lately i've been interested in the idea that the lumpenproletariat (or the unemployables as huey p newton called them) should be the focus of radical organizing. this week, i'm going to post different actions, programs, and writings of the young lords and other organizations that took this analysis.

American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000) comes down the moment that Patrick Bateman confronts his lawyer in person after leaving him an emotional confession over voicemail the night before. The lawyer is at first joking, then serious, then offended... he doesn't believe Bateman's experiences, in fact, he doesn't even think he is talking to Patrick Bateman. It's this complete dispossession of his identity, his great experiences that leads Bateman to insist "Don't you know who I am?" over and over to his lawyer, existentially insistent that he is, that his deeds have been.

Many first world communist parties have attached themselves to the "1% vs 99%" analysis of capitalist society. However, they have done so uncritically. A 99% v 1% analysis is fundamentally too vague to be useful as an analytical tool when looking at how policy is formulated and carried out in any political system. This is reflected by occupy's focus on campaign financing and relatively inconsequential legal fictions like corporate personhood.

We have arrived, as a species, at a peculiar juncture in the development of our shared world-system. An interdigitating set of political-economic and ecological crises looms large, threatening centuries of deprivation for our descendants, if not outright extinction. An absurdly unjust system of global capitalism, benefitting a tiny minority of kleptocrats and criminals, staggers mindlessly toward oblivion. As unrest grows and these crises intensify, it has become painfully obvious that no reform of this revolutionary state-capitalist machine is possible. It will destroy itself, and us with it, plunging us into debt-serf neofeudalism or worse, if we do not stop it.