FUCK THE WELFARE STATE!!, ANARCHY NOW!!
Welfare state was not established due to philanthropic reasons but as a powerful weapon against people's freedom and real social justice. It was created to dismantle the old worker's movement and its practice of self-management, autonomy and open struggle against the state and capitalism.
Welfare state changes nothing substantial in our lives, quite the opposite. Its real function is to make our daily exploitation more bearable and to humanise the state, making it look like a sort of “saviour of the poor” rather than what it is in reality, the absolute enemy of freedom, real human community and life.
In practical terms welfare state is designed to keep us all well tied to the chain of wage slavery, providing monetary “assistance” to the unemployed in exchange for their absolute submission. This creates a lot of social stigma towards those in the dole who are treated like rubbish in job centres and other institutions in a regular basis and have to accept undignifying and fascistic policing.
Welfare state has turned all of us into lazy, ignorant and degenerated individuals, totally unfit to carry out any struggle and organise ourselves. Entire generations, from grandparents to grandsons have grown accustomed to live out of the pittance they receive from the state, losing any tradition of self-organisation and anti-state, anti-capitalist fight. Here we are all responsible for our own negligence, not just “the system”.
Welfare state has allowed the left to grow to a huge extent. Social workers, NGO's, charity organisations, trade unions, left political parties, dubious “independent groups”... all of them work together to keep our lives and this shitty society unchanged. They are the first enemy, before even the cops, politicians, bankers and the military. They pretend to be in our side only to keep us under control and appoint themselves as our “representatives” in the negotiation table. These eternal reformists will always refuse to understand that a few legislative reforms can never make any real difference in our shitty lives. They must be attacked and done away with in the very first place.
Through welfare state the state, capitalism and representative demo-fascism manage to justify themselves as the “less bad” of all the political and economical systems on offer now a days. The reality is quite the opposite for what is called democracy is nothing but the most sophisticated and subtle dictatorial system human race has ever known. In this dictatorship the necessity of brute force as a means of repression has been reduced to a minimum thanks to the efficiency of mass media 24/7 brain-washing (along with other measures of “social engineering”) to turn people into policemen and policewoman of themselves (and the others) as well as collaborators with the elites who actually run this regime.
There will not be any return to the Welfare state simply because it is expensive to maintain, it generates a massive bureaucracy and so the states have to keep borrowing money from international banking institutions to keep it going. Besides we all know that wage labour is most of the time something every sane person should try to avoid at all costs. Such a realisation normally results in the huge rate of “benefit theft” and petty fraud involving the lowest social classes concomitant to every version of state and capitalist system that tries to display the “humanised” “charity”, Fabian appearance in its “public relations” with the workers and the poor.
A few months ago everyone hated Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and the Labour Party. Now everybody hates the Liberal-Tory coalition... what is going on here?, are too many MTV video-clips actually affecting our short/mid term memory?. what is the alternative after this then?, voting the SWP or any other into rule?... this would be utterly ridiculous of course for the problem is not in who is in office in a given moment but in the whole fucking system from top to bottom. In this thing that some call democracy the real, factual power figures (the army, the financial elites, the high profile civil servants) are not, (they just cannot be) elected by any of us and those who actually are do nothing but being the puppets of the former. Eventually the real power of this “democracy” falls in the weapons of the army even if this had to act against its “own people”, that is the truth about those who are so keenly regarded as “heroes” by the media propaganda.
Having seen all this we can just conclude the following:
THE REAL SOLUTION: SELF MANAGEMENT AND LIBERATED ZONES IN EVERY NEIGHBOURHOOD, COORDINATED NETWORKS OF LOCAL ASSEMBLIES OPEN TO EVERYONE AS DECISSION MAKING ORGANS, DO NOT DELEGATE POWER IN ANYONE, ALL THE POWER TO THE ASSEMBLIES/COUNCILS, IF DELEGATES ARE NEEDED LET THEM BE,TEMPORAL, ROTATIVE AND RECALLABLE AT EVERY MOMENT. FORMATION OF ARMED LOCAL MILITIA IN EVERY VILLAGE, BOROUGH AND TOWN, ORGANISATION OF FOOD SUPPLIES AND BASIC SERVICES (HEALTH ETC) BY LOCAL COLLECTIVES.
WE DON'T WANT THEIR FUCKING JOBS!!!
WE DON'T WANT TO BUY MORE OF THEIR SHIT!!
WE SPIT ON THEIR “CHARITY”!!
