G R O F A Z

Adrian Hamilton writes today in The Independent that France is a “deeply racist country.” President Sarkozy (a man whom I have precious little love for) has received criticism from all sides of the British press for using the recent spate of attacks on his country for “electioneering,” that is to say, he has been criticised for responding to these attacks.

There are some who’ve received less attention. These are the three commandos of the Recherce Asssistance Intervention Dissuasion wounded in action whilst storming Merah’s apartment. Their gallantry and courage in the defence of the values of the French Republic is commendable, and comparable to the famous actions at Verdun and later at Lille.

And what are these values, that our Soldier of Islam, Mohammed Merah, was raging against? Secularism? Democracy? Or is it un pour tous, tous pour un? Adrian Hamilton claims that “Mohammed Merah’s trail of death will only serve to make such prejudices [Islamophobia] more publicly acceptable.”

Let’s ask ourselves a question. Who’s the bigot here? Is it France, who had offered Merah a home; a citizenship, a plethora of rights and privileges claimed also by the other sixty million people who make up the French Republic and coveted by billions across the globe, on the sole condition that he consider himself a member of the very same society that had blessed him such? Who’s the bad guy here, the French or the people who subvert France?

Hamilton makes the comparison between Jews and Muslims. Let us then look at the words of Count de Clermont Tonnerre in 1789; “we must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to the Jews as individuals.” Yet the Jews have shown themselves worthy Frenchmen. The much maligned Alfred Dreyfuss, maltreated by the French Army, nonetheless served his country with skill and pride in the First World War. Thousands of French Jews took part in the armed resistance against German occupation of their country. They have brought great contribution to their country in not just the fields of military service, but in philosophy, science, art, music, literature and sport.

The French demand just one thing in exchange for the liberty, fraternity and equality of their society – that each citizen can have no higher allegiance than his country. Is this racism? The values that the RAID team last night took fire for are not racist and discriminatory. It is against these principles that the French police force bravely stood on the night of the 22^nd of March. This is not a new thing. Ethnic conflict between Jews and Muslims has been going on for more than a decade in France. It is in retaliation for the Palestinian-Israel conflict that Merah targeted Jews, and for France’s involvement in Afghanistan that he targeted Frenchmen.

If it’s true that France’s large Muslim minority are loyal citizens, then there will not be any problem with laws against “justifying acts of terror” or “seeking advice from terrorist websites.” None of these acts constitute a “nothing to be afraid of if you’re not guilty” concept – they are “strict liability”, that is to say, acts that in themselves constitute a moral if not physical attack on the French Republic. That’s not electioneering. That, Sir, is the job of the President.

SOPA and PROTECT IP, otherwise known as PIPA, are only preliminaries. The arrest of Kim Schmitz, the owner of Megaupload.com, and the closure of that site by the Federal Bureau of Investigation marks the main event, the declaration of war on the internet by the entertainment industry and their stooges in international “law enforcement.” It signals that they not only have the power, but the intent to close famous websites and arrest their authors for “copyright infringement.” 

It was obvious from day one that the entertainment industry; RIAA, Hollywood, CBS, FOX, etc, can not co-exist with the internet. Their “closed source,” for-profit programming used to constitute a monopoly on the provision of entertainment and information. The internet has destroyed this monopoly and now they’ve finally realised it, these agents are acting to re-establish their monopoly by legal power. 

Kim Schmitz, or Kim “Dotcom,” is no Julian Assange or Jimmy Wales-Larry Sanger. He’s just a guy who made money by hosting a website. A website that the FBI claims was an “international organised criminal enterprise responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of copyrighted works.” In reality it was a site that users could upload files to and download them from. 

Dotcom is not a drug runner, he doesn’t organise the sale of heroin. He’s not a gun runner, he doesn’t ship AK-47s to Mexican gangs. He’s not a pimp; he doesn’t trade in sex slaves. He’s not a terrorist; he doesn’t sell ricin to Al-Qaeda. These groups are criminal enterprises that have an actual effect on people’s lives. The only people who Dotcom affected were millions of ordinary people who’s lives were made easier and better, and an elite minority who saw a dent in their profits. 

