COLLECTIVE
Midnight Notes send its emissaries to all the major continents of the planet...only to find a collapse of wages everywhere. The deals of first, second and third world were withering away leaving earthquakes, war, plagues and starvation. But not defeat as "The Uses of an Earthquake" showed. The people of a proletarian neighborhood in Mexico City were able to turn an earthquake into an opportunity "to construct a different set of values: those of autonomy, self-activity, and the subordination of work to social needs." Similarly, "Resistance to the Plan Has Been Heavy" shows how capital's plans to control the proletariat in India through the green revolution has created "strange loops" and "short circuits" that have made it even more difficult to control.
Law, prisons and police by the mid-1980s was the reality for many of us experiencing the prison of the law or the law of the prison. "The Law of Deals" presaged and out-trumped Trump by describing a layer of struggle beneath and beyond the law, a struggle that shapes Trump's Law. "Policing Us" is a precise of the history of the police from the slave patrols of the South to the bombing of the MOVE house in 1985. "Substruction in the Class/Room Struggle" discusses escape from the prison of schools. Finally, there is a vision of the role of policing, prisons and the law from the insurrectional history of the proletariat. "The Delivery of Newgate" describes the June 1780 liberation of the prisoners by hundreds of Londoners led by Afro-Americans.
This was election year and the U.S. Left was registering voters for Mondale. For MN this was "the year of the Lemming" when "the left and much of the U.S. working class is leaping off a political cliff, driven by a mythical scarcity which exists only in political imagination or will. "How is it possible?" explains the Left's political suicide. "Bolo'Bolo" is an answer to this leftist Lemming leap into the maw of the Planetary Work Machine. It precisely describes the substruction of the three deals of the present world to create together a second reality: Bolo'Bolo.
This 'Midnight Querist' began this issue with questions of the movement's dead. The issue then analyzes the "Peace Movement" and its control by the "re-industrialization" sector of capital. It also presents a proletarian nuclear strategy that is increasingly relevant for us in the 1990s. We catch the post humorous laughter of hte insurrectionary dead from the eighteenth century, then address our real dead, from the voice of Rigoberta Menchu speaking from Guatemala, and our Italian comrades railroaded, tortured and killed. It concludes with an "Audit" of the balance of living class forces in the early 80s.
Reagan politics was the paradoxical synthesis of "the spokesman for a scientific and technological revolution that a few years ago would have smacked of science fiction with the revivalists of religious tendencies and moral conservatism that one would have thought was buried once and for all with 'our' Puritan Founding Fathers." This paradox is resolved in "Mormons in Space," where it is shown that this synthesis is characteristic when capital is in deep crisis and goes "back to basics." But what was our analysis of the capitalist limits and proletarian possibilities of the new technology? It is in "Prologue to the Use of Machines."
The initial Reagan year was one of world-wide capitalist recession, wage cutting, union busting and...space wars in Berlin, Brixton, Amsterdam and the key vault of capital, Zurich. Space Notes includes a long interview with a participant of the glass breaking struggle for a new social space. This is followed by a historic piece by the murderedYolanda Ward, "Spatial Deconcentration in Washington, D.C.," where the detailed government plan for "the transformation of parts of Washington, D.C. from a riot-torn, abandoned murder-city to a fast growing executive's paradise" is uncovered. The issue concludes with a discussion of race as a class special category in the U.S.
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