It really pisses me off when I hear some punk kid or anarchist claim they are boycotting Nike (or whichever other giant corporation). Not because I think they should be supporting Nike, but simply because it shows a lack of any understanding of what a boycott is. And if we desire to be effective, we need to have a clear understanding of what different tactics and strategies actually are.Boycotting is a non-violent consumer tactic which is based on withdrawing support (usually financial) as a way to force ones enemy/oppressor into a compromised position in which they must negotiate with you or meet your terms in order to regain your support. So simply not participating is not the same as actively boycotting. Thus going Vegan is not a boycott of the meat and dairy industry for example.There are many problems with the idea of some patched up crusty claiming to be engaging in boycott tactics against major corporations. The first of which is that in order to take part in a boycott, you must first have support to withdraw, meaning you need to be a client or customer of the target company who financially contributes to them. Even further, you need to be open to reinvesting that financial support one the target has complied with your demands. This differs greatly from the DIY punk ethos of making our own shit rather than giving them our money, which is actually more about creating an alternative economy, or perhaps an alternative to economy.
Continue READING:A couple of months ago, I discussed one of the most difficult challenges facing Occupy, the willingness of middle class progressives to rationalize the abuses of the police because they place a greater priority upon the preservation of social order by law enforcement. Such progressives want to square the political circle by seeking a transformation of American society without conflict. They are most perfectly represented by Chris Hedges, a man who seems to find the verbal abuse of the police at protests more disturbing than police assaults and finds himself incapable of deciding whether protesters should throw tear gas canisters back at the cops who fired them.But what is it that these progressives believe requires the protection of the police, even at the cost of the violent suppression of Occupy protesters? Upon reflection, the answer is obvious: private property and the hierarchical social relations inscribed by it. Of course, Occupy participants are not all anarchists or communists, far from it, but they have adopted direct action tactics that have frightened progressives with the ghost of expropriation. Initially, occupiers set up encampments in public spaces as a means of highlighting enormous income inequality and corruption. They sought to prefigure an alternative, much more egalitarian, social order that stood in marked contrast to the existing one. If we were living back in the 1960s or 1970s, the government would have responded with a program of increased public assistance, a program that would have drained away support for Occupy by providing housing, jobs, student aid and medical care, but that would have threatened to reverse the neoliberal process of the marketization of all aspects of our lives, and, hence, was never seriously considered.Instead, with the federal government guiding them behind the scenes, cities, starting with Oakland in October of last year, cleared out the encampments with force. There was an initial broad based criticism of these police attacks, but, as it became apparent that Occupy had evolved into a loose coalition of anti-authoritarians, people of color, the homeless and other marginalized people, such criticism dissipated. Meanwhile, particularly on the West Coast, occupiers organized more confrontational actions in response, such as the November 2nd general strike in Oakland, the December 12th port shutdown, the January 20th Occupy Wall Street West protests and the attempted seizure of the Kaiser Auditorium on January 28th. The failure of Occupy to extract any meaningful political response to the distress of millions of impoverished Americans and the interrelated corruption of the financial and political systems was pushing its participants towards more and more radical approaches. Within occupations, this resulted in increasingly acrimonious personal conflicts, as most publicly displayed in Oakland, while the progressives that should have been allies became hostile.
Why March on May Day in the name of Anti-Capitalism?
Because Capitalism is the Dominant Moment of the existing system of Global Domination. Because Global Capital strives for institutional domination, ideological domination, domination of the social imaginary, and domination of the practice of everyday life. Because Global Capital utilizes the hollow rhetoric of "limited government," even as it employs monstrous coercive force to impose economic oligarchy on humanity, and as it strives toward a totalitarian order of technological surveillance and control. Because Global Capital poses itself as the putative end of history, as even Stalinoid STATE capitalism mutates finally into state CAPITALISM. Because Global Capital mumbles pious platitudes about "free markets," even as it generates neo-feudalism on an immense scale and creates more literal slaves than those who toiled under classic slave economies. Because Global Capital creates massive planetary climate disruption and biodioversity loss that have culminated in the Sixth Great Mass Extinction of Life on Earth. In short, because Global Capitalism is the Universal Culture of Death: the culture of genocide, of ecocide, and of the degradation and destruction of the human spirit. It is because of all this, and out of love for Humanity and the Earth, and a passion to defend both Humanity and the Earth, that on May 1 some of us abandon the Everyday March of the Undead and join instead a March for Life and Liberation.
In our modern world, poverty is not natural, but the result of institutions that are set up to benefit a few at the expense of the many. Relief efforts are currently failing because they do not address the root causes of poverty. These causes are not mystical or hard to identify, as the most important ones are global property law, international debt, unfair trade, top-down privatization programs, corporate tax shelters, the those problems are social and political. Furthermore, there is a history to these problems, and poverty will not be addressed until this history is reversed.The colonial conquest of the New World, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, by European powers set up the structure of our current economic system.History books have done a good job depicting the brutality of this period. In many places, Europeans wiped out 99% of the native populations. In places where the natives did survive, many of them were captured and made to do hard labor. In Potosi, Bolivia, for instance, native Bolivians were forced to work silver mines that snaked deep into the earth. So many miners died, that a popular saying goes “enough silver was taken from the mine in Potosi to build a bridge to Madrid, Spain, and if the bones of the dead miners were pulled from the bowels of the mine, one could build a bridge all the way back.”
It's not a great photograph but its sole virtue is that its tells a story, and so illustrates so much of what is happening in Greece today and for that reason I posted it.
In it are all the elements of a new emerging economy that has been foisted upon Greece in the name of financial salvation. In the foreground is the child beggar, no more than 11, I'd venture, his Fagin like "handler" (How Dickens serves us in times of need) just off frame at the entrance of the Ble patisserie.
Ble, which serves high end baked goods at the kind of prices that even New Yorkers/Parisians might baulk at is, itself a perfect example of how the economy is going. Inside the employees haven't been paid for months and yet remain working, as they know giving up a job there means certain unemployment, a fact the supervisor hovering in the background is no doubt aware of.
300 Euro per month wages, total absence of labour protection laws and rampant poverty are the fate that awaits other southern European economies adopting the kind of austerity measures that Greece has implemented in the last three years.
