The Anarchist Panther

I was thinking back on some of the events I’ve been involved in putting together and I have to say this is the one I’m probably most proud of. Ashanti gives such a rich account of his time in the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. He and many others have given so much to the revolutionary movement, often time their very lives.

At the same time, I will say that I’ve come a long way in my political development watching this presentation. His politics are an eclectic mix of Maoism, life style Anarchism, privilege and identity politics. He also has an orthodox Marxist understanding about what it means to be Communist. Although I don’t agree with any of his politics now, it was an important step for me in understanding the revolutionary tradition and its history. If you’re interested take at look at his website, or contact the Institute for Anarchist Studies to book a talk.

Houston Immigration Forum Outline

About two months ago now I presented at the Houston Immigration Forum. I’m posting my outline because I’m trying to flesh out some challenges the immigrants right movement faces. A major one my outline eludes to is the need to transcend the human rights/activist framework and organize as revolutionaries in the immigrants rights movement from a class struggle perspective. However, people aren’t going to make this leap until they’ve had certain organizing experiences. What it means to struggle form a class struggle basis isn’t touched on, and in this sense my outline lacks substance. This is something I plan to build on. Hopefully, my comrades and I can aid in this development. Shout out to TZ for encouraging me to throw it up on my blog.

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Immigration Forum Presentation Outline

I. Intro

A) We’ve all come to this forum in order to step back from our day to day organizing and reflect, discuss and debate strategies Since we only have about 7 min to present I’m just going to hop into it with three main points of focus. Which are:

i. What strategies have and have not proven most effective over time?

ii. Is the struggle around immigration a fight for citizenship or human rights or a class struggle?

iii. What should immigration militants be building in between high points of struggle?

                                                – I’ll now elaborate on each of these points.

II. What strategies have and have not proven most effective over time?

La Teoría Comunista De Marx

I’m working with my comrade L Boogie on translating a series of posts for the Unity & Struggle website regarding Marxist theory and revolutionary organization into Spanish. We just finished up this piece and I’ll be posting the others here on my personal blog as well. The original link to the English version can be found here and the Spanish one here.

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Como siempre, si encuentras un error gramatical o en la traducción te agradeceríamos tu ayuda en corregirlo para mejorar nuestro trabajo.

Traducido por L Boogie y Parce

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La siguiente entrada representa una parte de un proyecto mayor sobre la teoría comunista y organización revolucionaria que se inició el verano pasado. Es un proyecto en curso que no sólo fue diseñado para proporcionar un esquema de referencia para nuestra propia agrupación. En términos más amplios, está destinado a ser una contribución a las discusiones en curso y debates sobre la teoría y práctica comunista, que, en nuestro momento histórico, no puede y no será el producto de cualquier grupo individual.

La totalidad del proyecto está dividida en tres partes principales 1) Una síntesis parcial de Marx 2) Una crítica de la historia de la organización revolucionaria 3) Pensamientos provisionales sobre la necesidad de organización hoy en día. Estamos actualmente en el proceso de escribir el borrador de la segunda parte, pero queríamos empezar a publicar la primera parte ahora, que será serializado durante los próximos meses.

El borrador sobre Marx no pretende ser un folleto introductorio popular. En cambio, está destinado para un público con un conocimiento básico de Marx. En nuestra propia práctica lo usamos como un complemento a los grupos de estudio y discusión en curso sobre Marx, así como la teoría revolucionaria en general.

Es importante decir algo acerca del concepto de comunismo que destaca esta serie. Nosotros entendemos comunismo en el sentido que Marx escribió en La Ideología Alemana:

Para nosotros, el comunismo no es un estado que debe implantarse, un ideal al que ha de sujetarse la realidad. Nosotros llamamos comunismo al movimiento real que anula y supera al estado de cosas actual. Las condiciones de este movimiento se desprenden de la premisa actualmente existente.

Este pasaje contiene todo un mundo de pensamiento y experiencia histórica que debe ser desenredado y recompuesto de nuevo. Sin embargo, lo que es importante acerca de la obra de Marx, incluyendo, crucialmente, El Capital, es que lo coloca la viviente actividad humana en el centro del concepto de comunismo. Comunismo es la lucha necesaria y permanente de la humanidad para lograr libertad – para liberarse de su propia existencia enajenada.

