There is an uprising happening in the United States of America. It is the response to a brutish President and the irresponsible management of a pandemic, catalyzed by the televised lynching of a black man. To succeed in achieving real change, real justice this uprising will require a conscience and a soul. It must address on a structural level, as well as on a policy level ugly injustices of racist apartheid. It must at the same address glaring inequalities of wealth. Both between the American worker and the American Oligarch, but also the way American wealth and privilege has been built on the backs of black, brown, white and yellow labor exploited abroad.
So many terrible things happen in the world that the natural human reaction is to un-see, perhaps also to un-know and thus un-feel. But as the latest body count rises, as long ignored ugly truths play on repeat that position is irresponsible.
Did you know that just two months before the death of George Floyd an Emergency Medical Technician in Kentucky named Breonna Taylor was gunned down in her sleep in a botched no-knock Police raid.
You might know that now, but at the time the Covid Pandemic drowned it out. Unconsciously on your phone and television you are fed happy, individualistic disinformation. Consciously, you make choices about what to spend your time on. Sports not history, porn not philosophy. Shopping not researching. Movies on a fantasy life you cannot probably lead and of course religion, promises of eternal paradise, but only when you die.
What you can know and what you can feel is on a highly manipulated spectrum in America. A product of a deliberate set of policies, multiple variations based on your class and skin tone and an elite consensus on how and who should run this country, and by default an empire.
What is perhaps still more shocking than the televised lynching of an African American is the strange quiet that accompanies the deaths of over 120,000 highly vulnerable Americans from Covid-19. The majority will be proven to be people of color ill served by long defunded health systems, living in the various ghettos of America, as well as the elderly abandoned to places that deliver neither nursing, or a home.
Despite rage and rhetoric, this was not the first and will not be the last series of lynching of a person of color in America. It will hopefully last time hundreds of thousands will die because of their race and their class deemed the second, third, fourth and fifth class citizens by public policy.
Not to mince words, all the many material comforts, relative security and general prosperity this nation enjoys is built on four highly uncomfortable truths that exist outside the written law.
Assailing an individual pillar of the Ziggurat will not result in real system change. Each pillar is holding up a vast injustice which capitalizes on the apathy and inaction of the American people.
The first pillar is an ongoing violent hegemony imposed on most other nations abroad that we all subsidize with our taxes. The result being a trade in working class American military lives abroad for an above average European quality of life and our own imperial ambitions. 800 bases in 70 foreign nations are there to enforce the economic prosperity of the United States.
The second pillar is an extra legal system of racial apartheid that in fairly obvious terms places a tiny group of ultra wealthy Euro-American oligarchs on the very top. Supporting the architecture of that system is a skilled professional and technical class mostly of Whites, Asians (6%) and Jews (1.7%). A majoritarian mass of White European settler descents as an imagined “Middle Class” (59.1% of population), a Latino/Hispanic labor class below it (18.3%), a largely subjugated the African descent reserve menial labor population (13.4%) and the remanent of the Native Indian population (1.5%). The lack of legal segregation and legislation to support Apartheied by no means prevents it from operating as such a system.
The third pillar is the popular rejection of “class consciousness”, where strangely most of the nation works almost their entire life believing they are a part of the “Middle Class“.
The Fourth Pillar is that this political system is not a democracy, your vote really does not matter. The two party system is a large expensive game of special interests making enormous campaign contributions that allow access to create new laws advantageous to corporations.
Americans have been systematically directed through low levels of education (under 30% have a college education) and inoculated by our mass media and hyper-materialistic consumer culture to basically reject a class analysis of modern poltical events.
Most Americans do not have the interest or formal education to even be aware of the full extent of violent interventions the nation is currently engaged in directly or by proxy. The majority of our people are too busy, kept constantly working Our entire lives.
Through Mass Incarceration and Racialized Aggressive Policing generations of people of color were disenfranchised, households broken up and large swaths of the population reduced to a below minimum wage captive labor pool.
Through grossly inadequate social services entire neighborhoods were ghettoized and reduced to cheap domestic labor reserves that we call “the Ghettos and Barrios”.
Through the relative high material comfort available to virtually all classes of Americans most people tolerate the system as it stands. No one starves in the streets of America by choice. We have Regressive Welfare for the poor and Amazon Prime for the Middle Class or anyone that can afford it.
If you set the bar very low and others reinforce your low objective for validation, then it may actually seem like progress. Daily demonstrations increased the charges on the officers who killed George Floyd, led to the tearing down of Confederate Statues, the Cosplay of the Seattle Autonomous Zone and a mainstream debate on “defunding the police.
That optimism is unfounded as this is not a real set of emerging victories. These are token expressions of first amendment rights inside a well contained system, a pressurized cage for acceptable dissent.
