The following text was delivered as Nattsvart Verkstads May Day speech:
Here we are again friends and comrades, May day, the anarchist holiday.
We are celebrating courage and sacrifice. We are mourning our martyrs. We remember our visions and attempts at making them real.
Anarchism, both as an ideology and, more importantly, as a practice is spreading now, even if one might not feel it living in the Northern European Geographies. People are discussing and trying to understand something together. This is fucking great.
The problem now is that we are missing the most important component of political organizing. What is the intersection of almost all successful attempts at social organizing? We think about how we always have to address the so-called “material conditions” of the working class, or the proletariat, or the fucking people or whatever the target group is. When we are talking about material conditions what this usually boils down to is the transfer of wealth.
Any revolutionary worth its salt has a proposal to transfer wealth from someone to someone else. Let’s face it, political power and rights mean nothing without the economic grounding to realize them.
Power doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun, it comes from the pantry.
For the traditional ruling class and capitalists this transfer has to do with the exploitation of the surplus labor of people who don’t own stuff. The classical colonists and slave owners didn’t even fuck around with just the surplus. This approach was even adopted by authoritarian socialists in their state capitalist projects. And yes, we’re still pissed off about Kronstadt.
With the fascists and racists this transfer is from ‘the Jews’ or ‘the immigrants’ or whatever group they claim has too much or takes too much space. The Nazis actually delivered on this promise to transfer wealth from Jewish residents and citizens of central Europe.
The center right is doing an excellent job of moving resources from the working class to rich right now. The white middle class cheers it on from their credit card financed jet skis. This is also what SD promises today, to redistribute wealth and social space from the immigrant population to an imagined ‘folk.’ Let’s not forget about the so-called settlers in Palestine transferring land via direct action and violence from Palestinian communities to, well, themselves.
On the good side the O.G. Zapata was all about the immediate transfer of land and resources from the land owning class to the rural proletariat. Nestor Makhno had a clear program to transfer wealth. Almost every indigenous movement tries to stop the transfer of wealth from their world to the colonizer’s. The Tupamaros had some problems of the authoritarian persuasion, but they brought home the plant-based bacon. The abolitionist movement, the Haitian revolution, they transferred wealth that should have never been wealth.
At the end of the day if you want people to throw in with you then you absolutely have to have a plan and program for transferring wealth.
Anarchists used to be at the forefront of this. This is one of the reasons that early social democrats hated anarchists so much. We wanted to transfer wealth immediately, to take it directly from the rich collectively. They used to call us bandits.
Lenin, I would love to kick you ass and take your fucking lunch money.
Of course it is super difficult to even talk about this now. It’s not like we can set out on a quest to slay monsters and find hordes of gold and magic items.
Money no longer has a physical form where it can sit in a dungeon or a conspicuous treasure chest. It is hard to chase the owners off a piece of land and use it for our communities. Everything about money, property, land, resources has to do with administration and use.
Ooccupation is important. There is something more though. Even if we say “fuck the law,” there is a social aspect of maintaining control of something.
Let’s say, for example, that we have occupied a factory. Even if we can barricade it, keep the cops out, hold the owners pissing themselves with fear in a hotel somewhere, we still need functional relationships with others for that factory to produce anything for the community.
We need a transfer of wealth that is founded in our communities. I want to murder the rich as much as anyone else. We probably will have to do this eventually (remember what they said about their cold dead hands), BUT, we need this social machinery in place which makes expropriation permanent. We need an expropriation which is not transferable later (think legalized squats selling properties or peasants during the Russian revolution selling their land.)
We need to make a movement with the will to change society so that nobody respects private ownership at all. We need to stop giving space to moderation. One of the biggest mistakes of the Paris Commune was the protection of the banks.
No patience for the rich, no quarter. It is time to plan for expropriation. It is time to build a movement that doesn’t try to pander to the rich for fear of I don’t know what (we’re looking at you social democrats.)
We need to finally destroy the colonial monster before it eats what’s left of our world. We can’t get there by compromising, and we can’t just get there by the make total destroy method (as fun as that would be.) We need to organize the economics and distribution systems of a horizontally organized world of many worlds, and we have to create these systems today.
So let’s stop treating the future like a promise note written by politicians and paid for with our subservience. The only wealth that ever stays transferred is the wealth we make unusable by masters. The only power that lasts is the power we practice together. No leaders, no saviors, no waiting room of history. We build the social bonds, the distribution, the care, the kitchens, the workshops, the housing, and the trust that makes expropriation irreversible.
Not tomorrow. Not after the revolution. Today.
This is what May Day is for: remembering that everything we need is already here, in our hands, in each other. And we don’t have to ask permission to use it.
