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KaBar

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I'm planning on going to the NHC this year.   I'm not going to be able to go early, though.  I'll probably get there sometime on the 6th or 7th.

 

You can never tell what  the NHC is going to be like.  One year it will be great, then the next year it may be a dud.  You just have to show up and see how it goes.

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I am leaving for the National Hobo Convention on August 5th.  The Convention will be held August 9th through 12th , 2018 in Britt, Iowa.

 

Free camping.  Men's and women's restrooms with showers.  A covered picnic pavilion building, and a cook shack.

 

The jungle feeds two free meals a day during the Convention, mostly dumpster-dived food brought in by Collinwood Kid.  Collinwood is a Zen-Master-level dumpster diver.  He dumpsters perfectly good food from commercial suppliers, most of it in one-gallon "restaurant sized" cans which have an expiration date which will expire about a month after he finds it in the dumpster.  The commercial suppliers can't take the risk of accidentally selling a customer a bunch of expired cans of beans or corn or whatever, so they cull their shelves of cans about thirty days before the cans' expiration dates.

 

There are numerous activities during Britt's "Hobo Days" celebration.  It's a lot like a small-town Fourth of July celebration.  They have a parade on Saturday morning with fire engines, VFW color guard, Scout troops, 4-H kids on horseback, antique tractors, hot rods with local Harvest Princesses, high school marching bands and so on.  It's great fun.  The tramps always have a float, and we throw hard candy to the little kids along the parade route.  If you come, bring candy to throw.

 

There is always a carnival set up on the main street of town, with food booths, vendors, swap meet, etc., etc.

 

There's too much going on to list everything, but Friday there is a Hobo Memorial Service at the cemetery for tramps that have passed away, and sometimes an internment or two.  Following the Memorial Service there is the meeting of the Hobo Council of TU63, up on the hill in the cemetery.  Saturday after the parade, the election of the King & Queen of Hobos is held at the city's gazebo, behind the Library.  There's music in the jungle, and the kids keep the camp fire burning day and night during the Convention.

 

If you've never been, you should go at least once.  As Ted Conover said in his book, "Rollin' Nowhere,"  "It ain't real.  But it's still fun."

Edited by KaBar2
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El Jefe Uno, good to hear from you.   I don't always check 12 Oz. every day, mostly because there's been so little traffic on here.  I think that this thread has been here so many years that most of the 12 Oz. regulars who cared to read it have already done so.  I have a couple of Reddit threads that I frequent--/r/Vagabond and /r/Vandwellers.  

 

It's odd how the same issues that I was coping with in 1970, and that we were discussing on here in 2001 (31 years later), are *still* being discussed on these other tramp-hobo-trainhopper threads today (48 years later.)  Tons of things have changed in those 48 years, but the basics of trainhopping remain more-or-less the same, and the skills necessary to survive as a tramp are still very similar.  What sort of things didn't we have, in 1970?

 

Cell phones.

 

Satellite GPS.

 

iPhones and the internet.

 

The Crew Change Guide.

 

Railroad Atlas map books and internet rail maps.

 

Credit cards and ATM technology at banks.

 

Advanced technology sleeping bags, bivys and cold weather gear.

 

And so on.  Catching out has changed so much, but at the same time, it's still basically the same.  It's hard to believe this thread has been running since October of 2001.  And I had other, older threads about tramping before this one, that were lost in the Great 12 Oz. Crash of 2001.

 

 

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I sure wish I could go this year, but my wife has health issues that prevent it.  I especially wish I could be there for the memorial service for Frog, Tuck and the other tramps who have caught the westbound.  I sent Jewell a donation for Tuck's funeral expenses.  The Convention starts in three days, but a lot of people are already up there getting the jungle ready.

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On 10/15/2001 at 11:22 AM, Fox Mulder said:

kabar i was just asking because you seemed to have a problem with stealing from a large corporation but not a problem with painting on them. both things cause the business to lose money. i personally don't see anything wrong with writing or stealing from large companies.

