Future's Past: Technology and the Class War by Other Means - Revisited

This is another in my series of revisited Phoenix Insurgent articles from the past. I wrote this piece a few years ago. Returning to it, I had intended to write a lengthy introduction re-investigating the trends that I discussed in the piece. However, as I began looking into it again I realized that the tendencies that I highlighted here have only gotten worse -- often much worse -- so rather than just post a bunch of new links I'll just link to the initial google news search I did so you can follow up for yourself and see if I was on point or not.

Because it turns out that's not really the point. I could have chosen almost any technological "advance" to illustrate that technology is a class war instrument at the point of production and distribution (and beyond), and that it is applied against workers for the purpose of controlling us and, specifically, undermining the constant threat that we pose to the production and distribution of Capital which, the gospel goes, should always, like helium, move naturally upwards to the top of any social structure. Naturally, I reject this false science. Search under "cell phone police", "gps worker" or any other number of technologies and you'll find further blasphemy to enrage the high priests of the technocracy.

Such queries only tell you what you already know: that technology is rapidly building an architecture of control that permeates -- like Capital -- every aspect of our lives. It does so at work for the same reason it does on our streets. Why are there cameras in every intersection? At the border? Control. Domination. To secure the transfer of wealth upwards and to maintain the flow of oppression downwards. To keep us distracted and stuck to a couch. Tracked at home and at work. Too afraid of getting caught to strike back.

Capital's all-seeing-eye now seeks the very same commanding heights which it once denied to state communism's sad-sack all-managing-bureaucracy. Whereas the old orthodoxy denounced the "workers paradise" of state planning, it now itself seeks to track and manage the worker and every one of the tiniest widgets she might produce. What it once pretended to oppose, it now seeks to become. And to me the arguments sound all too familiar.

The point of this article was to illustrate the early days of America's love affair with technology, and to suggest that, like so many rosy Rockwell-esque paintings that we've seen grace magazine covers, dentist office walls and military recruitment posters, there is more to the relationship than the honeymoon love-buzz. Capital has an agenda, and it manifests through technology. And that agenda likewise tends to organize through familiar paths of power, including white supremacy and general attacks on workers desire for self-organization, which I spend some time on considering in this essay. One need not be a Luddite to recognize this plain truth.

So, with that in mind, I submit another PI article from the archive. I hope you enjoy it. If I would make one change to the piece, I would have spent some time investigating the relationship between women and automation, particularly regarding the reproduction of labor power and the rise of automation, both at work and in the home. The relationship of automation to the infusion of women into the workforce during the war would be particularly interesting to research. I suspect that the tendencies that play out in general would apply here, but without having researched it at the time, I can't say for sure. This is a weakness that I would love to see investigated and rectified.

###

Future's Past: Technology and the class war by other means

By Phoenix Insurgent

"Strange business, this crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war; all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forbears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

THE APOLITICAL SCIENTIST

You know, there's no doubt that the scientists who worked on the atomic bomb project were smart folks. Some of them even had regrets of various kinds after their work was done, seeing the effects the bomb had, not just on a couple of Japanese cities and their helpless residents, but on the world as a whole. Of course, others remained unapologetic to the end.

The Christian Science Monitor ran a hilariously-titled story this week about Frank Moss, a former technology entrepreneur and current head of the MIT's prestigious Media Lab.

Cofounded by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT president Jerome Weisner in 1985, the Media Lab earned its reputation envisioning today's "digital lifestyle," developing ideas from wearable computers to digital ink to a $100 laptop computer for use by children in developing countries.

The lab is also, Moss boasts, "clearly the coolest place on the planet" to work, for those interested in how technology can change society.

But don't get the false impression that the lab's raison d'etre is charity. On its website, the Media Lab boasts that

[t]he Laboratory pioneered collaboration between academia and industry, and provides a unique environment to explore basic research and applications, without regard to traditional divisions among disciplines.

From the "Sponsorship" section of the website, the Media Lab fleshes out its point further, pointing out just what corporations that pony up the cash can expect to get in exchange for their sponsorship.

Many sponsors find the Laboratory to be a uniquely valuable resource for conducting research that is too costly or too "far out" to be accommodated within a corporate environment. The "multiplier" effect of joining a community of sponsors to support advanced research has impressive results. For less than the cost of one senior scientist's salary plus benefits, a sponsor can gain access to the work of a 300-person research laboratory.

The CSM expands on the purpose of the lab further in their article.

Most of the lab's $32 million yearly budget comes from corporate sponsors ranging from the expected - tech giants such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Cisco Systems - to the less obvious, such as Campbell Soup, Philip Morris, and The LEGO Group, maker of LEGO toys.

One of Moss's top priorities is to make sure these 80 or so corporate sponsors feel they benefit from the work of the lab. In the go-go days of the late 1990s tech boom, companies could simply decide, "This is cool. We're going to put money behind it," Moss says. But today, "You have to be able to justify that [spending] as a good investment that has a return."

Moss sees his "new" way of doing things as reaching beyond MIT, and hopefully setting the standard for a new era of cooperation between scientists, government and business.

One of the interesting things about Moss's vision is how convinced he is that his model amounts to something different in the world of high tech research. But, the truth is, we've seen this kind of thing before. Capitalism has always relied on government subsidy to fund both its products and the weapons it uses to attack the working class.

For those who want to understand the world, as the capitalists now stand ready again to remake it, it's instructive to look at the discussions and conditions that surrounded the implementation of an older technologies. If we look at the design and application of automation in the US, we can get a pretty sizeable hint at what the research conducted by folks like Moss is likely to accomplish in the future. And, from that hint, we can maybe design our own strategy to stop it.

THE POLITICAL SITUATION

Automation functioned as a flexible class war weapon, undermining workers in a variety of ways, depending on the needs of capital. Martin Glaberman writes that the end of the war saw a major transformation of the auto industry.

The centralization of power with the elimination of the smaller auto companies (Kaiser, Hudson, Packard, etc.) was combined with the decentralization of production in the newly automated or modernized plants. Reuther continued the policies begun by old Henry Ford and followed by CM's C. F. Wilson. The five-dollar day was superseded by the cost-of-living allowance as the golden chain that was to bind the workers to the most intense and alienating exploitation to be found anywhere in the industrialized world. No wage increase can compensate for the fact that the operations required of one worker on an auto assembly line never total as much as one minute.

In 1955 auto workers erupted in a wave of wildcat strikes that rejected the policy of fringe benefits combined with increasing speed-up. They made it clear that what was at issue was the inability of the union contract to provide any solution to the day-to-day problems on the plant floor. In some plants, at the expiration of the three-year contract, there are literally thousands of unresolved grievances testifying to the need of workers to manage production in their own name.

Coming out of World War II, the capitalists were in need of new additions to their arsenal, and workers control was a constant threat to profits and capitalist dictatorship on the job floor. While labor had ostensibly taken a "no-strike" pledge during the war, strikes had not abated as much as the capitalists would have liked. Workers went out as much in 1944 as they did in 1937 (the year of the famous Flint Sit-Down Strike), but government-imposed wage controls and forced arbitration limited gains.

In an effort to keep wages in line, the NWLB came up with a policy known as the Little Steel Formula. First applied to the steel industry then to a wide range of occupations, the formula allowed wage increases only at levels that would not increase inflation. Unionists argued that Little Steel fundamentally crippled collective bargaining and that wage increases were constantly behind inflation, keeping workers poor while corporations raked in incredible profits.

With the end of the war and the end of the "no-strike" pledge, workers exploded in mass action. In 1945 and 1946, workers struck GM. Capitalists feared a return to the pre-war militancy of labor and the re-emergence of the demands for workers control from the shop floor. Further, capitalists feared a return of the Depression if business returned to capitalism as usual.

And, towards these ends, capitalists viewed machinists with particular distrust. Because of the high level of skill demanded by the machines they utilized and the operations they had to perform, combined with their direct relationship to the point of production and the less alienated nature of their job, machinists represented a very real threat to the capitalist dream of unhindered control over labor and production.

A NEW ECONOMIC MODEL PROVIDES A NEW WEAPON

Pushed to meet increased production for the war, and with capitalism in shambles, the government had poured money into new technologies. Airplane production soared, thanks to automation.

Drawing on a plan proposed during World War I, the NDC decided to utilize automated production capabilities of automobile factories to produce aircraft parts, thereby permitting the aircraft companies to assemble even greater numbers of aircraft. Consolidated and possibly Douglas Aircraft would be teamed with Ford for the B-24, North American Aviation with General Motors for the B-25 and Martin with Chrysler for the B-26.