Hay un gran número de pensadores y tendencias políticas que han tomado el manto y han influido el desarrollo de nuestro propio pensamiento. Sin embargo, no reclamamos ninguna adherencia específica a ellos. Mientras que pueden haber hecho contribuciones importantes, no somos obligados por sus limitaciones que surgieron de sus experiencias históricas particulares. En cambio, necesitamos una  nueva síntesis que surge de las realidades sociales de hoy.

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La Teoría Comunista De Marx

La historia de organización comunista no puede ser separada de la historia del marxismo como una crítica de su propia historia. Dado que la crisis de la izquierda revolucionaria es, en parte, una crisis de la teoría revolucionaria nos debemos, hasta un cierto punto, empezar de nuevo volviendo a Marx. La historia de la teoría revolucionaria en sí está marcada por tales retornos en que los revolucionarios intentaron de entender su sociedad estudiando las ideas y luchas del pasado. Esto ha sido una parte fundamental y necesaria de la teoría y la práctica comunista históricamente.

Dado que hoy nos enfrentamos de nuevo a un impasse definido por una falta del conocimiento categórico y análisis nos debemos luchar de nuevo para encontrar un terreno sobre el cual pararnos. Sólo con claridad podemos llegar a una fundación más sólida para el trabajo revolucionario.

Si Tu Me Olvidas (If You Forget Me) – Pablo Neruda

QUIERO que sepas una cosa.

Tú sabes cómo es esto: si miro la luna de cristal, la rama roja del lento otoño en mi ventana, si toco junto al fuego la impalpable ceniza o el arrugado cuerpo de la leña, todo me lleva a ti, como si todo lo que existe, aromas, luz, metales, fueran pequeños barcos que navegan hacia las islas tuyas que me aguardan.

Ahora bien, si poco a poco dejas de quererme dejaré de quererte poco a poco.

Si de pronto me olvidas no me busques, que ya te habré olvidado.

Si consideras largo y loco el viento de banderas que pasa por mi vida y te decides a dejarme a la orilla del corazón en que tengo raíces, piensa que en ese día, a esa hora levantaré los brazos y saldrán mis raíces a buscar otra tierra.

Marxist-Feminism vs. Subjectivism: A Response to Fire Next Time

http://gatheringforces.org/2013/02/11/marxist-feminism-vs-subjectivism-a-response-to-fire-next-time/

By Eve Mitchel and Tyler Zimmerman

The East Coast network Fire Next Time recently posted this dialogue between two of their members, Zora and Ba Jin, contrasting Silvia Federici and Selma James.  The post argues that Federici’s Marxist-Feminist understanding of primitive accumulation in her book, Caliban and the Witch, forefronts global migration, colonization, and international connections among women and people of color.  On the other hand, the post asserts, James’ Marxist-Feminist analysis centers on the U.S.-centric housewife role and only secondarily takes up the question of waged women’s work and Third World and Black Feminism.  The post further critiques Wages for Housework as a liberal feminist goal, arguing that “it seems like a weird coexistence with capitalism.”  In response to this post, I feel the need to clear a few things up and ask some questions in the spirit of comradely debate.

My “n-word”?

This piece I put together is extremely underdeveloped and the aim unclear. I should have waited before posting it, but what’s done is done. I’m going to revamp it and put the polished version up later.

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I am in Latin America right now visiting family and doing some sight seeing, and recently I went to see a friend in Ecuador when we started discussing the movie Django Unchaned and the usage of the word nigga by people who aren’t black. It reminded me of a blog post by my comrade Adelita that she threw up a while back.

I feel a lot of affinity with what Adelita writes regarding the use of the word nigga. I never felt uncomfortable with my usage of the word until I left my hood for college and came across liberals, and later revolutionaries who said it wasn’t right to use that term. It actually reminds me of a quote from Frantz Fanon in “Black Skin, White Masks” (BSWM) where he says, “As long as the black (brown) man remains on his home territory, except for petty internal quarrels, he will not have to experience his being for others.”

Killa Kyleon

History and the Social Forms of Existence

Another repost from the Unity and Struggle website.

This is the second part in an ongoing series on some of the key ideas in Marx’s thought. The first part can be found here.

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The preceding section discussed Marx’s understanding of human beings in the abstract. However, a true picture only emerges when one grasps humanity in the concrete; that is, in its actual living existence. So, for instance, in the beginning of the previous section the relationship between essence and existence was described as a matter of “standpoint.” This terminology is important because it suggests how Marx conceived of humanity as a dialectical unity between its essence and its mode of existence. One can only view human beings from different, distinct sides that, nonetheless, constitute a whole. As was emphasized above, essence only comes into being through existence and its content only exists objectively as form.

