m not writing this to make you feel bad about what you already know. I’m writing this to pull the flowery cover off of our necks so that we are better able to see the chain and cut it. Conditions were intolerable before trump and his gangsters, and if we allow it they will be worse or at best remain the same after. Is this what we dream of? Is our desire for a safe and clean world for all of us that it even lives outside of the borders of our dreams? It does not have to be this way.

From the time we are small we know the differences between right and wrong, in fact as children we often have a heightened sense of justice. We can recapture that. All the petty tricks, the little humiliations, the grinding way of our dignity can be stopped. If we choose it. Those who divide us, are the same people who steal from us. We spend so much time looking at their faces, listening to their words we don’t see their hands jammed in our wallets. We know that the function of government from whichever side of the aisle is to make the theft as frictionless as possible. Here is the thing though, they need us, we don’t need them. It’s literally that simple. 

Power

The determination necessary for us to overcome is real and it will be difficult. There is no form of revolt that comes without sacrifice, and those sacrifices will be felt. To live in opposition requires us to live at an acute angle to power, offer a challenge to power, to be honest about power. To be in opposition is to seek a title, but never claim it. Those titles that we seek are the only thing those who currently hold power can give us that has any real value. Dissident, rebel, resistance, are not names we can give ourselves but honorable names that tell us who we are in relation to power. If the movement does not get those titles bestowed on it then the movement does not pose a real challenge to power. We must directly challenge power, and seek to replace it with worker power, our own power. We must seek title and power. 

We are taught from a young age the Lord Acton quote about power corrupting, but we are never taught why he said it. Lord Acton was royal and hated the idea of the people having a say in their own affairs. He saw this devolution of power down to the rabble as against god and that only those anointed by god, like himself, were worthy enough to wield power. This changes the phrase. But that old degenerate Acton did understand power, and the direct threat it posed to his peers in the great houses and the capitalists who were well entrenched by that time. He knew that the strikes, proto revolutions that were happening in the industrialized world, and the indigenous resistance that was also happening posed an existential danger to the comfortable and decadent hierarchies to himself and his peers.

There is a story about the circus elephant and the chain. The elephant wore the chain from the time it was born, the chain was too heavy for a baby elephant to break. She grows and the chain stays the same size. She grows to the massive size of an adult elephant and she could easily break the chain. She grows to adulthood, far larger and stronger than her jailers but still believing that she cannot break the chain. In turn she has her own baby and watches as the chain is put on her infant’s leg. Had she known her strength she would have shattered the chain, and prevented her child from being shackled. Her power was there all along.

The power that is used against us prevents us from having access to the very things we as workers produce. Housing, food, medicine, education, art, and safety are all delivered to those with power, our bosses, from us regular workers. It is time to up-end this arrangement. Our current moment illustrates how fragile the relationship really is and because of that we are forced to act. Simply if we the working class have no right to land, education, medical care, or the comforts we have produced for centuries then the ruling class have no right to peace. It is not enough to ask for a smaller chain in the form of reforms, but to remove the chain ourselves. It’s time we get bestowed the title of rebels.

Giving away power is a constant act of supplication that is demanded of us workers. This takes numerous forms all with their own champions. From voting to prison, alienating us from our own power is the constant. On the job we give over complete and total power to our bosses, we sometimes can mitigate the worst abuses by organizing a union, but only to a degree. In our neighborhoods we give up power to politicians whose only interest is a vote or donation, and whose job is to act as an obstacle to the formation of worker power. The police, the bureaucrats, etc, are all ways we give up power. 

Iconoclasm does not mean to replace one icon with another, it means to destroy the icons, slaughter the sacred cow, to usurp the current status. It absolutely does not mean to repaint, or freshen up the icon, it means removal altogether.

Peace.

The two people laugh by the terminal building, the cop slowly creeping up behind them in his car until he is inches right behind them. Blasting his siren he chases them away. The old men wrapped in blankets hunched back to the wind. The light rain making the normally rowdy highschoolers subdued shifting from leg to leg, it’s not freezing out, but it’s raw. “FUCK!” As the guy grabs his backpack, nylon bag and Wendy’s bag, his bus is leaving early for Harrington Hall. Burnside Park, normally full with people sleeping off their fix, is mostly empty today, picked up by the buses heading to the various shelters and not wanting to miss curfew. Tricks being turned for a bag, bankers strolling through, million dollar high rises all around, and city hall.

This is not a scene of peace, it is a place of fear and insecurity, it’s the threat of state violence as well as the threat of small anti-social violence, it’s working people. It’s our people,  working class people and it’s here where human lives are cast off, no longer able or too used up to be of economic use to capitalism, but still used as a warning. It’s a wild scene. What would peace mean here? What is it to be used up, only to serve your cold days as a reminder of “bad choices”? How can there be peace, when worker’s needs are not met? We have ideas of being deserving or undeserving of help, but only directed at workers on the margins, as though hunger or calm are not simply deserving to be delivered without asking. This is a failed system, this  is class war, and war is the opposed condition to peace. 

