or,
"Left is Right and Right is Wrong
Better decide which side you're on"
- Tom Robinson Band

* * *

I grew up under two dictatorships, and I was actively involved in the clandestine resistance to both:
- one was a military dictatorship operated by a Right-wing Junta installed by the US Pentagon in Athens, Greece;
- the other was a dictatorship operated by the Church, installed by the
UK/US in agreement with the Soviet Union. It was maintained in power by
the local Communist Party. This dictatorship was on the island of
Cyprus, an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" located in the Eastern
Mediterranean region of the Muddled East.

The fake left, pseudo-socialist forces that had lent their political
power to the dictatorship in the years of my youth, were led by a party
named Akel. It was the largest per capita "communist" party in any
country in the world outside of the Soviet Union. (For many years in
the Left the terminology was to designate such parties was "the local
Moscow line party, or CP".)

I know first hand the feelings of treachery, betrayal, mindfuck and
authoritarian distortion, manipulation and ignorance which are
generated by the actions of forces and individuals disguised as
"Socialist", who bring on far more death, misery and suffering to
people than some outright (and honest) Right-wing dictatorships can
cause.

Fake leftist propaganda and fake leftist terminology dominated the
political consciousness of the population all throughout those years.
Nationalism and localism (artificial nation-building campaigns) were
couched in slogans of "internationalist solidarity against
nationalism". Racism, sexism and homophobia were institutionalized
forms of oppression everywhere in the country, and they were promoted
through "progressive" slogans of "resistance to fascism". Every single
person who disagreed with the party or with the Church dictatorship
that it supported was branded a "fascist", a "cia agent", an "extreme
Right winger". I grew up breathing and swallowing those accusations
hurled against me, my family, my comrades and friends on a daily basis.

I survived torture of various "creative" flavours at the hands of some
of these "leftist liberators", including beatings with fists, boots and
rifle butts, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, forced exercise in
suffocating heat conditions, I was made to do push-ups with my face in
piles of rotting excrement in which were writhing billions of maggots
reeking with ammonia, I was forced to crawl on my arms belly-down
through barbed wire and broken glass, and to "dance" with a bayonette
balanced with its tip down embedded in the center of my palm. Probably
one of the "best of the best" torture practices (at least among the
ones I can remember) that these "socialist defenders of humanity"
engaged in was the "safety-pin game". The sharp metal branch of the
safety pin is pressed in and then released like a spring so that the
tip hits the victim on the nose. Repeatedly. After several hundred of
these nerve-jarring blows, waves of sensory distortions and
hallucinations set in and it becomes impossible to stand up. I remember
phasing in and out of the here and now as my face was on fire with
pain, unable to see from the tears and the swelling in my eyes, while
others around me collapsed like empty sacks, thinking to myself, wow,
do they really believe that they're revolutionary Leftists and
Christians? How did they become like this?

My entire world was defined and controlled by these people. To the
point where I often came to feeling and thinking that everything,
everything where the struggle for liberty and equality are concerned,
is controlled, betrayed, rotten, a lie. All a Big Lie.

I was wrong.

I 'm grateful that I was blessed in my life to encounter true
Socialists, Communists and Anarchists, Feminists, Greens, Autonomists,
who (regardless of the fact that some of them don't even use those
words to describe themselves) are motivated by true feelings of love,
by true and genuine compassion, and embody real dignity and respect for
all living beings. They are honest, democratic, and truly embody the
best of the best of the political ideologies and practices of the
personal, social and spiritual liberation movement.

Personal dignity and consistency is not enough though, to make a
movement's ideology and praxis valid. The culture of liberation is
important, and indispensable. Personal responsibility and
accountability are "sine qua non" elements for building networks of
comrades who can co-operate and able to go together in the right
direction. But there's science required, as well. And spirit.

When Che Guevara introduced feminist principles to Third World guerilla
fighters there was a break of continuity in the rigidified concepts of
"struggle" which revolutionized the revolutionary process.

