Program in Brief of the Revolutionary Socialist League
1. The REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST LEAGUE is an organization dedicated to the fight for freedom for all the world’s people – freedom from poverty and hunger; from racism and all forms of national, sexual, age and class-related oppression; from privileged rulers and wars – freedom from capitalism.
We believe that that this fight is more necessary than ever. Today, the world capitalist system is sliding deeper and deeper into a massive economic, political and social crisis. This crisis is bringing conditions as bad as or worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. In all countries, the ruling classes are responding to the crisis by bludgeoning down the living standards of the masses of people and curtailing our rights. Unemployment and wage-cutting, cutbacks in social services and a beefing up of the repressive apparatus – the police, military, prisons, etc. – all are part of the capitalist attack. As in the 1930s, the crisis is paving the way for the rise of fascist groups eager to impose their genocidal solution on humanity.
Internationally, the crisis will cause the battles among the different blocks of national capitalists to flare into full-scale wars, as each seeks to defend and increase its power, markets, investment outlets and control of natural resources against the others. Twice already in this century the capitalists have fought devastating world wars, in which millions of people have died. Now, with this development of huge nuclear arsenals capable of blowing up the planet hundreds of times over, human civilization itself hangs in the balance.
Thus the continued existence if the capitalist system is pushing us closer every day to depression, fascism, world war and possibly total destruction.
Lately there have been a lot of articles and letters about punk rock and the people involved, in all sorts of papers. The vast majority of what’s been written is from people who are outside looking in, trying to figure out what the fuck it all means.
Give up. It’s pointless. Unless you make the commitment to be involved you’ll get nowhere – real fast. We don’t feel we have to justify ourselfs to anyone elses standards. We get called reactionary by commies, socialists, liberals and other idiot lefties. Fascists, conservatives, ministers and various straight people (real sheep) call us anarchists, hoodlums and decadents. All things to all people. Come check us out. But don’t judge us. We’ll just laugh or throw something.
The point is we are trying to do what we want on our own terms as much as possible. I want to fuck things up. That [[3]] doesn’t mean every punk band agrees. Some want to sell records (there are always bad apples).
When we play I like to see chairs and tables broken; I like to see fights and lunacy and objects thrown around. That doesn’t mean that every other band is after that kind of release.
We are not part of a brand new mold. Every time you or any other paper approaches us as a new movement or a coherent unit of sameness, the fight to resist is that much harder.
Fuck this and fuck that: I want some fun – NOW!
The End is Near (I wish) Will Shatter Negative Trend San Francisco
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letter to Fifth Estate #291 (vol 13, #3; April 30, 1978) pp 2-3.
The heresy of the Free Spirit therefore demands a place in any survey of revolutionary eschatology – and that is still true even though its adherents were not social revolutionaries and did not find their followers amongst the turbulent masses of the urban poor. They were in face gnostics intent on their own individual salvation; but the gnosis at which they arrived was a quasi-mystical anarchism – an affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint and limitation. These people could be regarded as remote precursors of Bakunin and of Nietzsche – or rather of that bohemian intelligentsia which during the last half-century has been living from ideas once expressed by Bakunin and Nietzsche in their wilder moments. But extreme individualists of that kind can easily turn into social revolutionaries – and effective ones at that – if a potentially revolutionary situation arises. Nietzsche’s Superman, in however vulgarized a form, certainly obsessed the imagination of many of the ‘armed bohemians’ who made the National Socialist revolution; and many a present-day exponent of world revolution owes more to Bakunin than to Marx. In the later Middle Ages it was the adepts of the Free Spirit who conserved, as part of their creed of total emancipation, the only thoroughly revolutionary doctrine that existed. And it was from their midst that doctrinaires emerged to inspire the most ambitious essay in total social revolution which medieval Europe was ever to witness.
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Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition (NY: Oxford University Press, 1951/1970), pp 148–49.
This is Judith Butler’s reply to a bundle of four questions asked in Q&A during a 2006 teach-in at UC Berkeley about the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Audience members asked:
1. Since Israel is an imperialist, colonial project, should resistance be based on social movements or the nation-state?
2. What is the power of the Israel Lobby and is questioning it antisemitic?
3. Since the Left hesitates to support Hamas and Hezbollah “just” because of their use of violence, does this hurt Palestinian solidarity?