The cruel austerity that is our lives, where an ever shrinking safety net has a dual role of pushing people further into the margins, and as a threat to not ever risk losing the shitty job you have. There cannot be peace while there is threat. We get taught in school that war is an economic engine that can drive up profit and innovation. The class war does that too, massive numbers of people forced into greater desperation are a reserve army of workers, whose acute need compels them to accept conditions as they are given, without complaint. You can’t go AWOL in the class war. Empty bellies, and freezing nights make for bad negotiators. There is profit to be had by making housing scarce, and keeping wages low. There are new tools and devices to be made to further strip away at individual freedom through heightened surveillance and closer monitoring. Security contracts to be written for, checks to be cashed.

Capitalism leaps from crisis to crisis with no thought to the impact on workers’ lives, tumor-like it seeks growth regardless of social impact. Lives are lost, casualties on the streets, in the cells, on shelter cots. Every recession, every downturn which is more frequent than not leads to a greater shake up of worker’s lives and more people are left to fall. In no way can we claim that capitalism is a success. You’ll hear talking heads and politicians bemoan the visible presence of the “collateral damage” trying with all the might they can muster to demonize, stoke fear, call us parasites, or drains on the economy, or grossest of all that we drive property values down. They will talk about the illness of addiction as though it were not rooted in the depression of alienation, as though the corporations had not been found guilty of drug dealing and purposely getting workers addicted. Every pill is a dollar sign. This isn’t peace, it’s chemical class warfare.

Peace means not turning away, and not being a savior, it means facing our fellow workers and talking and sharing in our inherent dignity. Practically it also means an end to austerity and the false scarcity that is offered. Peace means secure homes for everyone, safety and warmth. Peace means land reform, peace means justice. Peace means confronting the worker  who preys on each other in primitive accumulation. Peace is a clear eyed facing of the failures of capitalism and knowing in our heart that we all deserve and can be so much more. Peace is all power to the people, ending the “right to exploit”. The system has failed us, we can’t fail each other.

Peace Land & Bread

Our organizing principles should be around the core needs of the working class. Those core needs should be expansive but always able to return to the roots of Peace Land & Bread. How we choose to define it must be done by new democratic forms created by workers alone.Too it must be implemented and enforced by workers alone. The class character is necessary in order to ensure accountability and scalability. 

So let’s look at the slogan itself and explore how it will inform and guide a process of liberation. Going to roots is central to making a workers movement honest and direct. Eliminating the unnecessary and language twisting of concepts makes a durable, accountable and open working class movement. To the root in all things, and that ends up being our needs Peace Land & Bread. 

PEACE: We live in desperate austerity, where social harms are regularly committed locally, nationally, and internationally. To live in peace means an end to forcible destruction of unhoused communities, police sweeps in our neighborhoods, ICE raids, usurious rents, threats of unemployment, loss of dignity. We will achieve peaceful self managed communities, and workplaces for all of Providence. Through workplace and community councils this can be achieved with durability and a promise. 

This is no utopian scheme, this is a practical matter of survival, the cruel nature of capitalism compels us to confront our bottom line, make based value judgements on what is good for us and what is bad for us to act on and enforce this. This means that working class  peace must be protected not only from the ruling class but also from a tiny member of our community who prey on each other. There can be no tolerance for the landlord who orders evictions or from the mugger who seeks to assault you. We are our best peacekeepers.

LAND: The ruling class have acted to destroy the land through pollution and partition, and our workplaces through management dictatorships. We demand full meaningful land reform now. Good safe permanent housing for the unhoused, strict limits on rents, strict limits on the ownership of the land, full access to the waters, full right to travel without police threat or intimidation. Restoration of the land and waters to the first peoples of Providence. 

With no drinkable surface water and a denuded bay the capitalists have had their chance and they have failed. An absentee landlord can have no pride of place, just extraction of workers wealth, they have failed to provide housing for all. Wages are artificially kept at the subsistence level by combine and compact between bosses, they have failed. Housing is a fundamental human right, access to open space is a fundamental human right. 

This isn’t a pollyannaish proposal, this is possible under the wise democratic control of workers who know best what is needed by their own community. The protection of personal property is sacred, the elimination of waste and destruction is absolutely necessary, our lives depend on liberated land.

BREAD: Simply free and democratic access to that which sustains us. Full bellies, full hearts, and full minds. That’s it.

Fascism thing.

We find ourselves in a moment that is as familiar as it is new. We need to explore what it is that places us in this particular now. Fascism as is popularly thought of has no depth or exploration of it as a functioning ideology. So much misunderstanding, and misdirection and conflation. This is a testament to the failures of schools as well as a failure of comrades to educate on the process and path that fascism takes. 

This new ideology, which was born out of the 18th and 19th century innovations of race science and the concept of the folk. Centrally both of these concepts represent the moving of western society from feudalism to capitalism. This transition is the product of colonialism, and the imperial desires of European powers. Simply, it became an issue of management and the need for better supervision and wealth accumulation from places that could take months to communicate with, so colonial governors and colonists themselves became the direct proxy for imperial power, each individual a petty tyrant.

It is expensive to conquer new places, it’s expensive to move the material and expertise to the far flung corners of Earth. The nobility with its capricious nature and untethered extravagance would be bankrupted by the process. Ships built at royal expense, armies which at the time were led by amateur royals, small cadre of professionals or mercenaries fought their numerous internecine wars with short term conscripts, this new era of global conquest required standing professional armies, patterned armies with predictable conditions for rank and promotion were raised at enormous expense to the royalty. Naval captains were press ganged into new blue water navies and given greater power. This is the birth of the modern military.

