E) THIRD WORLD HOLOCAUST: Eastern European/Soviet socialist demise and Soviet disintegration, in pulling down the sole bridge of semi-peripheral economic development out of Third World peripheral destitution, sealed the world-system economic alignment evident by the end of the twentieth century. The regionally consolidated, developed capitalist core to the capitalist world-economy in the northern hemisphere (North America/Europe/Japan) viciously exploited southern hemisphere Third World markets, labor and resources; finding it advantageous to undermine the Third World nation-state and keep this periphery in a constant condition of internecine conflict to further its exploitation. As a consequence, the Third World burned throughout the 1990’s and into the twenty-first century. Not only did Soviet collapse and subsequent civil war feed into this Third World inferno in the abstract, by example, but the black market in post-Soviet weaponry directly fueled a social carnage and destruction spreading worldwide. The number of wars between Third World nations were legion (Myanmar-Bangladesh-Thailand, India-Pakistan, India-Tibet-China, Turkey-Iran, Turkey-Armenia, Azanian Boer secession, Egypt-Libya, Peru-Bolivia, Brazil-Argentina, etc.). Divided, conquered and disenfranchised nations continued bloody liberation struggles (Kurdistan, Tamil India, Palestine). And the fragmentation within Third World nation-states was sometimes violently granular; with religion battling religion as faith divided into sects, class attacking class as social strata crumbled into mafias and gangs, and ethnic group fighting ethnic group as nationalities fragmented into tribes. Tribes with flags, gangs with vendettas, and sects with divine sanction fought each other, plundered each other, ravaged and scorched the earth in a “war without end” (India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Algeria, Zaire, Colombia, Brazil). Volatile supranational Third World movements (Pan African and Arabic movements, Islamic and Hindu fundamentalisms) failed to stem this devouring global social chaos. Indeed they often contributed to it. Population ballooned across Latin America, Africa and Asia. Climate and weather patterns shifted with incremental atmospheric warming. The Sahara and other deserts expanded. Whole species continued to die off. Increased ultraviolet radiation due to atmospheric ozone depletion (1996-2002 northern hemisphere ozone hole) cut into agricultural production, and began to play havoc with the ocean’s phytoplankton, disrupting fish supplies. Starvation, deforestation, massive erosion and famine followed. Diseases spread; the new in cancers and AIDS mutations, and the old in cholera and malaria. Pollution from toxic and radiation dumping, not to mention warfare, poisoned large regions of the periphery. Billions of people have died since 1991. All the while, the capitalist world-economy’s core maximized its exploitation of the peripheral Third World’s cheap indigenous and migrant labor, ample exportable resources, and war-hungry markets; establishing a permanent indenture upon the periphery with the 1998 Third World economic collapse.
F) GLOBAL CAPITALIST CONSOLIDATION: The capitalist-world economy, inclusive of the socialist bloc prior to Soviet communism’s demise, achieved the global penetration of multi-national corporate capitalism with the partial collapse of the socialist camp. With the Warsaw Pact and COMECON eliminated, and the remnant socialist bloc interested in capitalist investment, the “strong force” (multinational corporate capitalism) holding together the core’s several national centers of competing capitalist power attained a fully global reach. This heightened the wave of regional supranational capitalist consolidations out from the North American Trade Zone and European Economic Community, somewhat forcefully in eastern Europe (with mutual development/preferential trade treaties binding Community and Commonwealth into a continental system of slow economic development), and eagerly in Asia (South Korea/Japan trade pact, Taiwan/Philippines/Singapore economic alliance, India/Australia/New Zealand commercial confederation). It proved increasingly advantageous for the national centers of capitalist power in the capitalist world-economy’s core to consolidate supranational “co-development spheres” (to include developing and undeveloped peripheral regions), in order to secure stable, regionally diverse economic communities that could sustain a measure of internal market expansion and development. These consolidated capitalist regions served as bulwarks against the slow-motion Armageddon overtaking the former Soviet territories and much of the Third World. Finally, the collaboration between multinational corporate capitalism and regionally consolidated supranational capitalism to destabilize, shatter, ignite and loot the peripheral Third World completed the former’s global reach while minimizing conflicts in the Third World between the competing national centers of capitalist power through a division of plunder. The US continued to act as the “center of the empire” (dominating the world-system’s core even in decline, leading two wars against Iraq in the Persian Gulf, intervening in east Africa, the Balkans, central America and northern Asia) even as the capitalist world-economy became more polycentric. Nevertheless, the contradictions involved in US sponsorship of north American economic consolidation are illustrative, and worth detailing:
1) NORTH AMERICAN CONSOLIDATION: US INTENTIONS: America’s ruling circles developed plans for supranational continental economic unification chafed by the Japanese miracle, anticipating unified Europe’s economic power, and taking stock of widening world chaos. US sponsorship of the North American Trade Zone, via the Free Trade Agreement and subsequent, more protectionist amendments of the Continental Trade Agreement, was inclusive of Mexico, an unstable, poverty-stricken Third World country, and intended to be open ended in membership, focusing on the western hemisphere. American business and industry intended to practice its cowboy capitalism well into the twenty-first century. Neither incorporating unions into the social governance (Germany), nor treating workers as family (Japan), nor even providing basic social services (child care, universal health care-Britain) fit the John Wayne style of US corporate capitalism. US capital’s strategy to compete with Japan and Europe was simple; promote rapid continental economic restructuring and trade to launch a burst of economic prosperity that staves off the labor organizing, social ferment and tax burden that a true “social contract” entails. The Trade Zone was intended in particular to end the threat of organized labor. The strong Canadian unions were expected to crumble as US corporations bought out the Canadian economy. Mexico’s insurrectionary unionism was expected to evaporate with the increased opportunities and prosperity for its working class, and the increased stability of the country as a whole. And US unions, barely 10% of the work force, widely despised for their privileges, were intended to disappear entirely under the competition. A vast, continent wide pool of surplus labor, much of it migrant, was eventually to be created to fuel north American economic expansion. (Compare with European Economic Community use of eastern Europe as Third World region and as competition to attack western European unionism.)
2) NORTH AMERICAN CONSOLIDATION: THE RESULTS: US ruling circles, with the aid of their Canadian and Mexican counterparts, did their best to weave together the separate national economies of the continent into supranational whole cloth before the close of the twentieth century. And the middle years of the 1990’s did experience unprecedented economic reorganization across north America with a climb out of deep structural recession into a modest prosperity. However, the transnational ruling elite of this new continental economy was never more surprised than when militant labor organizing increased. Canadian unions in the CLC, seeing the writing on the wall, took the initiative and dispatched organizers and mutual aid to their US working class fellows in the AFL-CIO by the end of the 1990’s. Wildcat strikes, sit-downs and secondary boycotts re-emerged and were combined with new tactics; data and information system sabotage, high-tech muckraking, and molecular strikes (the 1998-99 US/Canadian 48-hour “slinky strikes” covering up to 80% of truckers, dock workers and merchant marines, railway workers, airplane mechanics and flight crew). Purely economic demands were being supplemented, and sometimes supplanted by political demands. Organized labor, the unions proper, did not sponsor these new campaigns of economic direct action. Instead ad hoc, extra-u
nion and extra-parliamentary, transnational workers organizations, in the form of independent industrial committees and councils, took responsibility. The complexities of litigating labor law across national borders in the Trade Zone were key to this new labor militancy’s initial successes. US dominated continental capitalism fought this resurgent unionism tooth-and-nail through the turn of the century. Ultimately, the continental ruling class resorted to war in southern Mexico and patriotism to split militant north American labor into conservative, pro-war AFL-CIO/CLC/CTM majority unionism opposed by minority anti-war, independent unionists. The US government’s reinstitution of a limited conscription has fueled anti-draft sentiments as well as a continental anti-war opposition, particularly among the young. (Compare to transEuropean democratic trade union movement; European peace movement.)