4. Do Hamas and Hezbollah actually threaten Israel’s existence, as portrayed in some media?
Judith Butler:
“Ok, well, I would just briefly say: I think its imperative to figure out what the mechanisms are of the various lobbies in the US – the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League – how they work to help to formulate US foreign policy toward Israel. I think there’s no question we need an honest, rigorous appraisal. I think there are some versions of it that strike me as perhaps a little too easily subscribing to conspiracy theories, and I think that there can be an antisemitic version, and there can be a really useful, critical version as well. I have no doubt it’s a very powerful lobby – I actually think of it as multifaceted – and I think we need more careful, rigorous analyses of it.
So you know the short answer is: one neither has to dispute the existence of such a lobby, or its power, to prove that one is not antisemitic; but neither does one have to accept every version of that, given that some versions are, I think, problematically bound up with conspiracy theories.
Similarly, I think: Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. So again, a critical, important engagement. I mean, I certainly think it should be entered into the conversation on the Left. I similarly think boycotts and divestment procedures are, again, an essential component of any resistance movement.”
NOTE: The questions start at 10:30 and Butler starts her answer at 14:55. [June 2012: video is no longer at original link, but is now available on youtube]
description from URL where video was originally available at:
Berkeley Teach-In Against War – Part VI – Question and Answer Session
Concerned about the devastation currently being inflicted on the people of Lebanon and Palestine by the Israeli Military Forces and with the very limited and biased reporting on these conflicts presented by most American media networks, we have organized a teach-in on the UC Berkeley campus in order to give students, faculty, and the Bay Area community at large a chance to gain a greater understanding of these events and to participate in an open discussion on their significance for both Americans and the people of the Middle East. During the first hour of this two-hour event, four scholars with expertise in the Middle East will present short analyses (15 minutes each) of the historical and political dimensions of this conflict, focusing on the following themes:
1. The role US foreign policy has played in enabling and authorizing the Israeli bombardment;
2. The origins and historical development of Hezbollah, and the role of this movement within Lebanese social and political arenas;
3. The shifting political alignments within Israel, and their relation to the current war on Lebanon and to Israel’s role in the region more broadly;
4. The impact of Israeli military actions in Gaza and the West Bank on the lives of Palestinians and the political landscape of the Palestinian society.
The second hour of the teach-in will be reserved for audience questions and comments. Confirmed speakers are UC Berkeley Professors Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature), Beshara Doumani (History), Charles Hirschkind (Anthropology), Saba Mahmood (Anthropology), as well as Zeina Zaatari, Program Officer for the Middle East and North Africa, The Global Fund for Women.
The teach-in took place in 145 Dwinelle on September 7th
Here Bakunin’s Socialism sets in with full strength: mental, personal, and social freedom to him are inseparable – Atheism, Anarchism, Socialism an organic unit. His Atheism is not that of an ordinary Freethinker, who may be an authoritarian and an anti-Socialist; nor is his Socialism that of an ordinary Socialist, who may be, and very often is, an authoritarian and a Christian; nor would his Anarchism ever deviate into the eccentricities of Tolstoi and Tucker. But each of these three ideas penetrates the other two an constitutes with them a living realisation of freedom, just as all our intellectual, political and social prejudices and evils descend from one common source – authority. Whoever reads “God and the State,” the best known of Bakunin’s many written expositions of these ideas, may discover that when the scales of religion fall from his eyes, at the same moment also the State will appear to him in it horrid hideousness, and anti-Statist Socialism will be the only way out. The thoroughness of Bakunin’s Socialist propaganda is, to my impression, unique.
