Defend Arizona Workers, Abolish the Police Unions

At times like these -- of austerity and broad attacks on workers, the poor and the excluded -- it must first be pointed out that the state revenue crisis is fake.  In Arizona, the justification for massive cuts and fee increases runs immediately up against the hard fact that while the right wing government is pleading poverty and cutting health and assistance programs for the poor, it is also busy slashing corporate taxes.  Famously, two out of three corporations in the Copper State pay no taxes and recurring proposals for a "flat tax" would shift the tax burden even further onto the poor and working class -- a group that already pays disproportionately more of their income than Arizona's rich.

It's in this context that a new series of anti-union bills have been introduced into the legislature.  Backed by the generally reactionary far right Goldwater Institute, these laws would remove basic rights of free association and self-defense from Arizona workers.  Among the deletions: automatic deductions and collective bargaining rights over pay and benefits.  And, unlike other states, such as Wisconsin, where similar legislation has been introduced, in Arizona police and fire departments are not excluded.  This comes in the context of an ongoing series of attacks on unions in Arizona.

In Arizona only six percent of workers are unionized, and this skews heavily towards public sector workers.  Perhaps not surprisingly, Arizona has one of the lowest percentage of unionized workers in the US, but even that small number is in decline, and last year many workers took the opportunity of the weakening of automatic deduction laws to leave unions that they felt had been poorly representing them, engaging in the classic 'dues strike'.  In Arizona, public sector unions have been increasingly seen by their members as functioning not to defend workers, but rather to manage the imposition of austerity in ways that don't rile up the rank and file.

And, of course, in any labor fight, conflicts with the police are never far off.  That's what makes these bills so interesting,  Given the important role of police as strikebreakers and the enforcers of capital's will, one tends to assume that almost certainly Arizona's right wing ideologues will have to pull a Wisconsin and create exceptions for the police and fire departments.  As we have recently seen in the case of Kyrsten Sinema's liberal candidacy for Congress, even so-called progressives in the state depend on the political support of the racist police unions.

Indeed, Synema recently accepted the endorsement of the worst police union in the state (although choosing is hard), the Professional Law Enforcement Association, famous for its vigorous advocacy for Arizona's anti-immigrant SB1070 law and unconscionable defense of Officer Richard Chrisman, who tortured, shot and killed unarmed Danny Rodriguez as well as his dog in his home on October 5, 2010.  Famously, PLEA President Mark Spencer not only helped bail Chrisman out with union funds, but also held a fund-raiser bbq for his defense.  But such it is with police unions.

Beyond that, if there is to be a fight that breaks out beyond the strict legislative boundaries enforced by the union bureaucracy and leadership, like perhaps a general strike, bosses and government officials will need the police to impose their class objectives.  Police, of course, are not just regular members of the working class.  They are paid to wage a never-ending war on poor people, folks of color in particular, and to maintain capitalist relations of property, wage labor and commodity production.

I've been reading Kristian Williams excellent book, "Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America" and he goes into quite a bit of depth about the history and reactionary tendencies of police unions that set them apart from and against other unions.  What strikes me as particularly relevant in the current situation is his analysis of the different ways that police union demands function versus the demands of other public sector workers.  Setting aside wage and benefit bargaining, the demands and lobbying of most public sector workers tends to involve benefits for the broader working class.  That is, teachers in the past have very often demand smaller class sizes, increased funding for free breakfast and lunch programs, and other social programs concomitant with their role.  For instance, the American Federation of Teachers in recent years joined the boycott of Arizona over SB1070.  These sorts of trends bear out amongst most other public sector unions.

However, this is not true when it comes to the police.  The results of police union bargaining tend much more strongly in the exact opposite direction.  Also, because of the often mutually beneficial relationship between police unions, the police bureaucracy, government and politicians, police negotiations and the lobbying that their organizations engage in tend to lead directly to increased budgets for weapons and equipment, expansion of police and jail facilities and other infrastructure to be used against the poor and marginalized populations.  So, while most public sector bargaining and lobbying can lead to increased services, police bargaining and lobbying leads to more murdered and imprisoned poor people, and the wrecked and ruined lives that go with it.  Beyond that, police union bureaucracy serves to protect cops from the consequences of their policing through its various internal discipline procedures.

So, if the legislature sticks to its ideology of right wing austerity and attacks on workers over the class pragmatism of privileging the police, there may be an opportunity to seriously weaken the police unions in Arizona, striking a blow for the working class and the poor and greatly opening up possibilities for further struggle.  To do this, workers will have to be brave enough to recognize their opposing interests to the police and to say, "Defend Arizona Workers, Abolish the Police Unions".

