TSA, Free Movement, and the Art of Not Being Governed

Watching the reactionary right wing debate the slightly less reactionary right wing in the media last week about the supposed TSA body scanner scandal and the most efficient way to control American's movements has me thinking. I'm not a right wing libertarian, of course, but I have to say it's telling that as far as I've seen the media hasn't had one of them on tv during this whole hooplah. Curious just because you see them in the media all the time when it comes to the economy and other issues (think CATO institute, for instance).

As much as I prefer the anarchist demand for free movement in general over the much more anemic right wing libertarian concerns over rights, searches, paid for tickets and such, it would be interesting to see one of them arguing with these various reactionaries that have been trotted forward in what are supposed to pass for "all things considered". I can just hear them now: "When I buy a ticket from Southwest Airlines, I am entering into a contract with the airline, not with Big Brother, so what right do you have to make me go through the scanner?! It's the airlines job to deal with safety, not the government's!" I probably ought to have written that in all caps to make it a proper tribute.

Instead, what we have seen, it seems to me, amongst everyone in general is this same old familiar kissing cousins argument that, since neither one deviates from the overall agenda of the ruling class for more controls on movement, naturally leads to conclusions with which the elite is quite comfortable. On the reactionary end we have people demanding exemptions for themselves (or, most often, for their poor grandmothers) from controls on movement because, well, they don't think they look like terrorists (i.e, the "Israeli style" being talked about). I call this the racist argument. On the other hand, unfortunately, we have the liberal argument, namely that everyone ought to face an egalitarian exposure to the naked scanners in exchange for desiring to travel. I suppose this is the "pay the devil his due" argument.

Both these arguments seem eerily familiar to me, I suppose, because of the analysis, investigations and interventions that PCWC did into the anti-speed camera movement here in Arizona over the last couple years. Now, sadly, that movement has turned away from what was once a pretty successful, creative and broadly supported direct action and political theater campaign that had the camera companies and polticians on the run. Unable to escape the white supremacist assumptions that underlay its politics (and despite the best efforts of some to prod it in new directions that challenged those contradictions), it mutated into a zombified, dead, boring and failed electoral movement which eventually had the main organizers in the right wing of the movement (avowed libertarians, many of them) lining up with the likes of Sheriff Joe Arpaio and State Senator Russell Pearce in a truly desperate and pathetic plea to whiteness.

As predicted by its critics on this site, the movement, having failed to reconcile those internal contradictions, eventually fully succumbed to the gravity of white supremacy, in effect demanding free movement for whites but regulated movement for "illegals" in a mish mash politics that couldn't be clearly articulated and didn't even make sense to most whites, who were too afraid of Mexican illegal drivers on their streets to see the encroaching police state steadily encircling them as well. So, unable or unwilling to choose the side of liberty on this crucial question of free movement for everyone and rejecting the direct action strategy for electoralism, the movement has gone down to defeat after defeat.

Anyhow, as I was with the speed camera stuff, I have lately been again looking for new ways of considering the question of movement with regard to the TSA debate. So, as you can imagine, I was quite happy when I stumbled upon this video below, in which James C. Scott, Yale University Professor, discusses his book "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia". The one thing that struck me in particular, in light of the TSA discussion, is his citation within those indigenous peoples that have resisted incorporation into the state a general tendency to block the abiding drive of the state to attempt control movement. As Scott says, "The state is the enemy of people who want to move around".

But Scott goes further, pointing out firstly that the hill peoples he studies not only cultivate an antagonistic relationship to the demands of the state for control of their movement, but that their movement itself is in fact a result of having resisted and escaped slavery in previous or nearby civilizations. In this sense, their demand for mobility is central to their resisting the imposition of slavery. With a right wing libertarian movement always going on and on about slavery and the NWO, you would think this argument would have some purchase and perhaps point at a way out of the TSA dialectic that defies rather than reinforces the arguments for increased state regulation of movement.

