A Letter to Andrew on Chris Hedges and the need for political independence.

Hi Andrew,

Yes, you have biases, I have biases, we all have biases. There is no such thing as objectivity in our world. Every thought and idea, every word and sentence serves some purpose—even if it appears to be nothing more than gobbledygook. I aim to make my words and sentences as clear as possible to serve the class that I have chosen to align with. I serve the class that I have been a part of for my entire life—the working class. But nobody is perfect, nobody is super-human. We are flawed characters with skeletons or ambitions of putting skeletons in our closets. We must recognize that we can only try our best and hope that history will be forgiving—and Facebook, despite what many people believe, is not going to destroy historical praise or ridicule, it will only magnify it.

More than biases, we are suffering from bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology raises us through the tender words of our parents and friends, through Sesame Street and Saturday morning cartoons, to CNN, the New York Times, Fox News, State of the Union addresses from the US President, non profits like Amnesty International and PETA and Green Peace. We are bombarded by bourgeois ideology and the product of this input is bourgeois prejudice. One might call this brainwashing, but I think its far less obvious than the Kool-Aid drinkers at Jonestown. We are prejudiced by ideas, opinions, slogans etc. which serve our ruling class. Hedges writes about this in the piece you cited (although I do not think he understands the gravity of what he quoted by Marx),

““The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”-Marx, quoted by Hedges.

It is very difficult to un-prejudice yourself. This re-education won’t be done effectively by North Korea or China, but it can be done by the most independent core of an independent movement and organization. This core I believe in a manner of speaking will have to raise the consciousness of over 170million Americans. They have nothing to gain for themselves really, everything to lose—they accept this duty out of an unconditional love for the masses of humanity.

So where was I?

Ahh yes, Hedges. In Politics, it takes a special kind of person to convince others of sincerity. Have you ever seen the film Lawrence of Arabia? The ending is fitting for a film on this subject. I’ll spoil it for you. King Feisal is sitting across the negotiating table from the British. The King says something that in essence suggests that Lawence was always insincere and was a loyal British servant—the British representative corrected Feisal, suggesting that Lawrence was sincere and that Britian could have never won such a coup without him as a dope. The two ask Lawrence to leave the room while they talk about how they will carve up the spoils in the colonization of the Middle East.

Why am I bringing up this little story? It doesn’t matter if Hedges is sincere or not, just like it doesn’t matter if Obama is sincere. In politics we don’t judge our allies and opponents by their intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. Instead, we judge carefully based on their allegiances and interests. Hedges has given his allegiance to our ruling class. I understand its difficult to see sometimes, especially when Hedges is given enough slack to mouth off against the ruling class like in the article you posted (“Let’s get this Class War Started”), but Hedges has shown in many previous articles just where he stands in the battlefield. The most recent article that reveals this is his endorsement of Kshama Sawant as “The Most Dangerous Woman in America,” but before that he flirted with the so called Anarchist and Marxist trends as one of them until he came out with a loathed article called “The Cancer of Occupy” where he basically denounced them as a “cancer.” This wasn’t too much of a surprise to anyone familiar with Hedges however, before that in 2009 he wrote about how Ralph Nader and the progressives were right, and of course there’s his history with one of the most notorious newspapers of the ruling class, the New York Times.

Andrew, I’d love to explain why violence against women requires something as “simple as overthrowing the elite (The greatest challenge our class presently faces).”

Hedges article, and articles like it are only given this degree of slack because there is a very serious danger by an independent movement that is real—a danger for the bourgeoisie of losing EVERYTHING. All of the horrible problems of capitalism, problems used by the ruling class to keep the other classes divided and weak are being used as FUEL by an independent movement to overthrow bourgeois rule—and they will continue to be used as fuel by an independent movement because they have been used as fuel throughout history by revolutionaries. The Democratic Party only bends towards women’s rights because those rights were being championed by revolutionaries, and if the bourgeoisie didn’t champion them it would be clear to more than half the population that they were the enemy of those rights! The same goes for Race and Sexuality and Gender and every other sub-theme in identity politics.

Yes, we can champion women—but we can only do so with an independent movement. If we ignore that need the bourgeoisie will be the sole champion of those rights, and when the independent energy is crushed, guess what!? Those rights and concessions will be taken away faster than you can say “Oh Fuck.” There’s no need for the ruling class to make concessions when it’s overwhelmingly victorious. Concessions are things you make when you’re in trouble, when you’re on the ropes, when you’re being threatened—when a thief has a knife to your throat.

The demands for women’s rights and dignity must come with a purpose—to raise the consciousness of the masses to the need to overthrow bourgeois rule in order to control society. And this principle of using partial demands as fuel for the historic mission of the working class is applicable to all of the fights for partial demands. A protest of 12 women against the closure of a Planned Parenthood will do nothing to save an abortion clinic. Just take a look at the roll backs in the deep south. 120Million women, striking and preparing to fight the class enemy in mortal combat, will make attempts to buy off the female demographic fall on us like rain. It will be the equivalent of the garage rock band that promises to never sell out, only to be promised a $10 million contract by an A&R executive in a sharkskin suit.

History is my witness.

The only inner reflection you must be concerned about is your own. Where will you stand on the battlefield? What will you fight for—or better yet as yourself, do you have the stomach to fight? Is it better to look good like Hedges? Or is there something more worthy of your life’s energy? Will you be able to look at yourself every day in the mirror with the decisions you make?

You can wait your entire life for some spiritual awakening of the masses. Maybe they’ll all find Jesus. Maybe we only have to wait for a meteor to threaten the Earth before they “wake up.” I am not going to wait for such spontaneous combustion. A fire doesn’t appear out of nowhere. It requires fuel, oxygen, heat. When I go out into the woods, I don’t wait for a lightning strike to make me a fire, I don’t wait for the fire to spontaneously spark alight in the rain. I build it carefully with care as soon as I realize I need one. Likewise when I construct a building, We don’t wait for everyone to spontaneously know what’s going on—we figure out what we need to do and we don’t waste a minute. How can we expect the masses to awaken to smell the coffee that we neglect to make?

If we want to fight, we must first understand what we’re fighting. We must understand the class enemy, the bourgeoisie. We must understand its tricks, strategies, tactics. We must understand that people like Hedges, myself, you—we’re not exempt from the ideal expressions of the dominant material relationships. Our politics will serve one of two sides here: The side of the ruling class, or the side of the working class and masses. There is no in-between.

Respectfully,
Art Francisco