The need to make it worthwhile for the commoner became necessary, privileges and social mobility were promised and colonialism could deliver it.  

Providence Calling

All the talk about challenging fascism comes down to understanding what it is that they want. Stripping it down to its fundament. Analyzing and getting down with their demands. The way to do this with any political movement is to ask: Who benefits? Who loses? Taking the latter question first it’s pretty easy. Immigrants lose, Black people lose, Queer and gender queer people lose, women lose, workers lose. The winners are just the amplified version of the status quo. Landlords win, bosses win, churches win, police win, the state wins. 

The use of fascist street thugs provides a dual use, 1) they claim physical space either triggering violence or denial to opposition. 2) they are a foil where sympathetic non-thugs can suddenly seem reasonable. The liberal sides of politics will neutrally call for order in the streets allowing greater repression by already reactionary police forces against anti fascist workers. This allows for more space to be claimed by fascists, where oppressed groups are in existential struggle fascists are not, allowing them and their knowing and unknowing allies to call the shots.

  Let’s look back, nor at the European experience but at the US experience with the forebears of fascism the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan predates the NAZI’s “Brownshirts” and Mussolini’s “Silvershirts” by almost 60 years. The Klan is viewed overly simplistically as an AntiBlack terror group exclusively ignoring their actual aims. Their initial goals were simple: prevent Black people from using their organized freedom to gain better life conditions. Prevent any trans-racial organizing, stop an influx of new populations who may coalesce into organization. In short it was class war with the target of ensuring that the US’s original imported working class population stayed cowed, restored to a pre-civil war condition. All of this was in service to large landowners and factory owners. 

Another central player was/is the American Legion formed in 1919 as an offshoot of the Chamber of Commerce, which was founded in 1912. The Chamber was specifically formed with other business groups to push back on the wave of effective and militant strikes happening across the nation, as well as the anti child labor laws the unions fought for. Their focus was on legislation and coordinating efforts between factory owners to combat union organizing. The Chamber saw a need for a self organized and militant paramilitary to do direct combat with unions, this was/is the American Legion. By framing unions and worker’s organizations as a foreign concept the Legion would like the Klan whip up nativist anti-labor sentiment backed up with the Chambers media control. The Legion was chartered by Congress with full knowledge of their anti-immigrant, anti-labor policy. 

The class character of Klan actions is more clear in the mid 1920s. Fully 25% of the white population were members of the Ku Klux Klan with over 2000 “Klaverns”(clubs) in every state and territory. Along with the newly formed American Legion, we see the formation of an informal but well organized army. They are explicitly organized to stop the advancement of workers in any form. From rent control, to unionizing, to human rights, to immigrant rights, to women’s rights they seek to push back and assert control over every aspect of our lives.

What they oppose and believe is instructional, and how they oppose it is worthy of deeper analysis. At its root is a belief in rigid “natural” hierarchies rooted in biology. The foundational unit of fascism is gender, women are inferior and need to be restricted to their “natural” role as breeder/server. From this we get the assaults on trans life which highlights the fragility and arbitrariness of “natural” roles. We have to push back on the simple and ahistorical explanations and recognize that Klan forces, and whatever allied group is pushing isn’t just hate its also what the bosses and landlords want. 

This is where alliances between what workers need and liberal opposition to fascism falls apart. To prevent the power of fascist thugs and their supporters requires workers to be organized in permanent defense. The rigid hierarchies of fascists overlap with those of elite liberal institutions and people. If defense of status quo and assaults on the marginal preserve profits or status, silence or a tepid response is the best that could be hoped for, after all the status quo is good for the bottom line without moral encumbrance. 

Their presence forces us to question the relationships that give rise to this emboldened scum. If it is service to the forces of reaction it also happens to be in service to the larger social project. Visible poverty is a gross reminder of the failures of the system to serve all people, it serves both the fascists and the status quo to clear homeless camps. The individual challenges that women’s liberation and gender equality demand of institutions is for the dominant group to share power. Fascists and the established institutions are served by restricting access and maintaining and reinforcing their power. These are some examples, there are of course more. Like sports teams with corporate and church sponsors the fascist gangs also have their sponsors, legal, and media support each with a specific pet axe to grind. 

Fascism itself is incoherent, shoehorning multiple political concepts into the poop bag called fascism. It has mythologies and esoteric teachings, strange codes and numerology. It encompasses a weird and broad set of ultimately conflicting ideologies from christian nationalism, to neo-paganism. As an ideology it has an incredible ability to tolerate divergent views as long as they advance a few specific core beliefs. Chauvinism, national and male, unfettered markets, worship of action. At its heart though its bosses who seek to suppress the efforts of workers, and use credulous reactionaries as their shock troops. It’s a unity of purpose.

Our response as workers is to claim our unity, but not by reacting to actions of capital and its thugs, but by reasserting more aggressively the unity of the individual causes of worker liberation. Honestly look at the actions of the past and look to its roots follow the money by asking who benefits. I guarantee the ones who benefit are either funding, or providing media support for fascist militias. They have a legacy of brutality and a willingness to use any means to advance their ugly cause. We cannot vote them away, because the scum would still be on the streets. We cannot law them away, because if a fascist sympathizer gets elected those same laws are used against workers. We can’t media them away, because of the shared interests in the owners of the media companies. Direct connection wins, talking, never stop explaining,  brick by brick building a wall of worker unity against the fascists. Making the places workers are no-go spaces for the scum. How we act must reinforce the values that all working people share, positive values of solidarity, generosity, hope, endurance and love. Providence contains these things in abundance.