American capitalism wasn't capable of taking on these costs itself. It needed subsidies, and the war and demands of the government provided the perfect symbiosis necessary to achieve both the government's plan to challenge Nazi imperialism and the capitalist's desire to tame its workforce.

The Chairman of North American Aviation at the time, J. H. Kindelberger, put it this way:

We must maintain a progressive attitude toward production methods improvements and continue to develop machinery and equipment adaptable to volume production. We should cooperate with each other in major industry-wide collaboration and with government in projects which offer wide applications and yet are too costly for financing by the companies.

In his book, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation, David F. Noble writes that the war saw a tremendous transformation of the relationship between business and government. Reflecting the generally accepted notion that free market capitalism had collapsed with the Great Depression, businesses looked to new models for development and the preservation of their dominance over workers. Government funding for research at Bell Labs, for instance, went from 1 percent of the budget in 1939 to 83 percent in 1943.

And the military and industry marriage of convenience elevated the status of scientists, as well. Again, Noble notes,

If preparation for war and the war itself lifted the nation out of the Depression, it also provided scientists and engineers with growing employment, a chance once again to demonstrate their prowess, and an opportunity to restore public confidence in scientific and technological progress. Engaging in continuous self-promotion and advertising their accomplishments in such areas as radar, rocketry, and atomic weaponry, the scientists emerged from the war with a larger-than-life image (and self-image) as genuine national heroes. Determined to preserve their heroic status, to lay to rest the doubts and disclosures of the Depression decade, and, above all, to rekindle the traditional American spirit of technological optimism, they early became the advance corps of a self-serving postwar cultural offensive. This progressivist cultural offensive succeeded and, as a consequence, the scientific community secured unprecedented peacetime military and civilian government support for its research and development activities.

Despite the grand mythology of scientific apoliticism and egalitarian progress, the War and the resulting order served to pull scientists into the political apparatus, primarily through the military budget. No longer mere inventors, the new economy transformed scientists into social engineers.

DEBATING AUTOMATION

In his 1962 essay, "Man, work & the automated feast", Ben B. Seligman wrote,

Automation is already moving with a rapidity that threatens to tear apart existing social and organizational structures; according to some observers, it will even alter the habits of thought that men have up to now prided themselves on … Now, new industrial functions, new economic forms, new work habits, and new social headaches are being created in ways that signify a kind of dialectical leap.

Without a doubt, automation did remake the American working class. Echoing elite sentiment, labor leaders generally embraced automation, if grudgingly at times, and ignored the complaints from their rank and file. Meanwhile, the capitalists' enthusiasm for it grew steadily following World War II, finally reaching near religious levels in the 50's and 60's.

The elite hope was that, by undermining the power of the machinists, control of production could be transferred from the shop floor, where it risked expropriation and sabotage by workers, to the offices of management and technicians. In a real sense, the replacement of workers with automation was a substitution of capital for labor, subsidized by government. Capitalist control was to be re-imposed on an unruly workforce.

"The unions now attempt to make management's decisions on prices, on profits, on production schedules, on depreciation reserves and on many other phases of industrial operation," lamented Ernest T. Weir, National Steel Corporation chairman.

But the exhilaration of the elite for automation, so obvious by the 60's and 70's, had earlier origins. Writing in Fortune Magazine in 1946, Eric W. Leaver and John J. Brown, laid out the future as they saw it in their influential article, "Machines Without Men":

The human machine tender is at best a makeshift. We are beginning to develop fabrication, control, safety, and observing devices immensely superior to the human mechanism. This development is only in its infancy, yet already we have machines that see better than eyes, calculate more reliable than brains, communicate faster and farther than the voice, record more accurately than memory, and act faster and better than hands. These devices are not subject to any human limitations. They do not mind working around the clock. They never feel hunger or fatigue. They are always satisfied with working conditions and never demand higher wages based on the company's ability to pay. They not only cause less trouble than humans doing comparable work, but they can be built to ring an alarm bell in the central control room whenever they are not working properly.

The advantages automation promised to capitalists were obvious, and because of this fact, any complaint from workers or their organizations about the effects of automation was received quite harshly by the powers that be. "Whenever an exasperated labor leader asserts that automation can be a curse, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce responds that he is a Luddite," said Seligman.

AUTOMATION AND WHITE SUPREMACY

Because the American capitalist conspiracy for domination centers on white supremacy and the division of the working class, the drive to automate necessarily also played out in ways disproportionately bad for workers of color, and Black factory workers in particular. Just as today's lay-offs in Detroit disproportionately affect African-Americans, in many factories with a high percentage of Black employees, automation often had lethal consequences, and could be applied selectively to force speed ups and to increase their rate of exploitation.

In their fantastic piece, "Niggermation In Auto: Company Policy and the Rise of Black Caucuses," Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin discuss the way that automation was brought to bear on Black workers. Automation was used, often selectively, to force dangerous speed ups in order to increase production.

Management credited this much higher productivity per worker to its improved managerial techniques and new machinery. Workers, on the other hand, claimed the higher productivity was primarily a result of their being forced to work harder and faster under increasingly unsafe and unhealthy conditions. The companies called their methods automation; black workers in Detroit called them 'niggermation.'

These speed ups imposed dangerous conditions on Black workers, as Georgakas and Surkin noted.

Eldon conditions were typical of conditions in the industry. Even when there were technological changes, usually only one segment of the assembly line was automated, so that the workers on other segments had to labor more strenuously to keep up. Often, the automation eliminated interesting jobs, leaving the more menial and monotonous tasks for people.

Writing in 1963, civil rights organizer Baynard Rustin, put it this way:

The civil rights movement alone cannot provide jobs for all. It cannot
solve the problems raised by automation—and automation deprives more Negroes
of jobs than any other single factor, including prejudice.

Martin Luther King came to similar conclusions about the effect of automation on Black workers struggling for respect and control over their lives. In a speech before the AFL-CIO in 1961, he remarked,

Labor today faces a grave crisis, perhaps the most calamitous since it began its march from the shadows of want and insecurity. In the next ten to twenty years automation will grind jobs into dust as it grinds out unbelievable volumes of production. This period is made to order for those who would seek to drive labor into impotency by viciously attacking it at every point of weakness.

Again King hit hard on the issue in 1968, foreseeing the dismantalling of the factory system and the rise of the service economy.

In the days to come, organized labor will increase its importance in the destinies of Negroes. Automation is imperceptibly but inexorably producing dislocations, skimming off unskilled labor from the industrial force. The displaced are flowing into proliferating service occupations. These enterprises are traditionally unorganized and provide low wage scales with longer hours. The Negroes pressed into these services need union protection, and the union movement needs their membership to maintain its relative strength in the whole society.

King, by that time, had recognized what some others, like Malcolm X had been saying for some time. Interviewed in 1964, Malcolm X said,

The Muslims, as the Nation of Islam is called, stress the futility of the integrationist program. They argue that there is no precedent for the absorption of Negroes into the greater white American mainstream in fact or in history, that integrationists are asking for something the American socioeconomic system is inherently unable to give them -- mass class mobility, so that at best Negroes can expect from the integrationist program a hopeless entry into the lowest levels of a working class already disenfranchised by automation.

It was becoming clear that what progress Blacks had made during and immediately after World War II was under attack by capitalism through automation. Without access to good jobs, the whole notion of Black economic uplift and integration came under attack. While automation attacked white workers wages and power on the job, it served to undermine the foundations of the integrationist mainstream of the civil rights movement. Framed correctly, a battle against automation carried within it at that time the potentiality of subverting white supremacy, and with it the underpinnings of American capitalism.

BUILDING A NEW ARSENAL

So, returning to MIT's Media Lab, it turns out that Director Moss's new idea isn't so new after all.

To take a contemporary example, consider just the affect that Department of Defense RFID purchasing has had on the spread of that technology. Several years ago, DoD demanded that its suppliers begin integrating RFID into its pallets by 2005, a move that Computerworld said in 2003 "likely will have an even bigger impact than a similar move by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. in June."

In early March of 2006, Mark Roberti reported for the RFID Journal, an industry paper, on the government/private collaboration behind RFID's success.

Alien [a major RFID firm] and the state of Ohio deserve kudos for investing in the state-of-the-art facility, but what’s most encouraging to me is that the lab is a rare example of a private company, government and academia working together to take RFID forward.

The RFID Solutions Center has enlisted the cooperation of five area universities, which will use the center for teaching, research and development. This kind of cooperation between industry, government and academia is going to be crucial if we are to solve the many implementation problems that still exist and develop solutions that transform the way companies manufacture, distribute and sell product.