But when you have no real historical context for your valid righteous anger and when you have no way to achieve a true majority (African Americans, their actu allies and White liberals if and when combined do not constitute even 50% of this country’s electorate), you will just march in a very large circle within the confines of your glass ceiling and soft cage.
Paired nicely with over 160,000 and rising Covid-19 deaths, two months of varying lockdowns the now daily marches of mostly peaceful protesters is exactly the kind of acceptable dissent this nation will tolerate. Endless marches that are in fact a theater. A game for the unemployed, under employed and college students. But the game has pre-rigged rules. Dissidents will be data based with facial recognition software, no physical space will be allowed to be occupied for long, and no matter what rhetorical games liberal Democrats and progressives play with Police Budgets. The economic order will not change. The two Party Plutocracy will not yield. The legalized bribery of campaign finance will not be reformed.
Here we can look well at Modern American history lessons:
There is no credible American left, but there is a large and well armed libertarian right.
Organized Labor is thuggish, conservative, largely discredited and is less than 10.3% of the workforce.
There is not a unified African American or Latino/Hispanic voting or buying block. Demographically neither ethnic group is large enough to force a major policy shift.
If a public space or building is occupied or any property is threatened then the iron heel of the state will come down hard and fast.
If a Black Messiah arises he or she will be killed.
If a collective rebel leadership emerges, they will be imprisoned, murdered or discredited by the 17 agencies of state repression we know exist.
If organized labor is radicalized it will be forcibly disbanded.
If you talk about “class” and talk about “robust publicly funded social programs” they will discredit you as “Communist“.
If a movement ever effectively combines demands for racial and economic justice it will be made public enemy number one.
Pre-2020 Uprising there was already the highest prisoner to population ratio on earth, 1 in 147 citizens and 1 in 8 black men.
If the following elements of a Resistance and Solution process are not put in place immediately all the demonstrations and countless deaths will be for nothing. They will not enact the change we need. This uprising will fail like all the ones before it. This is not tactical advocacy. It is one of strategy, alignment of vision and of an anti-necessitarian ideology— i.e. it is democratic, and confederalist. It has fusion elements of both the left and the right.
We have to end all Special Interest Campaign Financing, lower wages of politicians and publicly fund all campaigns ending the mockery of American legalized, formalized bribery.
We have to leglislatively challenge Class and Ethnic Discrimination in all social services.
We have to lower funding for the Police, Prisons, Corrections, Intelligence services and the Military.
We have to raise funding massively on Health, Education, Housing and Infrastructure.
We must form new poltical Parties that actually represent American Workers and the American Working Class.
We must acknowledge an American Apartheid and see it fully defeated. We must acknowledge a race-class discrimination where certain citizens gain better opportunities, jobs, schools, hospitals and lives based on their identity.
We must acknowledge that oppression or discrimination against any identity constitutes a crime against us all as society, but there is a heirarchy of oppression and protecting the most vulnerable communities is a responsibility for all.
There must be a National Service System created mandatory to all citizens age 18 to 21, through such a service we will create national unity, rebuild the nation, staff the civil services/military and reward our young people with free college educations and free healthcare.
We must Naturalize every person currently residing in our country and create a more just system for immigration.
We must must ensure a Democratic Meritocracy based on real ability not wealth and private connections to prevail in this country. To that end we should nationalize all schools, universities, health faculties and not allow private privilege to reign. The national service will be all citizens road to a equality of health and education placing all groups on even footing to begin their careers.
We must end our overseas imperialism and interventionist activities. We must shut down the majority of our overseas military bases, abolish all treaties committing us to the defense of foreign nations including Europe and Israel. We must embrace a multilateral world and focus our spending on domestic self reliance.
Wemust end a degrading and regressive welfare machine that perpetuates backwardness, dependency and multi generational poverty. We must replace it with a safety net that protects the vulnerable and reintegrates the poor back into livelihoods with dignity.
We must align our economic production to environmentally sustainable practices and make large scale policy level adjustments to prevent further environmental degradation.
We must amend our constitution to reflect the norms of international Human Rights Law.
The Way Forward is not found in the history books and comes not from the left or right, these are antiquated and disproven political positions.
The Liberals and Conservatives of the Democratic and Republican Parties have already discredited themselves with this two party charade which is in reality a Corporate Oligarchy of two flavors.
Certainly we have no use for radical extremism, mass violence, theocratic backwardness and no use at all for grand social experiments. Such things only unleash misery, atrocity, endless repression and expansionist war.
We should be able to fully recognize the violence humans have the capability to unleash and cruelty we are capable of. The History of humanity is a blood bath, especially during state collapse, civil warfare or unaccountable utopian experimentation.
We require one or many Working Class parties to be fully committed to dismantling a racist white supremacy.
We require Democratic Autonomy to be the foundation of all social organization.
We require so-called Human Rights to be made binding on this nation at home and its actions abroad.
