So as an alternative to reparations for slavery, how about reparations for primitive accumulation instead? Let’s make a united front in the class war, instead of letting class be hidden behind race relations. The way I see it (I’m a Proudhonian mutualist, by the way, not a Marxist), all tenants paying rent on apartments, urban tenements, public housing, etc., should stop. Those of us working for manufacturers and other large employers should “fire the boss,” as the Wobblies put it, and keep the fruit of our own labor. Agricultural wage laborers should dispossess the agribusiness companies and rich landlords whose plantations they work. Possession, for groups and individuals, should be the basis of ownership. The land to the cultivator, the shop to the worker, free and equitable exchange.
In other words, it is only possible to achieve racial “justice” if the broader demand for economic “justice” or class “justice” is satisfied. Any such settlement to race and class based conflict must necessarily include amnesty. It is well-known that the United States maintains the world’s largest prison population. More than one-quarter of all the world’s prisoners reside in US prisons. A grossly disproportionate number of these are blacks or other minorities. A comprehensive amnesty program is essential to any serious effort to dismantle the US Leviathan state. As a model for amnesty, we might look to that implemented by Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq, prior to the commencement of the current war. Most prisoners were given full amnesty, foreign spies excepted. Thieves were pardoned on the condition of victim restitution. Even violent criminals had their sentences commuted if the victim or the victim’s mother agreed to a pardon. If this was good enough for Saddam Hussein, it ought to be good enough for anti-state radicals in North America. Under such a general amnesty, the only remaining prisoners would be those who refused to compensate victims or whose crimes were serious enough to discourage the victim from granting a pardon. The rest of the prison population, from tax evaders to drug vendors to owners of “illegal” firearms to those convicted of violations of arcane regulatory statutes, would simply be cleared out. Likewise, those imprisoned for self-defense, whether against common criminals or the government (for example, Leonard Peltier, the surviving Branch Davidians, or those resisting “no-knock” raids) should also be granted amnesty. Additionally, panels of legal experts should be commissioned to review the cases of those convicted of even the most serious crimes. Given the notorious incompetence of the US legal system, it is likely a significant number of these are innocent.
Two extremely controversial issues that will naturally arise out of discussions of these types are those of crime and immigration. Thus far, much of the anti-state movement has failed to work out a consistent position on these questions. On crime, I propose the following approach: We should be tough on crime, but equally tough on cops, courts, and laws. On the issues of legal restrictions on the investigative and arrest powers of the police, the powers of the courts to prosecute the accused and impose sentences, and the powers of penal institutions to hold incarcerated persons and the conditions they are held under, we should take positions as “liberal” as those of the ACLU, the National Lawyers Guild, and beyond. However, when it comes to the right of private citizens to keep and bear arms, to use them in defense against criminals and to form private organizations (neighborhood watches, militias, posses, private security guard services, vigilance committees, and common law courts) for the purpose of mutual self-protection against crime (including government crime), we should take positions as “conservative” as the Gun Owners of America, the Michigan Militia, and beyond.
As a trivial but pertinent example of how such a policy might be implemented on a practical level, many people in large urban centers are persistently annoyed by the presence of aggressive bums demanding handouts from passers-by and issuing threats when refused. Now, we would not want to interfere with general free speech rights by prohibiting panhandling. Nor would we want to interfere with genuinely poor or disabled people, runaway kids, or others who wish to be peaceful beggars. Nor do we want to kowtow to bourgeois elements who object to the presence of such lumpen elements as an “eyesore,” “blight,” or, more specifically, a perceived threat to real estate values. We certainly do not want to turn public streets into “Official Police Property.” What, then, should be done about annoying or threatening panhandlers? A simple common law rule that states that if an aggressive panhandler continues to annoy a pedestrian after being refused twice before, the person being subjected to the annoyance may, in the presence of at least one witness, physically strike the annoyer once with a hand, foot, fist, or non-lethal object, and in a non-lethal way, should be efficient. Such would be a common sense conservative policy whereby government gets out of the way in favor of individual responsibility, initiative, and self-sufficiency.
On immigration, it is clear enough that the only viable solution is one of local sovereignty. Obviously, we should not wish to strengthen our great common enemy, the US federal government, by militarizing the borders and building a Berlin Wall along the Rio Grande. Instead, the Swiss model can be applied to immigration policy and individual communities can decide whether to be pro-immigrant “sanctuary” communities, anti-immigrant communities with the Minutemen stationed at the county line, or somewhere in between. The great Israeli dissident Israel Shamir discussed the value of the localist approach in his debate with Noam Chomsky:
Does this critique mean that the no-state idea should be discarded? Not at all. But instead of non-territorial millets, we may support small semi-independent territorial communes, as envisaged by Marx in his Civil War in France and by Lenin in his The State and Revolution, or indeed by Plato in his Republic. Such a solution is extremely suitable for Palestine and for the US, and for the rest of the world.