Lines will have to be drawn, but they won't be new lines.  In all likelihood this will mean contradicting the union bosses who will play, as is their habit, towards the racist, classist law and order line of safety and protection.  If we ever want to break out of this system of never-ending work, in which waged labor dominates our lives and we negotiate pitifully with the bosses for small glimpses of freedom and dignity, this will necessarily mean taking on the final defenders of work, the police.  Public sector workers may find it expedient in the short term to hide behind the boys in blue, but long term, given the fight that is coming, that strategy may come back to haunt them.

What a way to make a living? Or, 20 percent unemployment is a good start.

I know I don't usually get all personal on here when I write -- I try to keep it strictly business, as they say -- but it's been a fucking shitty last couple of weeks at work for me. Partly because of that, I haven't really been inspired to start on any of the new writing projects I've got bouncing around in my head right now (I think Jon Riley may have a couple things in the works if we're lucky, though). So when the classic 90's photo series below came across my phone this afternoon as the boss clock ticked down towards quitting time, it couldn't have come at a better time.

I suppose the montage goes without explanation. We recognize it immediately. Both it's form and it's content. No détournement required on this one, Situs, thank you. The series perhaps comes at a relevant time as well, or perhaps emerges as a meek but important counter-point, as we watch the tens of thousands gather in Wisconsin in a rearguard action in defense of their right to organize against capital and to keep the few paltry crumbs that warrant the absurd label "Cadillac" these days, that alone speaking volumes about how far we have fallen since the capitalist counter-attack began in the late 70's, early 80's.

So, three years into economic collapse and now well into the austerity measures that we all knew were coming from the get go, the best we get is a zombified union movement, rising from the crypt to sell us out again, paired with Democratic recuperators so chickenshit over a fight that they flee the state. One keeps hoping for a break in the terrible dance between capital and it's mild-mannered gentle critics on the American Left. We scan the skies for any sign of an emerging fightback that defies the acceptable boundaries.

Of course, lurking behind the scenes is the terrible step-child of the labor movement -- the refusal of work. The human desire to be done with the whole mess that lives in the space between working and unemployment. That terrain denied us in reality for the most part as well as in the popular dialog that delineates the borders of polite discussion. Have you heard any of those party hacks or union negotiators utter one word about it? All out in defense of work!

But we know, we remember, that fleeting feeling, before cold capitalist reality sets in, when you almost cheer for a second after you get that pink slip. The feeling of buying your buddies a round at the bar with your last paycheck. Maybe tossing a brick through the boss's Mercedes window on the way out. You know us, we're the ones who don't apologize for being on unemployment. The ones who love it. When I was on unemployment it was one of the most productive and enjoyable times in my life. This is not to repeat CrimethInc's naive mantra from the last decade about poverty and doing it right. It's just to remember a time of freedom that appeared unexpectedly and to lament it's eventual loss.

I mean, I get it: let's by all means defend ourselves from the capitalist coup de grace. Maybe push them back, snap victory from the jaws of defeat. I'd fight, too, if they tried to cut my pay or take away the benefits I fought hard for. But, still, I can't help but think that the most radical thing that could be asked in the middle of the conflict is, "Do you like your job?" It's certainly never come up that I've heard of. And it's of course precisely the misery of work that is captured so clearly in the Al Bundy series below (Bundy being, along with Homer Simpson, the classic working class hero/foil/numbskull all rolled into one), revealing at the same time, I think, the sheer poverty of the struggle taking place now in Wisconsin. Surely, somewhere, someone camping in that square tonight is thinking, I hope this thing at least goes through Tuesday so I can get an extra day off out of this.

In an age that is increasingly looking like it will be defined by permanent unemployment for so many who thought themselves previously immune (i.e., white, middle class), will the issue finally get forced on the agenda? Or will it further feed the already blazing anti-immigrant mania? I heard today a story on NPR alleging that what migrants remain in Arizona are having an easier time getting work than citizens. True or not, that's the kind of thought that creeps behind the eyeballs of white workers even in good times. One shivers, thinking of it's power now to rally the reactionaries. And how about the government workers? Will endemic unemployment continue to be turned on those few who still manage to hang onto to decent pay and benefits packages, a class eating itself before the lustily leering eyes of the capitalist pornographers. Enter the Tea Party again, stage right.

That said, will ten or twenty percent unemployment ever seem like a good start rather than a social ill to be remedied with stimulus and austerity? Some of us remember Paul LaFargue's "Right to Be Lazy" and Ivan Illich's "Right to Useful Unemployment". And of course that party pooper Bob Black. Or hell, even the Smith's singable "I was looking for a job and then I found a job and heaven knows I'm miserable now"! Or, I suppose, "Take This Job and Shove It" is reaching back just as far, expressing without fear that good ol' American desire not just to shirk work but to be done with the whole mess entirely. To wipe it off on your jeans and drive off in your F150, flippin' the bird. It seems like so much of this has been co-opted by the modern day concept of the entrepreneur, having polluted so much of what might otherwise pass for resistance in times of class struggle's low ebb. Even our musicians and sports heroes are not untouched. Not escapte artists -- entrepreneurs! Venture capitalists. Self-employed. Such a tragedy.