I Write This Un-Selfconsciously

I want these little words to inspire you to action. I want to hold you at the barricades, I want our adrenaline fueled yells to fill the air as the fascists run. I want us to return to our humble neighborhoods where the broken tiles carefully placed on the foundations tell the story of making beautiful the shattered parts, the waste of construction, into a shining base where we build our lives. A humility offset by the wild pride in our friends and families. I believe with you that each and every one of us is florid in our shared and individual dignity. The families chosen or given stand as monuments to our fortitude, compassion, and love. I want you to see yourself with my eyes. This is our world, fellow worker, now make it!

Inside, our homes where we fall exhausted on our couches, but rise to carry our babies. Inside the tent cities we share food, give the newcomer the lay of the land. Inside the prisons counting days, in sacred struggle to maintain humanity in the most unholy place. Inside of our heads as veterans always coming home. Inside the first cup of coffee and donut at coffee break with all the laughter, or the seven stolen minutes of camaraderie in a shared smoke. Inside all these little moments as workers we restore ourselves. These instances of joy belong to us, are worthy of us, and make us. Little moments that are the epic of working life, now defend it!

Inside our working history there is a parallel story of the most remarkable struggles, experiments, and victories. Overcoming massive destructive and anti-human schemes of our bosses. From making toddlers pick cotton to making other toddlers spin the cloth, we stopped that with our strikes. Machine guns and bombs trying to break picket lines only to find when the smoke cleared that the line held. General strikes to prevent a war loving country from pitting worker against worker. To lead captive workers in desperate flight from bosses who would whip and maim. We stopped it, over and over again. Now do it again!

Our bosses and the monsters they employ are very aware of our power, they react to every attempt at organizing our power with ruthless reaction. Every attempt is met with overwhelming force and anger. The modest requests for life, housing, food, and better conditions is portrayed as a direct and existential assault on them or worse, a direct attack on our own neighbors by appealing to skin, language, or who we love. They are in awe when they see us organized because they fully know our power. Let them tremble!

We can ignore the ideas of romantic and heroic battle against the forces of darkness, those stories are for history, and hollywood. Though it will be a battle to defend our jobs, schools, homes, and lives. That defense requires us to ensure that we never have to do it again, or worse that our children will have to do it. We can draw strength from the fact that we are together (even if we all don’t know it yet). The work ahead of us demands all of our creativity, patience, and time we can spare. The battle may not be heroic but is desperate, lives, livelihoods, and safety are at stake. We absolutely must believe in each other. Hold the thoughts of our dignity as a worthy thing. These are our lands, jobs, and homes. I believe that we are good and worth the fighting for!

Thing for the end

I sit as Casandra finding myself angry and helpless as my home takes its final strides into open fascism. Things which I thought were impossible are possible. 

Watching as my Comrades from the 80s died like a silent army of perfect young men. Screaming for the world to see only to be met dismissal, direct abuse, and violence. We were right then, the commodification of medical care led to the commodification of life itself. A wretched condition.

Watching as comrades stand arm in arm against young fascists in the street. Watching your back, watching your friends backs, hoping that when you were alone those wolves who only cowardly fought in packs would be elsewhere. As comrades fell, in wheelchairs and sometimes in graves. Warning that the these monsters would age as we age, they would get more legitimate as they grew their hair traded boots for suits.

Watching as comrades laid down everything to defend our Earth, Carted off to prison, or exile. Knowing that the bombs were planted by our own government but we would be blamed. Wonderful gifted organizers  hounded into mental instability cut off from their lives, families, comrades. Knowing that what they offered would be sold back. They would bear the blame for the scarcity.

Watching as we held the barricades in the west. The first time most of us had seen what fully armored and armed police looked like. The unbounded fear  as the police raise their guns to fire volley after volley or plastic bullets and tear gas cans the size of fist into our faces and stomachs. Calling out as we were shackled that this was fascism and only receive criticism of our confrontation, left bereft of the support and solidarity that was our fuel.

Watching as we huddled in an abandoned basement in our hundreds hammering out a new language and process to communicate to make a workers democracy real. Our words stolen, the very foundational language of revolt taken academicized and then weaponized against us. My comrades able minds rendered unstable by the gaslighting of the ambitious cynics who cared for the politics of party not the proletariat. 

Watching as my comrades face tanks and snipers clamoring for their lives. Imprisoned for their voices, pushed out of discourse, taken by the possibility of more to be handed worse than the same.  Harangued with scolds who knew better two generations before, we cry that the millions in jail show that we never won. Dismissed. 

At this end, today’s end we watch as the so called democracy falls without a shot because the shots were fired as I watched so long ago. The chain link was spooled out inch by inch with each action that was just a cry to be human, to care for the Earth, the worker, the immigrant, the tenant, the disabled. We called out when we should have fought. Instead of breaking the fangs off we begged for the monster to simply close its mouth. What will I watch this time? Will it be a beg of the abused? Or will we watch as we look beyond what we get told is possible, told to be quiet, to make it “palatable” or demand the impossible. It’s not enough to be symbolic these are days that call for rage. No longer be afraid to assert and take power where we can, abandon the fear of shackles, look to ourselves as the only one with the strength. No longer plea for our humanity but to pry open the monster’s mouth and break off the fangs once and forever.