Continuing, Roberti is careful to selectively remove the DoD funding from his analysis of RFID research dollars and, most importantly, purchasing, which is sort of like removing Army purchasing from the ammunition market. Perhaps this obfuscation is meant to bolster his case for government and corporate intervention in the market.

Where is that money going to come from? Some of it will come from governments. The European Union has put up nearly $10 million to fund the Promise project, which is looking at ways to use RFID for product lifecycle management. Asian countries have put up tens of millions of dollars to promote research in RFID. The United States federal government, despite the military’s push to adopt the technology, has done very little. States like Ohio and North Dakota are doing what they can.

The vast majority of funding will have to come from companies, and we’ve seen some visionary firms taking the lead. Airplane makers Airbus, Boeing and Embraer, as well as defense company BAE Systems, are supporting the Aero-ID Programme run by the Auto-ID Labs at Cambridge. Wal-Mart and others, meanwhile, are supporting the RFID Research Center at the University of Arkansas. But this is a drop in the proverbial bucket.

I understand that companies are not going to fund research out of a love for academics. The academics understand that, too. Research has to be applied toward solving the deployment issues end users face, or toward finding new ways to improve the way companies do business.

Of course, in a way typical of capitalist apologists, just why subsidy of business-friendly technologies is important is hardly addressed at all. It's generally just assumed that it is.

But, Roberti would do well to look more closely at RFID pioneers, Alien Technologies, for a reality check. In 2003, Alien Technologies broke ground on a RFID manufacturing plant at North Dakota State University’s Research and Technology Park, which they hope will help them raise their chip production capacity to 10 billion tags a year. Explaining the choice of location, Alien's CEO, Stav Prodromou, cited two main factors: the company's past cooperation with NDSU and the state's "very business friendly attitude."

When asked in January 2006 about when the "tipping point" for RFID will be, Prodromou responded,

It is Alien's perspective that the tipping point will happen when people break through the ROI barrier. Many large-scale applications were not economical at prices we saw in 2005. It's not across the board, but there is a payback for many applications, such as ensuring the on-shelf availability of apparel, brand protection and so on. As time goes on and tag prices fall, more and more products will fall into the category where there is a payback.

All manner of companies are gearing up now to implement RFID, but Prodromou makes sure to point out that "[t]he DFARS [Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement] became effective in mid-November, and we now have a number of projects underway."

In fact, in 2005 the government was already spending hundreds of millions a year on RFID, with growth then projected at 120 percent by 2009. Just this year, one DoD contract alone with Savi Technology was increased from $207.9 million to $424.5 million. Not insubstantial for a market that went from $1.3 billion in 2003 to $2.7 billion in 2006.

But, while it still might be true that military RFID expenditures have been eclipsed, however temporarily, by the private sector, the subsidy has served its purpose. Writing for the Electronic Business Online in January 2006, Geoffrey James, focused on the importance of a military/corporate research symbiosis in his aptly titled article, "The war at home".

It turns out that the military's use of RFID is second only to Wal-Mart's in generating demand for RFID chips, according to Parker, thereby helping create a mass market that will get tag prices down to the point where they'll become economical for widespread commercial adoption. Thus, by bootstrapping the RFID market sooner than it otherwise might have reached fruition, NCW will have a direct and positive impact on the revenues of the big RFID vendors: Philips, EM Electronics and Texas Instruments.
...
As they become more cost-conscious, defense electronics contractors are also drawing more heavily on existing commercial products to build the computing and communications infrastructure that will make NCW-enabled devices work together, according to former Marine colonel Terry Morgan, now director of Netcentric Strategies at Cisco Systems. "There's a core of technology in the commercial world that's now being sold into the defense world," he says. "The trick to keeping defense electronics economical is leveraging the mass market."
...
Ultimately, the need to achieve NCW quickly and cost-effectively must result in a symbiotic relationship between the defense industry and mainstream electronics firms, according to Morgan. "Research and development should be flowing in both directions," he explains. "The economics of the commercial sector should be helping keep the price of defense electronics down, even as the defense industry creates an incremental market for commercial products."

Such a symbiosis would provide substantial benefits to both sectors. Defense electronics firms would be freed to spend their resources on performing the defense-specific R&D required to make NCW practical, and commercial electronics firms could use their expertise to bring cost efficiencies to the manufacturing process. The symbiosis would also allow our armed forces to upgrade more quickly to NCW, which will not only help them succeed in their missions but also make troops less likely to be injured or killed in the process. And in the end, that's far more important than the health and welfare of the defense industry, the electronics industry or the political powers that be.

And, indeed, now that the market has been made safe for RFID, other companies, governments and their militaries/police are beginning to jump onboard. The Portland Business Journal highlighted one such instance last year. According to an October 2005 article,

Founded in 2001, EID Passport is a privately held company employing 30 people. Its main products, RapidGate and Secure Workplace Solution, use RFID technology to track people entering and leaving stores, warehouses and military facilities. Both systems use ID registration, badges, databases and handheld scanners to identify and track people at specific locations.

"We use RFID as it pertains to tracking and accountability," said Larson. "We attach the RFID plate to the actual picture card so it all becomes one."

And that really gets to the crux of the unstated benefit such technological research bestows on both capitalists and bureaucrats: control. As, Geoffrey James said, RFID will serve "to bring cost efficiencies to the manufacturing process." Translated, that means an attack on workers, who, because of a contradiction of capitalism, must make up the production, supply, distribution and even consumer chain of supply and receiving at the same time that their control and access to that very chain threatens capitalist profits and domination. The danger, from the capitalist's perspective, is always that workers will decide to use those relationships to production for their own benefit, rather than those of the absentee capitalist.

CLASS WAR BY OTHER MEANS

And, so it should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to the increasing police state that is the modern workplace in this country, that a new poll has found that employers are increasingly utilizing all manner of surveillance technologies to monitor, coerce and control workers. For the capitalists, RFID will make a welcome addition to this arsenal.

According to a Newsday article this week, "‘Big Brother’ firms keep eye on workers", there are reasons for that.

Certainly, bosses can cite significant reasons for tracking worker activity: Monitoring can go a long way toward cutting down on sexual harassment, workplace accidents and goofing off. Plus, in lawsuits, courts expect employers to be able to hand over electronic evidence.

So such surveillance is on the increase: The use of video monitoring for theft, violence and sabotage rose last year to 51 percent of 526 employers surveyed by the American Management Association and ePolicy Institute; only 33 percent were using such monitoring four years earlier.

The situation, despite the rapid rate of change, has elicited little commentary from the capitalist press. For anti-capitalists, it should be obvious, though: work is a dictatorship and a dictatorship needs surveillance. Capitalism's disenfranchizement of those who labor from the product of that labor necessitates constant surveillance and intervention. The Newsday article again sums it up nicely:

An employee enters an unauthorized area of the company, his smart-chip badge triggering a hidden surveillance camera. That sends an alert to a security officer, who uses his laptop or cell phone to monitor what the intruder is up to.

Once the realm of Tom Cruise movies, scenes such as this one are playing out at a worksite near you.

What’s more, employer surveillance of workers and property extends beyond the video screen: The boss can tell what Web sites you’ve visited on office computers, the content of e-mail you haven’t even sent, even your every move through cell phones equipped with global positioning. And coming soon: Employee identification through biometrics – measuring such biological components as fingerprints and voice pattern – as well as grain-of-wheat-sized chips implanted under the skin, turning you, in effect, into an EZPass.

The capitalist class, and the state that supports it, is busy honing its policing powers in the workplace in a way that is not without precedent, but which goes far beyond the wildest fantasies of the industrialists of old.

Quoted a few years ago, Per-Olof Loof, Sensormatic's president and CEO, looked into the future of theft deterrance at work.

"While traditional methods of security will always be used by retailers, improvements such as source tagging, RFID systems and technologically advanced surveillance systems are the real weapons in a retailer's war against revenue loss."

According to a 2000 survey of retailers, capitalists estimate they lost more than $13 billion to employee redistribution that year, more than shoplifters took. So, it's natural that capitalists would want to regulate workers as closely as possible on the job. Further, bosses, just like other dictators, have an interest in regulating the movements and interactions and overall freedom of their subjects in order to prevent being challenged.

But, in case RFID itself doesn't solve the problem, an analyst quoted in IT Week's January feature, "How retailers can keep the customer satisfied," was quick to point out that

[t]he number one issue for the shopper is out-of-stock merchandise – an inconvenience that causes 47 per cent of customers to shop elsewhere as a result. New RFID implementations must be linked to workforce management technologies to ensure that replenishment tasks are allocated and completed.