Perhaps I've said this before, but one of the things that Italian immigrants said about America when they came over in the 19th and 20th centuries (most to return home some years later) was that to them this was the land of bosses and clocks. That interminable clock on the factory wall, always ticking. Enforcing capital's narrative one unbearably painful second at a time. Coming from peasant villages and towns, they had no concept of the time card or the regimented work day.

Here's another thing I may have said before: when I worked at the post office the clock was divided into 100 segments per hour. Not sixty. Taking our fifteen minute breaks, we had to think in 36-second increments. We called them clicks. Naturally, you clocked in early, at 41 clicks, because if you hit 42 you were late. Like the laundromat near my house that offers washes at 99 cents but only lets you put money on your "laundry convenience card" in one dollar increments, there was no way to hit 15 minutes on the dot on those clocks. Always over or under. Those seconds were just plain stolen from you right before you eyes. Every day. Sure, you'd get a shop steward there with you when you got written up, defending your rights but doing nothing about the abominable 100 click clock. Looking at that damn timepiece every day, it often struck me how much I would have traded a million shop stewards for just one sturdy baseball bat almost any day. Of course, when the layoffs came, I was convinced. Naturally I had just rented a new apartment.

Of course now, thanks to the satellites hooked into our cell phones, the boss's clock stares at us all day, everywhere, working or not. All the clocks say the same thing now, for everyone. The discipline of capitalism consumes everything eventually, but most of all time, as I think perhaps Marx wrote a bit about once or twice.

So, as you can perhaps guess, after six years of letting us keep track of our own hours, with a decent amount of flexibility, my work started making us log in and out. Not on a time clock, yet, but in a book. Write down the exact time you show up but don't let it be before seven. No work before seven, we are told. Linger around, waiting, if you're early. Here's what actually happens: my co-workers sign in as if it's seven and begin their day at 6:57 or 6:58 anyhow, giving two or three minutes of their lives to the boss for free every day. And, although it seems illogical, ours is work that we'd just as soon have over, and sitting there staring at it, waiting for the clock doesn't help anyone, not even you. You just get done later.

Of course, not me. I'm coming in late. I don't give my time up for free. So, anyway, this little montage has been making its way across the tubes today and I figured since I didn't have anything else, I may as well write a little bit about it and post it up in the hopes that others out there may appreciate it the way that I did, and to maybe give a little context about why I did. It always strikes me that, along with the scratching record and the ticking clock, the sound of the end of day whistle at the factory still sticks with us in this society, even though they have been purged from most people's lives almost entirely. Maybe it harkens back to a certain analog universality, an experience we all shared and still do, even if now it has been digitized and internalized.

Anyhow, quittin' time!

Some other recent writings by others on work to complement "Union of Arsonists"

The most recent piece on work "Union of Arsonists" has been getting a pretty interesting response and getting some conversations going. I deliberately tried to avoid a lot of theory in writing it, trying to write in a more straightforward way. However, for people interested in following up on some of the ideas in a more academic way, there's a lot of older theoretical works that I could point people towards, since workers and others have been grasping with the new organization of work under late era capitalism since at least the Italian autonomist movement and the Situationists of the 60's and 70's.

But rather than link to those older works (which are certainly well worth checking out), in order to further contribute to that discussion I'm going to link to some recent articles on work that I have found interesting of late. As some may know, I've had a forced vacation recently thanks to a cop-induced broken arm, so I've had a little time to delve into some of the more recent developments in the anti-work field, so to speak. From these writings I have culled a few pieces that I think folks who found the "Arsonist..." piece interesting would find worth checking out.


(1) Bone Idle: or Work Doesn’t Work! An Interview with Ian Bone and Ray Roughler Jones

The first is an interview with Ian Bone (Class War) and Ray Roughler Jones on their relationship to work growing up in England's working class. The most interesting bit here is their explanation of the general refusal of work that permeated that time and the way that the UK welfare state allowed for a general shirking of work.

An excerpt:

H: And when did you both take against work?

RRJ: It’s just that nobody worked, none of our friends worked.

IB: No one ever worked… in Bash the Rich there’s a story about “turning to the working class” but we didn’t know anyone who was working! We were all on the dole so we started a Claimants’ Union, a union for people on the dole. We would fight to get you all your entitlements. The classic line was: “If they get you a job, we’ll fight your case!” There were all the jokes about what occupation you gave when you were signing on: Father Christmas, snow clearer. and so on. One job I gave was “Coronation Programme Seller”. “What’s that then, Mr Bone?” asked a puzzled clerk. “Very long hours. On the day, you’re up at five in the morning till all hours,” I countered — not mentioning I hadn’t had the luck of securing such a position since 1953.