Nostalgia

We have all seen the memes of WW2 US soldiers or Indiana Jones saying something to the effect of “we beat em before” or some other ahistorical account of the mid century. I hate to splash water on retro fun. It’s a less than rosy picture, but one that we should learn from. Was it as simple as rallying around a basic good guys bad guys Marvel comics plot. It’s more nuanced than that.  The part of the story that is missing is the struggles before the fascists took power in Germany and Italy and Japan to a different extent.

Long before the bombers, and tanks there was direct and real ongoing resistance to the fascist regimes that were forming in western europe. This is important to remember not just because we are duty bound to honor them, but also because they made a path. They made serious mistakes that they were not able to see at the moment, but they also had successes that are important to duplicate.

Here are some observations and  important facts for context. To fight fascism you have to be able to correctly identify it. A simple definition will do. Fascism is the co-governance of unfettered capitalism and state power, it uses division and militarism as its tools. It is centralized in ideology but not in the expression of power which is decentralized. Benito Mussolini, the father of fascism wrote: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” This ultimately means that you cannot separate the two. Certain protectionist policies, volkish hiring and firing practice etc. We see this with the dog whistle of DEI and the attempts at re-homing some influential companies. You cannot oppose fascism if you allow the conditions for fascism to exist. Or hinder regional efforts to oppose fascism. 

It was unions, socialists, and communists who most ardently opposed fascism in Germany and Italy. Though here in the US we like to focus on individuals it was concerted, sustained, collective effort that pushed most aggressively. Germany had a massive unionized workforce. 1 in 5 workers carried a union card they struck endlessly first to stop roll backs of gains and later to stop fascism. What thwarted them was a multi pronged approach and this is where the lesson really lies. 

Workers organized pose a direct threat to capitalist power. It has the power to demand higher wages and better conditions, this is in direct conflict with the accumulation of profit. Captains of industry will use all available means to prevent organization of workers. In Germany one way this was done was through “privatisierung” or privatizing public services and assets to corporations. This was fracturing of parts of the labor movement from industrial unions to trade unions or no union in the firms that privatized. This process has been successful in the United States from 1980 onward where union membership went from 35% in 1979 to 11% today, with only 6% in the private sector with the right to strike. 

Police and bureaucrats played a central role in Italy and Germany, ostensibly neutral civil servants these state actors drawn largely from reactionary elements (true in virtually every society) were elevated in status and given free reign to suppress strikes and protests, going as far as to protect the scab workers, and relentlessly harassing union activists and leaders. Assaulting communists, destroying offices and presses. They did this under no obligation to the new fascist party but as a matter of normal practice. They also allowed or facilitated non-state actors to attack strikes and protests, or standing idly by or directly assisting with intelligence information. Police leaders routinely called for law and order and would drive wedges between the general population by framing unionists and communists as lawless outsiders. This led the trade unions to break away from the industrial unions and publicly condemn strike actions and positioned themselves as partners to capitalist, this capitulation did not work then and it wont now.

Media’s role was to repeat corporate interests loudly and often, portraying them as the solution to the problems of unruly labor and out group protest. In addition the more reactionary papers highlighted the ethnic makeup of unionists labeling them as marxist or culturally Marxist by which in Germany and Italy of the time was a dog whistle for Jewish. Communists were doubly attacked on this front attempting to isolate them from rank and file union members. This  was effectively completed by the 1960s in the US where communists are legally barred from holding union office. A law that was also passed in 1930s Germany and Italy. 

Germany and Italy used “family” centered language to further alienate sexual, gender minorities, and feminists, the vast majorities of whom were workers and were carved out of labors body with the German “Kinder, Kuche, Kirche (child, kitchen, church, the three Ks were intentional). Making the nuclear family the foundational point of the nation, de-centering labor, which sought to improve conditions and compensation for working families. By depicting union leaders and communists as godless and opposed to “natural hierarchy”  they were placed in direct opposition to family life. This created the contradiction of being pro-union, pro-queer, pro-woman meant being anti family. Some unions and communist party groups attempted to show themselves to be more pro-family and church but this only moved the fight to the reactionary side and prevented diverse leaders from maintaining their positions. The corporate propaganda around this was virtually unavoidable. This also moved the discourse away from class and into specific identities, again not the worker’s battlefield of choice.

The carving out of populations and wedges of unions into trades vs. industrial, the direct police repression, the corporate and state media inventing the alien-ness of  communism, unions paved the way to the full expulsion and murder of millions. This would not have been possible had these specific pitfalls not happened. The lessons are as I see it:

• Build sector wide industrial unionism, remain militant and  working class focused. 
• No one can be carved out. 
• Recognize that there is no room for compromise on our ability to organize.
• Resist desires for smooth relationships with capital and the state.
• Hold intellectual and physical ground.

Sector wide Industrial unionism means regionally organizing all workers who work in any aspect of a specific industry, as opposed to trade unionism which only represents a specific trade in an industry. For example a hospital may have nurses in one union, janitorial staff in another, etc. an industrial union proposes to represent all under one umbrella, and further represent all in the medical sector. Dual membership is a path to this, as well as recognizing that every worker occupies an economic space. This prevents the breaking up or isolating specific trades, a tool that is put to good effect by capitalists, and by extension fascists.

