What the fuck, people! Why do some people — generally associated with anarchist politics — feel the need to constantly pursue these types of idiotic actions? If you really want to see the dismantling of corporate power, why don’t you and your 12 friends put down the metal pipes, walk away from the window, and set about trying to actually organize broad actions with masses of people?
I mean, what really is accomplished by a handful of anarcho-fools setting about to terrorize the workers and customers of a local Starbucks, many of whom (including the exploited baristas inside) will not know what the fuck is even going on, by smashing a window that Starbucks will simply quickly replace?!
I’m really, really losing my patience with such childish, selfish, egocentric, elitist, undemocratic, and adventurist actions. Seriously. Such isolated actions carried out by a tiny handful of unaccountable anarchists do way more harm than good to the cause of winning masses of people to join the struggle against corporate power & for workers’ rights.
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Time was, anarchists could simply look askance at a Starbucks’ big greedy oppression-symbolizing window and it’d shatter out of sheer terror. But in the age-old battle between anarchists and Starbucks, the coffeemaker appears to have gained the upper hand.
Saturday night, a group of a few dozen anarchists who’d been attending a nearby anarchist book fair marched on an East Village Starbucks, all hopped up on mate, shitty zines and Deleuze. It was time for a classic Starbucks smashing!
But they were foiled by Starbucks’ advanced anarchist-repelling window technology. The New York Daily News reports:
“Patrons at Astor Place coffee shop dashed underneath tables as metal pipe-wielding protesters attempted to shatter its floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas windows during a Saturday night riot, police and workers said.
“Luckily, the unbreakable panes prevented injuries, one barista said.”
Three protesters were arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer, disorderly conduct and being so 2009. Haven’t you been reading The New York Times, anarchists? The only people who drink at Starbucks in New York City anymore are construction workers, college students and tourists. Any respectable coffee shop-smashing snob would demolish a Blue Bottle Coffee.
Workfare: We won’t work for free
Youth Fight for Jobs join the central London protest against the workfare slave labour scheme. Paul Callanan, Youth Fight for Jobs national organiser, explains the socialist case for real jobs, and a mass trade union-led campaign to scrap the slave labour schemes. If people want work experience, it should be fully paid with a guaranteed job at the end and it should provide useful experience. The Work Programme is nothing more than providing free labour to increase the profits of big business.
| — | Vladimir Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904) |
London Bridge ft. Conrad The Scoundral by United Vibrations
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James Connolly (via artkeepsusgoing) “If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.” |
The heroes of May 1968 have helped lay a path that all humanity can follow towards emancipation, towards liberation, towards unity and happiness for all.
| — | Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845) |
“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
Vladimir Lenin, What is to be done? (1902)
Here is a collection of texts (and a by no means complete one) that I think are incredibly important to the understanding of Marxism; an understanding of which I think a fundamental necessity in intervening into the concrete actuality of the Class struggle toward bringing about the universal emancipation of all human kind from the exploitation degradation and humiliation of the Capitalist mode of production, that is, in bringing about the International Socialist Revolution. Listed in chronological order:
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1848)
Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx (1859)
Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx (1865)
Capital: Vol. 1 by Karl Marx (1867)
Critique of the Gotha Programme by Karl Marx (1875)
Anti-Duhring by Frederick Engels (1877)
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Frederick Engels (1880)
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels (1884)
Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy by Frederick Engels (1886)
The Meaning of Hegel by Georgi Plekhanov (1891)
On Historical Materialism by Franz Mehring (1893)
The Materialist Conception of History by Georgi Plekhanov (1897)
On The Role of The Individual in History by Georgi Plekhanov (1898)
Reform or Revolution by Rosa Luxemburg (1900)
What is to be done? by Vladimir Lenin (1902)
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism by Vladimir Lenin (1908)
Elements of Dialectics/On Dialectics by Vladimir Lenin (1914)
The Right of Nations to Self-Determination by Vladimir Lenin (1914)
The Collapse of the Second International by Vladimir Lenin (1915)
Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir Lenin (1917)
The State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin (1918)
The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin (1918)
Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder by Vladimir Lenin (1920)
The Third International after Lenin by Leon Trotsky (1928)
The Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky (1931)
Fascism: What it is and How to Fight it? by Leon Trotsky (1932)
The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky (1936)
The Transitional Program by Leon Trotsky (1938)
Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky (1938)
In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky (1940)
Lenin and Trotsky: What they really stood for by Ted Grant and Alan Woods (1969)
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses by Louis Althusser (1970)
Dialectical Logic by Evald Ilyenkov (1974)
“With the seizing of the means of production by society production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history – only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the humanity’s leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
“To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific socialism.”
Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring (1878)
