WAR: The “Mutual Butchery” of the Poor and Working Class

Luxemburg warns: �[s]ocial democracy is not linked to the organization of the working class; it is the working class�s own movement.�

What is needed is �education� for a �new discipline,� one that is �voluntary self-discipline.� Only by �defying and uprooting� this discipline instilled in them by the capitalist state, Luxemburg explains, can the movement of workers avoid the road leading to a totalitarian state where the workers� �spontaneous creative process of development� is sacrificed to the dictates of the leadership. Whether totalitarian or �democratic� government, citizens have been corralled fighting imperialist wars. In other words, Rosa Luxemburg warned against the legalization of repression, where protest, in a totalitarian or in a so-called �Democratic� State narrative, represents transgression, and workers, activists, and thinkers who dissent become the Emmanuel Goldstein of Orwell�s 1984, subject to derogation and marginalization.

War brought to you by the big corporate masters who run the show.

This isn�t just a war on Iraqis or Afghanis or even Arabs or Muslims. It is ultimately a war on us all. That�s because the billions and billions of dollars that are being spent on this war – the cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets, and yes, even salaries for the 125,000-plus troops – is money that will never be spent on education, on health care, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing, or to train and place the millions of workers who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone. (Mumia Abu Jamal, �The War against us All!� March 30, 2005)