What is to be done in the United States of America? A fast fading empire, a powder keg of racial and poltical conflict ready to blow? Will we turn inward and isolationist? Will we once again put a facade of paint on colonial manor and call it by a new name? The sea is rising. The virus is a taste of things to come. The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were the latest on a very long list of casualties. One Party offers you a billionaire real estate tycoon, a frend of pedophiliac and a rapist, a thief and thug. Another Party offers you a crappy, senile old man, a hang over from the last presidency. And there is no third option.
It doesnt matter if they put on a populist democratic socialist face, a gay female, a Latina progressive face. It doesn’t matter at all. This is a White Supremacist Settler slave state. This is an Oligarchy. The quality of life here is based on exploiting fully people all over the world.
What is to be done is to connect the dots, unite the factions and develop the resolve to fight. Begin drawing the connection between exploited labor, racial apartheid and Oligarchy masquerading as “Democracy.”
Only the renunciation of a systematic privilege for European descendants will result in Emmancipation for all people and an actual equality before the law.
Only the realization that we are workers and our labor makes other men rich, that we will work until we die; only when we see fellow humans and not racist paradigms of division and hate; only then will we realize that somewhere between bullets and ballots there is a middle road to our freedom. Only then the restoration of a Republic whose liberty has been based on others long term suffering, on pretty words alone, can ever be really free.
Then collective action will begin, the veil of hypocrisy must be torn off, our privileges relinquished and “American Exceptionalism” will then be a reflection of an actual muti-ethnic democracy, that actually upholds the high minded values it espouses and is in the world a force for a greater good, not a predator, not a violator not a thief.
I do not attempt to appeal to your guilt, hope, shame, ego, self interest, ideals or your patriotism. I ask you to draw your motivation from what you see before your eyes. Atrophy, injustice and apathetic glut existing right alongside pandemic death and state sponsored murder.
What is to be done in America? Unite the working class and defeat white supremacy. Just another socialist scheme to fight for human rights? Or something this country was founded to inevitably be strong enough to achieve.
← A Preamble on Justice (Pamplet One), Democratic Confederalist Papers
We will tell you now, what is wrong with this world and our country! No matter what country that it is we are addressing.
It is that you the people believe in yourselves more than you believe in each other. You believe you are in this world alone.
The fate of the individual has ground under iron heel even the faintest notion of the collective good. And rat racing, pitiless individualism has robbed us as a collective people of both our human conscience as well as our “duty to act”.
There are rights we all have: Women, Men and Children that are ours by virtue of being born human.
No deity nor national charter bestowed them. When either a religion or the state fails to secure these rights, then these institutions cease to be of value. They become a danger. Both the state system and the ideas of every existing religion present clear and present threats to human rights.
The states by trampling them or failing to enforce them. Religions by explicitly negating womens’ role in the world, sanctioning violence to non believing minorities and promising a “world of plenty and paradise” in a world you will never live to see, and no one has ever come back from.
The virtuousjustice of the “world to come” must be palpable, must be tangible, must be established by a happiness, prosperity and security in the living world, the world of the real.
The authority by which we or any other member of a Party of resistance compels you, a civilian to “take hold of your rights” comes only from the hearts and minds of other women and men just like you. We hold up no religious gospel or ideological flag. These rights for many decades were put to paper, signed by the nations and then out right ignored by all existing governments.
Let us reiterate what you may already know. It is in fact in every country too hard to feed one’s family. It is too hard to own the roof over one’s head even in nations where television and popular mythology lead some to believe the “streets are paved in gold”. Landlords exploit us and workers grind to the bone in every single nation. The governments of all “safe and civilized Northern nations” currently disparage and despise the immigrant while the natives seem to have forgotten completely the exodus and plight from which their family once fled.
The time to even speak of pacifism has passed.
We believe deeply in cutting the knees out from under each and every tyrant and local Oligarchy who together bleed and rape over half the nations of this earth. But in all the numerous wars fought, has a single human right ever been advanced or championed? Were not all these “Great Wars”, “Crusades”, “Jihads”, “Revolutions” and the World Wars 1, 2 and 3 (the so-called Cd War) all just highly bloody contests to control the resources below and above the soil, to dispose of an excess working class and to compel foreigners to the economic bondage of some great power?
Progress is wholly unequal and justice has become a perversion. Rights are worth the paper they are printed on.
Governments have sent millions of young people to die, maim and get maimed, kill and get killed for nothing other than a cold hard national ambition. The local Oligarchy of a time, using the state system for naked conquest. Channeling nationalism into mass theft, environmental devastation and ongoing bloodletting.
The many Crusades and Jihads were about the control of religious oligarchy, the Oligarchy of the priests and imams. The World Wars were European, Russian, American and Japanese bids for hegemony and empire; “control of the Core”. They didn’t stop fascist dictators from engaging in further atrocity as long as they were proclaimed anti-communist. Neither the Communist nor the Capitalist nor the Third World ideologues built us better worlds. The wealth and options of the North West are built on the exploitation of the rest. The World System and Globalization itself is built on raw inequality, the trampling of human life outside the Core. They built up the very instruments of terror we now oppose. Massive armies of spy surveillance, state torture, nuclear war and armies that if unleashed will finish off the earth.
