Hobos, Tramps and Homeless Bums

[GuitarroAnonymous]

On 10/13/2001 at 11:50 PM, KaBar said:

Vanity---I debated with myself for a while about how to respond to your statement about theft. You certainly have a right to whatever opinions you hold, and if you genuinely believe that living by ripping off from people is okay, then anything I have to say ain't going to influence you very much. I've known quite a few thieves in my life. Mostly, they treated other people with a lack of respect because they lacked respect for themselves. I can't say that I never took anything that didn't belong to me. Just riding freight trains at all is considered by the law to be a form of theft ("Theft of transportation", a Class C misdemeanor, on a par with littering or jumping turnstiles on the subway) and like any violation of law, if you get caught, there are consequences. Pretty slight consequences in this case, maybe a $75 ticket. But there is a big difference between riding an empty rbox, or a pig, or camping out on a 48 behind the container, and busting into cargo. Or ripping off somebody's gear. Or shoplifting from a store. That's all theft, and in my opinion, it is not okay. Property is owned by somebody by it's very definition. They have the right to own it, and control it, and to buy or sell it, and to limit it's use by others, unless the other person is willing to satisfy the owner with a purchase price, or rent or lease or some other exchange of value. Nobody understands the concept of property better than someone who has very little of it. I own more now than I used to, and it's still not much. But it is MINE, and pitiful little as it is, I will defend it against people who try to jack me up for it. In Montana, if someone is convicted of robbing a tramp of his bedroll, he can be sentenced to as much as twenty years in prison. Some rich rancher has his thousands of acres and his ranch house. All a transient has is his ruck and his bindle, but it's home. Out in the boondocks, one's ruck and bindle may be the difference between surviving the weather or death by exposure. Montana juries don't take robbing tramps lightly.

I chose to ride trains, I chose tramp life and during the parts of my life when I lived outdoors, I accepted the consequences of my decisions. I jumped freights knowing I was breaking rules. I've never been caught, and I've never been punished for it, but in the back of my mind, I know what I was doing was against the law, and I had already decided I was willing to accept the consequences of my actions. Maybe, if the consequences had been more severe, I would have been less willing to accept them. But I never thought, and still don't think, that I have a RIGHT to ride freight trains. The trains don't belong to me. If I get popped, well, then I guess I pay. I know three young guys that carjacked somebody with pellet pistols, and got arrested and convicted. One got ten years deferred adjudication. If he even gets so much as a MIP charge, he goes to prison. The other two got eight years apiece in the Texas Youth Commission. If they do all their time, they won't get out until they are about 25 years old.

Society is US. And WE, all of us together, collectively say, through the law, that taking anything that doesn't belong to you is wrong, and will be punished one way or another. Obviously, there are some people both rich and poor that try to get over by ripping people off. Ripping off with a fountain pen instead of a revolver doesn't make it right, and if they get caught, they get punished, or at least they are supposed to get punished. Justice is imperfect.

If I come face-to-face with somebody trying to rip ME off, I won't need any cop, judge or jury to settle it. Ultimately, that old line by Bob Dylan is true--"To live outside the law, you must be honest." I don't steal from other people because I don't want them stealing from me. Stores, restaurants, etc. all are owned by somebody. I know a few older tramps who are retired and receive a check from stocks or mutual funds that they own in companies. Essentially, they own part of the company. If you steal from the company, you are stealing from the stockholders, i.e. from thousands of people who have put up money to capitalize the company. You can buy stock too, anybody can. If you choose to spend your money on stuff you want instead of stocks, that's okay, but don't snivel that the company is some conspiracy to mistreat people. ANYBODY can buy stock. And most big corporations are now owned or controlled by worker retirement funds, essentially making American WORKERS the owners of AMERICAN COMPANIES. In other words, it's thousands of little people (and a few rich folks) who own virtually every large corporation.

I have, on occasion, GIVEN people half of whatever I had in my pocket. But how often can one afford to do that? It is the responsibility of each of us to take care of ourselves, unless we cannot do so. I might be willing to GIVE somebody five bucks, if I thought the situation warranted it. But if he tried to TAKE it from me, I would fight and use whatever force is necessary to keep it. That five dollars is mine. No sonofabitch has a right to it without my permission, not by theft, and not by robbery. So. Let criminals take heed, I guess. One lives by crime at a serious risk. The poorer the victim, the greater the crime.

 

[GuitarroAnonymous]

The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn’t true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over, “You folks, just think about your own history; don’t bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it.” In other words, it’s as if British socialists told Afrikan colonial revolutionaries to just study their own “traditions” and history – but not to study British imperialism. Or if revolutionaries in Czarist Poland or Finland were told not to examine the oppressor Great Russian nation. Theirstory is not incomplete; it is a series of complete lies, an ideological world-view cleverly designed to further imperialist domination over the oppressed.

Of course we are being tugged, pushed and pulled away from analyzing Euro-Amerikan society – why should imperialism want us to understand our enemy? But we should want to. In fact, for us and for revolutionaries of all nations it is a necessity. Even Third-World attempts to recover our varied histories here are thrown off when the central piece in the U.S. Empire – the Euro-Amerikan oppressor nation – is removed from view.

This work attempts to throw the light of historical materialism on Babylon itself.* For so long the oppressed have been the objects of investigation by Euro-imperialist sociology, anthropology, psychology, etc., etc. – all to further pacifying and controlling us (anthropology, for example, had its origins as an intelligence service for European colonialization of the world). Now it is time to scientifically examine the oppressor society, to go beneath the outward surface of the U.S. Empire to discover its fundamental structure, dynamic and contradictions. And as we reexamine and sift through the development of the oppressor nation we shall see ourselves there, visible from another angle.

