Unlike bacteria, humans live in a class society

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Why Anarchism Should Be Part Of The Left
San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair and Conference 2001
I wasn't surprised to see the anarchist bookfair consisted of shopkeepers peddling wares as hopelessly progressive as any you could find at any other left-liberal gathering.

The works of government anarchist Chomsky competed for space with pamphlets supporting the liberal establishment's war against freedom, amalgamating gun-owners with the Ku Klux Klan. For example, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists. Anarchy magazine's review is characteristically uncritical: "The links between supporters of Reagan-Bush and the Third Reich, along with many of the militia groups in the US are explicitly documented" (issue 51). Elsewhere on this site (/wildcat/dees1119.html) we explain how anti-fascists help reinforce the power of the state.

I did expect the conference on the second day, March 25, to be a little better. Organized by Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory and Research and Development (BASTARD), the agenda looked promising. Primitivist and anti-civilization arguments have clearly established themselves as a major force - among anthropology students in their twenties, anyway.

The subjects for discussion on the panel encompassed Green Anarchy, Primitivism, Technology and Domination, and the speakers included John Zerzan and Wolfi Landstreicher, who have done much to insist that the purpose of social revolution must be, not to take over technology and run it more democratically, but to break our dependence on it completely. Wolfi made the good point that "direct action" does not mean hanging banners from buildings telling people what you think, it means directly acting against what ails you. Zerzan was also in good form, but they "shared the platform" with a pathetic shower of liberal academics and students. What I was not prepared for was that the anti-civilization current already has an evil twin, undermining the hard-won insights of Zerzan, Perlman and the Fifth Estate: Green Anarchism. If the American left is chiefly driven by white guilt, the green anarchists go further. They argued that we as humans should be ashamed to exist, because we are consuming the earth's resources. Not a trace of a class analysis appeared to have sunk into their heads, despite the vicious prosecution of some of them by the police, given long prison sentences for minor incidents in demonstrations and so on. They shamelessly (or should that be shamefully?) defended the worst aspects of "deep ecology", a modern variant of the views of Malthus: the world's problems, ecological destruction, starvation and so on, derive from the fact that there are just too many people. In order to save the earth, most of us must die.

Eugene, Oregon, where the green anarchists came from, is a university town, but it is not a university. It may have hippies and crunchy granola, but it also has classes and class struggle. Even lifestyle anarchists could relate to that instead of defending Thomas Malthus's explicitly anti-working class views. (The Reverend Malthus used crude biological analogies to justify starvation, transportation and the rest of the Georgian/Victorian arsenal of violence against the dangerous classes). Green Anarchists in Europe, for all their moralism, do solidarize with the working class.

One of the sessions was entitled Should Anarchists Be Part Of The Left?. Even Zerzan came close to arguing the commonplace anarchist position that the left is dead, and that something new is needed to replace it, as if we are looking at a market opportunity. The left in one form or another will never die as long as industrial civilization needs a fifth column to sterilize nascent resistance. It mutates as the proletariat gets wise to its real nature. If you're a political animal trying to find a way to trick the working class into doing what you want by telling it things you don't believe, Marxism won't get you far today, but maybe Anarchism could be more successful. From what I saw of it at this conference, I can only hope not.
The Tyranny of Anarchy
There was limited time available, so it was crucial that the chairperson, or facilitator, or whatever s/he is called these days, took questions in order, and generally policed the debate to ensure a fair go for anyone who wanted to speak. Instead, the meeting degenerated into long exchanges between the green anarchists and their friends, the latter getting in several questions apiece. I had my hand up for half an hour, but wasn't selected. I got my five cents' worth when John Zerzan was taking questions. I asked John what he thought of the corpse of deep ecology being disinterred in his milieu, and he did a good job of setting matters right. I asked him whether he thought his views lead to the idea that the world's population is much too large. He responded in the negative: industrial society is so wasteful, paving thousands of acres a day, transporting food across continents instead of growing it locally. The cattle industry alone consumes liters of water for every gram of diseased flesh that comes out the other end. The world currently produces enough grain to feed the world's poulation. Some of it is destroyed because it cannot be sold at a profit, and much of it goes to livestock, losing an order of magnitude of food value in the process. (Roughly, if you feed ten grams of protein to an animal, you get a gram back, and of course you lose fiber, vitamins and minerals). In a remarkable display of common sense, John argued that there are forms of agriculture, permaculture being the best known, which are sustainable and can support large numbers of people. One thing John didn't do, and in my opinion should have, was to have criticized the green anarchists in something like the following words:

The toxic wastes produced by industrialism are not "unavoidably created by our life processes", they are the result of capitalist looting and a pathological culture. People need neither vast energy consumption nor toxic-waste production to be kept alive; in face, we are being steadily poisoned by them - How Deep is Deep Ecology?, George Bradford, Times Change Press, 1989.