The old authority of capital will not disappear in the future, despite all the elite's wistful talk of information economies and masturbatorily-named "knowlege workers". The old system will merely be augmented by a whole new and sophisiticated police state at work, intended to keep the worker in place, on task and with as little power as possible. And so the profits will flow.

RFID won't be alone in the capitalist's arsenal. The poll cited in the Newsday story further revealed that 76 percent of employers admitted to monitoring internet activity; 51 percent revealed using video surveillance to deter theft (16% to monitor performance); and, 8 percent said they use GPS to track workers.

LESSONS LEARNED

Anarchists - even those who see much potential in technological change - must recognize the centrality of technology to the class war as it is being framed in the 21st century in the First World. Technological development is political, just like the police forces, armies and parties of the ruling class. And, even if technology might somehow hold promise if we can somehow find out how to decentralize and democratize it, that in no way excuses us from casting a very critical eye towards the existing technology and the elite's future plans. We cannot ignore the political context from which it emerged. Whatever we think of it's potential after the revolution, technology as we now know it is certainly not neutral.

Late in the night of October 1, 1975, a small group of Washington Post press workers slid quietly into the pressroom. Once inside, they caught a foreman off guard. Threatening him with violence if he betrayed their action, they proceeded to dismantle the new computerized press the Post's managers had installed, the side-effect of which - intentional or not - had been to deskill the saboteurs and to concentrate more power in the hands of the bosses by shifting control over production into management's hands. Sytematically, they destroyed all 72 units of the Post's nine machines, cutting wires, jamming gears, locking cylinders and breaking off keys in the starting mechanisms.

Another worker, a deskilled machinist for GE, regretted the passivity of his fellow workers in the face of the technology that would eventually disempower them. "When they closed the division, we should have acted earlier and destroyed it ourselves."

A history worth learning from.

Photo of the day

July 7: Over 4,000 Anarchists took to the streets of Athens in solidarity with immigrants across Greece. A wave of repression by the Greek state, often in collaboration with fascist groups, has been unleashed against immigrants and allies in recent weeks. Below, anarchists hold the streets, as fires burn into the city night at a barricade in Athens. Solidarity to all compañer@s in the social struggle in Greece!

Photo from Athens Indymedia.

Rusty Childress and the False Class Consciousness of the Minutemen -- Revisited.

After some prodding from comrades, I've been considering putting out a collection of Phoenix Insurgent pieces from the last few years. As a result, I've been re-reading older pieces in order to evaluate what might make a cut if I went ahead and did it. I'm still not convinced there's much point in the project, given that everything is already mostly available free on the internet. One of the problems, of course, is that the old PI articles tended not to fit too well into either the blog format or the article format: they were long pieces but I'm not really sure that they translate well into print, given all the hyper-links and quoting going on. Putting some of the essays into physical form would require some work to annotate and I'm not sure I want to do that.

Anyhow, in the course of this re-visiting -- and partly inspired by a reunion with my old enemy Rusty Childress at one of the recent pro-migrant marches in Phoenix -- I rediscovered an piece that I wrote about this rich playboy masquerading as a working class Joe. Given the ongoing crisis surrounding migration, especially in the context of racist politico Russell Pierce's recent spate of xenophobic legislation, I thought it would be worthwhile to bring this piece back, both for comment and for consideration.

One of the problems with the immigrant movement, as I see it, is the failure to develop an understanding of why white people act politically the way they do. After all, why don't white working class people find common cause with folks of color from their same class? This question is the eternal demand made of revolutionary actors and theoreticians in the US. Answering it is important.

We here at PCWC subscribe to an analysis of American society that says that whiteness is a political identity rather than a racial one -- an alliance -- in which what we call 'white people' create a cross-class bargain, poor and rich, to defend collectively a privileged position for some people over others in exchange for not overturning the apple cart of capitalism. This undermines class unity and pits whites against people of color and, in the bigger scheme, defends capitalism and the exploitation of everyone -- including white workers, ironically. After all, in the end, even white working class people are exploited by capitalism.

Obviously this is problematic for revolutionary organizing. Towards rectifying this, we at PCWC recommend that white revolutionaries take on the vital task of both undermining this political alliance and addressing to white folks the revolutionary argument against white supremacy. If the alliance of white supremacy cannot be counted on by the ruling class to undermine our collective struggle against Capital, then anything is possible, and that's precisely what we want at PCWC. As long as the glue of white supremacy remains intact, however, the white working class will tend to fight to defend its class position through the familiar paths of white privilege, which in the end will only reinforce the domination of the capitalist class over everyone.

It is precisely into this pool of contradiction that my piece on Rusty dives. While I know that readers from outside Phoenix may not be familiar with Rusty, I think the piece is still quite instructive in terms of excavating the false class consciousness of the anti-immigration movement and the contradictions in the arguments it makes (especially to the extent that they are couched in class terms).

In that spirit, I re-post here the article I wrote three years ago. I should say, before I go, that I take some pride in the fact that when you search Google for Rusty's name, my article is number two in the list on the first page. Let's hope that it has made some impact, then, within the Minuteman and related milieu, exposing the argument of white supremacy for what it is: an argument for continued class domination by the rich over the poor and working class regardless of race or origin. The destruction of capitalism requires the destruction of white supremacy.

###

Racist Jet-Set: Rusty Childress and the false class consciousness of the Minutemen

By Phoenix Insurgent

I was surfing the Save Our State and other right-wing web forums yesterday and I came across a link to some pictures from the protest last Monday. Mostly, they're not all that interesting. I forwarded the link on to a friend who, it turns out, had just discovered it himself. "That's Rusty Childress' photo folder," he told me.

For those who don't know, Rusty is the owner of Childress Automall in Phoenix - and one of the big financial backers of the anti-immigrant movement in Arizona. He pumped money into Arizona's racist so-called "Protect Arizona Now" Proposition 200, which passed in November 2004, denying vital services to immigrants. Since Prop 200's passage, he continues to be one of the sugar daddies of the anti-immigration movement. Here I quote Rusty from an Arizona Republic article that ran in September of that year:

"We're tired of (picking up) the tab of illegal immigration. We are no longer willing to subsidize this. My business has sustained around $45,000 in damages since I got involved. It has been vandalized. There have been gunshots to windows and gases sprayed on our vehicles. For me in particular it is about speaking up on the issue of illegal immigration and demanding that politicians do something."

Because of his reactionary politics, Childress' business was the subject of a series of boycotts, protests and, as Rusty himself noted, direct action in 2004 by Latino groups and their allies in Phoenix.

Typical of the anti-immigrant movement, while the foot soldiers come from the white working class, the big money comes from rich white folks. And so it comes as no surprise that Rusty was born into the lucky sperm club of wealth and privilege. His online resume proudly proclaims his many awards and elite affiliations at the same time he projects a working class, good ol' boy facade. He is a man of contradictions, like President Bush, eager to appear and appeal to the working class, while also living a life of wealth and privilege.



According to the Inc. Magazine article from 1995, Rusty took over the company, as most rich kids do, thanks not to hard work and sticktoitiveness, but due to the everyday nepotism of capitalism. His father's car dealership, now one of GM's top 50 Buick dealerships, was then in financial crisis.

The senior Childress and then general manager Jerry Hughes had no answers. Hughes called in Childress's son -- at the time, head of marketing -- and asked for his help. The energetic twenty-something who'd once wanted to become a geologist so he could play on top of volcanoes now had something just as hot to handle. The challenge came with a new title -- owner-relations manager. And it came with tacit permission to change the entire organization.

You have to understand something about Rusty Childress. For being such a regular-looking guy and for all the Tom Peters slogans he uses, he's quite the hotdogger. The back of his business card tells all: hometown, Tucson; education, Northern Arizona University (B.S. Geology/B.S. Earth Science) and NADA Dealer Academy; interests, Harley-Davidson, Mardi Gras, the beach, and so on -- kayaking, Swedish massage, speaking on total quality management. One wall of his office is all photos of himself running big white water in his kayak. Overhauling his father's company was "The Next Big Adventure" -- white-water rapids for the workweek.

Regardless of his "git r' done" affectation, Rusty's jet-setting playboy lifestyle betrays him as something other than just another working class guy.