No carve outs means that every worker is full and equally worthy of public, practical, and meaningful solidarity. This precludes attempts by the fascists from isolating individuals by identity. It also prevents the false solidarity proffered by fascists of chauvinism.

No compromise means that all issues regarding workers are whole and indivisible. Offers of temporary improvement must include anti-fascist and pro-worker language and action. This also means any temporary gain does not eliminate the possibility of fascism.

Hold intellectual ground. Maintain constant reaffirming propaganda of the rightness of fighting fascism. Allow no room for counter argument. Holding physical ground means occupying the spaces needed to maintain mutual aid and to force confrontations that will highlight the contradictions of capitalism. How we define these contradictions must be determined by conversation and questions. To protect our communities means fostering an attitude of revolt against the tools that may not be in fascist hands now but could be. Building a community to solve its own solutions. This eliminates the possibility for fascism to dig in its claws.

The harms that fascism can do are real and existential, that harm is always directed at either splitting or eliminating whole swaths of the working class. Since working class unity is the first target, working class unity is the first defense.

To My Comrade Who I know But Haven’t Met

Divide and conquer only works in one direction top down. There is no version of this tactic that works from the bottom up and that should be all the information we need. Its so easily applied and used so often that I even think we are aware when we are having it done to us. It has so many permutations that it can be applied to almost anything its almost as if the ruling class just look at a menu and order it. In fact there is a multi billion dollar industry of media consultants, PR firms, media outlets that do this. These are skilled, well funded, well feted, and well fed people whose entire lives revolve around splitting the working class into bitter factions. This is so insidious that we even do it ourselves. 

We all can list the divisions and we can even walk them back to a source. The basic question has to be who benefits from the division. As a working class do we benefit from sexism, from the idea that women are less than? As workers do we benefit from Anti-Blackism? Transphobia? Antisemitism? Ableism? Inside our communities do we benefit from colorism? Do we benefit from excluding the flamboyant, the expressive, the open? Absolutely not. The ruling class does however, by exploiting the small differences between workers who as a class will contain the vast majority of all identities the bosses can prevent real and practical organization, but we know that. 

We also do it by ignoring the class character of the messenger and seeing ourselves recognized in their think pieces, academic journals, talks, and op-eds. We might recognize a specific social ill that we have experienced, or an establishment hypocrisy that we can feel validated by when it is called out. However virtually all of these pundits and mandarins are in the same economic and educational backgrounds of their hosts, or they aspire to be. Now some might have righteous intent, but if a pundit, academic, or writer does not focus on class as the underlying issue, or uses the “working class” in respect to only one race, or identity then that person is just there to stir up shit.The fact is, for the ruling class information is a commodity and trading on the inflammatory or divisive sells, and protects their interests.

Capitalism relies on maintaining an underclass in order to function and to eliminate the chance of reform or revolution. Who makes up the underclass is a shifting mark depending on the tactical needs of the ruling class. If there is a need to stop the maturing power  of an arriving group of immigrants, the bosses will use nativism to inflame workers against the immigrant to accept conditions as they are in order to “protect jobs” or “housing”. Defining “low skill jobs” as a thing that actually exists, pits worker/trades people to say some jobs are not worthy of paying meaningful wages. If Black people rise up for any reason the messaging is scolds from elders, isolation from political leaders, and de-classing the working class Black people.  The ruling class  fomenting hate against gender minorities in order to create an in-group. This creates an artificial shared identity with the ruling class, a false commonality that creates an internal contradiction in our lived experience as workers. The list is potentially endless.

That divide and conquer gets footing among us is an indication of need. There needs to be a revolutionary approach where workers are not dismissed from organizing because they internalized the bosses tricks. Instead it’s possible to restore with the same pride their identities as fellow workers. Recognize that the process of radicalization is ongoing and fragile. It’s not just inoculating each other against these ideas, its nurturing and building on existing points of solidarity.  

Be bloody minded when it comes to divisive issues that only serve the bosses. Uncompromising in returning the conversation to class. Reset the conversation back to its core every time. It’s not an argument, or dispute, the bosses offer what looks like an easy solution. As revolutionaries we have to offer a better one, but one that requires constant nurturing. Ignore the politics, the names of the dividers, get to the roots. Our individual identities are our greatest strength as proletarians, making up our resilience and our endless ability to create. Be fully single minded in our collective liberation, all else is division and distraction. 

Tender Comrade

Dearest Tender Comrade,

I  write to you in one of history’s moments that is so packed with importance and option. Over the last few decades we have witnessed capitalism’s most desperate attempts at saving itself, we are at the extremes of that here in the imperial core. If I am wrong so be it, if I am right we must seize the moment.

The rate at which capitalist extract from the Earth is unsustainable, a fact that capitalists are well aware of. Our lands, water, and air are pushed to its brittlest point as the pandemic showed. Capital finds the mining of workers pockets and bank accounts to be a truly finite finite resource. The financialization, and monetization of everything is far too volatile to maintain a dispersed and stable wealth base. The universities which for a brief period were engines of social mobility are just a machine of penury, trapping workers minds, talents, and bodies shackling them to to service their atomized debt.