3) NORTH AMERICAN CONSOLIDATION: SOUTHERN MEXICAN SECESSION: Mexican unionism, subject to chauvinism and racism from its northern “class comrades,” nevertheless provided stunning, charismatic leadership and ultimately the most powerful challenge to the North American Trade Zone. Mexican unionism took its spark from labor struggles further north; Mexican farm labor unions joining up with the resurgent United Farm Workers which spearheaded a reverse, migrant worker organizing drive into Canada. But the Mexican government’s propensity to resort to the Federales and unofficial death squads (Guadalajara, 1998; Oaxaca, 1999) created labor martyrs which, given the minority migrant Mexican populations in the US and Canada, provided much begrudged legends for all of north America’s labor struggles. The radical Mexican working class, in looking up to the accomplishments of the US/Canadian labor movement (which by and large shunned class struggle “south of the border”), ultimately made the qualitative leap that started unraveling the fabric of North American economic integration from the bottom up. The Union de Trabajadores de Mexico was founded in late 1997, to grow by leaps and bounds through the corrupt, PRI-purchased 1998 elections, to become Mexico’s largest libertarian trade union. The UTM organized the post-election protests which brought down a bloody response from the government and drove much of the union’s leadership underground. Sparks from UTM’s example flew about the country, creating numerous labor organizing brush fires that consumed the government-sponsored unions in the CTM before culminating in the formation of the multi-union Confederación del Trabajo by mid-1999. The CT’s first action, the calling of the November 1999 General Strike, precipitated a full state crackdown, declaration of martial law, brutal military and death squad repression, and covert CIA intervention. Driven underground once again, Mexico’s revolutionary forces regrouped, established the Zapata liberation Front, and launched the historic August 2000 Uprisings to establish the Meztican, Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories. The uprisings succeeded in declaring the latter two Liberated Territories by force of arms in the south by October. Thus, they founded a libertarian secessionist movement opposed wholeheartedly by the Mexican and US governments, and by the Canadian government only reluctantly (Quebec and aboriginal secessionism). When southern Mexico withdrew by insurrection from the North American Trade Zone, seceding from Mexico as the consciously anti-national Liberated Territories, the principle contradiction of the post-Soviet, capitalist world-system at the core played itself out. The “scorched earth” and “war without end,” promoted by core multi-national corporate capitalism and regionally consolidated capitalism in the peripheral Third World, had come home to roost. The ZLF defiantly picked apart the weave of continental economic unity from revolutionary southern Mexico, in the US’s own back yard, and US/Mexican military intervention was all but inevitable. But US/Mexican military war against the Liberated Territories is fast becoming an “endless conflict” between technomilitary counterinsurgents and brutal death squads on the one hand, and firmly entrenched, peasant guerrilla and popular forces on the other hand. (Compare to western European Basque and transEuropean Romani problems.)
G) WORLD SYSTEM, 2002: Capitalist world-economic core consolidation in its multi-national corporate and regional supranational dimensions was both the product of and a factor in Soviet collapse and Third World holocaust. Soviet collapse and Third World chaos were simultaneously a ripe harvest for consolidating capitalism and its Achilles heel...
TEN
DL pounded the raised, paved walkway surrounding Lake Merritt’s somber waters. The sun of a new day had not yet cleared the dark, sullen Oakland hills, though its violent aura sifted through drab clouds, broken after a brief rain. The morning was brisk. He could see his paced breathing in the air before him as he ran, careful to avoid the heroin syringes, crack viles, Elysium caps, Ynisvitrin baggies and 999 bindles littering the ground he had chosen as his track. An oily sheen lapped with the tiny salty waves onto the shore. A small flotilla of ducks, permanent lake residents, cruised the still surface. He inhaled the air of his relative freedom with relish, and determination.
Prison’s only gift to those doing time was time. It was up to the prisoner to find the self-discipline to use it wisely. Fortunately, DL had befriended a couple of powerful mentors to help him onto a productive course during his incarceration for accessory to auto theft; Askia of the New Afrikan Liberation Army and Isaak of the Nation of Islam. Despite their vast political differences, both had worked together in prison to punch out a small Black liberated zone behind bars. They conducted study groups and prayer sessions, and suffered long spells in solitary lock down for their efforts. Short-timer DL had gang money outside, so he did what he could for Askia and Isaak. They, in turn, gave him books to read and seminars to digest. Besides pumping iron, which almost everybody wound up doing, he had read volumes and developed his political consciousness. He had converted that prison self-discipline into habit once out, one as strong or stronger than his former crack habit. He had done the Black Panther thing; replaced his drug abuse with revolutionary zeal and commitment to “picking up the gun.” Each morning, every morning, he ran fifteen miles and hefted weights for an hour to keep himself in shape. Between politics and working out, DL had no time for anything else, let alone romance. Besides his gang girlfriend, Winnona, had kept on the pipe while he was doing time, and had been shot by her dealer for stealing from him.