We present a clear indictment of the current state system.
One
War is still rampant. It is just more diffuse and costs less white lives. It is now a time of small wars, non-state insurgent, low tech and proxy warfare. Driven by the great power intelligence services, Sunni Jihadists, criminal cartels, student movements and Maoist rebels the annual body count of over 35 Small Wars, is quite gruesome. Major conflict of some kind exists in the following nations; in Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Mexico and the Democratic Republic of Congo claim over 10,000 lives a year.
In Turkey (PKK and Maosist Insurgencies), Iraq, Somalia, Kenya, the Maghreb Insurgency (Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger and Tunisia), in the Boko Haram Insurgency (Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger Chad), in Sudan and South Sudan 1,000 to 10,000 lives lost a year.
In the Kasmir (India v. Pakistan), the Naxalite Insurgency (India), in Israel and Palestine, Donbass War in Ukraine (Ukraine v. Russia), in Myanmar (Karen, Kachina, Rohingya ethnic conflicts), Insurgency in Balochistan( Iran v. Pakistan), in Thailand, in the Catatumbo Campaign (Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela), Moro Conflict/ Communist Insurgency (Philippines), the Kyber Conflict (Pakistan), CAR, Egypt, and the Islamist Insurgency in Mozambique all claim between 100 and 1,000 casualties a year.
Low burning conflicts are occuring in Iran (PJAK Kurds and Khuzestan Arab), Xinjiang Conflict China (State against Uyghers), India (Assam, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Manipur regions), Indonesia (West Papua Conflict), Cabinda Conflict (Angola), Peru (Internal), Lord’s Resistance Army Insurgency (Uganda, DRC, CAR, South Sudan), Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict (Azerbaijan vs. Armenia), the Dissident Irish Republican Campaign (Northern Ireland against UK), War in Darfur Sudan, Islamist terrorism in Pakistan (Punjab and Sindh), ongoing Chechen Separtism in Russia, the Sinai Insurgency in Egypt, Hezbollah’s Jihad against Israel and the Syrian Civil War spill over into Lebanon.
There is major civil unrest ongoing in Venezuela (CIA against State), Hong Kong (CIA against China) and the United States of America.
Two
They have not ended slavery, they actually expanded it. They rebranded it, but it still retains the essence of complete bondage and subjugation, the degradation of a human into an animal, a creature of brutal use. There are more forced sweat shop slaves, child slaves, harvesting slaves, mining slavea and sex slave workers and indentured sweatshop laborers than there ever were as plantation slaves or feudal serfs in the late 17th century.
The North West didn’t ‘liberate women’ without completely objectifying them. In America 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted before age 18. 1 in every 147 Americans is in the penal system. The West has the gall to compare their advancements via armed struggle to be some how superior to those of the Monarchists, Fascists, Communists and Islamist Theocracy? These are all different brands of Oligarchy! The grinding logic of the world system depresses wages everywhere and makes humans a commodity, a resource to fully exploit.
Three
Poverty is a rampant genocide. 7 in 10 people live below $5 a day. 4 in 10 below $2 a day and over 2 billion people, 2 of 8 billion live below $2 a day. Even in so-called wealthy, “Northern” nations most people work their entire lives, living to work and working to live. A human life expectancy of 120 has been brought below 50 in most nations on earth, even in the wealthy North West OECD most still die before 80, most black men will die by age 53.
Damn the Oligarchy for its callous dominance. Cruel indifference to human suffering, abuse of power and massive ongoing theft! Those who speaks in numbers and spread sheets while tens of millions starve or die of easily treatable diseases; and every year hundreds of thousands fall to rape, pillage and war while millions of woman lack control over their bodies and tens of millions remain slaves. Of course, every oligarchy sets up, benefits from a priesthood speaking of unseen God! God of Gods or spirits telling us to be patient, accept hard work, accept our rough lot; in the world to come all will be “amazing”. They also set up a modern priesthood of management for thought and public opinion. A media, many talking heads to explain the “hiccups” to universal progress.
We tell these men damn their banal statistics, damn their intractable apathy, your failed policies and your unwillingness to move in the defense of the powerless. We will launch a war unlike any the world has seen. A war of workers, not blinded by made up races, invented cultures and unseen magic gods.
If naked you came to your country, than near naked you will depart. If bandit rapists drove you here or there, or a if some planned famine killed ¾ of your family before the rest died reroute of Cholera, or your came here or there shackled beaten and stolen in the belly of a ship; than you’d better damn never forget where you came from. There is not a safe zone, in “the North.” They will build even higher walls as the conditions on the ground worsen.
