8th Annual BASTARD conference

I won't be going to the BASTARD conference this year.

But if I was and if I was going to sponsor a workshop, this is what it would be:


SMALL EFFORTS TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE RISE OF A NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

Since the early 1990's, actions in the San Francisco Bay Area around mass transit, described here,

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/love2.html

the initial impetus behind this,

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/muni_social_strikeout.html

and the Mission Yuppie Eradication Project

http://www.infoshop.org/myep/myep_criticism.html


have been elements of an ongoing effort to establish a new kind of anti-state/anti-market, autonomous class struggle praxis, a new pattern of action relevant to the times we live in.

These actions should be seen as different moments in a single continuous effort, and as a first step towards creating a new proletarian politics in the country that is a central force in our larger global problem.

Each effort was initiated and pursued based on an understanding that --

1. These efforts take place "on the terrain of everyday life" of the contemporary wage-earning class, where working people confront what market relations do to our lives, and where worsening conditions of work and life give rise to the possibility of a mass collective response. These efforts haven't been directed towards the left-liberal protest ghetto, or toward academic, anarchist or Marxist subcultures.

2. Mass collective class struggle includes the fight against the boss in the workplace, but is not limited to the workplace.

3. In both form and substance the methods used to help catalyze a new politics of working class resistance to capitalism and it's political apparatus have to be qualitatively different from the politics of failure, the politics of the conventional left -- the left-wing of capital.

4. Authentic enemies of capitalism in the 21st century cannot use the strategies, tactics or communication methods used by pro-wage labor leftists in the 20th century.

5. With the virtual disappearance of the conventional left, and the accelerating decline of the United States as a world power, the way is now open for the creation of a new type of autonomous working class oppositional praxis. This praxis freely takes insights from the best aspects of the historical revolutionary movement of the past two hundred years and uses these insights as a point of departure, and not as an end-point. Anarcho-syndicalism and council communism were both useful in their day. That day has passed.

The efforts around mass transit described in the articles above have a much greater future subversive potential than the Mission District anti-gentrification effort; they have the potential to directly involve more working people over an entire city and to have a "bleed-through" effect, spreading resistance into other areas of modern life. But the communications methods use in the yuppie eradication project were more effective at getting an extremist message out in a big way than what happened with the mass transit efforts.

What's being examined here is mostly a method of communication. These methods can be a template for similar anti-state/anti-capitalist prole actions elsewhere, including but not limited to fights around housing and social space.

proletaire2003 [at] yahoo.com