Lately I've been reading Alex Butterworth's "The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents" and that has reinforced for me the importance of free movement in our own anarchist history. Echoing a point I've noticed in other recent books I've read, such as "Under Three Flags: Anarchism And The Anti-Colonial Imagination" by Benedict Anderson or even John W F Dulles' "Anarchists and Communists in Brazil , 1900-1935", anarchists and anarchism (and, even national liberation struggles, as Anderson points out) have benefited from the mobility of 19th century anarchists, coerced as it sometimes might have been.

Of course, always caught between the home state's desire to be rid of a problem and the intention of other states, like Britain, to aid their enemies' revolutionaries ("Britain: friend of every revolution but it's own" went the old saying), that movement of anarchist revolutionaries served as a mixing pot of ideas and eventually became quite a threat to the established order of its day. Think Bakunin and Kropotkin in Switzerland, for example, or the Communards in London. Think France for Sabate. And on and on. Often even the state's deportations came back to haunt them, as we learn from Louise Michel's study of the native Kanaks on the prison island of New Caledonia, and the much-storied way she helped them cut the telegraph lines from the island to the home country. We see the same phenomenon on display in Dulles's book, with Italian anarchists, deported after the revolutionary upsurges of the 19th century playing crucial roles in the class war in Brazil. In fact Brazil later reported many Italian anarchists back to Europe, sending the struggle full circle.

Returning to Scott, note as well his highlighting of both settlerism and what he calls "distance demolishing technologies" (roads, communications, etc) as further weapons in the state's attack on free movement and, essentially, human liberty. Settlerism, the usually state-supported invasion of a foreign population into indigenous lands, assaulter of autonomous ways of living and resistant cultures (George Washington, surveyor, imperialist and American hero, was known as "Town Destroyer" by the Iroquois, for instance), remains a problem with which we in the Southwest are quite familiar. But consider that in the case of the TSA, the distance demolishing technology is not in fact the body scanner, but actually the airplane. Is it the airplane itself rather than, or in combination with, the body scanner that serves as the attack on our free movement? Worth thinking about, but I imagine Scott would answer in the affirmative.

So, continuing to move on from right wing libertarians then, I think these arguments that Scott makes are ones that anarchists are quite well-prepared to make and would bring a lot to the discussion raging on cable news channels for the last week (although overshadowed now by Wikileaks and Julian Assange's catch-me-if-you-can race with Interpol, though the similarities are perhaps more than many would like to admit). Certainly, if these instead are our arguments, they bring more to the table than the rightwing libertarians' sad economism, which only seeks to substitute the bean-counting dictatorship of capital for the all-seeing Big Brother state.

After all, why ought any of us have any more confidence in Google to regulate our movement than the state? As if they were ever enemies to be played off each other. Obviously our argument is a rejection of both. A true defense of free movement, then, both as the hallmark of a free people -- as a necessary condition of freedom -- as well as, importantly, a mode of getting free, can threaten to break through the narrow debate now leading us, state and capital hand in hand as usual, towards more regulation, more tabulation and, certainly, more tyranny.

Resistance to SB1070 that you may have missed.

One of the problems with the overwhelmingly leftist orientation of the anti-SB1070 rally today, as evidenced by the seemingly unending admonitions to register to vote (for Democrats), is that it tends to obscure potential fractures and fissures on what may appear to be unanimity on the right with regard to the bill.

If you know anything about PCWC these days, it's probably that we look precisely for these kinds of potential openings in movements so that we can force open a space for more libertarian (in the traditional anarchist and anti-capitalist sense of the word) organizing, especially if we can encourage the development of contradictions that will cause a falling out on one side or another of white supremacy, and particularly amongst white movements on top of that. In our evaluation, it is the cross-class alliance of white supremacy that screws up what might otherwise be a revolutionary working class solidarity that would allow the overthrow of the capitalist state.