Aside from the Minutemen and other anti-immigrant groups, he counts among his political associations Sheriff Joe's Maricopa County Sheriff’s Executive Posse (famous for it's connections to organized crime), the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce Crime Council and the Phoenix Block Watch Advisory Board. He was also Chairman of the Arizona Automobile Dealers Association Ethics Judiciary Committee. Like all rich people, Rusty loves fighting crime. He's not a friend of the working class, and he links to the downtown anti-poor gentrification organization "N.A.I.L.E.M." from his website, which itself links to Mesa Racist and anti-immigrant legislator Russell Pierce. Both N.A.I.L.E.M. and Pierce supported PAN.

And, like every good fascist, and despite his silver spoon upbringing, Rusty loves to pretend to defend the little guy. In a letter to the editor to Sonoran News, he wrote,

The political elitists in their D.C. ivory towers again go against the will of the people and support an amnesty of even greater proportions than in the past. Why do the interests of Mexico and corporate America continue to override the poll results of American citizens on immigration? This is the United States, where the laws are supposed to be followed and the elected officials are supposed to legislate the will of the people by the people, for the people.

Why are the lawmakers siding with lawbreakers? Why are “willing workers” and “willing employers” so willing to break immigration law? Our law enforcement personnel are already out manned, outgunned, out funded . . . and yet the people in D.C. continue to make their jobs even more dangerous.

Rusty's identity confusion shows in the special "Rusty Trivia and Women's Guide" section of his website. Right next to each other are these contradictory tidbits:

...there’s a jacuzzi on his balcony

...fights for the underdog [my emphasis]

...drives a rag top Corvette

...travels the western U.S. on a Harley each year

Truly a man of the people. An avid world traveler, you'll know he's in town when you see his license plate, "LVITUP," in the parking lot of his multi-million dollar business. Thanks to his wealth, though, Rusty's international vacationing sets him apart from that of the poor migrants he spends so much time and money persecuting. They can't afford the plane trips and luxury resorts that he enjoys so much - and, neither can most Minutemen. Thanks to his unearned wealth, his regular jet-set border hopping to his vacation time share in Cancun violates no law and allow him access to privileges most working class folks will never share. There are no borders when it comes to money and privilege, and Rusty disregards them for his own benefit. But he loves them when it comes to poor people.



In another letter to the Sonoran News in 2004, Rusty again displayed his trademark Joe Sixpack schtick, railing against immigration and playing the race card by singling out "high fertility rates" and "ethnic lobbies" for particular attention.

Bush’s immigration initiatives pander to ethnic lobbies and business interests, foregoing the idea that we are a nation of laws and limited resources. Essentially what the President is doing, or proposing, is to turn immigration over to big business. If companies can’t find an American worker to do the job at the price they are willing to pay, they can go looking all over the world to find somebody, with no regard to population limits.

The problem is that mass immigration and high fertility rates are having a profound impact on our nation [my emphasis].

Europeans have obviously figured out that there are many benefits to couples having only one child – or none – as opposed to the financial, social, and environmental drawbacks of having multiple children. Fewer people on the planet means a better quality of life for everyone.

Without a doubt, Rusty's talk of fertility rates is racist code for white minority, a fear that goes to the heart of the immigration issue for whites, and represents their fear of an erosion of white privilege. This acknowledgement of privilege is sometimes camouflaged in their rhetoric as the rewards of "hard work" or "playing by the rules" and separates them from the poverty and imprisonment faced by so many working class people of color who work equally hard but face a racist system of vast inequality and repression. In reality, these privileges represent not the result of hard work, but the social contract between wealthy whites and working class whites, in which some privileges are extended to all whites in exchange for their complicity in the exploitation of people of color, a source of vast profits and at the same time problems for the rich in this country.

The code words may be hard to decipher at first, but, by just what twisted standard is Childress, owner of one of the nation's biggest Buick dealerships, not considered a "business interest?" He hopes that by playing on white fears, he can obscure his own wealth and privilege. Keen to play on play on white paranoia for this purpose, he has also resurrected an old immigrant stereotype, linking immigrants to disease. In an article from the Phoenix Business Journal last year, he said,

"This is one of the cheap thrills of cheap labor. As you may have noticed, many immigrants, legal or otherwise, are employed -- if they are at all -- as cooks, dishwashers, waiters and food handlers. And it's a fact that Hepatitis A, B, and C show up in fast food environments."

But, setting aside the racist leap of logic, for a guy who spends so much time in Mexico, in restaurants and drinking Mexican beer, it's a bizarre statement indeed. It sure is benevolent of him to worry about us regular folks down here at the bottom, especially since he himself has little to fear from the cooking on the cruises and five star resorts where he vacations in Mexico.



When it comes to economics, Childress unsurprisingly shifts the blame for economic conditions off rich white folks like himself and onto undocumented workers. As part of the ruling class, he certainly wouldn't want the working class people to which he addresses his racist, nationalist appeals to transcend their white supremacist politics and develop a class analysis of American society.

Illegal immigrants are an economic burden to society. They are filling up our jails, prisons, universities, welfare lines, hospitals and K-12 schools, all at taxpayers’ expense.

They drive down wages, create urban sprawl and drive away good businesses, and their sales tax revenues. As a result, state revenues have decreased and the budget has exploded, spelling economic disaster.

But, despite Rusty's assertions, it isn't immigrants who "drive down wages, create urban sprawl and drive away good businesses, and their sales tax revenues" - those are all things that rich people do. After all, it's rich people like Childress who set wages, hire and fire, control the city planning office, run the government, hold elected office and own the construction and development companies - some of the same people, ironically, who the Minutemen are working with to build their racist border wall.

For too long, Rusty Childress has manipulated to his own benefit a false class consciousness amongst white workers in Arizona. The Minuteman movement professes to defend the jobs and incomes of working class and middle class workers at the same time that it defends the participation of rich people like Rusty Childress whose economic interests are diametrically opposed to those of working class folks!

When defenders of immigrants - especially when white - appear, the movement is quick to denounce them as middle class outsiders, as one regular participant did recently on the Save Our State forum:

...those "anarchists" were little high school dorks. Hard core socialists? Hardly. They love to spew their comic book fantasy mantra's then go back to their upper middle class homes, all paid for by mommy & daddy. They're out there for something to do. They wouldn't survive 2 minutes on the mean streets of Chicago.

Another movement member, defended Rusty's wealth and privilege this way by using that familiar coded argument, saying, "Rusty is a great person, it sounds to me that maybe you have a problem with people that have made it in life." What bizarre apologetics from a movement that pretends to defend the little gal. To have had so much wealth handed to him and to have failed would have been shocking indeed.

The fact is, the Minuteman movement and its rich benefactors aren't fighting for the average working Joanne, as is betrayed by their political contradictions. A white movement that slanders it's white opponents as middle class, asserts itself as defending the little guy and yet defends the participation of the wealthy in it's organizations can only make sense when we realize that the object of the Minutemen is not to defend the working class, or "jobs", but rather to defend white supremacy, which by nature crosses class lines.

And so, rich politicos like Childress, because they defend and maintain the cross-class alliance of whiteness, get a pass on the class analysis, revealing the bogus class position of the Minutemen and their "Americans First" allies to be mere opportunistic window dressing on a racist defense of white privilege. This goes a long way towards explaining the anger of participants in the movement and the defensiveness they express when their opponents justifiably level accusations of racism at them. After all, how can a white movement bent on the deportation of 12 million Latinos not be racist, especially given the history of the region.

White workers need to wake up and realize that white skin privilege is the cause that the Minutemen truly defend. The entitlement that white workers feel to good jobs and political power, to be first hired and last fired, to health care, better schools and some economic mobility, however, is a racist struggle unless broadened to include all workers, regardless of color and regardless of legal status.

Many white workers are justified in their complaints against capitalism. This system is waging a viscious war against the working and middle classes right now. The rich are remaking the economy in conscious ways that undermine the gains that all workers have fought so hard for since this country was founded. However, turning on ourselves - attacking one part of the class to which we also belong - only empowers the rich to continue their exploitation of all of us.

Attacking immigrant labor only validates the class war strategy of the wealthy and strengthens their hand against us. As long as white workers fight to exclude undocumented laborers, we by default continue to maintain a key weapon the rich use against the working class as a whole. On the face of it, we must ask ourselves - if attacking part of the working class will increase workers bargaining power and thus raise wages and benefits, why would rich people like Childress support it? The rich have no interest in higher wages or increased worker power.

The analysis of the Minutemen is a false class consciousness, and not one that will challenge the overall structure of capitalist exploitation. By fragmenting rather than building workers power, it offers nothing towards solving the long or short term problems faced by workers of all colors in this country. Further, the diversion of class struggle into race struggle shifts the fight onto terrain that does not threaten the very wealthy in this country, given their overwhelming shared white status. The problems workers face derive not from the desires of millions of immigrant workers to build better lives but from the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small, wealth elite. The strategy advocated by the Minutemen and rich people like Rusty Childress maintains and exacerbates divisions within the working class that benefit the wealthy.