These contradictions are made manifest in our lives as workers specifically, and uniquely. The ripping of the Earth, the plunder of our meager savings, the promises and hope being ripped away have left us as workers utterly alone. The rate of unionization is small, and the legalism and party politics it has been tied to, as well as its professionalization of staff and leadership has changed the class character, as well as the class urgency that has been so desperately needed in a time of decline.

No Politician

At no time in our history, ever, not once has a politician or elected official been the hero of working peoples lives. No elected official has ever been the agent of change, maybe the tool of change, but agent no. Our leaders have always come from the people, and always at great personal cost. The politicians and the agencies that work for them have always attempted to discredit, defame, or stop our leaders from emerging and developing power. We get told what is possible and to temper our demands, that the “political climate isn’t right” We get told to wait, only to find that the wait is permanent. Our aspirations honestly seem so humble that we can truly see them just around the corner, always around the corner. Safe homes, safe neighborhoods, good jobs, clean air, medical care, and disability rights. Let’s look at it piece by piece.

Safe homes and neighborhoods, for example, can mean stable rents without a revolving door of short term tenants. It can mean absentee landlords shovel snow. All the way to having police that don’t act like an occupying force. There are so many things that can make a safe neighborhood. When we  present this to politicians they may do surface improvements, but usually the term safe neighborhood by the time it gets through a political machine it becomes “community calls for more police”.Calls for rent to be stable or affordable meets the wall of real estate profiteers, and it turns into a small minority of owners dictating terms to the majority of the people. If politicians were representatives of the people the call for reform would never need to be asked. It was leaders like Grace Lee Boggs who worked tirelessly on fair housing directly and fearlessly. There are the nameless thousands of union members of the Ladies Garment Workers Union who built the co-operative housing model in NYC. Or the un-eviction squads of Olneyville in the 1930s. Where there was a need they acted directly with aggressive and uncompromising action. It was the people lifting up their own leaders all along.

Good jobs are another issue that is outside of the realm of the politician. Every job is a good job when we make the job worthy of our work. Through organizing either through channels(not likely now) or through recognition, demand can make any job pay, improve conditions, and be worthy of us. It doesn’t happen from the outside. It is literally ours to decide as workers whether we take the bosses crap or not.  This happens by us talking to each other honestly about what our jobs are like and what we could hope to get from it. There is no politician that can organize a shop floor, maybe if trade unions donate enough they can get employer neutrality, maybe. The worker leaders who organize are virtually always other workers, Jimmy Hoffa, Big Bill Haywood, A Philip Randolph, Elizabeth gurley Flynn, Ben Fletcher, not a politician in the lot. Lucy Parsons and August spies have more to do with our day to day work lives than any politician. We have weekends(eroding), the eight hour day(too much) from bloody strikes of workers, after that comes the politicians and the law, who compromise our righteous demands.

Clean air, water, and land is a natural Earth gifted right to all of us and again there is no politician that has been the leader on it, cajoled kicking and screaming some get there, but no politicians simply will not center our environment’s health. It is workers like Wangari Maathai who linked the health of the community to the health of the planet, organizing ordinary working women to stand up to brutality and take direct action to protect our Earth. Berta Cacere leading the indigenous peoples to be the historic caretakers of the land, a position that has been largely agreed on in the world much to the chagrin of politicians and their special interests. Ken Saro Wiwa lynched by Shell Oil in Nigeria for exposing the degradation that the extractive industries are committing. No politician came out first, all workers, all indigenous, all us.

Medical Care which has been carefully preserved as a commodity by politicians was undone by the Black Panther Party Bobby Seale in particular.  Sojourner Truth, Malcolm X all re-defined and ensured that medical care was seen as a natural right and that its denial is a crime. This has been fought tooth and nail by virtually all politicians who will all argue for some status of exclusion. It is regular working people who open and staff clinics, share medicine every day. Again no politicians in the lead.

For disability rights it took activists, in solidarity with the Black Panther Party of Oakland, occupied buildings and refused to move until their rights were fully recognized. Their needs, their housing, their educational support would be delivered only under occupation. This was repeated on the steps of congress. There were politicians, in fact they made public jokes at the expense of these heroes. No politician took the lead on this, they had to be dragged. 

Of course there is beautiful Act-Up forcing the government to respond to the AIDS crisis by dropping the bodies of victims at the NIH. It was the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence drag activists that literally identified the pandemic and challenged visitation and burial rules around the world. There was again no politician to take up the banner. 

Every good aspect of life, the things that make us civil and kind neighbors happened in spite of politicians. It is a dead end and it is time to cop to it. Now I’m not advocating to abandon politicians to the wind, only to recognize their momentary utility. If we need a law passed to protect ourselves from the degradation of bosses and landlords, so be it. Always recognizing that the power of the law is temporary and only happens after the law has been broken, we know this because of $50,000,000,000 in stolen wages every year. Our power as working people is not temporary, it is permanent and intrinsic. 

MORE DEFINITIONS

Workers walk into revolutionary spaces and can immediately get overwhelmed by the jargon and presumed inside knowledge that seems to be automatically understood by all. Where bourgeois politics is all about the players on 2 teams, revolutionary politics seem to be about knowing the arcane lore. Now please do not take this as in any way as anti-intellectual or to steer away from theory, quite the opposite, the goal of this very, very short primer is to root theory back into its proper hands, the working class. Also this is in no way to discourage comrades from using and embracing what they know, just to be cognizant and truly know your audience. 