His Nike Superair’s crunched into the walkway’s damp gravel as he ran. DL wore a pair of headphones, but no matter how he ran or held his head, he could not seem to hold the signal from Liberation Station Afrika. DJ Elijah ran the pirate radio station single handedly; playing all types of African music from the Americas as well as the motherland; replaying the speeches, prose and poetry of famous Africans and African Americans; providing educational and self-help programming for the community; and broadcasting his controversial Liberation News Service comprised of international, national, state, city and neighborhood stories rarely, if ever, covered by the official media. Properly speaking, Elijah was an “African Zionist;” a Monophysitic, Gnostic mystic who belonged to an obscure sect of the Ethiopian Coptic Church and who preached a “black Christ/back to Africa” line. Rumor had it that he was a blind Persian Gulf vet who had kept his uncompromising pirate station operating for the past three years by using military surplus and a clever system of transmitters scattered about the city to avoid detection. DL also wore gray sweats, with a distinctive patch sewn into the long sleeve arm at biceps level.
Ahead, a dark shape, that of a man, loomed out of the morning.
“Yo, Snake Boy,” DL stopped in his tracks, “How you doin’. Long time.”
“DL, dat you?” Snake Boy cocked his head, his eyes glazed and bloodshot. “Ya out o’ jail man?”
“Been out almost a year,” DL stretched to keep from cramping, “How you been Snake?”
“Not too good,” the decaying young black man grinned a feeble, gap-toothed smile. “Dey be cuttin’ da street shit ‘gain. Can’t get it strong ‘nough. Ya still wit da Lords?”
“Got back into it,” DL was sketchy, acknowledging the other’s mention of his gang, the Young Afrikan Lords. “Things gonna be di
fferent.”
“Better be,” Snake Boy sniffled, then coughed, a deep, phlegm-rasping cough. “Dey be da main ones puttin’ out dat weak shit.”
“That ain’t us,” DL grimaced, “Some of the gangbangers from the Lords are still runnin’ the streets, but not under our name. The Lord’s ain’t sellin’ no shit.”
“Huh?” Snake Boy tweaked up his eyes, “DL, ya get religion in school?”
“Something better,” DL said, ignoring the street reference to jail. “Got liberation politics, boyeee.”
“Pie in a sky,” Snake Boy simply shrugged. “Ain’t gonna do nothin’ for ya but get ya killed.”
“Maybe. But I’m too proletarianly intoxicated to be astronomically intimidated,” DL laughed over his favorite quote, “Besides, its betterin’ killin’ yourself, like you doin’ Snake.”
“Ya just buyin’ inta Da Man’s rotten political system,” the addict bristled at DL’s remark.
“Fightin’ the powers-that-be is politics, but it ain’t sellin’ out,” the Young Afrikan Lord shook his head, “So what you contributin’ to the race with your crack pipe?”
“Man, I just tryin’ ta get through dis life,” Snake Boy was angry, “Just tryin’ ta get by dis racist system.”
“Racism’s cold truth, man,” DL preached, “But you don’t got to react to the system by doin’ Whitey’s work for him by killin’ yourself.”
Snake Boy did not answer. Instead, he turned abruptly and walked away. DL shrugged and started running again. As the two men separated, each thought of the other as deluded, a chaser of illusions.
***
The cold morning air slapped Greg’s face on his drive south to the city. He had a headache from the night before, two if the riemanium were counted. Sunrise wrinkled through clouds and spangled across the rain-wet new day. His brooding over Janet was dulled by the touch of hangover. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to smash up her life as she had broken up his. Wounded self-pity invariably gave way to a fist clenching anger. A desire for vengeance.
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