"Anarchy" in New Orleans?

north america / mexico | repression / prisoners | opinion / analysis Wednesday September 14, 2005 18:29 by pj lilley - Punching Out - NEFAC punchingout at nefac dot net

Death and devastation. A chemical factory explosion. Fires rage & tempers rise. Capitalist media around the world screamed the headline "ANARCHY" today. Days without food, water, medical supplies.

"Anarchy" in New Orleans?

Death and devastation. A chemical factory explosion. Fires rage & tempers rise. Capitalist media around the world screamed the headline "ANARCHY" today. Days without food, water, medical supplies.

It's very important to the war-makers, law-makers, and oil investors to submerge the real definition of anarchy: mutual aid without government, co-operation in solidarity, and ORDER. Their authoritarian control is deeply threatened by their own complete failure to meet basic needs. Their authority has rested on the divides of class, on misogyny and racism. Capital's media pitches images of black men with bags as "looters", while a lighter-skinned man is carrying "something he found". They didn't get pictures of the corrupt police, allowed into WalMart for "relief measures" instead loading their car trunk with DVD's and dogfood. The rulers have no humanity, only profit interests. They continue madly pouring billions into war, while expecting "charities" will bail out New Orleans.

Law is not order. Bush knew that levee would fail in at least 2001. Those who "chose not to evacuate" were the poor, black, elderly... while the rich had long left for their second homes, safe hotels and elsewhere. But it doesn't stop there, as the ruling class seem determined to make things even worse. Now the Governor of Louisiana brings in the National Guard - many young shell-shocked soldiers freshly returned from Iraq - "M-16's locked and loaded," she says about their killing capacity, "and I expect they will". They are sent in like so many other mercenaries, first to protect private property. [Remember that through the poverty draft, the south has already suffered among the heaviest casualties in Iraq, where doubtless many boys sit tonight wondering why they can't just come home to help their families and neighbours, whether they themselves will make it out alive.] A decent journalist from Toronto is nearly shot on sight for taking pictures of flagrant police brutality.

If this was anarchy, there would be neighborhood bases established much earlier to co-ordinate relief. Direct action toward liberation. Many people actually said it was the looters that first distributed food and water. Perhaps capital will not be able to recuperate. Possibly, finally, the bosses and their media lap-dogs may not escape the peoples' wrath on this one. Will it become widely understood that another world is possible? "Disasters like this can only be met when ordinary people begin to work together on a human level, to the best of their abilities helping each other to get through, instead of relying on highly bureaucratic and irrational social abstractions to save them..." as 'Shevek' put it to Indymedia. "Then there will actually be anarchy in New Orleans". Justice? Just us. Get organized.

See also: demands & call for solidarity from the Capital Terminus anarchist collective in Atlanta.

a publication of:
Punching Out,
an autonomous member collective of NEFAC: Northeastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists an organization of revolutionaries comingfrom different movements of resistance who identify with the communist tradition within anarchism. The federation's activities are organized around theoretical development, anarchist propaganda, and intervention in the struggle of our class, be it autonomously or by direct involvement in social movements.

For more info, to help distribute, or contribute,

contact:

punchingout@nefac.net

Punching Out
P.O. Box 79538
1995 Weston Rd
Toronto, ON
M9N 3W9

Labour donated