There is daily racist police violence, there is a technology of surveillance unlike anything in the past eras, an intractable relative poverty, and a plague of fever cough and death. When the world gets worse, and it has the potential to; the people of the North will build up even taller walls. With land mines and robot sentries.
What is to be done when there is nowhere safe to run?
If the question is “what can be done”, the interlude then is who should do it where. The interesting thing about this paper is that we can give it as a speech in Cairo, Damascus or Jerusalem, Paris or London, Moscow or Beijing, Port-Au-Prince, Port of Spain or Kingston Town. When we speak in the local language, when we have fire in our eyes and sincere passion our hearts; then we earn their time as well as their ears too.
People know that something has been broken for a long time. But after the grisly violence of the last hundred years, a direct product of a retrograde authoritarian Socialism clashing with a hypocritical republican order masquerading as Democracy; does anyone even trust ideology?
There are some pretty universal deficits when it comes to the global state of human rights, no one knows they have them. No one knows who grants them. They are a product of Enlightenment values, Socialist pressure and also, common sense. They are a list of demands. They have already been written down in 39 separate United Nations documents. They are fully violated everywhere.
Because we are not interested in part freedoms, half freedoms, freedoms just on paper or any abridgment of these 58 noble rights enshrined in the halls of the United Nations and trampled everywhere else: we’d make a good wager that our message speaks as true in the Gaza as it does in the Gully.
What is to be done? What is the way forward? We need to demand that governments adopt these rights as laws, or we must bring every single government to its knees.
Who is the primary agent of change?
We, all people.
As Church, Mosque and State have all failed so colossally we must rise to repossess them. We must not replace a corrupt order, that of the Westphalian State System with a new corrupt order. Nearly every nation is an arbitrary creation; a plantation with a flag. States must become tools in the hands of humanity for justice and rights, not soothe saying witch doctors urging schism and bloated bureaucracies enriching only themselves. We are students of a black history, and a cruel unnatural history is what we have read.
We indict the entire state system as lackeys to Oligarchy; Oligarchs must be tried and imprisoned.
The bureaucratic bloat of each state must be reigned in. The nation state is an anachronism. It must be replaced with community centered, democratic autonomy. This is the underlying message of the Democratic Confederalist Parties, the parties of workers and the oppressed; which is to say nearly all people living today.
You are in great company!
If these rogue governments, puppets of Oligarchy cannot be controlled through fair elections, they must be brought to their knees via armed struggle. Not the so-called ‘bourgeoisie’ against the so-called ‘proletariat’, that is old, dated language. Worker against Oligarchy. People who toil, who strive and spend their life as some kind of slave against a tiny, tiny group of malicious factions. Oligarchic Collectives of powerful ruling elite families. Vampires that use the state system to keep us working, keep as all divided and always afraid.
It is not seditious to say “I am a Worker!” You should say it proudly. The Working Class is the class of most humans, the class of people who make this machine run, keep the lights on. It is time to paralyze the machine if we must. To turn off the lights and leave the factory floor.
We are writing of a class of people that currently cannot feed their children, a class which is still affixed in chattel slavery, a class which dies of curable diseases, and lacks even clean water coming into equality with a far smaller class that has all the world’s good things and far too much more. The basis of all rights is an equality before them.
We are workers and this is a Party for Workers. A libertarian Workers Party, that orients a policy framework toward real social justice via a structural embrace of full human rights.
Saying who is the responsible party is actually the initiating question of this paper. We must believe that it is our duty and destiny as Workers first to set this example, there is no particularist destiny when it comes to human rights. They belong to all women, children and men. They belong to men who love men, women who love women and also to people born either woman or man, but don’t identify as such or change it later. If you are alive, and you are a sentient creature with a heart, a soul, a brain and conscience; you are entitled to Human Rights. “An Injury to one is an injury to all” as long as a single person has their rights violated we allow a permissive air of rights violation, a virus. An infection to a just society.
Human rights must be judged in their Availability, Accessibility, Acceptability and Quality. They must manifest in all aspects of social policy.
Rights for all or rights for none!
So who will be asked to fight? In this struggle of Workers against Oligarchs, Oligarchic Collectives that will bring the entire heel of spies, torture, police, military and government abuse on us for these ideas; Every man, woman and child who is able has to fight. Our unity must be a total unity. No rights will be secure if even one gay, black woman is slurred in closed quarters. We are after all fighting a long and total war. We are fighting internationally. No nation is real, each is an artificial construct to divide the Working Class. We have some allies, but mostly we have an array of very well resourced enemies. With nowhere to run or hide, not even Rojava or Cuba.
If you want to be free, “free” being the full attainment and total implementation of universal human rights as well as one day seeing the end of the war: Not just the several dozen live fire wars raging, but the end of man’s willingness and ability to make war then join humanity’s cause.