However, a unified working class, in which white workers saw common cause with their immigrant brothers and sisters, could build the kind of power that might put all workers in a position to dictate to the bosses for a change. There can be no successful struggle against the rich elites, whether in Washington or Arizona, without working class unity. And that's something you'll never see Rusty Childress spend his millions on.

PCWC interviews Chris from Propagandhi

A few weeks ago after tabling the show, PCWC got the opportunity to interview Chris, the singer and guitarist for the great anarchist punk band Propagandhi. We had tons of questions in mind for him, but knowing his enthusiasm for hockey, we decided to limit our discussion to sports and anarchy. PCWC has an unofficial anarchist Phoenix Suns supporter group, so we are very interested in the relationship that anti-capitalists have to professional sports.

Our set up at the Propagandhi show

Chris was very generous and even stayed to chat long after our camera's battery died. If you haven't yet, you'd be doing yourself a favor by getting your hands on a copy of Propagandhi's newest album. Unlike a lot of bands from the early Fat Wreck Chords days, they continue to challenge themselves and to put out interesting, quality music.

Anyhow, being anarchists and therefore procrastinators, we have only now gotten around to editing the footage and putting it on the interweb. We hope you enjoy it.

Beer and Revolution: Art in resistance, anarchism, and currency experiments

Collin Sick

The second Beer and Revolution is coming up, and we're excited to have Joey G. as the featured speaker for our second B&R. The first B&R was held earlier this month at the bar Boulders on Broadway in Tempe, over 20 anarchists and anti-authoritarians came out, joined by a few Marxists and constitutionalists as well. The discussions, debates, and conversations went long past the self designated Midnight ending we anticipated, despite some significant political disagreements everyone was in good humor, and the bartender kept the beer pouring.

The next two B&Rs will be a step up, we have lined up some fantastic speakers for these events. The July get together will feature local anarchist, librarian, artist, and local currency proponent Joey G, Joey's been in the news lately for a local currency experiment that he and other Phoenix artists are pushing called PHX BUX, the project is picking up steam as over two dozen local businesses now participate. Many already know Joey G for his promotion of the local arts scene and curating the long running anarchist library, an accessible archive he's made available to the public for nearly a decade, and his belief in art as a tool in the struggle for a better and freer world. These are some of the subjects that Joey G will be talking about at the July installment of Beer and Revolution, we look forward to all the debate, thought, criticism, and inspiration this event may further.

Once again, Beer and Revolution begins at 9 PM, and Joey will speak a little later, giving folks time to get there, get settled, and grab a couple of brews.

Come down to Tempe on Sunday, July 12, have some tasty beers and interesting talk, and enjoy the company of other anarchists and anti-authoritarians from the valley. Joel Olson, a longtime agitator, anarchist, and member of Bring the Ruckus, is scheduled as to speak on his study of fanaticism at the August B&R, more information on this to come soon.

We at PCWC look forward to seeing you in July, cheers!

Kansas Bleeding Again

By Phoenix Insurgent

When former director of victim's services for the Shawnee County District Attorney's office, Suzanne James, was asked by the LA Times how she would characterize anti-abortion militants like Dr. George Tiller's alleged killer Scott Roeder, she said, "Some of these guys had that John Brown look in their eyes."

The killing of Dr. Tiller by an anti-abortion militant has again raised the issue of fanaticism in the public consciousness. The fanatic has always occupied a unique space within American politics. Generally despised by the political mainstream as beyond reason, even mentally ill, the political zealot combines extremism and often violence in ways that brings moderates of the right and left together in harmonious -- if disingenuous -- choruses consisting of the righteous denunciation of violence on one hand and the moralistic defense of democratic debate on the other.

Insanity is a common epithet applied to zealots and fanatics. John Brown suffered them. Likewise, Roeder has been characterized as mentally ill, an all-too-common diagnosis in this society for those who act politically beyond what is considered moderate and 'rational'. The LA Times reported, however, that his fellow anti-abortion militants considered that he "held 'fringe' beliefs but was no hard-line lunatic." This is telling.

If not the product of the insane then, fanaticism, we are reminded at times like these, is at least anti-democratic and dangerous. Reasonable people, we are told, act in reasonable ways, and that means moderation and middle ground. Compromise and civility. The fanatic rejects these ideas and acts to obliterate them through her actions and words.

That anti-abortion activists describe pro-choice doctors as "baby killers" or Nazi doctors is an example of this framing. It draws a clear line that allows very little wiggle room for moderation and tends to force a choosing of sides on terms beneficial to the fanatic. After all, goes the argument, how can one be expected to compromise with those who would kill babies?

But the anti-choice militant is only the most recent manifestation of American fanaticism. And although anarchists oppose this extremist and his agenda for good reason, other fanatics have come before him and not all of them from the reactionary right. As a result, anarchists would do well to consider the politics of the fanatic and to consider if there is anything that we can learn from it.

When we look closely, what we see is that fanaticism is not a mental state or a political position opposed to "reasonableness" or "democracy". In fact, fanaticism is a political strategy, and one that can sometimes deliver positive results when employed by people with progressive politics, even if in this specific case it has not. Studying this application, then, even if we as anarchists would oppose the particular desired outcome of anti-choice militants, can be instructive for our own strategies and how we frame debates with regard to our own political opponents.

THE FANATICAL DEMOCRACY OF THE GARRISONIANS

In a recent talk, entitled "Politics of Protestant Violence: Abolitionists and Anti-Abortionists", NAU professor Joel Olson analyzed the two movements by comparing their use of fanatical violence to polarize the respective politics of their times. An anarchist himself, Olson has done a lot of interesting research on fanaticism, and specializes in the politics of the abolitionist movement. His insights on the matter are the perfect place to start for anarchists interested in the politics of the fanatic and I have drawn on them extensively for this essay.

The Garrisonian abolitionists, led by William Lloyd Garrison and his comrade Wendell Phillips, took an uncompromising stand towards the destruction of the slave system. Writing in their journal, Liberation, and acting through debate and civil disobedience, the Garrisonian movement refused to compromise on the question of slavery. Their demand was for an immediate and total end to the slave system and as a result they were routinely denounced as fanatics.

At the same time, they often took their arguments directly to anti-slavery moderates, which frequently led to physical confrontations, sometimes in their churches. Those that did not demand the immediate and total abolition of slavery were accused by the radicals as being just as complicit as the slave owner himself. One Garrisonian, Stephen Foster (famous for disrupting services at churches that didn't take a stand on slavery), denounced less fervent Northerners as “the basest of slaves, the vilest of hypocrites and the most execrable of man-stealers, inasmuch as they voluntarily consent to be the watch-dogs of the plantation.”

When challenged by less radical abolitionists, who advocated a more gradualist position, Garrison was famous for comparing the question of ending slavery to a house on fire: “You do not ‘gradually’ call for the firemen to come ‘gradually’, to ‘gradually’ put out your fire … you want it immediately extinquished”. When further faced with the charge that surely, regardless, an immediate end to slavery was not likely, Garrison would reply, “We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow, that it ought to be we shall always contend”.

The Garrisonians pushed hard for an uncompromising position on slavery, but their extremism didn't end there. As Olson writes in his interesting essay, "The Freshness of Fanaticism: The Abolitionist Defense of Zealotry", while the Garrisonians were definitely fanatics,

[t]hey were also passionate democrats. They defended the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, fought against racial discrimination, advocated for women’s rights, and condemned the exploitation of industrial workers. Garrisonians championed free speech, welcomed African Americans and white women into their organizations, and developed new participatory practices in public meetings. Their zeal for the antislavery cause reflected their commitment to democracy; in turn, their democratic beliefs inspired fanatical opposition to enslavement and racial inequality. Garrisonians brimmed with zealotry, yet they used their fanaticism to strengthen democracy rather than undermine it.

That is, their brand of fanaticism sought to broaden democratic participation, not to limit it.

Understandably, this brought them into conflict with other abolitionists. They denounced the Republicans -- Lincoln in particular -- as preservationists of the slave system by the fact of their commitment to the maintenance of the Union over the abolition of slavery. In other words, the political moderation of the less radical abolitionists was in fact, in the eyes of the Garrisonians, a capitulation and therefore equivalent the position of the slavocrats. Moderation, then, not just the slave owner, was the enemy of the liberation of the slave in the eyes of the Garrisonians.

