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Title: May Day Talk Author: James Herod Date: Summer 2012 Language: en Topics: May Day, Boston Source: Retrieved on 2017/3/8 from http://bostonmayday.org/sn_display1.php?row_ID=145 Notes: Published in the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, #58, Summer 2012.
Text of a talk given at the May Day noon rally in the City Hall Plaza in
Boston on Tuesday, May 1, 2012.
Capitalists have always been criminals. They have been willing to
exterminate entire peoples in order to keep the profits rolling in. May
Day stems from a capitalist crime. In 1886, in Chicago, during a period
of intense class struggle, they rounded up eight anarchists and accused
them of something they didn't do. Four were hanged a year later after a
fake trial. These executions sparked an international furor of protest.
May First was thereafter celebrated as a workers day in honor of the
Haymarket Martyrs.
So here it is 126 years later and the crimes of capitalists are
continuing unabated, except that they have now reached earth killing
levels. Global warming, which is being caused by capitalists, has the
potential of killing all life on earth. This is the mother of all
crimes. But even their lesser crimes are now global in scope and
destructiveness.
Thus it is more urgent than ever that we defeat capitalists.
Fortunately, we are in a window of opportunity. The keenest scholars of
capitalism and its history are agreed that we are entering a period of
chaos during which no one nation will be hegemonic. This gives us an
opening to establish a world full of democratic, autonomous communities,
free of capitalism, states, wage-slavery, hierarchy, markets, and money,
a world without borders or war, based on peace and justice.
How to do it? That is the question, and always has been. We have tried
many things. We must keep trying. We must be creative and keep inventing
new tactics and strategies. One thing is for sure: we can never defeat
them militarily. But this is not a plea for nonviolence. In fact, we
must expunge that false debate from our thinking once and for all.
Rather, it is a claim that we can only defeat capitalists by organizing
ourselves socially in ways superior to theirs.
Why don't we pick up and run with two concepts from the recent Occupy
Wall Street, and try to extend them? Occupations and Assemblies. Both
practices have always been part of revolutionary movements. For example:
during the Spanish Revolution factories and farms were occupied in key
towns and provinces; during the French Revolution workers in Paris set
up 48 assemblies, one for each section of the city. More recently,
beginning in Chiapas in 1994, assemblies have been popping up
everywhere, in Algeria, Argentina, Bolivia, Oaxaca, Greece, and just
last year in Egypt, Spain, and finally in New York City.
If we could extend these assemblies to expanded households of 200 or
more people, to neighborhoods, and to workplaces, we would begin to
organize ourselves socially in such a way as to be able to defeat
capitalists.
There is much merit in the recent slogan: "Occupy Everything." What does
this mean? It means that we counter the capitalist drive to "privatize"
everything, that is, to put everything under the control of
corporations, with our own drive to place everything back into the
commons, the public domain, into common ownership.
Traditionally, most anti-capitalists have believed that we could get rid
of capitalism by capturing the state, either through an armed revolution
or by winning elections. That has proved not to be the case.
This leaves us with the two anarchist strategies: anarcho-syndicalism
and anarcho-communism. Certainly, as already indicated, taking over our
workplaces, both profit and non-profit, will be a necessary part of
defeating capitalists. And certainly, trying to create sustainable
democratic communities is essential also. But we need something more.
I'm not sure we any longer have the time to build a new society within
the shell of the old, although we must keep struggling along that path.
Our problem now is not how to defeat capitalists, but how to defeat
capitalists quickly. We all need to be thinking hard about how to do
this.
First, we need to attack the very idea of the state. Capitalists and
their states are inseparable. We cannot get rid of capitalists without
also getting rid of the state. So we should organize a massive and
vigorous campaign to discredit the state, especially in its popular form
of representative government, and to foster instead the idea of direct
democracy, through popular assemblies. Then we should add to this a
drive to build a strong global movement to stop paying taxes.
Governments cannot exist without taxes.
Second, we need to focus on the big players, those who actually control
the world, mostly through their control of money. This is what was so
exciting about Occupy Wall Street. Finally, a group had put the spot
light on the money-bags. A recent study by a research team in
Switzerland identified these particular capitalists. They surveyed
43,060 transnational corporations, and the interconnections between
them. They found that out of those, 1318 were the core, and that of
those, only 147 controlled 40% of the world's economy. Many of them were
banks.
We must break the control that these capitalists have over our lives.
Just one tactic we might consider is to occupy all the stock exchanges
of the world. Flood them with thousands of people and shut these casinos
down. I'm sure we can think of other tactics too, like refusing to pay
interest on loans, and even repudiating the very idea of debt.
But one thing we know: The oil companies must be stopped. Goldman-Sachs
must be stopped. Monsanto must be stopped. The World Bank must be
stopped. The CIA must be stopped. It is an absolute evil if there ever
was one. The arms industry worldwide must be stopped. The Pentagon must
be stopped. The corporate media must be stopped. All these institutions
and many more like them must simply be overrun and dismantled.
So there is plenty to do for everyone. Let's get to it.
Thank You