Life, Love, and Liberty

It’s socialism without the state!

“What should the stance of the anarchists in regards to the welfare state be?

          For starters, we should follow the advice of the late Sam Dolgoff who maintained that workers should demand their entire pay without deductions of any kind ( income taxes, social security, corporate insurance programs) and instead create our own health care, old age, disability, etc. programs under our control through our own mutual aid and solidarity organizations ( unions, cooperatives, clubs, community groups). We need to organize claimants’ unions for the recipients of “public” assistance and demand direct cash payments to the beneficiaries themselves rather than vouchers, coupons and stamps issued by government agencies. “Public” schools, institutions created for the purpose of indoctrinating children with elite class ideology, should be scrapped in favor of progressive educational services established by our own working class oriented revolutionary organizations ( perhaps modeled after Summerhill or the Modern School). Workers organizations should demand the expulsion of both corporate overseers and government sponsored “regulatory” bureaucrats from our workplaces in favor of direct self-management and self-regulation by the workers themselves. “Public” housing authorities should be scrapped, their offices destroyed, and tenants should assume direct management of their own housing facilities. These same principles would, of course, apply to tenants renting from “private” landlords, the self-employed and farmers dealing with state-supervisory agencies, consumers’ interests and so on. The final aim, of course, should be the dismantling of the false dichotomy between the “public” and “private” sectors and the socialization and communalization of state and corporate resources under the direct control of our worker, consumer, tenant and community organizations.

          As I mentioned, current “antigovernment” rhetoric employed by elite class mouthpieces represents, I believe, a certain laziness and complacency that the “powers that be” have sunken into. So successful have their efforts of the past thirty years to coopt and subjugate the people through social democratic welfare state policies that they no longer think it is worth the bother. They no longer see the need to even put on the charade of maternalistic government, which they view as costly and not generating enough profits for corporate interests in the same way that the rapidly expanding prison-industrial complex and other recently emergent forms of repression are doing. Consequently, we see renewed attacks on our class in every area. Gentrification and “urban revitalization” are displacing the traditional urban poor. “Welfare reform” is displacing those enslaved to the state via “public assistance”. Nearly ten million people have been dispossessed of their traditional lands across the farm belt of the American heartland. Three million people, perhaps more, are living in the street and repression against the homeless is rising. One in thirty people, perhaps more, are in the direct clutches of the state by means of the prison-industrial complex and the repressive apparatus of so-called “criminal justice”. The availability, affordability and quality of health care has declined due the centralization of health care services under oligopolistic HMO’s. Now that U.S. warmongering and imperialism can no longer be justified with shallow Cold War rhetoric, the American regime simply undertakes violent assaults on other societies on whatever whim it fancies at the moment or for no apparent reason at all. The elite class is creating a powder keg that will eventually erupt in a rather big way.”

- Keith Preston

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power:”

- Benito Mussolini

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity (11). It is opposed to classical liberalism which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts

- Benito Mussolini

Tells it like it is:

First of all, I’m just amazed they can’t figure out, the Republicans are worried we can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal war in Iraq. Where ya gonna get that money? You going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement. This bill would provide healthcare for 10 million children and unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care. […]

But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress.

Of course, this kind of reality check is not welcomed by everyone in the allegedly “anti- Iraq War” Congress, so Nancy Pelosi had to step in to offer the following:

WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rebuked a fellow San Francisco Bay-area liberal Friday for what she said were “inappropriate” comments about Iraq during a congressional debate.
During a debate on children’s health care Thursday, Rep. Pete Stark accused Republicans of sending troops to Iraq to “get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.”

Condemnations rolled in from Republican politicians, right-leaning bloggers had a field day, and a White House spokesman declined to “dignify those remarks” with a response.

Pelosi issued a statement Friday evening rapping Stark, who is in his 18th term representing the liberal East Bay. He’s California’s longest-serving House members.

“While members of Congress are passionate about their views, what Congressman Stark said during the debate was inappropriate and distracted from the seriousness of the subject at hand—providing health care for America’s children,” Pelosi said.

I don’t think there are adequate words in the English language to describe how angry I am with the Democrats in Congress. They are complete partisans of the imperial project with only a few notable exceptions. And people will go to the polls in 2008 with the intent of voting for Clinton or Obama, or whichever militaristic candidate — and I’ll be pretty shocked if somebody like Kucinich gets it — gets the nomination. They will expect some kind of end to the slaughter and they will be entirely going about it the wrong way.

To any Democratic friends of peace reading this, please don’t vote at all, or if you must try to elect a Democrat, then choose somebody like Kucinich who has admirably stood up to the warfare state like virtually no other members of Congress have.

To the left-libertarians reading this, I know the guy is advocating government health insurance rather than something delightfully anarchistic like mutual aid societies combined with systemic overhaul, but he does let the Republicans know that being opposed to big government spending also means not starting trillion dollar wars.

And I do believe that stolen money is better spent insuring sick children living in the context of a statist tainted healthcare market rather than on killing Iraqis.

Compliments to the fiery Chris Floyd for alerting me to this story.

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