Just home from work and too tired to add commentary. I found this wiki-link by this guy on ZSpace here.

Here is the link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

Here is a nice quote from the page:

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers…Masses of laborers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois state; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is…The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason the social forms stringing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property…You are horrified at our intending to do away with private ownership of the means of production. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”^[82][10]

New stuff up soon. Though I’m not that good at this stuff, I feel I need to focus on Palestine and Greece for a while. It’s difficult to think about much else. Manana.

mb

PS: Before I get the emails: Yes I’m still an Anarchist and no I’m not part of the “Communist Conspiracy.”

“Old black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows…and everybody knows.”—Leonard Cohen

A cool damp night…

It was another night at work at the restaurant I manage in DC. By then the days were much shorter and a gray canopy of mist had enveloped the metro area. It was an unusual shift for a Tuesday in that usually the bar is dead and the dining room area is packed for about two hours with Senators, media people, war criminals, and insurance reps and so on. Tonight, however, the dining room was so empty that I cut the entire floor staff. But the bar was packed with well dressed, clearly upwardly mobile white people in their 20’s and 30’s.

At one point the bar became so busy that I had to start making drinks for people along side the bartender. This was a terrible development for me because, well, I’m freaking lazy and not to mention that I’m a self described class warrior with nothing but seething contempt for the majority of our “guests.”

As I was guiding a woman through the wine list she picked the second most expensive bottle of Cabernet. She explained that even though they were celebrating, they needed to “tighten their belts” a little. She then mumbled something about “the economy.”

“Ask not what your country can do for you…”

After about an hour I got the bartender caught up and could finally get back to what I do best: jack shit. So I left the bar—a wasteland of half eaten rare Ahi Shashimi, empty wine bottles and semi-drunk white people—and sought refuge in the empty dining room. Soon after, for a brief moment, every voice in the bar was hushed. The bartender then cranked the television volume full blast and I could hear Wolf Blitzer’s voice say something about an historic moment and then everybody just went absolutely batshit.

(more…)

Full confession: I didn’t know that much about Dr. Chomsky. However, I must pay respect to the unknown (and known outside of me) contributions that her very existence has given to the common good and our (now) higher knowledge. The Chomsky family has given the world of the upper-classes a window into how to live a life of grace, solidarity and to attempt a sincere commitment to justice.

And as a gift to us in the working classes, we’ve been given (for almost nothing) a frame of reference, history and a language to help guide our liberation. Mrs. and Mr. Chomsky could have (with their intellects and positions) chosen very different lives for themselves. They stayed (and stood) with us. This is inspiringly unusual.

Others will write more detailed tributes. I want to offer this small tribute to the Chomsky family in their time of horrible pain and say thank you to the memory of Carol Chomsky and to Noam Chomsky and family. We’re all sorry for your pain and thank you all for your collective dedication.

In Solidarity

Maxwell Black

I’ve held off mentioning this subject (though I’ve been following every moment I can) because I assumed the uprising would be crushed and it would be back to repression as usual. Also, I married into a Greek family and the subject is a little touchy. I once asked my usually chatty father-in-law about the Greek anti-fascist movement during WWII and subsequent US sponsored civil-war and he just stared at me like he might replace the roasting lamb in the backyard with me!

Anyhoo, it looks like the anarchists, students, leftists, immigrants, real socialists, workers etc. (wait a second, that sounds like the majority!) are winning. Fuck yes! And it seems that they are actually getting bolder and more organized by the day.

I spent my honeymoon in Greece and one day in a taxi I asked the driver about all of the anarchy symbols spray painted everywhere. He looked nervous and mumbled something about football hooligans. I didn’t believe him.  Greece might just get a taste of freedom. What are we waiting for?

I borrowed the following article from Z Net, click read more. I’ll have a new blog later tonight.

Inside Account of Activism in Greece

(more…)

Buenos noches muchachos. 2:20a.m. here in beautiful Bethesda Md, still existing in my in-law’s basement trying not to go totally fucking insane. This is my glorious “Friday” night from the restaurant biz (meaning we work the same five days but in a different sequence.) I’m really typing this to get that last post off of the top! It seemed toxic and not because of a negative response–because of no response. Never a good sign! For those that were spooked by it, keep in mind that I grew up with Zack de la Rocha and Jello Biafra as literary teachers; not Chomsky or Tom Robbins. Imagine Zack singing the words I wrote and it will make more sense. I was a musician before I was into Revolution and I’ve been rocking “One Day as a Lion” everyday at the gym. Apology for the last post is now over.

This fucking rain! And cold. And then sudden hot days. 

“Experts say that the jury is still out on ‘climate change’.”

This rain. It’s seems constant. Back to that in a second.

So I got back from New York a few day’s ago. My wife and I were visiting two of our best friends.  Both of them are semi-liberal quasi-political Obama supporters. They were sort of taken aback by my lack of enthusiasm for the “Pope of Hope” as Zed would put it. Our friend Tara (maid of honor at our wedding) said, “You have to be excited that a black democrat was just elected to the most powerful office in the world.” My first thought was the Leonard Cohen lyric: “Lie beside me baby, that’s an order.”

Why do I have to be excited? Or why must I? Did Tim Wise spike her freaking tea? More later.

Another interesting moment was when we were all walking in Brooklyn and it was finally blue skies sunny. I mentioned that it had rained in Maryland almost everyday since the election. It was a true non-political statement.  Literally. I was merely rejoicing at the fact that I could see more than a gray mist and that I dug it. The sentiment in the shared glances and giggles was that I, the big bad radical, must have an agenda, I just want to wallow in my love of anger. Even my wife rolled her eyes. 

I’m frustrated.

Not to take a swipe at my best friends or beloved wife. But I took note of a reality deficit.  The difference is that I don’t read US Weekly or SPIN. I don’t work in a building made of marble and glass–without a window. It makes sense that if the daily view of your life is a magazine ad, a television screen and/or fluorescent lights it could be easy to miss weeks of gray skies and drizzle, (or days and decades and centuries of horror.)

I don’t know. Once they said you don’t need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows, now people don’t even know if it’s raining or pouring without an email alert, an IM from a trusted acquaintance or National Security directive from the DHS.

Not only is it raining, I’ll go out on a limb here: the sky really is fucking falling!

…more tomorrow. During my days “off.”

“At this point, we’ve arrived at an understanding of a confluence of interest that utterly transcends the old “three worlds” paradigm, harkening an entirely different praxical symbiosis, one which is not so much revolutionary as it is devolutionary. We don’t want China out of Tibet so much as we want China out of China. We don’t just want the US out of Southeast Asia or Southern Africa or Central America, we want it out of North America, off the planet, out of existence all together. This is to say that we want the US out of our lives and thereby everyone else’s. The pieces dovetail rather well, don’t they? Indeed, they can’t really be separated and only a false analysis might ever have concluded that they could.”

“Hence we must seek nothing less than the dismemberment and dissolution of every statist/corporate entity in the world. All of them. No exceptions.”–Ward Churchill

So let’s start here shall we soldiers…

…So see ya CIA slayer, betrayer of innocents, subversion of solidarity and social economies. See I ate the red pill, and since then, ain’t been able to sit still. So smile, say cheese—Surprise—I’m your assassin at the windowsill.

We are the new serpents come to reclaim the garden. We are patient, yet we are hungry.

ssssss           ssssss           sSSSS!

           ssssss            ssssss

“I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.”–Che Guevara

The last two images were borrowed from Corner Soul

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

–Derrick Jensen