A Brief Introduction:

“American workers do not share France’s tradition of general strikes and mass unrest”<D>

New York Times<D>, Dec. 24, 1995

“I hope it never comes to that here”.<D>

AFL-CIO chief and enemy of the working class John Sweeney, referring to the mass strike wave that rocked France at the end of 1995

This publication exists to contribute to the emergence of an enduring culture of conscious opposition to capitalism rooted in the daily life of the working class and the poor, here in the United States and world-wide.  With this in mind The Poor the Bad and the Angry #2<D> describes the activities of this magazines authors and our comrades in the class war over the past several years.  We offer <D>information about, and critical analysis of, proletarian resistance to capital the world over.

In upcoming issues we will offer critical reexaminations of the strengths and limits of revolutionary movements of the past, for example, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and the May 1968 movement in France.  

The first issue of PBA <D>came out three years ago.  We intend to make future issues come out more often.

Our perspectives:

Our world is devastated by social relations based on money and market exchange. Every government and government-to-be, every politician, army and police force on this planet defends this system. Politicians and parties propose different management strategies for capital, but regardless of their real or imagined differences, Yeltsin and Mandela, Time Warner and MTV, Fidel Castro, the ecology lobby and the most bedraggled college campus socialist groups all agree - the world of wage labor must be maintained. In today’s world, most human beings have nothing but their labor power and they must sell it to an enterprise to be able to live. Everything exists to be bought or sold. All social relations revolve around money.  These seemingly normal and inevitable facts are the result of a long and violent process, the most murderous five hundred years in the life of our species.  

This global system, capitalism, is a historically specific form of class society based on the exploitation of human labor power as a commodity, on wage-labor, money, commodity production and the nation-state.  Imposed and maintained by terror, mystification and inertia, modern capitalism is a totalitarian system.  It has invaded and devastated all aspects of human life and degrades the planetary environment to an accelerating degree.  But capitalism has also given rise to social forces that can bring about the revolutionary destruction of this system; the mass collective actions of proletarians fighting against the conditions of our exploitation and impoverishment.

The class struggle is the primary liberatory social force of our time.  Class struggle is not only our fight as wage-workers against our employers.  The class war includes all the individual and collective struggles of exploited and propertyless people across the global against the conditions of our exploitation and impoverishment.  It  encompasses our fights against racism, sexism and homophobia, but not as separate reformist issues.  Class warfare involves fights for concessions from capital and the fight for our power outside of and against capitalist social relations.

The state is the monopoly of armed violence of the ruling class, the terrorist apparatus by which capitalist property relations are imposed and maintained.  The state is not a neutral institution, or a mechanism that can be of any use to the working class.  A revolutionary perspective is unconditionally and uncompromisingly hostile to all forms of the state and to bourgeois elections and legality.  Electoral politics is a source of mystification, a negation of class consciousness and the antithesis of the direct, collective action that characterizes our efforts in the class war.  A central objective of any revolutionary movement must be the violent destruction of the state and of any quasi-statist formations. A key element in revolutionary struggle will also be to bring about the collapse of the armed forces by desertions, sabotage, fraternization and revolutionary mutiny.  

In time of war, revolutionaries must actively work for the defeat of the war efforts of “their own” countries.  All forms of patriotism or nationalism are counter-revolutionary.

In the past hundred years, labor unions have come to serve capitalism both as labor merchandising outfits and as organizations that restrain and inhibit workers’ struggles.  Even those unions that were authentic products of working class combativity, such as the Spanish CNT, came to function in this manner.  As 20th century states have been compelled to frequently intervene in the economy, labor unions, regardless of their ideology or the subjective intentions of their members, have effectively become control mechanisms of the state and of bourgeois legality.  In taking action in the workplace and in extending actions beyond the workplace, wage-workers have to fight against and outside of all unions and unionist ideologies.  The working class must create anti-hierarchical self-organization for struggles inside of and outside of the workplace.  

Throughout the 20th century, counter-revolution has often appeared in seemingly radical forms. The former Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Cuba, etc. were not socialist societies but state capitalist systems, moments in the unfolding of capitalist domination over the earth. The left, so-called Socialist and Communist parties, social democracy, all forms of Leninism and much of anarchism are the left wing of capitalism, the left side of capital’s political apparatus.  The social movement of the future must ruthlessly examine the past and break with failed strategies and obsolete politics.

National liberation movements have been means for non-exploiting classes to be marshaled to fight and die for the political ambitions of the local bourgeoisie, a wing of the local bourgeoisie, or a substitute bourgeoisie of guerrilla bosses and professional intellectuals. National liberation struggles have always produced regimes that have been voluntary or involuntary cops for the world market against the needs and struggles of proletarians, impoverished peasants and indigenous peoples.  A Turkish proverb says it well: “When the ax came into the forest, the trees said: the handle is one of us.”  The FMLN, IRA, PLO, ANC, ETA, etc. are capitalist organizations and enemies of the working class.  They have more in common with existing nation states and multinational corporations than with “the real movement that abolishes existing conditions.”  The exploited must fight alone against the propertied classes. All “popular fronts” or “united fronts” between the exploited and other social forces inevitably lead to the defeat and massacre of the exploited.

The abolition of capitalism is not democracy, nationalization of major industries, state power in the hands of leftists or workers’ self-management of the economy.  The goal of an authentic revolutionary movement is the abolition of wage labor, the abolition of all forms of market relations, the destruction of all states, police forces, and national borders; the emergence of new social relations where poverty is abolished and labor no longer rules social life, a classless, stateless, moneyless global human community.  In a post-capitalist world, productive activity will be performed for the free and direct satisfaction of human needs while respecting the integrity of the planetary environment.

In spite of their flaws and limits, the defeated social revolutions of the 20th century, and the mass collective violence of the poor in revolt from Los Angeles to Iraqi Kurdistan, are embryonic expressions of the future anti-statist class dictatorship of the poor against capital worldwide, what must become a consciously communist movement without frontiers or compromises, a new world trying to come alive.  Social revolution, and class struggles that tend towards communism, require despotic action by the dispossessed against the system that dispossesses us.  The destruction of commodity relations and the emergence of authentic human community aren’t just measures that will be enacted “The Day After The Revolution”.  These communist urges live today as an impulse in collective struggles, and in many small gestures and attitudes.  We fight for this.  We seek to systematically spread and develop these perspectives. We seek companions in this effort.