(2) Sisyphus and the Labour of Imagination:
Autonomy, Cultural Production, and the Antinomies of Worker Self-Management

The Second piece is an academic by Stevphen Shukaitis published this month in "Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action". Shukaitis takes the analogy of Sisyphus and applies it to the struggle for workers self-management in the modern era, bringing in his own experience working at the collective record label Ever Reviled Records.

This combination of history and experience allows him to look at the problematic relationship between workers control that doesn't topple the overarching capitalist system outside it. Of particular note is the way that, absent a total break with capital, workers self-management can sometimes recuperate capitalism and turn workers from their natural tendency to develop means of resistance to work into self-police watching each other for those same traits under self-management. That, of course, suggests that a complete break is in order to reap the full benefits from it and that previous limited experiments only hint at its potential.

An excerpt:

And so where does this leave the conceptual territory and practices of self-management? Best consigned to the dustbin of history? Tempting, perhaps, although to do so would be a bit hasty, and likely an instance of throwing out the baby with the bathwater of our discontent. WSM can play a vital role in social resistance, but one that is more limited than I thought several years ago when I started thinking about this more deeply. WSM can play an important role in creating networks of knowledge and cooperation laboratories for experimentation and the development of resources and skills for “building the new world within the shell of the old,” to use the old Wobbly phrase. But it is important to never forget that this new world is being built within the shell of the old, within the iron cage of capitalist rationality, which is far more likely to impinge upon its growth than to be torn asunder by other forms of social life developing within it. Practices of WSM exist in a cramped position as a form of “minor politics” and composition. Their radicality rests in this position, in WSM’s capability to create resources and time, and in consciously avoiding becoming a “major” or representative form.[45] In other words, WSM can help to create space and time that foster the cultivation of other possibilities--for other possible worlds emerging. But that does not mean that we can just “buy back the world” from the capitalists, or that WSM can serve as a means to overcome without difficulties the vast arrays of power that still exist. WSM is not an unambivalent outside to the realities of capitalism. But it can create time that partially is one.

It is also fundamentally important that self-management, as an affirmation of the creative potentiality of non-alienated labour, does not unwittingly find itself sliding back into an affirmation of “the dignity of work” that has haunted various forms of labour organizing and radicalism from times immemorial and that has been the target of radicals more prone to celebrate the refusal of work and argue for its reduction, from Paul Lafargue to the Italian autonomists, Bob Black to the Situationists. The idea would be rather to extend and deepen the relation between the refusal of work and its self-management, as when Vaneigem called for the unity of workers’ councils and the refusal of work.[46] This is not nearly as paradoxical (or silly) as it might seem at first. Rather it is an argument based on the realization that socialized labour’s potentiality is revealed most clearly by its absence, which is the basic concept underlying strikes after all. Therefore, the way to affirm such potentiality is not under conditions which limit it absurdly within the present but by the constant immanent shaping of a collective imagination and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound within a fixed form

(3) Nowtopia: Strategic Exodus? by Chris Carlsson and Francesca Manning

Finally, I've made no secret here about my affinity for the recent work of Chris Carlsson, which I think tries in a very interesting way to bring together Marxist concepts of composition into play in a period in which the demands of workers for control over labor increasingly manifest outside the workplace. This is the result of thirty or forty years of de-skilling, professionalization, automation, computerization and the transfer of productive work overseas.

In such an environment, the working class increasingly finds itself seeking to attack its own class position -- that is, to leave the fight for control of the means of production (such that they are) behind and to develop new means of attacking capitalism outside the workplace. Carlsson and Manning here do a good job of providing a fresh context for the emergence of a variety of tools of resistance often maligned by leftist revolutionaries as drop-out or lifestylist. This article draws extensively from Carlsson's relatively recent book "Nowtopia" which PCWC distributes.

An excerpt:

Nowtopia is a term that attempts to describe the myriad efforts to reclaim and reinvent work against the logic of capital. Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid) work on the other. No longer can our waged jobs be assumed to define us, and no longer can they be the primary basis for politics. Precisely because so many people find their work lives inadequate, incomplete, degrading, pointless, stupid and oppressive, they form identities and communities outside of paid work—in spaces where they are not working class. It is in these activities that people, who are reduced on the job to “mere workers”, fully engage their capacities to create, to shape, to invent, and to cooperate without monetary incentive. They “work” or “labor” in a way in which the particular substance of their activity is meaningful. These communities may not look much like the working class organizations of the past two centuries, but it is important to recognize that in this topsy-turvy period of system breakdown and transition, new political forms are emerging to reshape the endless struggle between capital and humanity. In the face of widespread dismissal of nowtopian movements as “lifestyle” politics or irrelevant “dropout” culture, we argue that they are in fact new political forms that are addressing directly many immediate problems of capitalist society.