Anyhow, the events of the last few days have been momentous indeed, but in the rush of media attention and, as I mentioned before, due to the overwhelmingly leftist reformist orientation of the anti-SB1070 movement leadership (since they control the bulk of the message -- often with Stalinist like precision), some smaller actions have been overlooked. Here I will highlight two of them.

The first is of someone known to PCWC, and with whom we have interacted very cordially at a variety of our events, but who I won't identify since I don't know if he wants to be named. Regular attendees of PCWC actions and events will probably know him. The video linked below, taken by someone in the counter-protest on Friday, shows this person bravely moving into the reactionary crowd and calling them out vigorously for their support of the bill. In true fanatical fashion, this man begins yelling forcefully "This bill is the mark of the beast!", "Prepare for the New World Order!" and "Who would Jesus hate?!".



This is important for a few reasons. One, it comes at the right reactionaries on terrain that they are familiar with. This is something that we, as anarchists are not able to do anywhere near as effectively. Two, it opens a front on the reactionaries from their rear, hitting them in a way and from a direction that they do not expect. Three, it comes as a heartfelt and genuine defense of the true values professed by the libertarian and even Christian right, while recognizing the general tendency not to live up to them in any meaningful way.

In my opinion the disconnect that is being called out between professed Christianity and actual results derives from their adherence to white supremacist values. They defend their cross-class alliance of whiteness over their professed values of Christian love for their brother and sister, effectively. And, probably most importantly, the charges made in the video demands accountability and asserts an either/or dichotomy that attempts to erase middle ground, asserting, will you be Christian or will you hate? Will you be Christian or will you support the "mark of the beast"? This is very important because to oppose the bill in many ways contains within it the potentiality of refusing the alliance of whiteness. PCWC has spent quite a lot of effort encouraging this sort of thing and I welcome it and support it. Cheers for this revolt!

The second video is one published by Shelton at 4409. Shelton is perhaps best known amongst anarchists for his work around speed cameras. We have engaged on this front several times in the last year, encouraging their work but also being critical of pointing out what we perceive to be the unconscious white supremacist undercurrents of their strategy.

I want to be clear, this is not to say that we consider Shelton a white supremacist or anything of the sort. Even though he opposes what he calls "amnesty" for the undocumented, we believe that the racism inherent in the argument he makes is not conscious or malicious: it is the sort of white supremacy that underlies most of the assumptions that underpin white organizing in general, whether of the left or right. The flaw is not his in particular and it is important to separate it from the kind of overt racist strategy that we see being pursued by those who support the bill.

And, indeed, the arguments that Shelton has made in the past against the bill are generally pretty good although, as with the anti-SB1070 current on the left, he suffers the same problem of demanding increased policing at the border. On the left, this manifests in a demand for reform that included heightened border patrol enforcement at la linea itself. This is important for a lot of reasons, but not least of all because it sacrifices the lives of people that live on the border, specifically but not limited to the Tohono O'odham people, whose land down south is bisected by the border and who have an inherent right of travel across it. This right is currently under heavy assault by the very forces that many opponents of the bill propose to "secure" the border.

On the right the opposition to SB1070 is weakened by a similar assertion that if policing at the border were increased, then there would be less need for internal surveillance and checks on movement. Indeed, this is also the critical flaw in the libertarian/constitutionalist opposition to internal border patrol checkpoints. You can see how, ironically, these two positions, though from opposite poles of the political spectrum, suffer from the same problem. The fact is, militarization of the border must be separated from the discussion of SB1070 (and, of course, it must be opposed). If not, it remains a devil's bargain that sells some out in the name of defending others. That's not solidarity.

So, in that context, consider Shelton's interesting new video, in which he goes to the state capitol and confronts legislators on the bill and its effects. Aside from its entertaining nature, it is really informative about the kinds of opposition to this bill that could -- and sometimes does -- spread from the right. This is a tendency that I continue to believe is worth engaging with and I would be very interested in developing some sort of way of further fleshing out common ground for critical solidarity with elements of this type that are interested in challenging the bill and constraints on free movement generally (the position we defend). Of course, in the end, we will not accept any increased policing at the border because we believe in free movement for all. However, that in my opinion does not preclude the increasing investigation of points of common struggle within this milieu.

