Monday, April 22, 2013

heaven

A turtle carries its home in a backpack, an island in a moment, a sudden rush of adrenaline
seratonin pump shotgun, expressing self-led digest, yes,
a silty bottom for the rest of the lake to surface, 
porcelain people from old oil paintings are crusted with the glitter of modern fashioned metal furniture, 
ha! what an easy trick of words, playing time with cut fingernails and plastic dishes, 
each and every creature is propelled by this god person, just a prop 
empty entities are shells for loathing, lugging, and reloading, click click-mice drop bomb rhymes like obama kills children, drugs kill time while protestas keep chilling, check mate the masters and them bodies still be burning, oh! but then a revolutionary change of hands! a new shiny leash for my black leather jack off, fresh politricians at the death angel doctors office, picking flowers in the garden outside while pubes and heads get shaved, no lice in the camps now kids, no flowers on the graves, just stones where we layed tracks over trains, ancient remnants of what couldnt be saved by religeon, 
they ask, god please keep us in heaven, 
because we live life in this prison. 

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

flag dress

patchwork in the fabric
of this outer layer
stiffness in my bleeding fingers
the bus rolls on
stone dark
cold, calm
in my machine state
following the process
within movement
this motion
feeling lost and found in the traffic
screaming ocean
singing prophecy
tried again, moved back
you didn't see my other end
now
know my deeper black humor, superficial impulse
and anger
bring warmth with your light
heal the wounded friend beneath
uncovering in shallow upper stream bank
walk to the rocky beach of my dreams
in the hills, far from living memory
this feeling dwells
my caution dies
finally justice is killed
the empire gutted
back on my island
adventures over, dead field, road closure
still each moment
takes so long
to caress my pillowed love, fuck living
stop driving
and ride off into our own
sea of tears
standing on the docks
the wind seizing salt off my face
onto yours
the taste brings tomorrow alone
to a hymn
then the excitement returns
when I see you
in cloth once again

Friday, May 6, 2011

Childhood’s End for Humanity?

by Kevin Carson

Center for a Stateless Society

May 1, 2011

History, since the agricultural revolution, can be usefully conceptualized as an offensive-defensive arms race between technologies of abundance and social structures of expropriation.

Until the appearance of agriculture, human society didn’t produce a large enough surplus to support much in the way of social organization above the hunter-gatherer group. Agriculture was the first technology of abundance sufficiently productive to support parasitic classes on a large scale. With agriculture came a superstructure of kings, priests, martial castes and landlords who milked the producing classes like cattle.

We now seem to be nearing the end of an interval of ten thousand years or so between two thresholds. The first threshold was the appearance of the first large-scale technology of abundance — agriculture.

Since then we have been in that aforementioned arms race. Sometimes technologies of abundance produce an increase in the social surplus faster than the class superstructure can expropriate it, and things become better for the ordinary person — as in the late Middle Ages, when the horse collar and crop rotation caused a massive increase in agricultural productivity, the craftsmen of the free towns developed new production technologies, and the decay of feudalism resulted in falling rents and de facto emancipation of large sectors of the peasantry. Sometimes the advantage shifts to the social structures of expropriation, and things get worse — as in the case of the absolute monarchies’ suppression of the free towns, what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “long sixteenth century,” and the Enclosures.

We’re approaching the second threshold, when the technologies of abundance reach a takeoff point beyond which the social structures of expropriation can no longer keep up with the rising production curve.

The interval between the two thresholds has been comparatively brief, compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that homo sapiens has existed in something like its present form and the billion years or so that the sun will likely be able to support human life. Seen in that light, this interval is a brief initial adjustment period in the early stages of human productivity. The state was an anomaly in this early stage of the technological explosion, in the childhood of the human race, by whose means the parasitic classes were briefly able to piggyback on the revolution in productivity and harness it as a source of income for themselves.

During this brief interval, parasitic classes — bureaucrats, usurers, landlords, and assorted rentiers — used the state to create scarcity by artificial means, in order to enclose the increased productivity from technologies of abundance as a source of rents for themselves. But after these first few millennia, the productivity curve has shifted so sharply upward that the increases in output will dwarf the rentier classes’ ability to expropriate it. What’s more, new technologies of abundance are rendering artificial scarcities unenforceable.

Around forty years ago, it was fashionable to say that humanity was entering the “Age of Aquarius.” There is a sense in which the 1970s really were the beginning of a new age of human liberation. They saw the birth of the two technologies of abundance — the desktop computer and cheap numerically-controlled machine tools — which will eventually free us from the grip of the corporate state and its artificial scarcities.