To develop this methodological point further it is necessary to consider the important role of abstraction in Marx’s thought.  In order to understand the concrete phenomena of society, it is necessary to abstract from their particularity. Since a specific phenomena cannot be comprehended in itself, but only in its relation to other phenomena, it is necessary to discover new concepts that explain their unity. One thereby moves toward a conception of the totality of all relations in society. Without the relations between phenomena, the concrete becomes merely empirical. Once again, in Marx’s approach there are no “things,” but only relations and moments of totality. However, it is also necessary to grasp the concrete or else the relations from which phenomena emerge would become abstract. As a result, social reality and its concrete historical movement could not be comprehended at all. Marx’s methodology regarding abstraction and the concrete will be returned to later and developed further.

With these considerations in mind it becomes clear that Marx’s philosophical break in the “Theses” and ‘Estranged Labor” does not really begin to take methodological shape until he grounds his categories in history. For Marx history is the movement of the successive modes of existence humanity has created. History is the result of and the process of the objectivity of sensuous activity he speaks of in those early writings. In this light it is possible to understand more clearly Marx’s turn to the critique of political economy. Of course, this move was necessary to critique bourgeois ideology. But this critique proceeded in immanent fashion by grasping the movement of human activity in its concrete forms of existence. Marx’s aim was to show how in class society, humanity’s essence and existence come into contradiction with each other.

Notas Del Capítulo uno de El Capital

Yo traduje la siguinte entrada que fue publicada originalmente en la pagina de Unity and Struggle, y es la primera parte de algunas notas del capítulo uno de El Capital. Esta es mi primera vez traduciendo un artículo tan complejo como éste. Así que si lees algo que no está traducido bien o hay un error gramático le agradecería su ayuda en corregirlo. Puedes conseguir el artículo original en Ingles aquí.

Originalmente escrito por HiFi y traducido por Parcer.

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El Carácter Doble de la Mercancía es el Carácter Doble Del Trabajo 

Marx empieza capítulo uno de El Capital describiendo el carácter doble de la mercancía. Un lado de la mercancía se define por la forma en que se utiliza. Marx llama a esto el “valor de uso.” Él define uso por cómo la mercancía “satisface necesidades humanas, de cualquier clase que ellas sean” (3). La idea de “necesidades humanas” representa una función importante en el pensamiento de Marx y toma una multitud de significados interrelacionados. En La Ideología Alemana él argumenta “El primer hecho histórico es, por consiguiente, la producción de los medios indispensables para la satisfacción de estas necesidades, es decir la producción de la vida material misma, y no cabe duda de que es éste un hecho histórico, una condición fundamental de toda historia” (28). A lo largo de la historia los seres humanos han producido cosas, o “usos,” para atender sus necesidades básicas y ampliadas, que causa formas particulares de la sociedad, determinados tipos de relaciones sociales y subjetividades.

Cuando se observa sólo como un uso, la mercancía es indistinguible del proceso de satisfacer necesidades como una característica general de todas las sociedades humanas. Así, como diversos tipos de usos para cumplir con nuestras numerosas necesidades, la mercancía “forma el contenido material de la riqueza, cualquiera que sea la forma social de ésta.” Sin embargo, Marx deduce en El Capital que una mercancía asume características que son específicas de la sociedad capitalista, que sólo se aclarará cuando se mira al otro lado de la mercancía: el cambio. “En el tipo de sociedad que nos proponemos estudiar [en Capitalismo], los valores de uso son, además, el soporte material del valor de cambio” (4).

La producción de usos para satisfacer necesidades en la sociedad capitalista asume una forma específica de cambio. Aunque históricamente han habido otros tipos de cambio, estos reflejaban no capitalista formas de sociedad. Una de las tareas de Marx es mostrar cómo la forma de cambio en el capitalismo, y por lo tanto las relaciones sociales o forma de esa sociedad no tiene precedentes históricamente y es algo nuevo.

Unity & Struggle

I undertook the task of giving a brief 10 min summary of what/who Unity & Struggle is at our recent general meeting. I thought I’d share my summary on the blog because I don’t think it’s half bad, although many of the ideas require more context. Which we went into detail during the meeting. I’v come along way since first joing the group in my understanding of our politics and being able to articulate them. I still need a lot work, especially on my oration skills. I’m no Malcolm, yet.