In the US, it would solve many problems; people would be able to choose whether to live in a mixed or a separated community, a liberal or conservative one, with or without abortions and gay marriages, and would not be imposing their social vision upon others. The federative framework consisting of independent units would not be an aggressive state prone to send troops to Iraq, but it would be able to organise its mutual self-defence. It would mean undoing the lifework of a Bismarck or Garibaldi, and good riddance, too! Full autonomy for every commune would slow down if not eliminate migration flow and would help people to regain their roots. Indeed, let the people of Boston or Atlanta decide whether they want to accept immigration from Ghana or Sweden, instead of having this question decided for them by the New York-based media and Washington lobbies. This was the rule in Switzerland: Alexander Herzen, a Russian noble and dissident of the 19th century, discovered that the Swiss federal government had no power to grant citizenship or even rights of residence to a stranger; it was a prerogative of a local commune. This wise rule can be implemented today everywhere.
6. Resistance on All Fronts
In formulating a strategy for resistance to the US regime and ruling class, it might be best to observe the efforts of successful resistance movements from other nations and to also take a look at the lessons from the past. Most successful or semi-successful resistance forces, whether the IRA/Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Vietcong, or the present-day insurgency in Iraq have followed rather consistent patterns in terms of their strategic approach. Each of these have applied an underground/overground strategy that included a wide range of actions such as electoral politics, grassroots community organizing, international propaganda campaigns, cultivating “friends in high places,” maintaining alternative institutional infrastructure, and armed struggle. Obviously, some of these are more suitable for present-day North America than others. As anarchist radicals in the United States, there are two historical precedents we might wish to draw on, one from anarchist history and the other from American history. The Spanish anarchist movement of the 1930s had as its militant leadership corps the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), a strongly Bakuninist but relatively non-sectarian outfit. The FAI com
prised the political leadership of the much larger National Confederation of Workers (CNT), an anarcho-syndicalist labor union federation. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, the anarchists put together an even larger militia confederation drawn from the ranks of anti-fascist, anti-Soviet, and anti-capitalist forces of all ideological stripes, ranging from non-Stalinist Marxists to non-fascist nationalists. The French anarchists of the same era maintained a similar arrangement. The French counterpart to the FAI, the Union Anarchiste, organized a “Revolutionary Front” alliance of the same kinds of anti-fascist, anti-Stalinist, and anti-capitalist forces that made up the militias of Spain.
This was the only time in history when anarchists achieved even the most meager amounts of success. The question is how to replicate this in twenty-first-century North America. An obscure but interesting part of American history might provide us with a clue. There was a long-forgotten antislavery party, the Liberty Party, which competed in US national elections during the 1840s. Its electoral performance was comparable to that of today’s Libertarians, Greens, or Constitutionalists. The party leadership made a strategic decision to orient the party towards the primary goal of blocking the furtherance of slavery into the western territories. Towards this end, they aligned themselves with the “know-nothings,” a virulently racist party that also opposed the westward expansion of slavery, but for ideologically opposite reasons. The antislavery activists knew they were aligning themselves with persons whose values they would find extremely distasteful, but they also knew that the political victory of this alliance would be the death knell for slavery itself. The alliance of the Liberty Party, the “know-nothing” American Party and, later, the Free Soilers and the anti-Southern Constitutional Union with the left wing of the remnants of the Whig Party once that party could no longer sustain itself became the basis for the founding of the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. This is not to say that Republican ideology and ambitions, then or later, were benign or salutary. It does, however, demonstrate how a small, radical party with militantly libertarian ideals managed to advance itself beyond its wildest dreams in less than two decades.
I propose that anti-state radicals in the United States work towards the goal of recreating the general framework of the Spanish and French anarchist movements in America using the strategy and methodology employed by the Liberty Party. What would this mean? As mentioned, we need a militant anarchist vanguard organization comparable to the FAI or the Union Anarchiste that would in turn serve as the leadership corps, brains trust, primary intellectual and activist base, principal strategists, propaganda front, and mediating coordinators of a much larger populist movement utilizing some of the concepts I have already outlined. The only organizational vehicles that ever brought the classical anarchists any success were the mass anarcho-syndicalist labor federations of the early twentieth century. Now, the time of organized labor as a mass movement seems to have passed and an attempt to revive such a movement would probably be to take an archaic and reactionary position. Instead, a comparable organizational structure that is relevant to North American political culture would be a political party but a very unique type of political party. Such a party would be organized internally as a federation of local and regional parties, with these in turn having economic, institutional, and military arms of their own. At the national level, the party would deal only with a handful of the most pressing matters that dissidents of virtually all stripes agree upon such as opposition to US imperialism, the corporate state, and the federal police state. All other matters, whether specific ideological tendencies, specific political, economic, or cultural arrangements or controversial social issues (abortion, the death penalty, gay marriage, stem cell research, immigration, school prayer) would be dealt with on a local basis. Therefore, the party platforms of the Idaho or Texas branches of the party might be similar to those of the present-day Constitution, American Independent, or America First parties. The platforms of the Vermont or Oregon parties might resemble those of the Libertarian or Green parties and the programs of the most reliably centrist regions might be similar to the Reform or Independence parties. The South Carolina party might reflect the ideals of the Christian Exodus Project while the northern California party might reflect the values of the Republic of Ganjastan.