This is no prelude to a dream. No woman or man ought fall under wrath of war, famine, pestilence or disease, not while in some many gilded ghettos fear of these horsemen have been near obliterated. We look you in the eyes and tell you help is coming and we’re going to win some of these rights or die trying.
This is no “I have a dream”, when the pages end, you open your eyes and help us hold the lines. We will tell you how!
We’re going to get our Human Rights the old fashioned way. The settler way, the cowboy-cowgirl way. The Kurdish way. With tenacity and brazen force of will. With zealous persistence. Or more specifically the kibbutz bootstrap way, the way once called “Zionism”. Until the left and Palestinians made such a word a dirty word. A word associated with Occupation. But the idea of “Zionism”, before there was Israel, before Israel became a colony of America; the idea was to build piecemeal institutions of a state that was unrealistic and unrecognized, that didn’t yet even exist. To step, by step set up a Parallel State to whatever unjust order was horsetrading, macarading as reality. The idea of “Zion”, “the world to come” built in the world of the real is also known by the Hebrew people as “Tikkun Olam”. Zionism today is almost purely associated with Palestinian oppression. Tikkun Olam, is mostly a liberal kumbaya for social justice, in an age of unmitigated bloodshed and terror.
Until enshrined in righteous law, set in constitutions and adjudicated by judges; rights must have a fort.
We’re going to have to build thousands and thousands of such forts way up in the mountains and hold out for a human dawn, that will hopefully arrive before the Capitalists bleed the entire earth dry and we are left with a violent, well armed desert. Killing each other over water.
Democratic Confederalism is the ideological fusion of American Libertarianism, Jewish Zionism and also a Kurdish Socialism. It has profound commitments to participatory democracy, womens’ equality, environmentalism and the protection of ethnic/religious minorities. It is neither purely left nor right in policy. It is the ideological merger of alternatives to a failed Capitalist Modernity, a solution process where the state has collapsed or the state is an agent of great predation. It is a bold idea, in a war of ideas that prepares a defense of structural rights, Available, Accessible,Acceptable and of actual Quality. It embraces a false ncesatarian stand that we cannot have elements of left and right in the social policies to which they apply.
These forts, these outposts of liberty and justice will radiate the ideals we fight for. They will demonstrate the viability of a human rights protected world, collective economics, democracy and non-state solutions to daily problems. Our children and our grandchildren will be given their rights. Our outposts, be they infrastructure, training academies or schools to help, heal and save this sick sad world are our answer to the failed projects of Capitalism. We will build up our own credit unions, charter schools, vocational programs, volunteer rescue agencies, housing cooperatives, clinics, banks, universities and major syndicates modeled on justice. Framing Human Rights goals alongside Workers power. With Democratic Confederalism and actionable work to achieve Human Rights we will craft the foundation of thousands of confederated cantons; a series of Parallel States. If the existing states cannot or will not legislate Human Rights Enabling legislation and will not arrest these criminal Oligarchs; we must achieve rights for ourselves and deny the state system our tax revenue.
Democratic Confederalism is the future. It is the full achievement of human rights by social networks and grassroots infrastructure when elected or self appointed government fails to provide, or threatens us. It is not universally adversarial; but it is a matter of survival. It should be defended with armed self defense.
Our main foreign policy as a movement and Party is the full and total exportation of the technology and ideas into the hands of our fellow human beings more oppressed than ourselves by man or nature. The weapons of our immediate war are the bootstrap teaching outposts, guerrilla medical programs and clinics; make shift vocational academies, and security services that prevent inter-ethnic bloodletting, or that of state actors against their own civilians.
We will not, and cannot fight a war purely on ideas like the United Nations has done for 70 years to implement these documents. We must make the governments afraid. This is the only reasonable way any of the will make change. But we must make them nervous, not terrified, in terror they will only lash out with the entirety of their militarily and police forces. History is full of this. However, the majority if not all state governments must be removed. They are illegitimate and serve on the Oligarchy or each nation.
We are not the kind of people who build a school to watch it burn down or build a clinic to then see nurses abused and aid workers threatened or a local community victimized for wanting to better its condition. Every single institution we set up must be defended like a fortress. Defended by a People’s Defense Force. Note carefully from history that our enemy the Oligarchy and the repressive forces of the State will kill rape or torture anyone it believes is a threat. It will rape your loved on in front of you and put whole ethnic groups in death camps. It will torture your activists, kill your leaders and call you a “terrorist”.
But you’re only a terrorist if you are killing unarmed civilians. You’re only a terrorist when you kill people who are not part of the actual war.
When we build a school or a clinic, know we plan to defend each and everyone we set up with our lives and steel. In East New York, in Cite Soleil, in the Gaza or the Gully or Rome, Istanbul, or Jerusalem we will fight for human rights like a war for Armageddon with the calculated strategy of Machiavelli acting out the Art of War. We have to form quite a lot of something out of almost nothing. In the world today, the world of the real Human rights aren’t worth the pages they are printed on.