Human society is not like "bacteria in a petri dish" as one of the green anarchists asserted; it does not consist of organisms frantically eating all the available resources, breeding as fast as possible, heading for apocalypse as the food suddenly runs out. Human beings have less children when they can afford not to trade the short-term security of a large family for long-term environmental sustainability. In other words, poor people have large families. For example, look at Holland and Bangladesh. In some ways, they are similar countries - low, alluvial, flood-prone, densely populated intensive farming areas at major estuaries. If humans were like bacteria, people in these countries would behave similarly, but in reality, they could hardly be more at variance. In one, population growth has stabilized thanks to a high standard of living, freedom for women and a welfare state. In the other, millions are forced to divide their land among growing families which they have to support them in their old age, which women reach at thirty-five thanks to a dozen babies born in primitive (I use the word loosely) conditions, and the basis of their existence is being washed away by increasingly serious floods as the forests are cut down for building and firewood.

Unlike bacteria, humans live in a class society in which most people are forced to contribute to a force which leads to their extinction by slaving in offices, farms and factories for a minority of executives, generals and politicians. There is nothing inherent in homo sapiens which makes it destroy the earth. As every speaker at the anarchist conference recognized, the war against life is a recent deviation from the way we lived for ninety-nine percent of our time on earth. Although the hunter-gatherer way cannot be recreated, a more sustainable society is within our grasp. The revolutionary movement that is emerging, having rejected the old left, must be careful not to degenerate into a new one, if we are to succeed, and time is running out.

Richard Tate, March 31 2001



Support for progress used to be endemic among those who considered themselves opponents of capitalism. It was thought that a revolutionary movement could take the means of production from the hands of its present irresponsible owners, and redirect it to benefit humanity. To express it more poetically:

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels [1].

These "means" could, it was thought, be taken over and used for different purposes by a different class.

An alternative approach emerged during the 1970's. Jacques Camatte, John Zerzan and Fredy Perlman among others focused the growing unease about technology generated by the accumulating evidence that the industrial system is destroying the world. Instead of accepting the traditional conflict between the relations of production (bad) and the forces of production (good), these new Luddites eschewed production per se. Fredy Perlman's Against His-story, Against Leviathan! [2] was the closest thing to a manifesto of the emerging revolutionary perspective. By this I mean that it attempts to explain the whole of human history and pre-history.

Perlman's argument goes like this: Civilization is only 8,000 years old. Human beings have been around for hundreds of thousands of years. Communities existed in the New World for thousands of years without leading to Civilization. (Perlman uses the word Leviathan, from Hobbes' work of the same name [3], to mean a Civilization: an artificial beast with enslaved people as its organs). The Aztecs and the Incas were in decline when the conquistadors arrived. The continent is littered with the ruins of a hundred failed Leviathans. The Old World has even more: but one of these artificial monsters, the Sumerian, succeeded. The rest of history is the result of enslavement, and resistance to it. Contra Marxism, the evidence does not show that Civilization is inevitable, desirable, or irreversible. But resistance to continual slave-raids tends to lead to a permanent military force, and another Leviathan. Though not inevitable in the way Marxists believe, Civilization was difficult to stop. Though it almost always failed, it only had to succeed once. Where it couldn't be escaped, communities ran away, but eventually, it covered the world.

The abolition of Civilization, and a return to communities of free human beings, has always been possible. There were revolutionary uprisings in 1st century Rome, 4th century Persia and 16th century Germany, in the 19th and 20th centuries and at numerous other times. The aim of a real revolution is to bury Caesar, not to praise him; to destroy the productive forces, not to develop them. Leviathans have a continual struggle to keep going, and most fall apart. Progress is the result of a disruption of cyclical time. Our struggle reasserts invariant, cyclical time against progressive, linear time.

