Civil Rights & Liberties or "White Privileges"? Re: Green Party official busted at gunpoint

Gordon Fitch gcf at panix.com
Mon Nov 5 17:00:17 PST 2001


Hakki Alacakaptan:
> That's exactly why I retracted my counter-insult. Listen to the guy, he's
> angry as hell but he's also telling us clearly why, if you care to read
> between the epithets. He's blaming the white left of having auto-destructed
> by deserting the blacks. Is this not an issue? Is Art making this up? I
> don't recall any recent debate about this, has the question been settled and
> the blame apportioned? If the blacks really think the US deserved S11,
> aren't they already aligned with the South, which the anti-globalization
> movement is supposed to be fighting for? Why aren't we celebrating then?

One might not agree with the strategy.

To quote Niall Ferguson (from the list): "The US must make the transition from informal to formal empire."

This was a realistic treatment of the path facing the Western bourgeoisie: rule the world, or begin the retreat from power. Ruling the world will require a lot of death and destruction, as it already has, and some fitful counterattacks are to be expected as all that is not Capital or subject to it is pushed toward extinction. (These attacks will be used, as we have observed, to advance the very process they oppose; if there is anything Capital knows how to do, it is to eat.)

It is the inevitable other shoe of "peace with justice" where justice is identified with imperial power, as it is when one talks about "international police efforts to track down the perpetrators" and so forth in a context where only the enemies of the grand regime can be arrested, tried and punished. One is brought into the position of disputing the décor of the empire while accepting its architecture.

Just on the other side of the coin, or the even rounder and fewer-sided world, I suppose this is one of the three possibilities open to leftists at this time: to accept imperial rule and even participate in it, hoping to mitigate its rigors; to oppose it using State methods, to wit, violence and terror, but without a State or even a guerrilla base, therefore using terrorism, with very poor prospects; or to eschew violence altogther as do religious pacifists and some anarchists and try to work in the interstices of the established order, by means of subversion and seduction, like Christians of old in the catacombs. There is some crossover possible under present circumstances, but not much, not like there was in the good old days of the Popular Front or the Civil Rights Movement.

Of the three choices, the first is to desert the Blacks / South _for_their_own_good_ (as well as one's own); the second is to invite them to an _auto_da_fe_ in which they are the main dish and radicals are the garnish; and I will leave it to the many non-anarchists here to say why the third way (!) is also bad. Ineffective? Maybe. But as my hypocritical oath begins, First do no harm.

-- Gordon



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