High Noon is Too Late for Tea: Seeking Ways to Engage and Oppose the Tea Party Movement

It's been quite interesting to see the reactionary right go haywire over the recent call to "crash the tea parties". Reading their blogs, one can literally track the echo chamber effect in real time. One wing nut on the information superhighway characterizes the anarchists without proof as stooges for the Feds (the standard accusation from these folks) and before you know it the next kook is citing the first kook as proof.

For the Truthers in the movement in particular, the standard frame through which they see the world goes like this: the CIA/Feds manipulate movements that aren't "awake" (a term that refers to everyone outside that wing of the Tea Party movement). This skepticism of movements stems in part from their inherently conservative nature. They distrust peoples movements that tend to lead to generally progressive results. Naturally, then, in their eyes such movements must be run by outside paymasters. They are composed of poor fools who don't know they are being used (at best) if not outright paid thugs. Throw in a healthy dose of internets and capital letters and -- boom! -- the anarchists have transformed into a front for the CIA! Infoshop is an organization run by the NWO! Reality be damned!

If the Tea Party people could slow their roll for a minute, I think they would find a lot to learn from this exercise in self-delusion. But for them the ideology, so drenched in American patriotic mythology, trumps the reality. Because of this, a "teachable moment", so to say, is unlikely. So, instead, let's think about what we as anarchists can learn from the call and the reaction.

The first thing that occurs to me is the general wishy-washiness of the call put out on Infoshop. It really doesn't call for much. Indeed, some on the right have found it quite confusing. One criticism made frequently on right wing message boards and blogs that I think is quite prescient is the questioning of how anarchists can come out in defense of government. This is a fair point. Still, calling for the defense of social programs as a bulwark against austerity and direct attack by the capitalists is not necessarily a contradiction. For anarchists it's always been more about the how than the nature of the concession exacted from the elite. After all, we're revolutionaries not reformists. The goal, as always, is the generalization of the attack until a broad insurrection rises to destroy Capital and the State. The struggle is the means to that end.

However, when framed as an attempt to move the Tea Party to the left, it certainly starts to enter the dangerous waters of leftist defense of the State for its own sake. This is clearly not an anarchist position. Indeed, it's not clear at all how, as the call out suggests, a more leftist Tea Party (or Tea Partiers of a more leftist persuasion) would be any better. Are we calling them to support Obama? To become dissident Democrats? To become socialists? What exactly would moving them to the left mean and, more importantly, what would it mean for anarchists and the prospects for revolution? This relationship -- one of persuading Tea Partiers to move leftward -- fails to define anarchists as anything other than extreme liberals and is problematic to say the least. In this case we are nothing but the shepherds of the social welfare state, herding those who wander from the herd to its defense. People on the right are correct to call the piece out on this hypocrisy.

Next, I think that while the very short article is correct to recognize a shift towards fascism in some (increasingly dominant) tendencies within the Tea Party movement, its analysis is in the end quite unsophisticated. For instance, the piece really fails to recognize contradictions within the movement that can be exploited, not to move it to the left, but to divide it, neutralize it and, hopefully, to cause a shaking out of its more truly libertarian elements towards advancing the attack on Capitalism and State. That is, framed correctly, it is possible to intervene in this movement in order to give encouragement to the libertarian and working class elements within it so that they will break with the overall fascist tendency, the reactionary free market ideology and the infantile patriotism. I'll get back to this with some examples from Phoenix Class War Council's organizing here in Phoenix.

But as an aside, before I move on, I do think it's interesting and quite embarrassing for the Tea Partiers that several, much longer and much more critical essays (that deal with the question in depth), have passed them by entirely. It seems that this tiny little essay was just the right dimensions to be digestible by their very limited critical capacities. Likewise, it was probably just simple enough for the big money interests to blast it out like a megaphone to be consumed by the more conspiratorial and hardcore conservative reactionary elements of the movement.