FANATACISM AS A POLITICAL STRATEGY

In another presentation in 2006, Olson described fanaticism as "'the mobilization of collectivities according to a friends/enemies dichotomy by non-state actors who are willing to sacrifice themselves or others in such a mobilization.'" He reported that from his research on the abolitionist movement, particularly the radical Garrisonians, what he had found was that rather than being cowed by appellations like "zealot" and "fanatic", they embraced them in their quest to defeat slavery and broaden the democratic character of American society.

Olson continued: "[W]hen we understand fanaticism in this way, we see that it's not inherently undemocratic. That what zealotry really is is a critique and a rejection of political moderation - not a rejection of reason, of rationality or anything like that. And, as such, fanaticism and reason can be consistent. And furthermore, it can be consistent with justice and democracy in times when moderation lends support to the enemies of democracy... so at certain points in history perhaps fanaticism is the more democratic option over liberal moderation."

I take the question Olson has been investigating lately to be one of the orientation that revolutionary movements ought to take towards moderate or liberal elements. These elements often frame themselves against supposedly irrational radical - or fanatical - movements at the same time that they immerse themselves in the liberal democratic myth of the responsible middle ground, in which disagreeing sides can dialogue and come to compromises. American democracy treats the middle ground as hallowed ground. In this 'pragmatic' democratic tradition, fanaticism is treated as irrational or unrealistic, and fanatics are denounced by so-called reasonable moderates in the name of justice and democracy.

However, although Olson's conclusions contradict this commonly held American belief, those of us who study history and have organized in broader movements will probably understand it quite well. It expresses a common relationship that anarchists have to moderate elements in the movements in which we participate. While it can be useful at times, the moderate middle is also the engine of co-optation and recuperation -- and also sometimes the vehicle of left-cover reaction by the ruling class.

So how should committed revolutionaries relate to this malleable center? One possibility is to treat it as a potential ally and therefore to moderate our own actions and rhetoric in service of some larger goal that it is perceived can be achieved through such unity. This has been a path that many anarchists and other radicals have taken in the anti-war movement, for instance. The hope seems to be that either the moderates will come around to our way of thinking, or, perhaps, that their belief (and despite our equal un-belief) in the reasonableness of the system will somehow manifest in reality, persuading through speaking truth to power and other such measures.

But another way of looking at this dilemma is to view the moderate middle as an impediment to revolutionary progress. They are not to be persuaded so much as made irrelevant or politically eliminated from the terrain of political contestation. In that case, perhaps the proper course is not to take a moderate stance, but rather to stick to extremist positions, putting pressure on the middle, thus polarizing the debate and forcing recuperationist moderate elements to choose sides. In this sense, organizing in a fanatical manner means having two targets in mind when one acts: the opponent and the political moderate. This was the strategy of the Garrisonian abolitionists.

With that in mind, and recognizing the reactionary character of the attack and the goals of the anti-choice movement, I think that looking at the case of the murder of Dr. Tiller can in fact provide useful information for anarchists engaged in our own admittedly quite different struggle.

There are three key elements to the fanatical approach to politics playing out as a result of the attack. They can be discovered first by looking at whether and how the action contributes to a polarization in the debate both within the broader popular discussion and within the anti-abortion movement itself. Then, let's consider the question of whether this fanatical act contributes or challenges notions of democracy because, as Olson has pointed out so aptly, fanatacism and democracy are not necessarily at odds, even if the two are generally portrayed as opposites. In fact, as in the case of the abolitionists, fanaticism can actually open up space for broad democratic participation.

THE NATIONAL DEBATE

The national media reacted to the murder of Tiller with near universal condemnation and revulsion. Katie Couric posted on her CBS News blog: "No matter what your moral position may be on abortion, Tiller was first and foremost a doctor and acting within the law. That should not have cost him his life." President Obama echoed this point, saying that "[h]owever profound our differences over difficult issues, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence." The New York Times concurred, calling for increasing national police attention to the issue of extremism while calling on anti-abortion advocates to "refrain from the 'baby killer' rhetoric that inflames an already heated debate." The Dallas Morning News called the murder "a tragedy".

If anything then, this attack seems to have provoked from within the mainstream media a call to a national spirit of moderatism that the Garrisonians would have found familiar. We can enjoy the obvious hypocrisy of the NY Times, head chearleader of the war in Iraq, and Obama, replacement architect of this war, denouncing political violence as a means of accomplishing political goals. But this is to be expected. Certainly their tendency to defend the moderate middle is due in part to the fact that the national press is the beneficiary of its position as the official mediator of the national dialogue. Likewise the "Washington Consensus" and other elite capitalist policy positions reflect a genuine unity in the capitalist class, which may differ internally on some tactical questions but tends to agree broadly on most strategic questions. The press reflects this tendency as well for obvious reasons.

What's interesting about this attack is that it comes as the religious right finds itself in retreat and political disarray. Yet, according to NARAL Pro-Choice America, 87% of counties in the US lack an abortion provider and that is largely thanks to the actions of militants like Roeder. While the media appeals to moderatism, in fact the bombings, the murders and the fake anthrax attacks have had their desired effect. The fanatical application of violence, sabotage and civil disobedience has accomplished genuine reactionary victories that affect real people's lives. And the decision of Tiller's clinic not to re-open following the murder only puts an exclamation point on this fact.

The question now becomes whether this attack will reverse or advance the achievements of the militant wing of the movement. In 1994 and 1998, when two past murders of abortion providers happened, the right was in the ascent. This is not the case now. Will the changed political terrain further the attack against abortion providers outside the legal arena, or will there finally be some push back from the society at large? What effect will the attack have on the positions held by Americans on the question of abortion? This murder will be a test case. Will the moderate middle in the abortion debate be pushed to one side or another by this action? Or will a general moderatism continue to prevail?

One problem that pro-choice organizers have when debate is polarized around abortion is reflected in the growing numbers of Americans who report that they sympathize more with anti-abortion arguments than with pro-choice ones. Because of the general lack of a discussion around abortion that centers around the equality and liberation of women -- that is, of the centrality of abortion rights to women's equality -- the pro-choice movement has little to fall back on when fanatical anti-abortion militants take action to frame the discussion in harsh terms. In a religious country like the US, allowing the terrain to shift towards the moral rather than the libertarian puts the reactionary militant in a powerful position to project his will and this is precisely why they do it. Likewise, the lack of an equivalent response from pro-choice militants maintains a space defined by religious right moralists and this is to their advantage.

THE INTERNAL DEBATE

Now let's turn to the question of what effect the action had inside the anti-abortion movement. It is vital to recognize that this murder aimed to affect the debate there as well, which the attacker seems to have viewed as broadly too moderate. Because this is a fanatical act, it is aimed both at movement enemies - Tiller in particular and those that provide abortions in general - but also, critically, at the anti-abortion movement as well. It's a two-pronged tactic that seeks to evaporate the middle ground so that all that remains is the political extreme represented by the killer and his comrades in the movement. So, the New York Times only gets half the story when they report that the attack was aimed "toward the dwindling cadre of physicians who risk their safety to perform legal medical procedures." Clearly that, but not just that.

When we look at the debate in the religious right, what we see on one side is a fear of a backlash and the pressure to moderate and hunker down. The AP reports that, rather than striking a mortal blow to those few remaining doctors willing to perform abortions, the killing has actually put some in the anti-abortion movement on the defensive. At a recent press conference denouncing the president's supreme court nominee, the Christian Defense Coalition headman Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney was flanked by activists from Operation Save America, an anti-abortion group that promises to use "only biblical principles" in its fight against abortion rights.

Mary Kay Culp, executive director of Kansans for Life, said, "In the immediate future, it makes it difficult to even speak about an issue we've been speaking about for 365 days a year. Anything you say — somebody is going to pounce on us." Anti-abortion groups in Kansas distanced themselves from the killer and lamented the timing with regard to the upcoming debate on Obama's supreme court nominee.

The Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission president, Richard Land, explained his reaction this way, saying, "First of all, I thought, 'how horrible'. I thought this is going to be the same song and dance that we had the last time this happened, people trying to paint all of us as wild-eyed crazies." Rev. Pat Mahoney of the anti-abortion Christian Defense Coalition complained, "Please, don't use this tragic situation to broad-brush the pro-life community as extremists... politically, this could not have happened at a worse time."

However, on the other hand, extremists within the movement have taken a harsher stand. “Scott is not my hero in that sense; he has not inspired me to shoot an abortionist," wrote Dave Leach, publisher of Prayer and Action News, a publication to which Roeder subscribed. "But, definitely, he will be the hero to thousands of babies who will not be slain because Scott sacrificed everything for them.” Roeder himself allegedly posted to anti-choice websites comparing Tiller to a Nazi: "Tiller is the concentration camp 'Mengele' of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation."