Myths such as Dream Time, Eden and the Golden Age when

They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods -- Hesiod, cited in [2],

are humanity's memories of life before the disaster.

Against His-story completely overturned the old productivist vision. Revolutionaries today, for example the authors of Wildcat and Green Anarchist, don't oppose the way technology is used by capitalism. We don't urge the working class to set up workers' councils to manage production. Our ancestors never worked. They didn't get up cursing the fact that they had to go out hunting and gathering. These activities were part of life, not a chore necessary to fulfill other, unrelated needs.

However, Against His-story has its flaws, and this essay attempts to deal with them. Perlman claims relationships between species in the state of nature are benign. When a bird eats an insect, Perlman says the insect has made a gift of its freedom to the bird. Successful species have caused the extinction of most of the others. The dodo was nothing special. Whenever mammals floated to an island, they ate all the flightless birds. Both the Victorian view of Nature as red in tooth and claw and the modern sentimental fairytale are projections of human values. When he accuses anthropologists of projecting (Against His-story pp7-8, 15...), he implies we can avoid doing so.

But the system of exploitation produced by a small minority of people over the last few thousand years is a different ballgame than the normal struggle of species for survival. It is a war against life itself. The growing destruction of nature isn't a mistake, nor the result of bad management. In 1992, for the first time, the leaders of Leviathan got together, claiming to see if they could tame the beast. The affluent effluent of 178 countries flowed into Rio for the Earth Summit, and produced a lot of hot air about global warming. Five years later, they gathered again. This is what they have achieved:

"Worldwide almost 14 million hectares of forests -- an area the size of Nepal -- are lost to logging or slash-and-burn agriculture each year. Disappearing along with the trees are habitats for rare and endangered species, which the United Nations says are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate of 50,000 a year. In coastal areas, where two-thirds of the world's population lives, water pollution is spreading disease, killing fish and destroying coral reefs. In the open seas, more than 60 percent of the world's fisheries are fully exploited or in danger of collapse. In developing nations, rapid growth in the use of fossil fuels is expected to double global energy consumption by the middle of the next century. The modernization of countries such as China probably will confound efforts to control greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which many scientists blame for rising global temperatures and an increase in extreme droughts and floods" -- LA Times-Washington Post Service, June 23, 1997.

Environmental laws have saved a spotted owl here and there, but after a brief respite, US industry is back on the warpath. In most countries there has not even been a token turn to environmentally friendly capitalism. It's officially admitted. Even when his own divination tells him that he is destroying the basis of his own existence, the sorcerer is unable to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. To put it more prosaically, "The world is going to hell" [4].

Armor and Alienation
Throughout Against His-story, ordinary events are embellished with references to people struggling to free themselves from the armor which Civilization has bolted onto their otherwise cute personalities. But how does Perlman know what part of us is really us, and what is merely internalized compulsion? Human beings have no instinctive ability to look after ourselves. We cannot survive if abandoned at birth. Modern parents may try to reason with their offspring, but at the end of the day, toilet training and other basic behaviors are not a matter of opinion: they have to be imposed on the child by the authority of the parents. It is not at all obvious which parts of our personae are the neurotic compulsions of civilization, and which are the restraints necessary for belonging to a human community, or indeed being human at all. This is not to say that the concept of "armor" is useless. But it needs to be carefully defined before you go around tearing off bits of people's psyches. There is a dangerous circularity in assuming you know how people really are. Objectors to Perlman's "armor" hypothesis are dismissed as... armored. There is no Perlman cult, but this kind of thinking is cultish. If the word "cult" means anything, it means a collective, trapped, not in armor, but in circular logic.

Perlman has to do some impressive mental gymnastics to fit the facts into his theory. For instance, he treats the whole history of the Roman Empire as a rebellion against the Etruscans which became "diverted" into another Leviathan. But something cannot turn into its opposite. A diverted rebellion is one which is slightly off course, not going in the opposite direction. The Empire did not contain "traces" of the original rebellion except in the trivial sense that you can find a quantum of anything in almost anything else. He speaks of the Earth as if it were alive, conscious and female. "Mother Earth" became one of the bromides of the nineties.