But this is more than that. This is more than Kim Schmitz. This is a statement that the entertainment industry can censor and regulate the internet, “for the sake of Transformers 2,” as my friend put it. Transformers 2 is a good film. It provided me with 2 hours of enjoyment; if I watch it again, then 4. The internet, on the other hand… 

… provides inestimable value to education, creativity, science, technology, information, entertainment, networking, career searching, etc… It is not a tool to be controlled by a few people who want to consolidate their ego and profits.

It’s night time for half the earth when the battleship Pangaea swings around the moon, the light blue glow of her engine drives illuminating the battlecruisers Canopus and Sirius and making them occasionally visible as they maneouvre in and out of the light. Down below, people stop and watch. They crane their necks up in the night sky and see what amounts to a small lunar eclipse as the long, tubular shape begins to pass rapidly across the moon, carrying the hopes of humanity with it.

The huge battleship has been named after what the earth once was, because even after 200,000 years of evolution, nothing has been able to eradicate from the human mentality the overwhelming desire to cling to the past. Those things that we have behind us are dependable and romantic; the future is full of uncertainty, and this is especially true now. It was perhaps with a certain sense of superstition that the largest warship we’ve ever constructed, humanity’s last hope, has been named for something we had in the past; maybe a desire to go backwards, to reverse what has happened to us.

Don’t let the tense of this story fool you into a happy ending; it’s not even plausible that we win. Pangaea rocks for a minute and Canopus explodes, the debris of her wreck slamming into the larger ship that she’s tailing. Of course nobody notices that because they are all watching the Pangaea and trying to count the dozens or hundreds of little impacts that rock across her body before she just blows up like something that has been left in the microwave for too long. Nobody can see the rest of the battle because it is no longer playing out in front of the moon like one huge projector. But they know that it is brief and predetermined and anyway they have better things to be doing like praying or having one last cigarette or something, because about half an hour later the alien armada annihilates every last living thing on the planet earth and yes even the cockroaches die too.

It was bound to happen anyway. A race of superior predators from the stars chased to humanity to extinction, like so many species before them. We could make a film about it if we weren’t all dead.

A friend recently linked me to an article by Murray Rothbard (deceased) of the Austrian School. Mr Rothbard has always been my least favourite Austrian, partially for his absurd views on war and peace, and partially for his complete obnoxiousness in the face of any counter-argument. 

It would be useful to begin by dealing with Mr Rothbard’s unjustified assault on Mr Chomsky. He makes the claim that Mr Chomsky is not an anarchist, and here he operates under the typical delusion that anarchy has ever meant, or indeed presently means, “without Government.” We find, linguistically speaking, that anarchy means “without Order/Rule.” Indeed, the first political anarchists realised that there is more than one type of rule than Government; identifying capital, church, and the class system with rule and order. The aim of anarchy is to remove hierarchies; for how can we say that we advocate a lack of “order” when we acknowledge the rule of one class over another? Is this not social order?

Indeed, Mr Rothbard can quite accurately be labelled the first political theorist to use the term Anarchy in this “anarcho capitalist” fashion. Both Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner, worshipped by the Mises Institute, were against the employers and rent and interest. So how Mr Rothbard can annex the term Anarchy to mean solely “no Government” is quite beyond me, although apparently not beyond his arrogance. So when he accuses Chomsky of being a statist, what he really means is that Chomsky acknowledges that in the short, realistic, term, the state can be a tool used to de-construct social hierarchies.