Randall A. Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, wrote in an editorial on June 1st that "[i]t now falls to pro-life leaders like myself to stand strong and unflinching in the face of the unjust criticism we will now endure because of his killing. And so I turn my attention to the attacks that will follow his death. We must use this as a 'teaching moment;' a chance for 'dialogue' with our fellow Americans concerning this terrific holocaust of the unborn." Rejecting the call for moderation, he closed his piece saying, "These foolish accusations fly in the face of equally radical rhetoric, images, and images in the civil rights movement, the suffragette movement, and the abolitionist movement. If Dr. Martin Luther King had followed the advice of the timid in his day, President Obama would still be riding in the back of the bus."

That's certainly a hell of a comparison for a movement that generally sat out or even opposed the civil rights movement and took quite a conservative stand on women's liberation. Nevertheless, it's worth noting the recurring reference to the abolitionists within the anti-abortion movement, and there has been some discussion within the movement of the abolitionists as a model.

So, it does seem like Roeder has at least hit on a division within his own movement and time will tell whether the rush to moderation by some anti-choice elements will result in a political vacuum that can be filled by more fanatical elements. His attack has if nothing else forced the taking of sides in his own movement, which is a primary goal of fanatical political actors. Kansas City anti-abortion activist Regina Dinwiddie said, "If anybody needed killing, George Tiller needed killing. The gut reaction from everybody who doesn't have their thoughts filtered by fear is 'Yahoo!' "

DEMOCRACY?

The remaining question is whether the attack has broadened or narrowed the space for democratic activity. This should concern anarchists not because we either limit ourselves to bourgeois definitions of democracy, but because broadening the participation of people in the society they live is one of our goals. In a sense, knowing the truth of the bourgeois press's general lack of commitment to actual democracy is enlightening in the context of their galloping defense of it in the face of fanatical acts. Therefore, it's worth considering the way that the mainstream defenders of that narrow spectrum that masquerades as the democratic debate related to this murder. We should analyze the response understanding that some fanatical acts can open space for democracy even if this one may not have.

Defending the traditional church of moderation, Brad Hirschfield wrote in his blog in the "On Faith" section for Newsweek: "Ultimately though, we need to reframe this debate from one about abortion to one about democracy. This debate needs to be framed as being about nothing less than democracy in America. When zealots act as they did this week in Kansas, they are making war on America, upon the constitution and the rule of law."

Similarly, a Dallas Morning News editorial denounced the polarizing rhetoric surrounding the issue, claiming that "Violence undermines any hope of a civil debate about important issues. Sadly, this atrocity is likely to push both sides further from finding any common ground. Democracy is noisy, but it should not be violent. Abortion opponents must focus their efforts on changing the law — not taking it into their own hands."

While violence may or may not push apart opposing sides depending on the circumstances, it's far from clear that violence in all cases is contrary to democracy, as Olson has noted in his research. In the case of the abolitionists it led to the expansion of democratic forces both within the abolitionist movement and American society as a whole.

However, the question for anarchists is not whether the attack broadens democracy in the anti-choice movement (although that would be interesting in itself), but whether it has any potential to broaden democratic participation beyond that. Given the nature of the anti-choice movement's goal of restricting the options available for women with regard to reproduction and the power that flows from that, however, this would indeed be very, very unlikely.

Unlike the civil rights movement and the liberation movements that preceded it, the anti-abortion movement seeks to limit choices that are central to whether women can operate in society as free and equal human beings. Indeed, the anti-abortion movement's historical points of comparison fail when they try to frame themselves as liberators of the unborn. After all, if Tiller is Mengele, then what is the woman who goes to him for an abortion? Is she a Nazi as well? Just a 'good German'? In the end, what we see is that in fact it is ultimately the woman herself who is the target of the anti-choice movement. This can't help but have reactionary results with regard to democracy. As anarchists, however, it is this argument that should appeal to us, not the fake and self-serving defenses of the moderate middle ground and capitalist democracy by the bourgeois press.

CONCLUSION

What awaits the anti-abortion movement and its militants remains to be seen. As American politics has taken a vaguely noticeable turn to the left, will the movement turn increasingly towards fanaticism in the political sense or will the moderate elements maintain the politically advantageous terrain of broker between their opponents, the American public and the extremists? Already, we see more moderate activists within the movement shifting gears to more local and state-level activity. This is a reflection of their evaluation of their diminished opportunities in the new administration.

Interestingly, Roeder said in a recent interview with the AP that he knew that more attacks were planned by others for the future. And meanwhile, the Daily Mail in the UK reports what so many Americans know: secretly, there are millions who support the murder. "I don't lose sleep over the death of anyone who pushes a needle through a crying baby's brain," said a woman interviewed in the article.

The proof will come in whether the debate polarizes and if a solution to the extremists liking is forthcoming. For anarchists, it will be worth keeping our attention on the movement, not leastwise because our fates are tied up in it, but also because political developments there may provide lessons for us in how we orient towards the movements with which we find ourselves allied, whether through political convenience or historical inertia.

The anarchist movement has a well-known history of falling victim to the knives of our so-called allies on the left and in the popular fronts, so the fanatical strategy is one anarchists ought to consider. Certainly as many liberals and leftists continue their failed moderate strategies with regard to issues like never-ending wars and a collapsing environment -- at the same time that these very crises continue to grow and worsen -- the question of how to relate to these so-called progressive forces will become more and more pressing.

When the alliances we find ourselves in keep us muzzled or marginalized, it might just be worth questioning whether it's time to re-evaluate the allies we keep and our orientation towards them. A break with the "play nice" strategy that can tend to dominate big tent coalition-type organizing may be in order. If so, a fanatical voice for liberation may be the appropriate response.

First Friday Transformed! Observers of art become participants in their own lives! Police confronted by mob after raiding the UM gallery

by Jon Riley

First Friday on "Roosevelt Row" took a decidedly confrontational turn last week after undercover Phoenix police officers ran a sting on the UM gallery down on 5th st. PCWC was tabling that night when we noticed everyone in the gallery being pushed out by a handful of uniformed and a couple of undercover cops. The crowd grew in the yard as word spread that they were busted for serving alcohol, particularly angering people as alcohol is prevalent at most of the spaces on First Friday, and to make matters worse the host of the gallery, a DJ, and two artists were held in hand cuffs inside.

Everybody forced out was pretty angry that the police were breaking up the show, so people took photos of both the uniformed and the undercover officers, yelled at the police, and chanted "Let them go!". It was nice to see a united group challenging the actions of the cops, even after the police brought the DJ out in an appeal to the crowd to leave the crowd, people saw through such a cynical move by not leaving, and instead shouting out support and blaming the cops for sending him out. In addition to that a cop came down and tried to talk to someone they perceived as a leader only to have the man cover his ears when the cop spoke, and a local art community big name tried to do one for the cops only to be told off. Everyone wanted their friends freed, right then and there, no compromise, no debate. The handful of cops called in reinforcements, and soon after 30+ cops arrived and cleared the front yard, many people stood their ground and refused to leave, causing a scuffle between a few people and a cop.

The folks inside were eventually released, only after being cited for serving without a permit, and everyone flooded into the gallery to take a last look at the art before the venue shuttered for the night. As we were walking off, word spread that a police car had been tagged, excitedly we turned around to check out a little anti-cop action! We were happy to see a few spray painted tags on the police SUV (one of the many police cars jamming 5th st up), even though one man was arrested.

All in all, a lovely cool late spring night in central Phoenix; an inspiring show of solidarity between young and old, art lovers, radicals, passer-bys, and friends of the detained; and mostly a spontaneous social rupture that Phoenix has needed for sometime. It was rewarding to see the smiles on faces when the police left the gallery with no one in cuffs, to hear people talking about how much fun confronting the police had been, and the crowd of people surrounding the police SUV laughing and taking pictures of the tags while the police stood by wearing grimaces. It was nice to see the police on the defensive! And, best if all, our resistance worked: all charges were dropped a couple weeks later!

We need to remember victories like this and how they happen if we want to defend our own autonomous spaces. When we all stand up in solidarity behind our collective desire to live our individual desires free from the control of Capital and the State, we liberate each other and ourselves. What will we do next time?

Nearly 20 cops stand guard over the gallery in the front yard.

The cops have left, people excitedly return to the UM gallery!

Art is everywhere: A beautiful site in downtown Phoenix.