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When we describe our aims, we can't assume that you are neutral. Despite the tremendous ignorance and deception that permeates our society, there is a vast conflict going on today. To quickly summarize our positions, we begin with the assumption that the reader has at least an intuitive understanding of the battle that is raging secretly and openly throughout the world.
The rulers of this country and all others have worked hard to destroy the meanings of the words which have described society - the ways in which people relate together as a whole. From TV news to civics classes, standard vocabulary makes it difficult for anyone today to discuss society and their position within it.
From this, we will have to describe in detail what changes and what system we are talking about before most labels will have a concrete meaning.
Class has mostly been colored by the ruling class' attacks on us. The LA riots proved there was a class division in this country. The ruling class works to make the line of division help them. They want inner city blacks versus everyone else.
Instead, we must create a division that suits our interests. We are part of a larger movement over the last two hundred years to regain a human community. Communism, socialism and anarchism are words which have been used at times to describe this movement. These words have also been used to describe exactly the opposite - the Stalinist regimes of China and formerly The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
For two million years, human beings lived in cooperative societies, societies without governments and often lacking starvation and hardship. Marx called This type of society "primitive communism." Humans are far more adapted to this gentle, lazy style of living than to the modern life of wage slavery, commodity production and robotic control.
The ideal of communism is not to push the clock back but to create a society with the humanness of primitive life but using the scientific understanding of modern society to create a world community.
Communism is not a moral program, not an effort to simply do good. It is a system of human relations that has always existed to some degree in human societies, if like today, it has been pushed to the background. We, the entire dispossessed class, can imagine a communist society because we already hold the seeds of that society within ourselves. All acts of sabotage, spontaneous gifts and refusal to work form a community of resistance that give us some feeling of what our future community will be.
The workers' councils formed during some wildcat strikes give an idea of the form that would be a part of the new society. But the content of this would be just as important. This would be the negation of wage labor by play and the negation of commodity production by gift. Today, we are in the communist movement when the entire world's power structure is fighting against it.
We fight for communism. How do we expect it to come about? Mostly, it will be the dispossessed organizing themselves to take control of their lives.
How can we help? Self-conscious communists are a small group taken as a whole. The value we can have is being aware of the directions that struggles have taken in the past and providing the guidance and the spark that can take the movement through critical phases.
There is always a struggle for communism. We show the unity of these so-far limited struggles and strategies they can use. We must show how looting and wildcat strikes are united as negations of the world market, of capitalism.
These explosions only occasionally escape the framework that the rulers have set. When there is the chance of a breakthrough, we attempt to be there with a level of force and clarity that could carry the movement to a new level.
We don't have a complete picture of how this will happen. We have learned some things that are important. Some things the movement has to do, some things it must not do. We have a general outline of the underlying system of this society.
We can look at times in history where an existing social seemed to be collapsing: Russia, Spain, China, France in 68. Once revolution is on the agenda, each faction, from capitalists to social workers to average dispossessed people, tries to realize their version. In all these situations, the elites re-established capitalism even if the particular government and social order collapsed.
Thus we know what the position the dispossessed will find themselves once the battle begins. They must be prepared to suppress all those trying recreate the old order. The struggle today must be directly for the new society.
This discussion come at a time when the conditions of struggle are extremely distorted. While the democracy of elections fools almost no one today, the democracy of TV can still give the false impression that we can change this world instead of building a new one.
Riots, wildcat strikes, occupations of factories and office buildings, and all disruptions of routine have a strategic value. But by themselves they are guaranteed to lose. Capitalism has vast automated armies at its disposal that can destroy cities, neighborhoods or countries.
The real value of revolts is political. They signal possibilities that are suppressed by the dominant powers. They force a debate about the nature of this world, a debate that this society's media, rulers and racists work constantly to suppress.
The fight against and debate about this society will show the unity of the capitalism and all who serve the economy. Thus it will reveal the vast majority of people in the world of all colors are united as the proletariat. This army is united by having nothing to lose but our televisions, our manipulations by fashion and racism and our jobs. This army can also sweep away the present system.