When the Weather Underground re-invented armed struggle so as to be
centered on using lethal force without killing anyone, there was a
moral ascendancy gained for the liberation movement and a new kind of
Path created for revolutionaries which is still valid more than forty
years later. Additionally, when the Weather Underground and its allied
above-ground mass-movement entities variously labeled as Yippies, etc,
incorporated the Psychedelic experience within the individual and group
process of liberation, they helped to resurrect and sculpt an ancient
form of worship, personal growth, and medicine into a modern tool for
social progress and liberation. Plus, for use as an instrument for
navigating the revolutionary movement.

When Lenin articulated the basics of Direct Democracy as vital and
obligatory elements interwoven within Revolutionary Socialism there was
for the first time a clarification of the difference between democracy
of the people as opposed to Corporate "democracy" of the capitalist
class. He stated that in order for the State to be abolished it can not
be simply seized and used as is, or "declared abolished"; it must be
"smashed and broken up" in order to be transcended, in concurrence with
the following requirements:
- abolition of the standing army (this includes police and all other
special armed bodies of suppression), and its replacement by the armed
people;
- all officials and representatives to be elected and subject to recall;
- the abolition of all representation allowances, and of all monetary
privileges to officials, the reduction of the remuneration of all
servants of the state to the level of "working people's wages";
- the rotation of duties so that administration, control, accounting,
etc. can be exercised by each and every member of society, both at the
workplace and in the civic arena;
- "expropriation of the expropriators", ie the transformation of
capitalist private ownership of the means of production, of social and
natural resources, into social ownership, commonly shared by all, owned
and administered together by all.

It is in this sense, he wrote, that scientific socialism sees the
revolutionary process as an evolutionary development through which the
armed, self-organized people can be self-governed, and it is in this
sense, that the State "begins to wither away. Instead of the special
institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the
chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfil
all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are
performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the
existence of this power." [From "The State and Revolution"; please
"Related Readings" below.]

Deep-Ecology (radical Green) versions of that form of Direct Democracy
are practiced today by the Zapatista communities in all the liberated
zones where the forces of Empire can not reach.

The process of social change, whether by reform or revolution, is often
driven by blind and unconscious social and personal forces. It's only
when we organize ourselves together on the basis of shared values,
principles of association and co-operation, and armed with moral
integrity and political clarity that our motion actually generates any
movement forward. When political praxis is guided by theory and
nurtured with love and in tune with spirit, we experience true
liberation in the process, but we also build something constructive for
ourselves and for the generations to follow. Otherwise, what do, all
the struggles in which we engage, all the sacrifices either end up for
nothing, or worse (and more commonly) , become the vehicles for
manipulators, opportunists and authoritarians to install new forms of
oppression, new forms of exploitation, suffering, misery, poverty and
war. And that is where the fake left, the pseudo-socialists, the
stalinist, authoritarian forces become relevant.

In relation to the existence and form of the State, in particular, Marx had that same insight when he wrote that:
"Originating from the Middle Ages, there developed in the 19th century
"the centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing
army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature." With the
development of class antagonisms between capital and labor, "state
power assumed more and more the character of a public force organized
for the suppression of the working class, of a machine of class rule.
After every revolution, which marks an advance in the class struggle,
the purely coercive character of the state power stands out in bolder
and bolder relief." After the revolution of 1848-49, state power became
"the national war instruments of capital against labor". [from "The
Civil War in France"; please see "Related Readings" below.]

In order to break the vicious cycle of a series of purely coercive
States succeeding one another after popular revolutions and/or waves of
reform extending ad nauseum into the long road of history in a
parasitic association with Corporate Capital - with which they fuse,
nowadays, into a global Imperium - Consciousness, in all of its
dimensions, needs to be part and parcel of every effort of the
resistance. It needs to be built into every feature of the
pro-democracy movement, needs to be guiding every aspect of the
Socialist project. Otherwise, the Empire will simply continue to unfold
according to the Project for a New American Century ...with the only
hope remaining that perhaps someday it might be confronted by Duck
Dodgers in the 24th Century.

Regardless of whether we "believe in" gravity or not, it continues to
act upon all bodies despite our faith, despite our understanding, our
science and technology. In fact, in terms of gravity, our science and
technology are nothing other than complicated and - sometimes abstract,
sometimes concrete - ways of expressing exactly that: that gravity
exists and acts as a force per se, entirely independent of how it is
reflected by awareness or consciousness. Scientific development occurs
when gravity is accepted as prime quality of existence, built into the
geometry of the Universe. From that, arises all gravity-related
technology. Meaningful reflections of this render consciousness into
Consciousness.