Today basic needs are going unmet for millions. Urgent efforts at long-term and medium-term planning to adapt to the increasingly visible collapse of natural systems are rejected out of ideological blindness. But individual human ingenuity flows over government and corporate obstacles. The solutions to social and ecological crises of our time are frequently coming from unwaged work that is done because people want and need it, rather than in hopes of monetary remuneration. Still at the margins of modern life for now, many people and communities are taking more of their time and care out of the market and making ways to live together, to get our needs met and desires engaged, by working together, working hard, and not working for money.

Nowtopians engage in a wide variety of labor-intensive projects, from organic gardening, bike repair, or coding software, to making music, writing fiction, producing radio shows, or painting a mural. Permaculturists, the quintessential nowtopian technologists, have initiated various epistemological challenges to basic scientific paradigms through their unpaid, passionate work. A semi-conscious war between these life-affirming, self-emancipating behaviors and the coercive domination of money, property, and survival is the kernel of a potentially revolutionary transformation.

For those interested in more from Carlsson on the concept of Nowtopia, I recommend watching the video below, in which he lectures, of all places, at the Google headquarters. Quite interesting indeed!

Enjoy!

Union of Arsonists: The flammable estates of the rich and the class war fires of liberation

Who says the local news is all crap these days? News Channel 3, always a shimmering example of journalistic excellence, has been kind enough to give us rich-hating anti-capitalists more kindling for the bonfires this week by offering up a guided tour of two of the most expensive homes (estates?) in the Valley.

In the photo gallery below we tour two of the most exclusive (and expensive) properties currently on the market in metro Phoenix. An eight bedroom, 12,000 square foot abode nestled on 40 acres in Paradise Valley and a 25,000 square foot villa with a bargain price of $24.9 million.

Get a look while you can at the wealth of the rich parasites that enjoy the good life while those of us down here suffer foreclosure, precarity, unwanted unemployment, soaring health care costs and repossessions, along with all manner of other humiliations from which the rich are immune. With Arizona now scoring the second highest rate of poverty in the country, it's more enraging than ever to see such opulence on open display.

Enjoy the tour. Take it all in. The 20 car garage. The acres of green grass. The huge master bedroom. Maybe make a few notes on your brief foray into the foyers of the rich and spoiled:

5 acre estate with 35,000 sq.ft.under roof & 25,000 sq.ft. ac/heated. Flooring of 6 ft. marble slabs from Italy, library with $350,000 Pierre Lange mahogany cabinetry, $1,200,000 Avia high tech security & sound equipment, a 13 seat mahogany theatre w/true movie projection & D-box chairs that move with the movie action. 2 swimming pools and 20 car garage including a $400,000 ''show garage''

I was told by someone who would know the other day that the rich and powerful in the Valley often complain that their possessions regularly get pilfered by the many workers required to maintain their irresponsible and exploitative lifestyles. Presumably the quick-handed disappear them when the owner is sunning by his Olympic-sized pool. Or perhaps they return in the summer when those with the money are safely chilling in their beach houses far from Phoenix's scorching weather. If you have more than one home, you can't be in all of them at once. That's a risk you take being rich, I suppose.

Which reminds me, did they ever catch those Paradise Valley "rock burglars"? Last I heard they had successfully managed over 300 break-ins resulting in more than ten million dollars worth of crap that rich people have being re-appropriated from the undeserving dresser drawers of the Valley's spoiled rich. It's nice to know that they get robbed, though, isn't it? Coming in through the master bedroom window, broken with a rock (hence the "rock burglars" name), is apparently the way to go according to the newspapers. There's no security system at that end of the house usually, it seems. Again, that's straight out of the papers. Hopefully it creeps those rich bastards out knowing the proles have rifled through their intimates.

Of course, getting a job working for rich people seems to work just as well as a means of procuring their stuff. Or, if you can hold your nose that long, even just getting to know them works. That was the case for antique thief Matthew Walker, who pleaded guilty this week to acquiring many of the prized possessions of the wealthy in his area simply by hanging around them so much. This guy managed to take prized heirlooms and other items passed down, like their illegitimate wealth, from one generation of rich scum to the next. Good for him. Caught now, unfortunately, but it's still more evidence that the rich are far from secure in their persons and items. When the cops came to his house and matched a stolen serial number to the 52 inch tv mounted on the wall, Walker claimed it was a set up. Nice. Fuck their tv and fuck the cops.