The apparent reaction of the decades since — neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus, Reaganism and Thatcherism, the jackbooted police state of the Drug War and War on Terror, the neocons’ wet dream of a Thousand Year Reich enforced by the Sole Remaining Superpower, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — can be seen as a desperate rear guard action by the corporate state, the death throes of a dying system, a last-ditch effort by the forces of artificial scarcity to suppress the forces that will destroy them.

This effort will fail. What file-sharing has done to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has done to the national security state, are only the dimmest foreshadowings of what technologies of abundance and freedom will do to the old authoritarian institutions.

Encryption and darknets are destroying the power of the music, publishing, and movie industries to collect rents on their so-called “intellectual property,” and eliminating economic transactions as a tax base to support bureaucrats.

New physical production technologies, by extracting greater outputs from ever smaller inputs, are rendering the privileged classes’ huge supplies of land and capital utterly useless as a source of income.

Ordinary people, with cheap means of informational and physical production, will soon be able to meet our needs through peaceful production and trade in a fraction of the present workweek, and dump the rentiers off our backs.

If this framing of human history is valid, we’re just finishing the dawn of humanity’s brief childhood, and entering the long afternoon of its maturity.


Must We Rebuild Their Anthill? A Letter to/for Japanese Comrades

By Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis

Dear comrades,

We are writing to express to you our solidarity at a time when the pain for those who have died or have disappeared is still raw, and the task of reshaping of life out of the immense wreckage caused by the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear reactor meltdowns must appear unimaginable. We also write to think together with you what this moment marked by the most horrific nuclear disaster yet in history signifies for our future, for the politics of anti-capitalist social movements, as well as the fundamentals of everyday reproduction.

Concerning our future and the politics of anti-capitalist movements, one thing is sure. The present situation in Japan is potentially more damaging to people’s confidence in capitalism than any disaster in the “under-developed” world and certainly far more damaging than the previous exemplar of nuclear catastrophe, Chernobyl. For none of the exonerating excuses or explanations commonly flagged in front of man-made disasters can apply in this case. Famines in Africa can be blamed, however wrongly, on the lack of capital and technological “know how,” i.e., they can be blamed on the lack of development, while the Chernobyl accident can be attributed to the technocratic megalomania bred in centrally-planned socialist societies. But neither underdevelopment nor socialism can be used to explain a disaster in 21st century Japan that has the world’s third largest capitalist economy and the most technologically sophisticated infrastructure on the planet. The consequences of the earthquake, the tsunami and, most fatefully, the damaged nuclear reactors can hardly be blamed on the lack of capitalist development. On the contrary, they are the clearest evidence that high tech capitalism does not protect us against catastrophes, and it only intensifies their threat to human life while blocking any escape route. This is why the events in Japan are potentially so threatening and so de-legitimizing for the international capitalist power-structure. For the chain of meltdowns feared or actually occurring stands as a concrete embodiment of what capitalism has in store for us —an embodiment of the dangers to which we are being exposed with total disregard of our well-being, and what we can expect in our future, as from China to the US and beyond, country after country is planning to multiply its nuclear plants.

-please read the entirety of this powerful letter at infoshop.org

Thursday, April 28, 2011

BABY BLOC


After pepper spraying a family in Portland, a police officer said, "That’s why you shouldn't bring kids to protests." Blaming the victim is the standard defense for political violence. Kids and parents should be safe at legal rallies because protests shouldn't be cordoned off, ordered to disperse without time or a place to go, and attacked.

At least one woman had a miscarriage after the WTO demonstrations in Seattle in 1999. I told somebody about this and they got angry saying, “Anybody who goes into a situation like that while they're pregnant is irresponsible!” But she was a local resident who's neighborhood was invaded by police using tear gas. Who was responsible for that?

Pondering these events, and helping raise twin radical toddlers, I contacted the family that got pepper sprayed in Portland and offered to bring our kids if they ever held a protest against the way they were treated. It felt good to talk about my anger and the fear of kids being hurt at political events.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
-
Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

weep

you are the wind

are the notes

I am singing

you, the wind

return

to singing

you are

the voice

am I speaking

to you, the wind?

are you listening?

the channel is flush with flow and flux

my wind will blow through and through

the sea is blue and black my child

my river

is red, when she runs

when she leaves me

my son will shine

the paint will dry

when you are gone

the wind will moan

am I wet?

dying or sleeping or somewhere

close, yet distantly off the street

the river we’ll cross

where we will meet

in the center

at death

are you a sharp corner

am I stone?

should we cry to the open eyes

of atmosphere

the lids of space containing us?

can I simplify my pattern?

.tree.

I am the trunk, the bark and branches,

leaves

you are the wind, the air, the river, sweet whispers and love

is the song

Friday, April 15, 2011

"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Frederick Douglass