Similarly, one of the most stupendous discoveries of science in regard
to what determines and shapes the landscape of social struggle and
politics is articulated by Karl Marx in these words:
"The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that
the production of the means to support human life and, next to
production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social
structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the
manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes
or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and
how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final
causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be
sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal
truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and
exchange." [From "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific".]

It's the foundation of all theory and praxis within the context of
Scientific Socialism. It's the recognition that regardless of whether
we "believe in" production or not, or in the accumulation of labor
congealed into machines, tools, merchandise and products, it continues
to take place despite our faith, despite our understanding, our
ideologies. In fact, in terms of production, our political science and
ideologies are nothing other than complicated and - sometimes abstract,
sometimes concrete - ways of expressing exactly that: that production,
the accumulation of labor with its associated modes of production,
exists and acts as a force per se, entirely independent of whether it
is reflected by awareness or consciousness. Scientific development or
social progress occurs when this is accepted as a prime quality of
social existence, built into the geometry of human reality. From that,
arises all political ideology. Meaningful reflections of this render
consciousness into Consciousness.

Our political landscape is determined by the modes of production and by
the relations of groups of people who are defined as "classes"
according to the role of each group in the production and distribution
process. Regardless of whether one "believes in" Socialism or not,
Socialism itself can only be actualized to the degree that political
action is guided by Consciousness that is in harmony with the
development of the forces of production and which aims to a resolvement
of the class conflict which is now embedded in Capitalism, ie, the fact
that while production is an organized collective process carried out by
the co-operation of millions of people together on a daily basis, the
fruits of our labor are stolen at the point of production and sold back
to us, not to fulfil human needs but in order to raise profits.

This class conflict between the producers (wage workers) and the
private (Corporate) owners of industry is what determines the landscape
on which all social activity and political struggle that takes place in
today's world. Knowing this, helps us create maps of the political
landscape in order to navigate our efforts.

When Mao rebuilt the Red Army during and after the Long March,
reconstituting it into a political organization, he stipulated that its
members shall be community organizers, first, and their role as
warriors would only be a secondary or tertiary attribute. This, in
essence, was the turning of the great Chinese Revolution from a
pro-democracy and patriotic independence movement being misled by fake
Left stalinists into a genuine, continent-wide Socialist movement.

Education for the Reds in community relations, class relations, human
relations, methods of organization and daily hands-on work in
agriculture, civic administration and in community development projects
(public hygiene, food distribution, road building, etc), these became
with Mao's guidance a way for Socialists to actualize the basic tenet
of "serve the people" - military affairs became secondary, whereas all
emphasis and effort was invested in helping the population to become
self-organized on a new foundation that by-passed feudalism, and to
realize its own strength both in production and in self-defence. It was
in this context that the revolution empowered the people (peasants and
proletarians together) to overcome the warlords, overcome military
occupation by foreign armies, and overthrow its "own" class of
capitalists by restoring ownership of all resources back to the
community.

And when Mao many decades later came back to say "hey, both society and
the party need to be renewed and refreshed through new forms of
struggle against authority and to redefine liberty in modern terms"
initiating the Cultural Revolution, there it was again, the same
commitment to prevent a rigid authority from setting itself into power
eternally, a commitment to neutralize and disempower those opportunists
and manipulators who "waving the Red flag in order to oppose the Red
flag" had used the process of social change to exploit and oppress
people and to climb above others.

His concern was almost absurd, one might say, given that the party that
he headed already held State power in its hands, and had brought
industrial and agricultural production entirely under its guidance;
isn't it absurd to launch a revolution against one's "own" State power,
one's "own" party officials?

Isn't it ridiculous that the head of State of the largest country in
the world did not initiate a new "hire and fire" period to clean out
the social services, but instead went directly to the people and said
"only you have the power to restore clarity, dignity and socialism to
our country, only you can re-orient the State and the party to their
prime mission, which is to serve the people. You, we, together, let's
force those in power to live up to their socialist pretensions."
Foolish and ridiculous, right? But there is wisdom in that foolishness,
closer to the true liberation process than any of the pseudo-socialists
or authoritarian anarcho-poser, infatuated libertarian or rigidified
fake leftist we might find anywhere in place or time.