You have to begin in your own community by feeding the poor, clothing the naked and teaching ethics to the young people. You must of course begin close to home and enlist the support of your family and friends. You begin must small, but always dream with grandeur. Question tradition, it perpetuated wrongness. Question impossible, everything was impossible until it was done.
You must focus on small victories that build off each other. Feeding free breakfast to children or busing families to visit prisoners, is only revolutionary when it offer s service the state does not provide, or provides inadequately AND is openly associated with a Party of the resistance. Keeping a few blocks litter free, keeping them safe and then drug free. Litter free is an act of charity. Safe is an act of community control of policing, drug free is a challenge to some gang or the mob. You could work to rehabilitate convicts and junkies, which is charity. You can integrate the disposed into a meaningful role in the community, turn them from a vagrant to a worker. You could teach law and accounting to the poor or volunteer in a shelter making art, the move from a charity to a revolutionary communal institution has a lot to do with intent. Capitalists and Oligarchs fund charities and foundations to appear philanthropic, wash some of their wealth. Most charities, like NGOs, are about pork chop politics; about small solutions to the worst elements of obvious poverty, but they are not revolutionary.
A communal institution is revolutionary because it seeks to take control of the means of development, it seeks to compete with the inadequate of absent service the state provides with the tax base.
There are many beachheads to secure. Which is to say places so hopeless that any help is something. There are refugee camps so large they go on for all the eye to see, miles and miles of squalor. There are countries where social services are given only to the preferred ethnic group. We will win this war; but we must wage it correctly. The purpose of an emergency group is to set up the beach head which introduces the skills to develop the initial communal institution, then the strategic planning in place to create backwards and forwards linkages between these institutions. Until the revolutionary institution are valid alternative to what the state offers, further de-legitimizing the state. But expect assault in the front and the rear and side upon these mechanisms.
Thus to secure our rights we must control the means to provide social services, the means of development. To transition from pitiless capitalism to socialism or some False Necessitarian fusion, we require organized workers cooperatives; to control the means of production. You cannot seize institutions of the state and expect them to behave in a manner that is less corrupt, less fallible. You cannot take another mans factory and declare it a workers cooperative. In many ways Democratization of the social and economic spheres of life require new institutions and Social Entrepreneurship; Democratic Confederalism is an ideology of governance that values empowerment.
We set up new schools, new clinic and new infrastructure run by the workers. We set up new enterprises, also run by the workers. This does not mean total equality attributed to communism, or enforced top down restriction like State Socialism; there is room for elements of both Socialism and Capitalism in a society that is democratic and human rights reinenforced.
We have to focus where the state has failed or is flailing. This is the strategy of an emergency group sent to secure a beach head, build the first forts. But at some stage, an early stage the Party must protect its institution and confederated structures.
WE CANNOT VIOLATE RIGHTS AND HOPE TO FULLY OBTAIN THEM. WE CANNOT GET SUCKED INTO A PROTRACTED GUERRILLA WAR WITH A DECADENT AND BRUTALLY REPRESSIVE NATION STATE SYSTEM.
We must always take preventative measures. There are some very guilty men in the world, probably a few women too, but they’re all going to die of old age just like everyone else. Hopefully in white light tight plastic rooms heavily guarded with the latest in life prolonging health options available in The Hague. We advocate the capture and imprisonment of war criminals, but we cannot call for their assassination. We must isolate them, indemnify them and then better educate their grandchildren.
The posture of the Peoples’ Defense Forces must always be defensive. There is a large body of precedent to suggest against embarking on a people’s war. Such campaigns are bloody, in decisive and always result in widespread death and destruction. The Defense Forces are to protect communities from aggression, state aggression, non state paramilitaries, theocratic fundamentalists or criminal banditry.
There are five key pillars to Democratic Confederalist parties functionality;
Democratic Autonomy (establishing meaningful participatory democracy in a all structures, assemblies and bodies)
Human Mass Mobilization ( Widespread Human Rights Active Education and Policy Level Implementation/enforcement)
Control and Enhancement of all local Social Services (controlling and improving on the means of social and economic development)
Control and Democratization of Productive Mechanisms (controlling and democratizing the means of production)
Mobilization of a Peoples’ Defense Forces (enlistment of local forces for deterrent self-defense)
Know that you are not alone in questioning why it’s been so bad, for so long. Know that we have had a very long night and you have been born just before dawn. Know that good women and men serve in this Party and that we all stand on the shoulders of giants that fell fighting for an idea whose time has arrived.
The only question left is to ask what you can specifically do to end your role as a collaborator or as a civilian and begin training as a champion of our people and our universal rights.
And we have a few ideas!