(One among many other street gangs with an analysis)
The welfare state was NOT thought up or implemented by socialists but by capitalists and the statespeople they control in order to keep the working class dependent on the state and less radicalized. Do the working people need help? Absolutely, but as radicals we should NEVER use the state to achieve our goals.
ReplyDeleteMy only criticism is lumping in unions with the welfare state. Trade unions have historically been very anti-authoritarian and I hate the fact that a lot of them have sold out. But don't lump in groups like the CNT, IWW, etc. with reactionary and reformist unions.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your criticism. I think that Trade-Unionism as a prais still needs some criticism though, despite the good intentions of most of their members (I'm talking about the radical grassroots unions here).
ReplyDeleteHowever when I wrote this pamphlet I was obviously referring to the sold out unions whose main interest in this protest is to save their own function as representatives of the working class and the poor with all the perks that so many professional bureaucrats get from such an execrable job.
About CNT in particular there are many things to be said and criticised about its role in the Spanish Civil War as well as in the subsequent Anti-Francoist "Maquis" and other critical periods of Spanish History but that is a long, long History...
Good luck at the other side of the puddle and thanks again for your comments.
I think we should embrace unions and try to radicalize them. It is a real pity though that many have been de-radicalized by, as you would have guessed, the welfare state.
ReplyDeleteI'm just sick and tired of "anarchists" who still put faith in the State and who insist on using it as a way to achieve their ends (which will never happen). The ironic thing is, many of them do understand full well that the whole reason for the welfare state was a way for the ruling class to throw the working class a few crumbs of bread so the workers wouldn't rise up and take the whole loaf. The rich agree to pay a little more in taxes (the wealthiest pay nearly no taxes at all, for the record) to create these statist programs (since they control the State) so the working class's living standards will rise just a little bit more to keep them from flat-out rebelling. The reformist anarchists know this, yet they still insist on using statist means to achieve anti-statist ends which is bull. I say fuck the State and start building alternative institutions to help the working class.
Late in the game here. I googled 'welfare is not anarchism' and this was the first page.
ReplyDeleteI could not agree more. So many professed anarchists seek and accept welfare from the state with a sense of entitlement.
I have been on welfare and I know how it is used as a powerful tool for the State to manipulate and control populations. I am not on welfare now, but if I went on it again I would make sure that it was only temporarily and grudgingly: my last and only choice.
I have brought this up as a topic of debate at anarcho-communist sites like infoshop.org and gotten the beat down. They say things like 'well you use the roads, same thing' and 'why pick on people on welfare instead of capitalists'.
The reason of course is because accepting welfare legitimizes the State. It wastes precious time and is also a form of mind control and social engineering.
I understand that some people see few options, but I also witness that many people go on welfare and never go off. It has made them apathetic and non-competitive. We need revolutionaries, not idle welfare recipients who accept hand outs.
"The reason of course is because accepting welfare legitimizes the State. It wastes precious time and is also a form of mind control and social engineering."
ReplyDeleteDING DING DING DING DING!!!!!
When will radicals learn that the state is not our friend and never will be? It's ridiculous the way comrades turn to authority instead of doing what anarchists have always done and turn to each other for ways of helping those who have been fucked over by the system. Using the state only legitimizes its power and de-radicalizes workers in the process. Go into any workplace (wage slave factory) and you'll see the "Labor Rights" act posted on the walls; that's a clear way of manipulating workers into thinking that the state can protect their rights when really the state is the reason their boss has the "right" to own private property and exploit them.
The problem is, these "anarchists" who are really just social democrats who happen to quote lots of anarchist thinkers like Bakunin and Berkman always conjure up the "lesser evil" way of thinking. It's always, "Well, I'd rather have state control than Koch bros control because the state is slightly more democratic than Koch." The reason why this is bullshit is because the state IS a capitalist institution and is controlled 100% by capitalists. The only way the workers get ANY services from the state is when the ruling class approves, meaning the workers have NO POWER and never will under the capitalist-statist system. So it's not "the state or the Kochs"; it's the state AND the Kochs. The state is not the antithesis to capitalism regardless of what Chomsky and his die-hard followers tell you, so I think we should form solidarity ourselves and just completely forget about using the state.
Sadly, the last month of this country’s freedom is December 2012. Be ready!! Be prepared!! Why don’t you follow U.S. home? I’ll await you in Heaven Above. God bless you. _thewarningsecondcoming.com_
ReplyDelete