When Dr. Wilhelm Reich developed his science "of the subjective"
element of history, discovering the biological foundations of
authoritarianism and sadism, and created a new scientific understanding
of the sexual and psychological underpinnings of Fascism, the science
of personal change and social revolution was empowered as never before.
Soon it will be a eighty years since those excellent scientific
projects illuminated the Path for those who are dedicated to liberty,
and yet, the work is so advanced that only very few social political
organizations were able to integrate its knowledge into their practice
and even then, weren't able to do much with it. But progressive popular
revolts and insurrections made a great lot of good usage of that
knowledge.

Reich gave us a clear understanding through biology, sexuality,
psychology, class relations and family function, of how society
generates the petty tyrant and the Nazi, how exactly it is that
authoritarian Reds turn into a Red version of the Fascists. In that
sense, he was the first of the revolutionary Socialists to investigate
the similarities, the parallel character structures and oppressive
social activities in which both Fascists and authoritarian
fake-socialists engage. The equivalence of Black and Red Fascism, and
the liberating, democracy-building potential of a free sexuality became
defining concepts in his work that guided the French Revolution of
1968, the US New Left, and many millions of people engaged in the
struggle all over the world throughout the decades of the nineteen
sixties and seventies.

Fake left, pseudo-socialists, authoritarian Reds, all are without doubt
degenerate and poisonous elements of the movement, products of the era
of Capitalism and Empire whom we need to identify, to oppose and
neutralize at every opportunity.

But the general project of the liberation process, defined in "Leftist"
terms such as Socialism, Communism and Anarchism remains valid as ever.

Here, for instance, is one way of articulating the long and the short
view of that project, taken from the political papers of an
internationalist solidarity anti-war group named KaliMerhaba, published
under the title "The Short Statement":

"We seek to unite with [all] people ...who, like us, aim for the
re-uniting of all of Humanity's peoples, aim for the destruction of all
borders and the disarming of the armies guarding them, and for the
final overthrow of the governments arming and training them for that
purpose.
We aim for the overthrow of the system of profits and authoritarian
power, and for its replacement by the simple functions of ecological
Direct Democracy: a system of self-administration and self-government
within all of our communities, which are to be run by voluntary
Peoples' Councils at all levels, in the schools, the workplace, the
neighbourhoods, the villages and towns.

We believe that when the influence of the system of profits and of
authoritarian power is removed from both our external and internal
(psychological) world, people everywhere are capable of living as
equals who can respect and honour each other, and who are capable and
willing to make together the major and minor decisions which affect our
everyday lives as neighbours, co-workers, colleagues, friends, lovers,
comrades."

And further:
"...there are many radical Green-minded
individuals and organizations in all the countries of our region ...and
abroad, active in the heartlands of the imperialist countries, who wish
to see our communities re-united again, on the basis of a unity founded
on the global efforts to *replace* the socio -political system of
profits. We believe that our people can be re-united meaningfully only
on the basis of the shared efforts to replace the political system
currently exercised by authoritarian power and capital, with a system
of equality and justice for all, which is founded on co-operation (as
opposed to capitalist competition and exploitation), and founded on
self-government within our communities, instead of government by local
neo-colonialist 'managerial administration teams' appointed by global
and regional capital."

It's definitely a mouthful. But worth chewing.

Petros Evdokas
petros@cyprus-org.net
http://petros-evdokas.cyprus-org.net/Another-sort-of-Introduction.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Related Readings:

"The State and Revolution"
by V. I. Lenin
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

"Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045709/

"Socialism: Utopian and Scientific"
by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/index.htm

"Project for the New American Century"
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Project_for_the_New_American_...
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Project_for_the_New_American_C...

"The Short Statement"
http://www.cyprusindymedia.org/The_Short_Statement-KaliMerhaba.htm

"Better Decide Which Side You're On"
http://www.tomrobinson.com/trb/songs.htm#bd

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