Numerous authors are quoted, completely out of context, to back up his theory. Snatches of Yeats' and Eliot's poetry are cited to make them look like opponents of Civilization (pp 1-2). According to Perlman, Buddha renounced Civilization, not the world as such. Attempts to recruit philosophers as diverse as Nietzsche and Sartre to his side are far-fetched.

But Perlman doesn't claim to be defending a manifesto or a theory. It's a vision, or a story. Perlman sometimes called himself a "rememberer". Like it or not, Against His-story tells the whole story of the human race under a unifying perspective, just as The Communist Manifesto does. But the latter's authors were open about the grandeur of their scheme. Perlman's attempt to sound like a humble storyteller is a convenient way of trying to avoid responsibility. Like all anarchists, he wants to say "this is what's wrong, and this is what to do about it" without actually saying so: that would be authoritarian. If he dealt with Hobbes' Leviathan fairly, he would have to consider this succinct argument against anarchy:

And whosoever thinking Soveraign Power too great, will seek to make it lesse; must subject himselfe, to the Power, that can limit it; that is to say, to a greater [3].

Against Hysteria
This is not the place to fully re-examine the concessions to women's liberation which have been made by men involved in radical movements since the swinging, but sexist, sixties. However, Perlman complains that the story of Civilization is a male story, hence the title of Against His-story. It explicitly identifies the triumph of Leviathan with the defeat of the female sex, so it's necessary to briefly look at this position and its consequences.

As Nietzsche remarked in Beyond Good and Evil, "In no age has the weaker sex been treated with as much respect by men as in ours" . This is certainly true of radical movements like Earth First! , and to a lesser extent, of Western societies in general. Many recent moral panics, by which the media tries to persuade us to support the state, originate in the women's movement. Date rape, pornography, sexual harassment, domestic violence and child molesting are some examples. Thanks to the women's movement, in Western countries, the testimony of women is taken more seriously than that of men. In November 1990, an innocent man was convicted of the rape and murder of a girl 21 years before [5]. The only evidence was the recollection of his mad feminist daughter [6]. After 6‡ years of hell, he was released in July 1996 [7]. If he were not a man, if it was not a sexual case, and if the sole witness were not a woman, the case would have never reached court.

Normally, one person's word against another is insufficient even to prosecute, let alone convict. If I went to the police and said I had seen someone whom I remember burglarizing my house three years ago, but didn't report at the time, they'd laugh me out of the precinct. But if a woman made a claim of rape or sexual assault with similar lack of evidence, or even something as ephemeral as sexual harassment, she would be taken seriously. The Satanic child abuse witchhunts, which seriously damaged many innocent people's lives on both sides of the Atlantic, were the product of a holy alliance of feminists and Christians [8]. The courts aren't 'fair', but they are not completely arbitrary. It is possible to avoid conviction if the prosecution haven't proven their case. Feminism has aided the state by undermining the assumption of innocence, and strengthening the assumption of slave morality: that losers are morally superior to winners.

The idea that women were freer in primitive societies, as Perlman believed, is simplistic to say the least. I won't attempt to demonstrate this, Zerzan-style, by citing dozens of anthropological examples. The reader can easily find as many examples of primitive patriarchy as sexual equality. One of my own favorites is the JÌvaro of Equador. These people have a history of resistance to colonialism. They once overran the gold-thirsty Spaniards and, with delicious irony, poured molten gold down the governor's throat. This kept the conquistadores out for three hundred years. The JÌvaro are not the egalitarians of Perlman's story. They keep women in domestic servitude [9].

According to Perlman, every time men succeeded in subduing women, this was a step toward Armageddon, but most hysterians are progressive. They accumulate evidence that women were responsible for Civilization [10], and even culture [11], unquestioningly assuming that these advances are to their credit. Whereas Marija Gimbutas [10] defends Civilization against male barbarism, Perlman sees the former as a product of the latter. The Fifth Estate happily embraces both viewpoints. They may be mutually exclusive, but both perspectives are against men. If we really want to reject the progressive tradition, we have to reject feminism as firmly as Marxism.

No U-turn
It is more than a banality to say we cannot go back, and that we have to deal with the world as it is. Allowing the development of Civilization was certainly a mistake, and arguably, Agriculture wasn't such a hot idea either [12], but it does not follow that these errors can be rectified. It would be impossible to return to the Stone Age. The current population of the world cannot support itself under capitalism, but neither could it survive by hunting. Some kind of small-scale sustainable Agriculture will be necessary.