Of course, being generally unaware of the recuperation of their own movement by big money interests because of the weaknesses in their own pro-Capital ideology (the class war equivalent of "Yes, sir, may I have another?"), Tea Partiers have been unable to interact meaningfully outside of the narrow script being written for them by the likes of long-time GOP operative Grover Norquist. Indeed, framed as it is between the "austerity for you, bailouts for us" politics of Obama's banker buddies and the white free marketeers of the Republican "drown big government in the bathtub" cadres, the capitalist class as a whole must be laughing its collective ass off over gold-flaked martinis considering the dialectical outcome of that lovefest of reactionary kissing cousins.

As it is, the Tea Party is being used as a hammer to attack the last remaining source of middle class wages in the US -- the state bureaucracy. The hypocrisy of blue hairs on Medicare and Social Security ranting against "socialism", or military families on government pensions and Veterans Administration health care screaming about "Obamacare" is certainly good for a hearty belly laugh. But the sad truth is teachers, municipal workers and the rest, among the last vestiges of the albeit quite flawed union organizations in the US, are now taking the brunt of the final assault on what remains of concessions extracted from the capitalists by the working class. Such past attacks on Capital, however, having been corrupted by the political relationship of white supremacy, never included everyone, and large populations were left out or pushed out of the deal. And, white supremacy being a relationship to Capital that exists at Capital's convenience, and now having dismantled the heart of organized workers in Detroit (to the cheers of much of the white working and middle class), the capitalists are now moving in for the kill. The Tea Party (having refused solidarity as a weapon), armed now only with its self-hating free market fantasies, is the eager accomplice to the murder, witting or not.

Of course, as anarchists we should defend neither the state bureaucracy nor bloated leftist unions in a knee-jerk fashion. Still, we are left with the fact that the attack on the formally organized wing of the working class has reached levels unprecedented in most Americans' lifetimes. Something fundamental has changed in the relationship between capital and the working and middle class. The Tea Party emerges from this new cocktail. They seek to reassert what they perceive to be a looming collapse of the deal of white supremacy. But is the deal still to be had?

When considering this question, the libertarians within the movement should not be confused with the conservative, fascist wing. The libertarians are attracted by ideology, but they are not the knife's edge in this fight. We share some key things in common with them and the Tea Party is not necessarily a happy home for them. Like the relationship between anarchists and communists, the one between libertarians and conservatives is not as seamless as outsiders might otherwise believe. In fact, they are a point of potential conflict because their overall politics do not fit well within the overall goals of the movement, and the conservative leaderhip knows it. Hence their vigorous push to consolidate control and marginalize libertarian elements.

In PCWC lingo, this conflict is a site of potential "fractures and fissures". That is, putting pressure on this contradiction can potentially cause a split, a falling out or a "coming to Jesus" moment. It can also force one element to stay true to its stated ideology over otherwise reactionary political tendencies. This is something to keep in mind and it points to a fourth way to engage the Tea Party movement beyond either ignoring them, attempting to move them to the left or outright unconditional opposition.

Let me give an example of what I mean. When PCWC was organizing the Inglourious Basterds Bloc to confront the National Socialist Movement, we reached out to libertarians on the right. In Arizona, the libertarian tendency is probably the largest dissident faction in politics. So, in our call to action, which was posted to the largest libertarian news site in the state and got a lot of play in local media, we addressed a particular section to them:

We at PCWC also want to extend a particular invitation to our friends in the Libertarian movement. Because of your vigorous protests at Obama's recent speech, you have been painted as racist. We know that you feel this is unfair. You see yourselves as protesting this country's turn towards fascism. We sympathize with this argument and are ourselves no fans of the Obama administration. However, we want to point out that unlike some of your past protests, the NSM rally offers you the perfect opportunity to make known your opposition to fascism in an unambiguous way. We hope you come to the event.