Such a party could have its own economic arm in the form of dissident labor unions (a foreshadowing of this might be seen in the recent AFL-CIO split), an assortment of alternative economic enterprises, its own internal social service and health care delivery system (Hezbollah and Hamas might be models to emulate here), a system of alternative media (we can learn from both talk radio and the religious right on this one), legal defense organizations (modeled on the ACLU and NRA), fundraising organizations, single-issue oriented organizing projects, and a vast network of community and support organizations. We might commence our drive towards the realization of this ambition through the practice of entryism into one of the present minor parties (I would suggest either the Libertarians or the Greens, or both simultaneously) with the goal of achieving leadership positions, particularly in the realm of strategic formulation. From where will our ideological support base come from? Point Four of the American Revolutionary Vanguard Twenty-Five Point Program states:
American Revolutionary Vanguard seeks to network with and form alliances with all groups and individuals engaged in active resistance including decentralists, non-supremacist separatists, constitutionalists, autonomists, patriots, populists, anti-corporate libertarians, anarchists, sovereigns, common law advocates, regionalists, anti-state conservatives, non-statist nationalists, agorists, mutualists, syndicalists, individualists, guild socialists, council communists, individualist anarchists, collectivist anarchists, national anarchists, municipalists, Georgists, farmer liberationists, agrarians, radical traditionalists, micronationalists, Luddites, radical environmentalists, deep ecologists, non-reactionary third positionists, geonomists, geolibertarians, libertarian socialists, non-racist militias, anarcha-feminists, libertarian feminists, queer activists, anti-globalists and non-statist class struggle advocates of every kind.
It is also important to remember that most of American politics is driven by individual issues rather than by ideology. Our party must be a “coalition of coalitions” organized around such issues. Here they are:
authentic fiscal conservatives vs. corporate plutocrats
welfare recipients vs. New Class social service bureaucrats
students/parents vs. educrats unions
black nationalists, separatists, and the urban “underclass” vs. the black bourgeoisie, civil rights industry
white working class vs. white liberal elite
non-Zionist Jews/anti-Zionist Jews vs. Israel Firsters
labor militants vs. corporate stooge labor bosses
authentic class war militants vs. social democratic politicians
gay counterculture vs. gay middle class
prisoners, prisoners’ advocates and families vs. prison-industrial complex
soldiers, veterans vs. foreign policy elite, military-industrial complex
antiwar activists vs. “humanitarian” interventionists, revolutionary democratists
rank and file evangelical Christians vs. televangelist charlatans
drug users, medical marijuana advocates vs. DEA, narcotics police, drug war profiteers
American Indian tribes vs. Bureau of Indian Affairs
gun owners vs. gun grabbers, BATF
lumpenproletariat vs. urban bourgeoisie
taxpayers, tax resisters vs. IRS
anti-Zionists vs. Israeli lobby
small property holders vs. regulators, land grabbers
environmentalists, land rights advocates vs. state-corporate monopolists
farmers vs. agribusiness
alternative medicine advocates vs. medical-industrial complex
mental patients vs. psychiatric industry
civil libertarians vs. police state
parents’
rights advocates vs. Child Protective Services, social service bureaucrats
fathers’ rights advocates vs. family courts, feminist lobby
libertarian-individualist feminists, poor and working women vs. bourgeois gender feminists
consumer advocates vs. corporate lobbies
common law advocates vs. legal industry
young people vs. selective service, drinking ages, curfews, music censorship, truant officers, schools
sex workers vs. vice police
small broadcasters, alternative media vs. FCC
“hate” groups vs. “anti-hate” professionals
“cults” vs. religious bigots
immigrants vs. INS
anti-immigration activists vs. antidiscrimination laws, entitlements for non-citizens
gang members vs. gang-enforcement units
Third Worldists vs. US imperialism
Muslims, Arab-Americans vs. Zionists, imperialists
smokers vs. health Nazis
free speech vs. political correctness
isolationists vs. imperialists
paleoconservatives vs. neoconservatives
populists vs. professional politicians
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