In PWD for example we have many members who are truly advanced in their understanding of their relationship to the bosses, can speak with force and eloquence on the impacts of day to day life under capitalism, but can be flummoxed by the use of what amounts to internal jargon. PWD’s goal is to build working class consciousness and in that theory is in service to the working class. The revolutionary lingo should offer clarity and definition to working class life, not to redefine it along existing lines. 

PWD started with definitions of basic ideas like class, capitalism, revolution etc. Much of these definitions come from members themselves. But there is a further need for definitions as PWD engages with and forms partnerships with other revolutionaries. Not exhaustive, or complete, these are just words and phrases that have come up in the past several meetings. 

CURRENT CONDITIONS- This is a sweeping phrase that can reach globally as well as locally, right down to the kitchen table. In short the current conditions here in Providence are:

• The political climate. Is the mood of workers receptive to the ideas of liberation, or reaction? 
• What is the behavior of police and politicians to dissent, or support? 
• What is the behavior of bosses to dissent, or praise?

PWD believes that the current conditions are against the working class and we are entering a period of severe repression.

MATERIAL CONDITIONS- Simply, identifiable, named and broad economic conditions of the workers of Rhode Island. 

• Rent is too high.
• 40% of us go to bed hungry, or at risk of going hungry.
• Wages are far too low to keep pace with inflation.
• Utilities are far too high.
• Access to clean air, water, and land is harder to get.

NECESSARY CONDITIONS- What is needed for liberation, or fascism. 

For fascism the necessary conditions have been met and those conditions are (or could be)

• Demonization of any out group.
• Militarized police.
• Hyper profit. 
• Captured regulatory agencies.
• Weak unions.
• Massive prisons.
• Mass surveillance.

For liberations the necessary conditions are(or can be).

• An advanced working class party (more on that word later).
• Mass and popular support.
• Mass working class consciousness.
• Mass willingness to revolt.
• Spontaneous worker organizing.

PWD believes that the necessary conditions for fascism have been met, and for out group communities the experiments in fascism have been ongoing. In the US the repression we call fascism now is foundational. As to the necessary conditions for liberation PWD and other revolutionary organizations see the sparks of it here and there, but it is not a done deal. The bosses will use every trick in the book to disrupt, de-rail, and defend their system, it is up to us as workers to make the necessary conditions for liberation happen.

PARTY- So this is weirdly complicated even though it isn’t. For revolutionaries a party is any organization of workers that share a similar (but not identical) practice of principles, tactics, and strategy. We tend to think of parties as being like the dems or gop but they are different in that they seek to control the disputes between capitalists and keep the working class in its place, either through extreme measures or through reforms that don’t go after the root of the problem. Now some revolutionary parties participate in candidates and voting, others don’t, the Black Panther Party did not believe any good could come from voting, the PSL and DSA occasionally runs candidates, that does not make them less or more revolutionary, just different.

DICTATORSHIP- This word has real weight, we can name actual dictators, and based on our education system, we can mis-label some actual leaders as dictators, and we can mis-label actual dictators as non dictators. In PWD we have used the Marxist definition of dictatorship. Under capitalism the entire system, every relationship is defined by its relationship to capitalism. Capitalists aka bosses, aka bourgeoisie are the dictators of our current society. PWD honestly though we don’t often use the word believe that society should be under the full democratic control and for the benefit of workers, aka the proletariat, as individuals and as a class, a dictatorship of workers.

DEMOCRACY- This word, at once sacred and fully besmirched. It comes from the Greek word demos meaning “the people” roughly. In boss ruled societies like ours, democracy is the regular vote by some of the people for a narrow choice of managers. There is absolute zero democracy in workplaces, and rents etc. Students have no voice in how their schools are run (unless they pay enormous amounts to private institutions). Workers have no say in who works and who doesn’t, what products get made, how much they are sold for etc. Tenants have precious little protections, and the unhoused absolutely none. PWD sees democracy as a total involvement in social decision making, and implementation.

LEFT-RIGHT- It could be a hangover from some kinds of religious thinking like Calvinism, left-right politics is roughly left is slightly more socially libertarian, and the right less so. In our system the left occasionally seeks some reform and expansion of privileges, and the right fights it. PWD could be lumped in with the “left” but we reject the label. In current politics both Nancy Pelosi and Che Guevara are the “left”. It’s a meaningless distinction.

DOMINANT SYSTEM – The dominant system is capitalism, it touches every aspect of our lives, literally every aspect. Capitalism has a set of foundational ideas the permeate everything capitalists do and push out to us. 

DOMINANT IDEAS- The foundational ideas of the capitalist, that everything can be seen as an exchange. These ideas get into and infect all of us, from racism, to patriarchy, to love, capitalism’s ideas dominate because they serve capitalists. PWD believes that this is deadly for us as individuals and for the planet itself, we seek to remove their gross ideas with solidarity, internationalism, and expansive and unforgiving justice.

Thanks, there are words I won’t go into here because they are best defined by you, like revolution, liberation, and justice. As we expand and meet new friends and comrades, let’s try to think through how our new comrade’s experience can inform our ideas and how our ideas can offer definition. None of it is automatic, being practical tells us when there is a fire, learning to be a firefighter teaches you how to put the fire out. Theory teaches how to fight fires (and start some too).