We all know that the “United States” is an oppressor nation; that is, a nation that oppresses other nations. This is a characteristic that the U.S. shares with other imperialist powers. What is specific, is particular about the U.S. oppressor nation is that it is an illegitimate nation.

What pretends to be one continental nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific is really a Euro-Amerikan settler empire, built on colonially oppressed nations and peoples whose very independent existence has been forcibly submerged. But the colonial crime, the criminals, the victims, and the stolen lands and labor still exist. The many Indian nations, the Afrikan nation in the South, Puerto Rico, the northern half of Mexico, Asian Hawaii – all are now considered the lands of the Euro-Amerikan settlers. The true citizens of this U.S. Empire are the European invaders and their descendants. So that the “United States” is in reality not one, but many nations (oppressor and oppressed).

We see the recognition of Amerika as a “prisonhouse of nations” as the beginning – no more, no less – of the differences between revisionist and communist politics here. We note the hysterical energy that upfront revisionists pour into denying the existence of various oppressed nations, most notably the Afrikan Nation. It’s interesting that the leadership of the KDP (Union of Democratic Filipinos), for example, has participated in several major theoretical expeditions to prove that the Afrikan Nation never has and never will exist. In the well-known 1975 Critique of the Black Nation Thesis, the KDP leaders and other Asian and Afrikan radicals claimed not only that the Afrikan Nation was a crazy idea thought up by racist whites, but that nationalism has never had any support in the Afrikan communities. The document even goes so far as to say that no nationalist movement has ever existed among Afrikans here in the U.S. Empire.

Now united with other revisionists in the “Line of March” organization, these Asian-Amerikan activists are still writing documents arguing that Afrikans suffer no national oppression within the U.S. Empire (only “racism”). Why is this supposedly non-existent Afrikan Nation so, so important to them? Why spend years writing about something you claim doesn’t exist? Unless you fear that this supposedly non-existent Nation and its very existent revolutionary struggle will upset your applecart of reformist-integrationist schemes and alliances. It’s interesting that during these years the KDP leadership, which has been so concerned about combating Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism, has yet to concern itself with doing a significant class and national analysis of the Filipino community here in the U.S. We hold that once this outward shell of integration into a single, white-dominated “U.S.A.” is cracked open – to reveal the colonial oppression and anti-colonial struggle within – then the correct path to a communist understanding of the U.S. Empire is begun.

We hold that settlerism is the historic instrument created by the European ruling classes to safeguard their colonial conquests with entire, imported populations of European invaders. In return for special privileges and a small share of the colonial loot these settlers became the loyal, live-in garrison troops of Empire over us. As such they objectively side with our oppressors and become imperialism’s willing servants. Everywhere they are filled with white supremacy, national chauvinism, and a hatred and fear of the oppressed. So that in South Afrika, in Palestine, and right here in the U.S. Empire, the Revolution objectively is locked in battle with the European settler masses. On this matter there is no choice.

Usually it is argued that the majority of Euro-Amerikan settlers are exploited proletarians, and that the class exploitation they suffer is or soon will be opening their eyes to revolutionary unity with us, their fellow proletarians. This is not just a view that is identified solely with those comrades who have diluted themselves away into one of the many white “Left” parties. For example, this line clearly dominated the historic May, 1974 national conference on “Racism and Imperialism” given by the now-defunct Afrikan Liberation Support Committee.

We mention them especially because of the great significance of the A.L.S.C. at its peak, and also because of the vanguard role of the Black Liberation Movement as a whole played during the 1960s and 1970s in reawakening all resistance to U.S. imperialism on the continent.

Most of the leadership-panelists at the Conference strongly supported one or another variation of this line. (1) Abdul Alkalimat of Peoples College pointed out that “the white working class” were “friends” of Third-World people, and that the problems caused by their white supremacy should be handled by “the methods used to resolve non-antagonistic contradictions among friends…” Kwame Toure (sn Stokely Carmichael) of the AAPRP bluntly told the audience that: “… for real socialist transformation to come to America, the white working class is the crucial element… History has demonstrated to us the willingness of the Black man to work with his ally, the white working class… Although the Black worker must be the vanguard, he must push the white worker out front. The Black worker must not move unless the white worker is moving.” And so on.

The only two revolutionary voices on the panel opposing this view of uniting with the white masses were Amiri Baraka (of CAP) and the three spokesmen for the Afrikan Peoples Party (APP). Baraka commented that: “Racism renders talk about the entire working class, at this time, as idealistic conjecture.” One of the APP representatives stated that: “There is a class struggle, but this class struggle is between white workers and capitalists is dormant, asleep, and we can’t wait until it wakes up before we struggle for our demands.” Another APP spokesman said that the way to awaken the white working class was by liberating the oppressed nations:

“We are not claiming that there are not class contradictions within the U.S. The less the oppressor nation receives from the Afrikan colonies the harder they will have to come down on the so-called white proletariat…”

Today, CAP and Amiri Baraka have been convinced that counting on the settler masses is the right road to revolution. CAP has dissolved into another “multi-national” organization, and Baraka has repudiated his former views. The APP has now put forward in their recent theoretical journal, Black Revolution, that in Amerika: “The problem is institutionalized racism.” Their lead editorial states that because of “racism” the white majority “doesn’t see it in their class interest to unite with New Afrikans and are becoming more openly racist.” But the APP believes that if we can defeat “racist repression,” then white and Third-World workers will see that they are all united parts of “the true majority of the people, the many-sectored working class.” (2)

[GuitarroAnonymous]

[GuitarroAnonymous]

Just now, GuitarroAnonymous said:

In 2000 I was given a Dodge Van by people I worked for, I left Arkansas to be a Desert Dweller. https://mojaveradio.blogspot.com/