Can We Get Anywhere? Yes, We Can

north america / mexico | anarchist movement | opinion / analysis Saturday March 03, 2007 11:11 by Jon - Capital Terminus Collective Supporter

We discuss passively whom to blame for the world’s problems. We do activism on the premise of “just wanting to help”. We put our faith in systems such as the government, and think they will do our bidding if we vote. We discuss our theories on what needs to be done in the world’s impoverished countries, but don’t bother to ask the people in that country what they need. We end up getting burnt out or utterly disillusioned. Others just don’t care and move on with their lives.

What we don’t realize, however, is that we fucked up long ago. We don’t understand what we’re up against. We’re up against the State, we’re up against the most intricately designed economic system, we’re up against the all the major and most heavily trained armies in the world, but mostly we’re up against ourselves.

We are taught that we need support of the government, that groups working outside of the system, without state sanction, always fail. We are stuck thinking that we can do it, if only we try our hardest. The truth is that all we’ll gain is a small victory, temporary contentment, while oppression continues. We are never taught to see the big picture. We are taught to see the big picture of the poverty that remains, but not who perpetuates it. If another group says the system itself perpetuates atrocities, they are demonized, or called "marginal". We are told we must rely on institutions, centers of authority where we can “get our voice heard” and use our state-granted power to “change the system”. That is what we are taught.

Can we get anywhere? That is the first question. The answer is “Yes”. But only in one sense. Forget all we have been told, all that we have been taught to put our trust in. Forget working with governments, with charity organizations, with power holding structures. By working with ourselves, our own communities, and our own organizations that reject the fundamental issue of hierarchy, we find a whole world of possibilities and a whole world of dangers. We must lose the privilege of “living comfortably”. We lose the privileges of funding; we lose a degree of safety. But we see the world as it is, and the potential of changing things, and a possibility of a fight- perhaps on the distant future- that shall be won.

The big picture is basic. There is a world where a small minority holds power and a vast majority is kept separate through nationalities, religions, races, genders, and classes. Castes of people, superiority based on artificial divisions. These divisions really do not matter, and hold no purpose but to keep the masses from uniting in a common interest.

Then there is the American Myth, “Try hard enough and you can be at the top. You can get here. If you work by our ways, we will let you in.” This is one of the cruelest inventions. A nation is created that “allows” dissent within the system by voting, peaceful protest or other moderate means that offer hope of small victories, to pacify us.

A nation that allows a fortunate few to go from “rags to riches”, than champions them as evidence the system “works”. Yet this nation is a country where Whites sit higher than Blacks, and citizens are more comfortable than immigrants. This nation contains the world’s economic power. It has the ability to sustain a smaller nation, and the ability to crush it. It propagandizes its dream to the world, attracting the lust of starving people who hope to have some food in their bellies and a roof over their heads. It tells people, if you join our Free Trade pact, we shall help you out. It says, “If you join our wars, we shall help you out”. If you disagree with this nation, it will call you “communists”, “terrorists” or even worse “Anarchists”! This nation starves others to manufacture consent and agreement. And when people use all means to grasp the dream offered, they are arrested and deported as Illegal Aliens. If this nation needs a cause for war, they make it. Overtly or covertly a war is always going on, and always has been. For centuries, whole groups of people have known nothing more than an economic war that is waged on them. Through taxation, imprisonment, segregation, imperialism, slavery, and genocide, economic wars have been raging. With gentrification or the prison industrial complex, the outcome is the same. The benefit is for the upper classes. For the lower classes, death, hopelessness and poverty. With state communism the stratification remained. It has all been class war.

The Anarchists did not declare class war. No, the champions of the democratic system declared class war. The people who held authority over others, the fascists, the czars, the kings, and the Chairmen of the Party declared class war. We never asked for this war. We never wanted it. But it was forced on us. We saw it when white men from Europe committed genocide on the indigenous in the new world. We saw it when Africans were taken from their villages to slave ships, then worked for the gain of rich white men in Europe and America. We saw it when European Christians started being missionaries in Africa and Asia, only to plunder their resources and take their land, in exchange for Bibles. We saw it when colonies sprung up in Australia, Africa, the Middle East, and in South and Central America. We saw it when sharecropping was legalized in the USA, when whole immigrant and working class families worked in the mines and factories. We saw it when no one decided to help the second Spanish Republic in 1936 and when “democratic” nations supplied the Fascists with gasoline. We saw it when the Holocaust of Jews, homosexuals and communists happened in Germany. We saw it the segregated United States. We saw it as the U.S. supported and instated brutal dictators who allowed multinationals access to all national resources. We saw it when Wounded Knee II happened and Leonard Peltier was imprisoned. We saw it as we found Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton lying dead. We saw it as the CIA imported crack cocaine into the inner city. We saw it as apartheid reigned in South Africa. We saw it as 500,000 Iraqi children died due to sanctions put by America from 1991-2003. And we see it today, right now, as 650,000 Iraqis have died to keep American corporate power over the Middle East. We see Class War occur in our very own towns when gentrification occurs, when another inner city public school is under funded, when the victims of Hurricane Katrina have houses destroyed to pave the way for upper class homes. We see it as Third World countries are mired in debt due to IMF loans, that the impoverished remain while multinationals profit. This list could go on forever and go back for many centuries. To win the struggle for liberation, we must recognize that this war has been declared, and the same institutions we are told to work with, started the war.

But daring to struggle is suicidal to many. This system can kill and cover it up easily. This system can lay people off from work, deny proper education, and imprison them. It can starve families. It can deny any form of dignity. The class war becomes overt. We can say that it just takes an uprising, a mobilization of people, all we want. We can write it on paper all we want, but it does not fix the fact that people are desperate for money, respect, and food, and will buy into the system to meet those needs. Or if those needs are not completely met, at least a semi-stable way to keep their families alive. Survival matters most. Revolution will come second, maybe third. If we are calling people to struggle with us, we must find out what their needs are and how they can be met. We must find out how everyone may have dignity and respect. We must find a way to provide hope, and not a false one, but a real possibility of winning this struggle. We must find a way to provide education to children, medicine for the sick, and work for the unemployed. We must find housing for the homeless and food for the hungry. We must let them have a say and we must work according to their needs and abilities. And we must work to our needs and abilities as well. We must provide a way for enjoyment and play, and a place for serious discussion. There is so much we must do.

Education is what we have to have, in order to win. We have to be educated on the needs of the people, on the logistics, on how to farm, how to defend ourselves, and on how the current system works and runs. We must learn how to cooperate and break down mental barriers that have been consciously and unconsciously placed in our minds. We must learn how to work without an authority guiding us or telling us what to do. Education leads to organization. From organization comes emancipation.

It will be a long struggle. It has been, and will continue to be, a bloody one. We must be prepared to not see the final outcome. But we profit, in the currency of self-respect. Honor. And the acknowledgement of the fact that we have been fighting for liberation. We will know on our deathbed that we give our children and grandchildren more than was our birthright; that their generation's community will be another stage on the path to emancipation. But to waste our lives never seeing the truth and never knowing what it is to be truly free, is devastating. To join in the struggle is to sacrifice, and yet to gain.

There are no guarantees; there is no set destination. To gain self-respect, to create something for oneself and one’s community, is the payoff. To have no doors opened by some leader, but to create in league with others the doorway to a new society: this is the struggle.

One can only free his mind. A community can free itself. A world can rebuild itself. Can we get anywhere? Yes. Yes, we will get somewhere, someday.

Written for anarkismo.net