Those who say the luxuries enjoyed by the rich are the just reward for a life of hard work are off their rockers. One doesn't have a hard time imagining that they have never walked a thousand miles to stand on a street corner, ducking la poli-migra, and cleaning pools or mowing lawns in the blistering sun. Or tried to hold a job (which they hate anyway) while on work release from one of Sheriff Joe's gulags, suffering after work the routine indignity of waiting in line at gunpoint to sleep in the summer heat in his outdoor jail, all because Phoenix doesn't have a decent public transportation system.

Maybe they have never slaved away for nine or ten hours in a windowless call center, fielding pointless calls or following shitty leads in hopes of making the rent this month. Or maybe they've never spent ten hours in the cab of a truck passing the endless hours and miles bringing consumer goods they can't afford to the bars and restaurants of the wealthy and their even more spoiled children.

If hard work was the key to success under capitalism, the women fishing coins off dead bodies for twelve hours a day at the mouth of the Ganges River would rule the planet. Or those guys who dismantle the beached ships in Asia. They'd be everyone's boss. And don't forget those kids who rummage through the piles of the West's discarded computers for toxic metals. We'd be cleaning their Ferraris if hard work made the world go around.


Make no mistake, this is not a defense of work. Nor the alleged nobility of the small-headed, broad-shouldered laborer portrayed by communist painters in grand Soviet murals. You know, the worker works, the Party thinks. No, for sure, my sympathies are with the slackers and the shirkers. With the folks who know what "it fell off the truck" means and don't say a word to the boss. And with the ones who clock their friends in and out so they can sleep off last night's party. Long live those who still defend the siesta, sadly long ago now a Southwest memory for most of us, dominated by the boss's time clock as we are. When I worked at the post office the time clock was divided up into one hundred segments per hour instead of sixty. Want to know crazy? Try calculating your 15 minute break in 36 second segments.

Take another example: Domino's worker Jamal Thomas. A trainee for an assistant manager position, he complained that he was jumped by hoodlums outside work one night and beaten. In true corporate form, his bosses accused him of violating security protocols during his beatdown because the front door was unlocked as it took place. Broken in the brawl, Thomas's jaw was wired shut and he couldn't eat solid food or talk for six weeks. He was fired. According to his family he turned bitter at this insult. Understandably so.

But, the police say, Thomas didn't take this affront laying down. Keeping his key and his dignity, Thomas visited various Domino's locations "in uniform claiming to be a member of a secret Domino's unit that measured employee satisfaction." He was scoping out targets. Oh, the irony! And what creativity -- although surely not of the kind his bosses could appreciate. Nope, dressing up and pretending to be an employee satisfaction monitor, visiting various locations and scouting the best targets, and then setting them to the torch -- using their own pizza boxes as kindling! -- that clearly is the kind of creativity that while inspired by Domino's, can never be contained by it.

And isn't that all our experience, in a way? Because no matter how much or how well you do a job like that, your only thanks is more of the same. An assistant manager position, with the small bump in pay and the freedom to play some solitaire from time to time in the office -- that's your prize in this system. No personal development. No chance to control the real substance of your life. No choice in what you make, where you make it, when and how. No control over what's done with it. And the cherry on top is that most of what we are forced to make is crap anyhow. "Time to make the donuts", as the old commercial used to say. Always time to make the donuts. Who wants control over it anyhow? Better to burn it down. Making pizzas at Domino's can never be a fulfilling vocation. In a time of mass layoffs, is it too much to ask for meaningful unemployment?

I can remember a conversation I had -- more like an argument -- with another class war anarchist who had mistaken me for an hardcore primitivist because of a pin I was wearing. Never bothering to see the Durruti pin on the other side, he proceeded to launch into me with a tirade about the dignity of work. How pleased were the janitors he was organizing, he said, when they had finished cleaning a room! What dignity in work! What pride! Bullshit! For most of us, the only dignity at work is ending the day with some intact.

There's a saying that goes like this: "That's an idea so ridiculous only an intellectual could believe it." Well, it's the same with the organizers of the working class. The bosses are right about us. We hate work, we hate our jobs and we hate them. They are right to distrust us. Pride in work as we know it is an idea so ridiculous only a union organizer could believe it because the truth of the workweek is something quite different. Biting your tongue, hiding in the bathroom, grabbing a smoke or pretending to be doing something are the most common activities at any modern job.

Working in a call center and get hung up on? Let it hang there for a few minutes. No need to rush. Just let that dial tone ring for a bit and grab back part of your life a few minutes at a time. That's the reality. Who would want to democratize most of this? Can you imagine the drudgery of the Slurpee committee meeting at the collectivized 7-11? Surely better just to put it to the torch and be done with all illusions. No thanks, budding union bureaucrats: the arsonist is a much better shop steward these days.