It has long been established that land, or the possession of land does not bring any inherent, long-term security. Its capture in fact is one of the fundamental historical exacerbation of humanities many woes and burdens. Defensibility is no sure fire guarantee of anything other that temporary survivability, but that does not connote fulfillment of human potential. So “new land” therefore always has old problems, and surely now there is no “new land”. Even since time immoral there is especially never an ‘empty land.’ There is always an indigenous population and a conquering outsider. A colonizer and the colonized. It’s never worked out well to say the least.
So we don’t obtain universal human rights by settlement of land upon some aggressor-violators’ territory, not in the traditional since anyway.
There is no uncharted isle, no unclaimed valley: the word is a much-sectioned off place. Invisible little, bloody lines telling women and men they are forever divided. But we will fight that false notion on the beaches, shores and airwaves, with pen and with the rifle. What divides us are invented lines, lines of conquest, colonization and subjugation. The nation state is not natural, it is man made. It is a false consciousness imposing a loyalty, a flag and an anthem along with a mostly made up history on a global slave population; the working class.
Some slaveries are far worse than others. Some slaveries take on the shape of careers. But make no mistake, you will be kept working until near the day that you die too early from exhaustion and stress.
SO ALWAYS WORKING FROM WHAT IS, not what we’d ideally like it to be is the first major break from “traditional Zionism”. We do not make the capture of a new nation any type of objective or means to our ends. The second defining break is the level of participation. Having a land need not make one a ‘real people’ as any Kurd or Basque can tell you. Nor are the good things of life always enjoyed within a so-called ‘State’ as virtually every Congolese, Sudanese or Sub-Saharan African can tell you.
So, first things first. Seizure of land solves absolutely nothing.
Second, tactics of economic and political Zionism can be harnessed without the politics of identity-based nationalism and that is called Democratic Confederalism. An ideological theory established by Murray Bookchin; Jew, Zionist then Anarchist but was put into practice by Abdullah Ocalan; first a third world liberation nationalist, then a Maoist then a Democratic Confederalist. Ocalan built on Bookchin who built on Wallerstien who built on Marx.
Thirdly, mobilization of a wealthy Diaspora is often a detriment. Always better to mobilize the working class Diaspora. Rich people really do all think quite alike. Much of a diaspora is riddled with collaborators, people who defected from confrontation, and their children, and children’s children who culturally have imbibed the rapid individualism of the North and the West.
We must reject all forms of nationalism. The only valid nationalism is nationalism as a cultural sentimentality, but not as a unifying identity. Nationalism8 is a structural implementation of slavery and a re-conceptualization of the feudal order.
No nation had clean historical hands! The particular-ism of United States of America is that the it was a colony that shed its metro-pol Great Britain quite early on. And on top of that within three hundred years came to age as a world empire; presiding of the Globalization Epoch of Capitalist Modernity. It is now in decline and the People’s Republic of China is emergent.
Who can blame the United States that cannot blame Russian, China, Spain, Japan, France, England and virtually every European country? Every nation on earth took part in genocide & atrocity of some kind pre, post or during slavery and colonialism. And to the cultural nationalists of the undeveloped world and their Diaspora we remind them that there is no well documented golden age in Africa, South America and Asia either, even before violent pale monkeys barged in with some germs, guns and steel.
THE IMMEDATE AIM OF THE MOVEMENT IS TO DEMONSTRATE A RANGE OF TACTICS WITHIN A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT CALLED “DEMOCRATIC CONFEDERALISM” TO IMPLEMENT “PARA-STATE INFASTRUCTURE” THROUGHOUT THE WORLD. TO FIGHT FOR AND OBTAIN UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS AS OUTLINED IN THE UNITED NATIONS DOCUMENTS BEARING THE SAME NAME AS FACTS ON THE GROUND. ESTABLISHED BY “WORKERS PARTIES”, “COMMUNAL INSTIUTIONS”, “WORKERS COOPERATIVES” AND DEFENDED BY “PEOPLES DEFENSE FORCES”.
We are not simply content to document or apprehend war criminals, we need real infrastructure and we need it now. No more after the fact agonizing on atrocities. We need emergency groups, we need flying columns and a reserve army of human rights professionals and labor.
Since 1948 there have been few positive developments in the cause of human rights. No army will enforce them; no champions have risen with arms to heroically bring them into a state of real being.
Once again, until the time the United Nations or any state actor will actually protect and enshrine these rights then the women and men of the Workers Parties, and the hundreds of international formations like our own will take this burden on our shoulders for the sake of our future.
We lay claim our 58 codified rights and bellow help is coming, push forward to inevitable victory! We don’t want a state, or some land and we don’t crave power for the sake of power, or the ease of doing some business. Using the following tactics outlined in this program we seek a massive and overlapping set of infrastructures generated by civilians, through Workers Parties to enforce and enact these rights without the blessing or endorsement of any government. Where others have failed we will succeed; because we must succeed if we are to survive.
Humanity this is your call to arms!
← A Preamble on Justice (Pamplet One), Democratic Confederalist Papers
WALTER ADLER 