I. What is Communism?

•From the German Ideology – “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

•Meaning an emphasis on the self movement of the working class as the subject of history and the only ones capable of abolishing our existence in the value form, ending the way we are alienated from each other, nature and the means of production. Where we try to satisfy our many sided needs through performing a single function in the capitalist division of labor in order to produce surplus value.

•This takes on particular racialized and gendered forms, ex: I (a male and Latino) work in the HVAC industry and depend on that to reproduce myself, i.e. to buy food, pay rent, car note, clothes etc. Anything else that nourishes my existence and makes up a part of who I am (art, sports, travel, family etc.) I must try to work in around my basic physical and mental reproduction of daily life. Communism is the transcendence of these conditions we live under, the reconnecting of production and reproduction, or essence and existence.

•If this is the picture, however limited, of what communism is, what then are the premises now in existence? With the crisis and the austerity offensive we see the need for capital to drive down the cost of labor which is the moving contradiction of capital to expel labor from the process of production while at the same time requiring it for valorization, and the contradiction of dead labor over living labor.

II. Historical Moment & Tasks Before Us Today

•What is austerity? Some features of austerity are massive layoffs (unemployment is really high in Europe, US and elsewhere), it also is dramatically cutting social spending (ruling class no longer wants to help pay for reproduction of the working class). Let’s look at examples of resistance against austerity and against attack on the working class broadly speaking.

•Police murder and incarceration of Black people and Immigration.

•These reflect the beginnings or re-emergence of self-movement among Blacks & Latinos, activity that we haven’t seen consistently in a long time.

•Oscar Grant, Treyvon Martin, Troy Davis, and GA Prisoner Strike. Capital is trying to keep in check the reserve army of labor of Black & Latino workers. Capital & the state needs to find an outlet, and deal with it through murder & incarceration.

•Passing of Jim Crow immigration laws (SB 1070 & Copycats) in AZ, GA, AL, SC, etc. Latinos increasingly make up very important and large parts of production process in the U.S. in unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled labor. This will be essential in coming class struggles. These laws are trying to address this, by keeping wages low, keeping undocumented people in state of fear of deportation. Another tool for keeping the class divided, amongst Latinos and amongst the class as a whole, between undocumented and documented.

•Internationally we’ve seen the Arab Spring, Greece Uprising, Indignados in Spain, and the reemergence of a student movement in Chile.

•Alongside this we have a crisis on the left both organizationally and theoretically where revolutionary ideas, organizing and understanding are very low in part due to the loss of roots among the working class.

•Another aspect is that Orthodox Marxism has failed in trying to prevent working class struggles from reabsorbed into capital by focusing undialectically on the forms of struggle and not so much the content of those struggles. Let’s take the unions for example; Orthodox Marxists do not question form of unions, so if they have critiques it is only of the current leadership. But they do not see how unions still trap struggle in confines of capital. They do not focus on the negation of our existence in the value form.

•One of our historical tasks is rebuilding the fighting organizations of the class.

III. Why Revolutionary Organization?

•Through study and experience revolutionary organization is necessary to overcome some of the limitations I just talked about. It acts as a form to organize and equip ourselves with the proper tools to do so. A great influence on U&S has been Lenin and his work in “What Is To Be Done.”

•The revolutionary organization is the place for cadre to gain organizing experience and theoretical training. This happens through study groups and the day to day grind work that entails organizing with the class such as facilitating meetings, preparing agendas, flyering, and discussing tactics and strategy. The importance in theoretical work is to achieve categorical clarity based on the movement of the class to foresee what is happening and why in order to know what our exact tasks at hand are.

• Another task of revolutionaries is maintaining continuity between the ebbs and flows of class struggle. Some ways we do this are through organizing centers in what we call the intermediate layer. This is neither a revolutionary or mass organization, but a form of organization where revolutionaries and the working class can come together to organize during times of low activity.

•We use this center model to find advanced groupings of proletarians who would make up the vanguard. Vanguard in the sense that they represent the most active or militant layer of the proletariat.

IV. Conclusion

•As a revolutionary group one of the roles we are trying to play here is build up independent organizing and a political ecology where we build spaces for people to talk politics about what’s going on in the world, share experiences, and devise tactics and strategy in order to fight for radical change.