From these remarks it may be gathered that I dissent from certain recent attempts to revindicate Bakunin almost exclusively as a Syndicalist. He was, at the time of the International, greatly interested in seeing the scattered masses of the workers combining into trade societies or sections of the International. Solidarity in the economic struggle was to be the only basis of working-class organization. He expressed the opinion that these organisations would spontaneously evolve into federated Socialist bodies, the natural basis of future society. This automatic evolution has been rightly contested by our Swiss comrade Bertoni. But did Bakunin really mean it when he sketched it out in his writings of elementary public propaganda? We must not forget that Bakunin – and here we touch on one of his shortcomings – seeing the backward dispositions of the great masses in his time, did not think it possible to propagate the whole of his ideas directly among the people. By insisting on purely economic organisation, he wished to protect the masses against the greedy politician who, under the cloak of Socialism, farms and exploits their electoral “power” in our age of progress! [[7]]
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I say again: it is preposterous to think that Bakunin would have been a syndicalist and nothing else – but what he would have tried to make of Syndicalism, how he would have tried to group these and many other materials of revolt and to lead them to action, this my imagination cannot sketch out, but I feel that things would have gone otherwise, and the capitalists would sleep less quietly. I am no admirer of personalities, and have many faults to find with Bakunin also on other grounds; but this I feel, that where he was rebellion grew round him, whilst to-day, with such splendid material, rebellion is nowhere. South Africa, Colorado, are ever so hopeful events; but think what a Bakunin would have made of them – and then we can measure the value of this man in the struggle for freedom. [[11]]
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Max Nettalu, “Michael Bakunin” in Writings on Bakunin (London: Carl Slienger, 1976), pp 7, 11.
The book’s notes indicate that the essay was originally published in Freedom, June 1914.
In spite of serious ideological and political differences with the Independent Socialist League, we have long considered their weekly paper, LABOR ACTION, to be one of the best radical publications in the country. The current series of articles by Hal Draper on “Stalinism Without Stalin” should be read carefully by every one interested in the recent switch inside the Soviet Union.
After giving considerable background material, much of which is already well known throughout the anti-Stalinist left, comrade Draper takes issues with those who see in the events in Russia changes of a fundamental nature in the regime itself. He declares that Stalinism continues intact without Stalin. He demonstrates conclusively, with a wealth of detail and examples coupled with sound reasoning, that the present “collective leadership” in Moscow is every bit as totalitarian as was the one-man leadership of Stalin. Numerous examples are given and the whole subject is done up brown – except for one important part, and this to us is decisive.
Below is an ad from Emma Goldman’s journal Mother Earth, advertising the collected works of Frederich Nietzsche, which could be ordered directly through the magazine. This ad originally appeared in the November 1912 issue, and the magazine offered Nietzsche’s works for sale through 1914.
In the end the band of brothers that is the historic-formal party is capable only of reproducing the received structuring of an apparently neutral ‘effectiveness’ in decision making – and by such means, enters competitively for its share in the marketplace of established interests. I would suggest, as an alternative to the leaderless leninism of those who would diverge partially from the party-form (substituting unions, federations, networks, fora and other forms) that another step is required, i.e. a disinvestment from formal structures of decision-making altogether. In place of structure there should be initiated attempts at de-structuring, this would take the form of negative interventions aimed at relaxing the hold within organisations of those determining factors which have thus far caused the proletariat to consistently decide wrongly.
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from Frere Dupont, “The Most Average Length Suicide Note in History” (draft)
RADICAL ARCHIVES note:Some readers will be particularly interested in the NWLF’s explicitly antisemitic “anti-Zionist” theories, as mentioned in the middle of the article.
NWLF: good hit, no pitch Celine Hagbard
The New World Liberation Front, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist organization which has carried out an uninterrupted urban guerilla offensive around the Bay Area and Northern California for almost three years, may well be the most tactically advanced guerilla group in the United States. As a result of recent theoretical pronouncements on anarchism, feminism, homosexuality and Zionism, however, they have made themselves the most controversial guerillas within the revolutionary left as well.
“You are just a bunch of anarchists, the new Plato on the block will finally yell at us. That is not true. We would be anarchists if we were not to speak (as did Thrasymacus and Callicles, Plato’s immortal interlocutors) from the standpoint of a materiality constituted in the networks of of productive cooperation, in other words, from the perspective of a humanity that is constructed productively, that is constituted through the “common name” of freedom. No, we are not anarchists but communists who have seen how much repression and destruction of humanity have been wrought by liberal and socialist big governments. We have seen how all this is being re-created in imperial government, just when the circuits of productive cooperation have made labor power as a whole capable of constituting itself in government.”
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Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2000), p 350. [Italics in the original.]
radicalarchives 