And there is no escape for most of us from the drudgery of work and the liberal way it wastes our time and energies. Landlords and grocery stores, mechanics and credit card companies can be strict masters and if you can't refuse work, the best you can do is try to get the most out of it you can, for your own ends. If that's not possible, may as well burn it down. Thomas caused more than a million dollars in damage. As a point of reference, take out the mythic Vail arsons and this guy's up there with the ELF on average and maybe rivals the black bloc rampages through any number of North American streets this year, not that there's anything wrong with them. Different strokes for different folks.

It is natural for us to hate hard work (i.e., compelled work), but for the defenders of the rich, as they always do, to say that it is only hard work that separates the family living out of their car from the millionaire on the mountain is obscene. Likewise the Dominoes assistant manager from the Paradise Valley mansion. Even most the rich don't believe it. The myth of mobility and hard work isn't meant for them. Commenting on why he collaborated with Oliver Stone on his most recent remake of his classic 80's Wall Street attack movie, Anthony Scaramucci, hedge fund director and founder of Skybridge Capital said, "[Oliver Stone] believes that the lower quartile of society is suffering in a megalomaniacal capitalist society — and you know, he's probably right on some of the stuff he's saying."

Which reminds me, there were two forklift drivers killed in the last two weeks in Phoenix. Crushed underneath them. This is something close to my heart, having occasion to drive a forklift at work with some regularity myself. Those things are fucking dangerous. But with the slashing of budgets and the paring of workforces, you can bet that the speedup that is work life under the new never-ending crisis is to blame. More work to be done with less workers means doing it faster, cutting corners, or not having proper assistance. Profits are up, payrolls are down, and more of us are six feet under every day. And trust me, crushed under a forklift is not a death that any of those rich bastards on the mountain will suffer, sadly.

But where are the funerals for these "heroes" of the new crisis capitalism? The people who against their will, against their health and against their human desire to be free, make this economy run, despite being largely locked out of its largess and surely denied its mansions and limos, except to clean and maintain them. Workers killed on the job for the most part are lucky to get a blurb that mentions their name in the paper if they meet their end on the clock. No funeral processions, no media helicopters hovering over cemeteries, no grieving husbands or wives. No plastic-featured anchorman breaking into our regular programming.

Not, that is, unless you are a cop worker or a soldier worker. Only the workers that protect the ruling class are worthy of mention or thanks in this country. The only exception perhaps comes from the pandering politicians in election year, hoping as they do that some of us will accept this bullshit title of "hard working American" in exchange for the acceptance of heightened social war on others, often of color, in other countries, migrants, prisoners, et cetera.

But when it comes to the cops and soldiers, we get treated to a fete fit for an angel! There is no investigation. Just how many complaints did that cop have against him? How many civilians did that soldier kill? Quite relevant and related questions these days as more and more of these fucked up veterans come back and join police forces. Once there, their violently short tempers set the tone for the rest of the force. And of course lacking entirely from public discussion when one of these killer-workers gets killed is a critical assessment of the role that cops and soldiers play in the maintenance of everyday order, itself a long, slow murder for most of us. All is forgiven and nothing is remembered when the sacrifice is for the State and Capital.

I know I'm not the only one who looks up at those houses on Camelback Mountain while driving to work and hopes for a landslide or a brushfire or, hell, a meteor strike to erase that whole disgusting scene from my view, likewise relinquishing the stranglehold they have on so many of us. Or maybe, more satisfying, for the fiery justice of a people no longer willing to be exploited, tagged, imprisoned, tracked, beaten, mocked, marginalized and pushed around just so some rich asshole can have a mountainside resort for a second or third home.

We all resist in our own small ways everyday, trying against the odds and against the reality of our no-vacation, low pay jobs, to carve out for ourselves a little bit of dignity and autonomy against a system determined to crush us or -- at best -- to throw us some crumbs if we agree to mind-numbing labor day in and day out. Assistant manager, indeed.

So thanks to Channel 3 for that kindling. Whenever I see those rich bastards and their gilded estates, it just fires me up even more. Sometimes not every article has to end with a grand philosophical point. Today I just felt like a good ol' rant was in order. Those mansions make me think of a day, hopefully not far off, when it will all explode and we'll look up to a long torchlit march up those hills and to the liberating fires of a new day, free at last from work and those who make us do it. Drinks on them in the rec rooms first, of course.

Swinging from the Tyburn Tree: the violent creation of the working class and the resistance it spawned.

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's fantastic book, "The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic" is one of my favorite books of all time. That book, when combined with Linebaugh's excellent "The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century", offer two first-class and complimentary views on the violent imposition of capitalism on the English population and the rest of the then emerging colonial world. Naturally, people resisted this reorganization in all manner of ways.

