Tags
Capitalism, consumption based upon need, elections, Exploitation, guerrilla warfare, Labour Unions, land, natural resources, productive machinery, Ruling class, so-called socialist regimes, The working class has no country, Working class
Source: WORKERS’ OFFENSIVE
These are the basic political principles that the members of our organization and its sympathizers are expected to uphold and to defend:
1. Capitalism is a worldwide social system that rests on the exploitation of the large majority of the population forcefully excluded from control over land, natural resources, and productive machinery. It is the cause of all the wars, environmental degradation, poverty, and misery today. This system cannot be changed through gradual reform but must be abolished. In its place must emerge a global community interlinking all of humanity, without states, borders, money, nor classes, in which the administration of economic and social life is the collective work of everyone and individual consumption is based upon need.
2. The wellbeing of the working class, a social category that includes those who subsist through the sale of their ability to do work and all others residing within the household who are also dependent on the wage packet, conflicts with the reproduction and accumulation of capital, which is grounded on their exploitation and impoverishment. The struggle of the working class against capitalist exploitation carries within itself the emancipation of the entire human species from all other forms of oppression.
3. The working class has no country! All the world’s workers form a single exploited class locked in a deadly conflict with the capitalists, whose power is fractured into many states. For this reason, we offer unqualified material and symbolic support to undocumented immigrants and all other working class exiles and refugees. All wars besides the uncompromising class war between the workers and capital are imperialist orgies; the working class has no stake whatsoever in any of the wars between different factions of the exploiting class to retain or to advance their positions within world capitalism. Patriotism and racism are only tools of the capitalists to divide and manipulate workers. The workers must reject any call to fight for the mother country, as it can only mean massacring one another for the profit of their exploiters.
4. The working class has no cause in common with their exploiters. Any political maneuver that calls on the workers to join forces with the capitalists, even if temporarily, only serves to derail the workers from their objective of abolishing capitalism and subordinates their interests to those of their exploiters.
5. Labor unions, regardless of their internal structure, are not workers’ organizations but organs of the capitalist state that smother and contain the resistance of the working class against the exploitative system through the negotiation and enforcement of contracts with capital. In the heat of the class struggle, the workers must destroy the unions and form their own mass and unitary organizations to direct and carry out their struggle against capitalism.
6. The central aim of workers’ struggle against capital is conquering political power to radically transform social relations. This does not mean running candidates for public office or staging a military coup to overthrow the existing state, but the forcible displacement of the capitalist state’s administrative apparatus and the rule of the entire working class through the very same organizations created in the course of the class struggle.
7. All elections are a sham. Political power is fundamentally a question of violence, not votes. The ritual of mass self-delusion that forms part of electoral politics acts as a safe outlet into which the grievances of the exploited class can be harmlessly redirected. Participation in elections helps maintain capitalists’ mental dominion over the working class by reviving the great lie that workers have any voice within this system. Begging pathetically at the feet of the exploiters and entrusting a tiny minority to fight all its battles does not produce independence and assertiveness in the working class, only weakness and submission.
8. In order to unite workers and form the class front against capitalism, it is critical to address non-class forms of oppression, such as racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., which, after all, weigh heaviest on the working class. Nevertheless, we recognize that social movements organized around these issues, at best, tend to be narrow in their focus and suppress, rather than expose, class conflicts; at worst, these movements attempt to integrate marginalized populations into capitalist society. Working class militants who are active within them must seek to heal the divisions within the working class itself and force a break along class lines between capitalists and their collaborators, on the one hand, and workers, on the other.
9. The unyielding offensive of the working class against its class enemy finds its purest expression in the solidarity of the collective members of this class and the mass actions which they carry out in direct confrontation with their exploiters. Terrorism and similar tactics, such as guerrilla warfare by paramilitary groups and coups, or any variation thereof, have been employed historically by various factions of the exploiting class to consolidate power or to take it from another faction of the same group, but they are completely foreign to the working class, whose greatest strength lies in its numbers and its ability to organize itself as a class.
10. However they may have justified their existence, the brutal regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries, China, North Korea, Cuba, and others, were not systems in which the working class held power. Neither were they societies in which class rule was transcended. Instead, these were particularly cruel and repressive class societies within which bureaucrats at various levels, enterprise managers, party and military elites, and others within the state, appropriated the entire product of society for themselves, leaving workers with just enough to subsist through their wages and rations, and sold the great remainder on the world market, not unlike the way large transnational corporations and governments who manage key industries conduct their business presently. As far as the working class is concerned, these parasites in the bureaucracy are not much different from the capitalists in the liberal-democratic countries, and in both cases the outcome of the class struggle will be the same: their factories and lands will be confiscated, their privileges and perks revoked, their political system completely dismantled, etc.
I think the IWW said more succinctly in 1905. Here is the preamble to their constitution.
“The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can e no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.
Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth.”
Any questions? Let’s get busy!
This is why I am more than skeptical of every ism out there, whether it be socialism, communism or capitalism. The minute a “representative” form of government or union is put in place, the same old shit starts all over again.
As far as I can tell, there is no way out of this continuous-if-loop from hell!
Setting aside for the moment the possibility of people actually organizing to take the existing order down, that you may be right in your assertion that there doesn’t appear to be a snow ball’s chance in hell that we will ever be able to transcend oppression, I’m curious about which of the ten principles put forth by Worker’s Offensive you disagree with, if any and in what respects.
No need to answer if you are not up to it or are too taken up with other matters, Sojourner. I’m merely curious.
I, too, have serious reservations about “representative” forms of elite governance, and although some people who put themselves forth as “communists” or “socialists” don’t seem to be able to conceive of any other kind of governance, not all communists or socialists conceive it in that fashion.
As for “-isms:” as a human being you can always characterize any person’s viewpoints and thus reduce them to an ensemble of beliefs that, pertaining to their range of relevance about the world, regardless of whether they actually correspond to external reality, are more or less internally coherent, and thus express a coherent perspective or ‘way of looking at and thinking about’ an aspect or aspects of human concern. And if that is the case, you can give any of these perspectives a ‘name’ so as to signify it as a recognizable pattern of thought, and thereby you have designated an “-ism.”
Of course, not all existing perspectives have necessarily been labelled in this way, but in principle they can be, and consequently if that is the case, and no one can escape relating to the world and him/herself but through “pre-figuring assumptions and perspectives,” but by “framing” reality in designatable cognitive terms or patterns, how can anyone possibly escape the curse of “-isms?”
For “-isms” are part-and-parcel of belief, in fact are mere designations, that is to say, “signifiers” of logically cohering sets of beliefs, their “referents.” Is it possible for a normal human not to hold to sets of beliefs that do not at some level and in some fashion logically cohere?
I can agree with the idea that a person can for whatever reasons be dismissive of this or that “-ism,” but I can’t concede that one can be dismissive of all possible “–isms.” For even the latter, as a core conviction, is an “-ism:” it’s called ‘radical skepticism.’
Norm, I guess this explains where I am at right now. This speaks to me in a way that political ideologies have never been able to:
http://edwardcurtin.com/disembodied-americans-and-the-crucifixion-of-the-world/
I don’t see evidence of the individual existing in these man made terms and ideologies. I was born a unique individual, as was everyone else. And so I resent, and resist, having to conform to ideological titles placed on me, and I also reject the systems, the isms, that concocted these titles.
I am not a member of a class. I reject this man made notion. If this makes a “radical skeptic” of me, in the eyes of the vast herd, so be it.
As I’ve jokingly stated many times, I feel as though I was dropped off on the wrong planet. I really don’t fit anywhere, nor have I ever.
But don’t give up on me, okay?!