Our intent here was to call the libertarians in Arizona, who had been flirting with anti-immigration positions for quite a while, to choose whether they were going to act on their alleged opposition to fascism or whether they were going to defend the Nazis. Up to this time, large parts of the libertarian movement in the state had flirted, to say the least, with a kind of anti-immigrant politics that emerged mostly from their unconscious defense of whiteness. At best, they had stood by without speaking up against the crack down on immigrants and brown people generally.

If you know anything about libertarianism as an ideology, whether right or left, a firm commitment to free movement comprises a core tenet. Our sense, through careful analysis of the anti-immigration movement, was that the libertarian wing was uncomfortable to say the least with the relationship. It was more a politics of default, which is what whiteness is in many ways. We also recognized that at the heart of the conservative reactionary wing of even the anti-immigrant front is a pretension to libertarian, constitutionalist values. Values that are almost never lived up to when they come in conflict with whiteness. So, we said to libertarians: will you defend your rhetoric or your whiteness? Will you stand up against fascism or find yourself in the camp of the NSM? If you stand today against fascism we will stand along side you. It's important to note here that such calls were not disingenuous. We meant it.

In this sense, we hoped to appeal to the better nature of the libertarians and to weaken the broader reactionary current. This was in the context of several other interventions into movements in which they participate. And libertarians did the right thing and came out. Interestingly, a week following our triumphant victory against the NSM, the "mainstream" anti-immigrant movement "Save Our State" had a rally. The NSM, who had showed up without challenge many times before to these events, was attacked physically and driven out by organizers. The NSM are racists, they claimed, and had no place at the SOS event. Split accomplished. NSM out maneuvered. The right had attacked the right and the NSM had been denied future access to fertile grounds for organizing. And libertarians had taken a consistent position against white supremacy.

Later, libertarians started to turn out for pro-migrant events. Their politics are now more consistent and a facet of the white reaction has been weakened. A few months after Inglourious Basterds Bloc, there has been a bit of a revolt in the Republican party against the main pusher in the Senate of anti-immigrant legislation. The most prominent face of libertarianism in the state has come out against a new anti-immigration law because it opens the door to Real ID controls on movement.

Interviewed by local New Times writer Stephen Lemons, he said: "This is the police state in immigration camouflage. You want to know how that Nazi Germany [stuff] happens? This is how it happens." Lemons continued, writing, "Hancock observed that the immigration issue often becomes a Trojan horse for civil liberties, with people willing to give up their rights in exchange for ridding their community of illegal immigrants. He called Russell Pearce a 'Judas goat,' leading ordinary citizens 'to the slaughter.'" This in particular was a point we had hit hard on in the past.

In essence what they had done was choose a consistent position over their alliance to whiteness. And we welcome it. This was possible because, among other things, we recognized a contradiction within their position, thought about their politics and their relations to others, and engaged them. We pushed on a contradiction, held them to their rhetoric and offered an either/or choice: defend the NSM or defend migrants. What will it be? We were both vocal and unequivocal in our position. We were fanatical: free movement for all people without compromise. It's worth noting that since being booted from the SOS event, the NSM has not shown its face -- even to counter protest at immigration rallies.

So, I reference this one particular incidence of the "fissures and fractures" practice we have been using as a potential fourth way to engage the Tea Party. I could list others. But the essence of the strategy is this: find the contradictions within it and push on them; try to give elements in the movement either/or choices; call them on their hypocrisies; and, most importantly, find elements within them to whom sympathetic arguments can be made. These elements, if approached honestly and directly, can pick up your criticisms and make them their own.

Because, when facing your opponent, it's not always necessary to defeat them outright through head on attack. And persuasion of the broad reactionary current is generally impossible. However, you can, especially when you're a minority movement, look to split them and see what the political fallout is. In our experience at PCWC, the result tends to change political relationships in some interesting ways, remaking the field of battle and providing for new opportunities for anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist politics that weren't possible before.