Perlman has no clear idea of how Civilization will end. He mentions a few ranters and a bit of resistance, but largely relies on Leviathan's own unsteadiness to bring it down, urging us to sing and dance, and wait 'til the sun rises.

Perlman's work contributed major insights which could be developed into a coherent perspective. This perspective would demonstrate that progress is not inevitable. It would break the link between resistance, progress and the state, forged by Marxism, and used by the latter to defeat the former. Against His-story is not that perspective. Perlman left many loose ends. But his basic position has proven unanswerable. Opposition to progress, development and Civilization are part of the minimum program of revolutionaries today.

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Review: The Redneck Manifesto

Jim Goad, Simon and Schuster, New York 1997



Richard Tate, Nov 1997

The purpose of this book is to challenge the anti-white racism of the American media. It explains how racism has gradually been turned upside down, so the media and the liberal establishment in general perpetrate racist slurs against the white working class population. The author isn't a redneck, but an articulate advocate of working class unity.

He refutes the myth at the origin of anti-white racism, the idea that all white people arrived voluntarily in luxury liners. In fact, most white people arrived in the holds of ships with a mortality rate similar to that of slave ships from Africa, and their arrival was a product of
a) actual slavery - he argues that there were at least as many white slaves as black
b) transportation of various kinds
c) economic force - move or starve.

When they got to America, white immigrants were sometimes treated worse than black slaves. Jim explains why with an analogy. Many whites were temporary servants, bound to their masters for seven or ten years. Black slaves were usually a man's property for life. A white servant was like a rented car: you thrash the hell out of it while you've got it. It didn't matter if a white servant died of exhaustion a day after his term of servitude ended. Masters could murder or rape their servants or slaves with impunity. Through the school system and the media, Americans are taught the horrors of black slavery over and over again, but white "indentured servitude" is hardly mentioned.

This is a polemical book, not a scientific treatise. All the history needs to be checked, but there is enough authentic research in it to assert that the origin of the white working class in America was no tea party. Discussing the origins of the slave trade, Jim notes: "Africans were imperialistic; they just weren't very good at it." This is simplistic to the point of inaccuracy, but makes a good point. Most Africans were hunters a small-scale agriculturalists, but among them were empires such as Ethiopia, which was good at imperialism. See The Race to Fashoda by David Levering Lewis, for an account of how Ethiopia defeated Italy and played off Britain and France against each other during the big carve-up of the mid-19th century. In any case, there were indigenous slave-traders in Africa. Most of them were Muslims, like Louis Farrakhan.

It might be asked, what does all this history prove? The barrage of anti-white racism puts its opponents in a difficult position. Most of what it claims is both false, and strictly irrelevant. It is not true that most white people's ancestors benefitted from slavery, and even if it were true, no-one should have to pay for the crimes of their ancestors. Most whites in America today are working class, and have far more in common with their black neighbors than their white bosses. Or as Jim puts it, "if the niggers and rednecks ever joined forces, they'd be unbeatable".

It could be said, and often is, that poor whites may be poor, but they defend their relative privileges, and thus the system as a whole. Some of them do, but so do latter day carpetbaggers like the Southern Poverty Law Center and all those who try to hold all white people responsible for the state of blacks today. Jim shows that the history of poor white/poor black antagonism in the South is not as simple as we are taught to believe; a clear cut case of poor whites ferociously defending their meager advantages against any black advancement. There are examples of the political system using black people to keep the white workers down, for instance immediately after the Civil War. In any case, it's always the bosses pitting one section against another, divide and rule at its crudest. Blaming the white working class, as liberals do, is part of this policy. The professional anti-white racist demagogues are far more effective than the Ku Klux Klan.When they can't find hate crimes, they just make them up.