Moving on, with this in mind, we can see why Mr Rothbard so utterly detests Unions, because he is ready to accept any injustice so long as there is no “Government” involved in it. In fact he openly spurs the idea that anyone who is not in a position of social or economic control can make decisions… “Karl, trapped in an anarcho-syndicalist framework, could only lamely reply that the workers would come to some sort of agreement.” This statement is presumably facetious. If one were to ask an “anarcho capitalist” a similar question, such as “What happens if I own a road and put a land mine on it and somebody dies?” they would probably reply something like: “Well, a private arbitration court would probably come to some sort of agreement…” Yet in the economic sphere, Mr Rothbard believes that “The proper and swift answer would have been that the stockholder-owners would decide.” In other words, only those with economic power are in the right position to come to some sort of agreement.

He charges Unions with intimidation and violence. On this charge, he is sometimes correct. This is similar to charging a regiment of troops with intimidation and violence. For what is the purpose of the Union? Collective bargaining. When their members are routinely beaten, shot, arrested, deported, exiled, assassinated, how can a Union stand by in idle pacifism? Is it not the birthright of human beings to fight back against tyranny? (Apparently not, since Mr Rothbard does not believe that the Second World War was a Just War, although the Southern Secession of 1861 apparently was.)

We can make no mistake that the founding cause of organised labour was a battle against tyranny. The working conditions endured by the men – and women and children – of the 19^th century working class demanded industrial action. Working hours, pay, and safety conditions were abysmal. Any revolt inspired immediate dismissal. Here we come to the primary failure of the voluntarist argument that Mr Rothbard sets forth. He states that free market capitalism is the only system that relies on “voluntary inducements.” If the choice is between working for 14 hours a day in extremely dangerous conditions, or your family starving to death, then one is not really given a choice. The choice exists so long as one ignores the objective social condition; so long as one ignores the basic human desire to live, to eat, to breathe. So when a man says: “Work for me, under my conditions, for my profit and gain, and I will reward you meagrely; and if you do not work, you will starve,” we can be wholly sure that there is nothing but tyranny.

(“Well,” said the capitalist, puffing out his chest indignantly, “I own the machines.” The alien stroked its chin. “So, who built the machines?”)

Mr Rothbard has attempted to show that syndicalism is a failure. On this count, he makes some irritating hypocrises. Every student and believer of the Austrian school knows that Rome is not built in a day. No economic system can be designed and work perfectly, instantly. The capitalist system took hundreds of years to perfect; markets have been around for thousands of years. So when he levels the charge that syndicalism is unworkable, he forgets that it lacks these thousands of years of experimentation. Interestingly, he uses Yugoslavia is a prime example.

“For while the workers in each plant indeed own their plants, the relations between plants are strictly governed by a free price system, and by profit-and-loss tests… furthermore, the Yugoslavs are rapidly moving in the direction of individual shares of ownership for each worker, and the subsequent trading of such shares in some sort of “people’s stock market,” which will culminate their shift to a free-market economy.” This is a good description of the Yugoslav economy as of 1971 (when Rothbard wrote the article.) “The Yugoslav system, therefore, is indeed not syndicalist, but a market economy of producers’ cooperatives.” Again true. Let us remember that Yugoslavia had the best standard of living of all the Socialist countries of world history. Indeed this is an excellent blueprint for a transitional socialist system. For while Yugoslavia had its problems (and let’s not doubt that the Western free market countries have theirs, too), it was a developing and modernising state. Then Mr Rothbard brings up the typical anarcho-capitalist reply: “If this is really all that the anarcho-syndicalists demand, then they can easily bring the new society into being by simply forming producers’ co-ops owned by the workers themselves.”

Not quite true, Sir. Only twenty years later, after infiltration and attack by the Western capitalist economies, Yugoslavia was selling itself to the United States. Ronald Reagan ordered the subversive collapse of the Yugoslav economy, and Western nations issued trade embargoes and blockades. The IMF demanded privatisation in exchange for loans. Peaceful Yugoslavia, which had maintained friendly relations with all the countries of the world, a founder of the Non Aligned Movement, a nation which had never threatened another and was, throughout its post-war history, wholly peaceful, was toppled. The path was opened for Western investment.