We find this is particularly the case with the context of white supremacy, which is in fact a political relation that tends to trump all others. In the case of those who advocate the free market, history shows to what extent their denunciations of social programs is in fact belied by their reliance on the social program of whiteness, which has its roots in settlerism, slavery and imperialism and has its most prominent manifestation domestically nowadays in the the prisons and the various police departments. Indeed, the Tea Party's demand for the dismantlement of the welfare state, framed as it is under non-revolutionary pro-capitalist conditions, is in fact a demand made against what they believe to be the improper redistributive nature of taxation and the welfare state; that is, the welfare state, they think, takes wealth from those who "earn it" (which we understand to mean whites) and gives it to those who do not (everyone else). They of course reject this characterization, but that in my opinion doesn't make it less true.

It is the contradiction of white supremacy that reveals the lie behind the working class revolt elements within the Tea Party. It is also what will in the end deny them anything more than the pathetic privileges of white supremacy at the end of the day. Such a limited vision is anything but revolutionary to be sure. And, by reinforcing white supremacy, it does nothing to go after the fatcats that many of the Tea Party members are legitimately angry at. Notice the disappearance of anti-bailout rhetoric from the movement.

By finding ways in which this contradiction can fall out one way or the other, new relations by definition become possible. Previously contradictory relations sort themselves out. Further, by taking a revolutionary anarchist position against both the state in general (but against the attack by the capitalists on its few remaining positive redistributive tendencies), and also against white supremacy, the issue becomes framed in a way that is likely to drive the conservative element batshit insane. And because of the fundamental nature of white supremacy to maintaining American capitalism, the opportunities for revolution become enhanced considerably.

The goal is not to build revolutionary alliances with the libertarian right. Such a thing isn't possible. It is to undermine the broader opposition, to give space and encouragement to a dissident faction with which some common ground exists (itself within a larger reactionary movement), to reveal the true nature of that movement, and, in our case, to weaken white supremacy in order to open up the potential for a broader revolt against capitalism and the state.

Of course, such interventions, however useful, only buy time and opportunity. But once that opportunity comes knocking, you need to have something there as an alternative. That means events that can be attended. Actions that can be pointed to and that can inspire. Decent theory that can explain the true cause of the crisis. Solidarity that can be delivered. And allies in the broader struggle. For white people, what this means is following the decades old admonishment from Malcolm X: it is our obligation to confront white supremacy within the white communities from which we come. Reaching out, over, behind and around reactionary movements to engage white people in discussion of anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and anti-racist ideas is vital. In many ways, we share potential constituencies.

Capitalism is in collapse. The state is anemic. Traditional reactionary currents are in flux. If we lose this one, it's on us.

Considering the immigrant crackdown in the context of the Chinese Exclusion Act

The other day I revisited a chapter in Christian Parenti's excellent book "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror". The cause of my return was the recent awakening of the local right libertarian movement to the connection between the demand for the policing of immigrants and the steady march of the police state in general. Local anti-immigrant hothead and state Senator Russell Pearce has recently come under fire from within the Right for an anti-immigrant bill that libertarians believe, with good justification, will open the door to the imposition of the Real ID or similar national ID card.

Parenti's book, a good read overall, has a truly amazing chapter on the relation between the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act and other similar laws and the rise of the first ID cards (the chapter can be read online for free). Likewise, it goes into a good amount of detail about the ingenious ways that Chinese immigrants developed for resisting and overcoming increasingly onerous State regulation of their movements and relations. Forgery, bribery, flaunting of the law, lying, reliance on familial relations, mass resistance and refusal -- all of these and more constituted the tool box from which Chinese immigrants drew upon in their fight to define for themselves the terms of their lives in the land of the Flower Flag Country.

The story parallels so precisely the situation here in Arizona that the chapter ought to be required reading for anyone organizing against controls on movement, not least of all right libertarians interested in understanding the roots of the national ID card and the ever-present excuse of policing people of color that makes it possible. Parenti writes, "Ultimately Chinese exclusion was the first campaign of mass identification and registration of a civilian population by the US federal government. Conversely, the paper sons industry was the first largest informal anti-surveillance movement in US history."