Stealing from a Corporation in Godly, Shame on moron,s who worship Corporate Greed. A ferocious & awe-inspiring text, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! is author Fredy Perlman's magnum opus. The book describes the many acts of Maniacal Genocide that The U.S.A. has perpetuated against the world. this kabar1 guy is ignorant of U.S. reality.

Colonialism Imperialism Marxism Native Issues Third Worldism 

J. Sakai: The Original Introduction to Settlers

April 22, 2021 LOOP Afrikan Liberation Support Committee, Afrikan Peoples Party, Amiri Baraka, Black Liberation, Black Liberation Army, Black Panther Party, Ethnic Studies, Imperialism, Kwame Ture, Masses, Prison House of Nations, Proletarian, Revisionism, Sakai, Union of Democratic Filipinos, White Left

[LOOP is pleased to publish online for the first time the original introduction to J. Sakai’s important critical labor history Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat. The text here is transcribed from the first edition of Settlers, published under the title The Mythology of the White Proletariat: A Short Course in Understanding Babylon in 1983 by the Chicago-based Morningstar Press. The difference between the two introductions is substantial: the introduction included in subsequent editions, including the recent Kersplebedeb republication, cuts over 2500 words.

What is significant in the differences? Among a number of expanded discussions, Sakai’s original introduction situates the text in a concrete political context – as an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist contribution to the Asian movement aimed at fostering and defending a revolutionary class analysis of the United States. The text is polemical at points, which in part frames Settlers as a critique of attempts within both the Asian movement and wider socialist movement to undermine the Black liberation struggle. Recognition of the US as a “prisonhouse of nations” as a dividing line between revisionism and anti-revisionism, and the consequent primary of anti-colonial struggle to communist politics, is underlined in these discussions. “Settlerism” – a category still yet needing further elaboration, especially in relationship with the work of Native theorists on settler colonial ideologies – is clearly defined.]

 

When the Asian Movement made the great leap to Marxism-Leninism in the 1970s much was gained, but much was also lost. Many feel that the militant “heart” of the movement has chilled. Taking up Marxism-Leninism paradoxically reconciled angry young militants to living in White Amerika; that is, in the effort to break through to clearer, scientific socialist concepts of how to make the revolution, comrades have become more confused and less revolutionary-minded.

This is because the particular “Marxism-Leninism” that has been taken up is the “classic” Euro-Amerikan revisionist analysis – which falsely pictures the 1980s U.S. Empire as though it had the same class structure and political dynamic as 1848 Germany or 1871 France. Of course, in the “classic” class analysis of 19th Century Europe the Europeans of all classes are there – but we are not. No wonder comrades have gotten misled and miseducated by this misapplied European analysis of a century ago. The misapplication is no accident, but is another tactic in the Euro-Amerikan ideological domination of the oppressed.

Other Third-World movements have met similar problems (although our experiences have not been identical). In fact, the 1960s breakthrough of “ethnic studies programs” at universities has been dialectically turned around and used against us. We are getting imperialist-sponsored and imperialist-financed “Asian studies,” “Black studies,” “Puerto Rican studies,” etc. etc. pushed back down our throats. Some of the most prominent Third World intellectuals in the U.S. Empire are getting paid good salaries by the imperialists to teach us our histories. Why?

U.S. imperialism would rather that all Third-World people in their Empire remain totally blank and ignorant about themselves, their nations, their cultures, their pasts, about each other, about everything except going to work in the morning. But that day is over. So instead they oppose enlightenment by giving in to it in form, but not in essence. Like jiu-jitsu, our original demand that our separate and unique histories be uncovered and recognized is now being used to throw us off our ideological balance. The imperialists promoted watered-down and distorted versions of our pasts as oppressed Third-World nations and peoples. The imperialists even concede that their standard “U.S. history” is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why?

 
 

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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.

 

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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)

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