In 1996, there was a lot of fuss made about white racists setting fire to "black" churches. A little-noticed item in USA Today looked at the statistics, and it turned out that arson of churches was distributed fairly evenly across the ethnicity of their congregations. Numerous other hate crimes were faked. These range from outrageous provocations to clumsy stunts which backfire on the liberal establishment which encourages them. A black woman claimed to have been raped by white men, and was gleefully paraded in front of the liberal media by politicians like Al Sharpton. It turned out to be a fantasy. A black lesbian in Portland even pretended to be disabled, and planted a burning cross on her own front lawn, attempting to get a triple dose of sympathy from the liberals ("Hate Crimes That Weren't", Willamette Week, July 3, 1996). When blacks make racist attacks on white people, you won't hear a squeak about it.

Campaigners for racial and sexual equality do not challenge capitalism at all. On the contrary. If companies hired people solely on the basis of ability, they would do better. There would be just as much inequality, but it would be an inequality of ability, an inequality which benefits the economy. Anti-racism is simply racism in reverse. Its purpose is to distract us from the real issues. For example, we are told that an average black person's income has risen from 50% to 59% of the average white's in the last 25 years. The reaction is supposed to be that we still have a long way to go. What they don't tell us is that this increase has been achieved by reducing real income for whites. Since 1973, average income has slumped more than 10%. Eventually, perhaps the entire working class will live in the same abject povery. Then the anti-racist liberals will be happy. "Average" usually means "mean", a meaningless figure. It only takes a few white multi- billionaires to greatly increase the mean income of the entire white population. If a man who earns a million dollars a year walks into a room with nine people who earn $30,000, the mean income in that room would more than quadruple, to $127,000. Are you feeling privileged yet? There are few, if any, black billionaires. So the disparity between black and white working class income is not as great as the figures suggest.

The facts you discover follow from the categories you classify them into. The racist media assume that all white people, or all women, or all members of various other categories, have something in common, and then produce statistics which apparently prove just what they have assumed. One response to this is to reject their categories altogether, and defend the interests of the one category they never use: the proletariat. They do talk of "Labor" or "working people", but these categories divide the proletariat, which includes many people who aren't in unions or don't work. But it is sometimes effective to counter the media by pointing out that even if their assumptions were true, their conclusions would not follow. This will only work if we remember that we are on enemy ground from the outset.

Guilt is a powerful instrument of social control. There is a constant barrage of propaganda trying to make white people, and particularly, white men, feel guilty for the accidents of their birth. One effect of this is that white working class people are blackmailed into keeping quiet about their own condition. Another is to provoke a racist reaction to the anti-white racism of the media. The different varieties of racism reinforce each other.

Do you answer the ideologues by "fist-fucking them with the facts", to cite Jim's purple prose again, or by pointing out that their claims are red herrings? I think you need to do both. Jim generally chooses the first, and occasionally this leads him into a liberal trap. Explaining in great detail where poor whites came from, and how they've been used and exploited, almost gives the impression that he's competing with the liberals on their own terms: here's another oppressed group to whine about. Hey, white boy, it's ok! You're descended from victims, not oppressors! He even talks about his own origins, as if, like an American leftist, he needs to say where he comes from before telling us what he thinks. His overdone explanation of his white trash "roots" could be read as a parody: "Speaking as a half-Irish redneck...", instead of "as a gay Mexican...", or whatever. But eventually, it becomes clear that he really does identify with white trash.

Jim's identity politics is akin to the workerism of the late British anarchist paper Class War. But Class War never whined: they glorified working class victories, not complained about their defeats. In America today, there are precious few successes to brag about, particularly among the congenital losers Jim champions.

Occasionally, Jim even defends blue-collar conservative resentment against college kids and foreigners coming over here and taking "our" jobs. But his description of the working class he lives and works with tends to undermine his pride in them. A moron in Jim's local bar sums it up: "Working people built this fuckin' country, and they don't give a damn about us." It's difficult to avoid the thought that, if the working class is stupid enough to swallow patriotism, it deserves to lose. At least, until it sees through this trash, it is bound to stay at the bottom of it. Class pride is not the same as class consciousness. Being proud of the accident of being born working class is as ridiculous as being proud of your skin color. And you can change your class, if you're clever and ruthless enough.

It takes courage to stand up against the liberal establishment, and despite its faults, you should support Jim by obtaining this book. "Being called a racist can ruin a career just like communist blacklisting could destroy someone in the fifties." In the current anti-right, anti-white political climate, The Redneck Manifesto is an important addition to the arsenal of anyone who wants to puncture the liberal concensus with a few salvoes of sarcasm.