So, the awakening on the right to this scam is a very important development. We at PCWC have engaged that movement several times over the question, what we see as the contradiction between the demand by the Right for a police regime for immigrants at the same time it demands immunity for itself and declaims the increasing infringement by the state on their own freedoms. This contradiction stands in stark relief when that same movement insists that the demands it makes -- against all evidence -- are somehow not racist. Being interested in contradictions, PCWC has focused on revealing this incongruity and pointing out that, contrary to what many on the Right say, it is in fact the latent white supremacist immunity from policing that is the hidden solution to the conundrum.

To us it's obvious: one can't support the expansion of police power in one sector without expecting it to expand generally. The support by the white population for increasing controls on immigrants, from eVerify to the border wall, has allowed the State the cover it needed to vastly expand the overall system of policing. Now, these controls are being generalized in the forms of freeway speed cameras, national ID cards, national police powers for local cops, internal checkpoints, etc. Lacking an analysis of white supremacy and its affect on the working class (and similarly without a true understanding of class), libertarians have had a hard time recognizing this contradiction.

The white supremacist influence on their politics blinded libertarians on the Right to the encroaching police state under their very nose. They assumed -- perhaps only unconsciously in the case of many -- that, as whites tend to be generally, they would be exempted from the unblinking gaze of the surveillance state as its domain grew. Indeed, as we have analyzed here in the past, some of their attempted resistance to enhanced policing, because it is perverted by the system of white supremacy, has indeed sought precisely to undermine the broadening of the police apparatus and technology only to demand a return to older methods that tended to land disproportionately on people of color. Not very libertarian!

That is, their fight uses the false cover of a fight against tyranny to obscure what is in reality a demand for a "get out of jail free card" from a system that they hope will focus on people of color specifically and leave them, the "good citizens" that "don't break the law" alone. For example, the dominant tendency within the fight against freeway cameras reflects this tendency, since it demands the removal of a relatively "democratic" policing system (in the sense that it tickets anyone who goes over the limit regardless of race) and its replacement with more human police who will, naturally, tend to reflect the general anti-people of color biases that dominate in other spheres. Of course, some in the struggle against surveillance have dissented, most notably the Santas who disabled speed and red light cameras in December 2008. Overall, however, their position was an extreme minority at the time.

The dominant dialog on the Right with regard to the question of immigration is of course problematic not just because it allows the unobstructed -- even welcomed -- advance of the police state, but also because strategically this blind spot undermines class unity by turning one section of the working class into the complicit police officer and jailer of another section. Under these conditions the kind of unity that is required to project a real working class power against Capital becomes impossible. The white part of the working class, then, is in many ways operating within a cross-class alliance with the capitalists, serving the function of a hammer on people who should naturally be their comrades in struggle.

What's important is not just the way that the ruling class exploits or encourages this backstabbing, but also the way that white workers demand the protection of the nanny state's policing apparatus in order to preserve their privileged status in the workplace and other areas. This should be noted because it reveals the common cause of white workers and the capitalist elite. For instance, in the case of Chinese exclusion white workers wanted regulation of the workforce in their favor and the ruling class wanted a timid, marginalized and exploitable foreign labor pool. The two complemented each other and form, in the case of the white working class, a kind of white welfare system, guaranteeing higher wages and other social benefits in exchange for loyalty to the cross-class alliance of whiteness.

So the realization amongst some in the libertarian Right milieu of the true nature of the anti-immigrant agenda -- at least as far as the policing angle goes -- is a very positive development. They may reject the point I am going to make next, but I don't think that makes it less true. When libertarians support resistance to the application of special police powers over immigrants (and thus people of color in general) by seeing within that attack an assault on themselves as well, they are defying the traditional political bonds of whiteness. And, in doing so, they open the way for broader struggle that can further bring the attack on capitalism and the state.