Linebaugh's book in particular offers the reader not just a view of life before capitalism, but it also reveals the bloody battle that took place over the imposition of capitalist relations, centering on the hangings at the Tyburn gallows. On these gallows those poor in London, dispossessed of their commons and resisting or locked out of the new capitalist work regime, faced the grim, bloody justice of emerging capitalism, determined as it was to bring the English poor to heel before the new mode one way or another. Performed in public, before large crowds and en masse, the hangings amounted to mass state terrorism on the population. A warning of the most extreme kind: conform or die.

Itself often a point of violent contention, with mobs known to riot and rescue the judged from time to time, the hangings routinely involved those charged with stealing food and other minor offenses. The commodity form was just emerging and it was to be respected! This in an era of the mass dislocation of the enclosures gives a hint of the grand scale of the terror. Those lucky enough to escape the hanging tree suffered transportation to Europe's "New World" in bondage under harsh terms of indentured servitude. Thus it is from the resisting English working class, initially, that the colonial State got much of its settler masses.

In the "Many-Headed Hydra" Linebaugh and Rediker take time to point out as well, using the coastal Atlantic's sea-going working class as the example, the effects of the likewise emerging system of white supremacy. Sailors, a motley multi-racial bunch, routinely defied the new racial regulations of the day, bringing a working class wreck across racial lines to colonial society's elites, rioting and resisting their way from port to port. At the same time, these heterogeneous working class formations' contentions with colonial capitalism's racial forms and privileges also spurred the State to further regiment and formalize them. And as the settler State increasingly turned to chattel slavery kidnapped from Africa, the threat that faced the ruling English white elite in colonial America was always a tri-racial alliance of the emerging white working class, African slaves and indigenous tribes. It was this burning fuse that whiteness was constructed to douse. And it is this division that lives with us to this day.

Thinking of these early rebels from the capitalist and racialized order is important, because it shows us not only an alternate history, but it also a hint of what we had and how we lost it. Relationships which perhaps seem normal enough to us now, like work or policing, seem quite the opposite when we look back and realize the sheer violence that the State was willing to use to impose and defend what were then new and generally unwelcome institutions for the extraction of profit and the preservation of power and privilege.

Returning now to the sailors, there was one particular kind of sailor that terrorized the elite like no other. For hundreds of years, but peaking perhaps in the early 18th century, pirates stirred the fearful imaginations of blue-blooded American aristocrats like none other save perhaps the slave insurrections of the South. Indeed, when the Amistad ship, famous for its mutiny and flight out of bondage, first appeared on the North Carolina horizon it was described in no uncertain terms as a pirate ship. The comparison was apt, not least of all because of the infamously defiant multi-racial characteristics of the sailor class and, in particular, the pirate hordes that plagued corporate shipping.

Pirates themselves defied not just the racial regulations of their time, but also the system of work under capitalism. Seizing and plundering, electing their own leaders, dividing up the loot in egalitarian ways and living in the moment all defined the pirate existence on the open sea. This stood in sharp contrast to a system increasingly regulated by the clock and the turning of gears inside the dank, repressive factory. Naturally, aside from the general miserable conditions of life under capitalism, the prime recruiter for the pirate population was in fact the specific nature of life as a sailor. Life on a navy ship or merchant vessel was factory-like to the extreme. Many sailors served against their will and for little or no pay. It's easy to see how in these conditions questions of race and division can quickly fade away.

It's interesting to note that on the slave ships that navigated the Middle Passage with their stolen cargo, it wasn't uncommon for nets to stretch out from the ship out over the sea for some distance beyond the deck. Captured slaves it seems, would not infrequently attempt suicide by jumping into the sea when they had the opportunity, denying in essence the capitalist the value of their captured labor. In contemporary times, I'm reminded of the nets deployed around the FoxConn factories in China, meant to contain and nullify the wave of suicides afflicting the company and its workforce. Before the nets, many of those attempting self-liberation from Capital's undead grip took flight from the FoxConn factory roof itself, ending up a bloody mash on the sidewalk below. Capitalism lets nothing go without a fight, not even your own body.

So, its in this spirit that I post below two links to recent Marcus Rediker lectures both on piracy. The first, titled, "Black Pirates: The Curious Early History of the Amistad Rebellion" focuses on the framework of piracy as a way of looking at the Amistad rebellion. The second, "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean", was given in 2007 at the 2007 Bristol Radical History Week in the UK and goes over some of the history he uncovered while writing his book, "Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age". Check them out. They're both well worth your time.





Watch "The Real Pirates Of the Caribbean" at the Bristol Radical History Group's webpage. Note that Rediker's lecture begins at the Tyburn tree. Many pirates likewise met their end there.