Neither can he say that the implementation of market principles into the syndicalist society heralds a move toward capitalism, since there is no private control of the means of production. One can not get around the fact that by the 1970s, slightly after the original article was written, industry and agriculture in Yugoslavia was owned in common by the working class. No large-scale capitalists. No investment firms. No sweatshops. No merchant banks.In other words, we are looking for the best system that can operate without the existence of private ownership, in the practical, realistic, future.

Maybe, Mr Rothbard, if your friends, the stockholder-owners, gave syndicalism a chance, it might work. But at every turn where it has been attempted it has been viciously suppressed by the capitalist class. The very few exceptions, such as MONDRAGON and the Co-Operative, do exist presently. They are examples of how worker self-management can compete and succeed, but they are no basis for a future socialist society.

Mr Rothbard poses a question that he claims nobody has yet answered. That is, in our future, worker-managed, equalitarian society, will people be allowed to own private property? He poses it as the Aubun question. The answer is soundly: No. When one man hoards the resources of the world for his own self-gain, we have capitalism. Even if these systems were compatible, it would be foolish to allow a capitalist system to operate in close proximity to a Socialist one: if only because the historical record shows quite clearly that it is capitalism, not socialism, that absolutely can not put up with competing forms of organisation.

Mr Rothbard makes all sorts of claims about Unions being violent, intimidating, criminal. When the workers of Bloody Harlan County went on strike to protest the working conditions of their children in the mines, they were arrested, shot at, beaten. Miners houses were riddled with machine gun bullets in the middle of the night. Who here is guilty of violence? Intimidation? Criminality? 

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender,
this I could not do;
I took my gun and vanished.
I have changed my name so often,
I’ve lost my wife and children
but I have many friends,
and some of them are with me.

An old woman gave us shelter,
kept us hidden in the garret,
then the soldiers came;
she died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I’m the only one this evening
but I must go on;
the frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we’ll come from the shadows.

Les Allemands e’taient chez moi, (The Germans were at my home)
ils me dirent, “Signe toi,” (They said, “Sign yourself,”)
mais je n’ai pas peur; (But I am not afraid)
j’ai repris mon arme. (I have retaken my weapon.)

J’ai change’ cent fois de nom, (I have changed names a hundred times)
j’ai perdu femme et enfants (I have lost wife and children)
mais j’ai tant d’amis; (But I have so many friends)
j’ai la France entie`re. (I have all of France)

Un vieil homme dans un grenier (An old man, in an attic)
pour la nuit nous a cache’, (Hid us for the night)
les Allemands l’ont pris; (The Germans captured him)
il est mort sans surprise. (He died without surprise.)

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
through the graves the wind is blowing,
freedom soon will come;
then we’ll come from the shadows.

- Leonard Cohen

I sat down at a table. Daniel came over and was drying out glasses with a cloth. “Hi Max,” he said.

“Hi Daniel. I’ll have a beer.”

“There’s no beer,” he said. He dried a glass. It looked more dirty after that.

“Well, I’ll have the pork option then.”

“There’s no pork today, only dog.” He dried a glass.

“You idiot,” I cried. “John’s place has beer and pork there. Why would anyone come here?” We both burst out into laughter. 

“You’re the idiot.” He dried a glass. “Why don’t you go to John’s place?” He dried a glass. “If it’s so much better.”

“Alright, I capitulate.” I threw my hands into the air. “I’ll have the dog.”

“Daniel gave me a helmet with the dog fillets in. They were mixed with potato and some water. The water was dirty so I drained it out. “This potato is raw.” I said.

“Cook it yourself then.” He dried a glass.

I ate it anyway. “Delicious. How much?”

Daniel put the glasses down. “Sixteen cartridges.”

“You’re an idiot. Where am I supposed to get sixteen cartridges from?”

“The same place I am supposed to get dog from.” We both burst out into laughter. I paid him four cartridges and left.