Midwest Anarchist Report:
This Hierarchy in Crisis – The Managerial Class.
Federico Jones
Chicago, IL


Dear Friends, Comrades and Collaborators,

This is an open letter, of likely no consequence whatsoever, yet necessarily made as an update – a report back - from one so entirely devoured in capital as to feel ill, in despair and quite without the firepower to respond. We’re still making the maps, drawing our lines, strategizing … and as Slavoj Zizek has said, “these are pre-revolutionary times and historically they’ve never been very pretty. Lot’s of bloodshed”. Some of our friends are retreating back into mysticism and spirituality.

The hierarchical system of capitalism, religion and representative democracy is in crisis and its pretty clear, they have no idea what they’re doing. Only greed-driven initiatives are getting any major press and we know they’ve had their day: only those who’ve internalized the power structure, those who as Deleuze has said, “have trees [hierarchy] in their brains” continue to believe in it. Barak Obama is a handsome face on a brutal system. We fully expect a police-state soon.

Before even touching upon the horrors of the Iraq War, (the civilian dead), Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Colombia and Guantanamo, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, the Congo and Guinea…before going to all the officially, state-monopolized violences around the world, there is a microcosm, a haven for fascism right within and among us in the United States – and I’m not speaking of the minutemen or kkk – I’m speaking of a much more gigantic population: which upholds corporate power; which defends it; which ridicules popular initiatives; which owns property and wants strong police and “law and order”; which thinks the animal and earth freedom groups are simply insane; which mistrusts art and literature; which is hyper-entertained and hyper-afraid of ‘otherness’; which is religious and accepts God’s authority as it is embodied in the church, synagogue or mosque; which watches FOX news, …on and on…maybe you know some of them, not to mention their “silent majorities”. Even Barak only won 52 to 48.

In Europe they were called the bourgeois, in the U.S. the middle class, though this class distinction is often fuzzy and unclear. Perhaps it is better to speak of the Management Class and their minions, beginning with where most people work – its hierarchy - and ending with republicans and democrats. Who calls the shots? Whose points of view matter? Whose interests are represented? Who just got bailed out?

Noam Chomsky might disagree with me as he thinks the American population is progressive: anti-war, in favor of socialized health-care, critical of the government. The statistics do bring this out. But he fails to remind everyone that where they go to work everyday (M.I.T., his university post is a major, military part) is set up to ensure that the voices of revolutionary working people, students, soldiers, farm labor, the poor and the infirm are never heard. He even says as much, without spending much effort on how it might be changed – and trying to funnel some resources in those directions. If we’re subservient, we’re allowed to survive another day. Just keep quiet and go to work.

Ah well, at least Chomsky’s historical research has been helpful. Look at how the RNC and DNC were covered in the major media. This is what most Americans see and which Chomsky rightly called “manufactured consent”. He just doesn’t say that consent is manufactured right where we work everyday, which upholds the entire system of hierarchy. Many of my anarchist friends have the hardest time with anti-capitalism, because American workers have it so much better than the third-world. Well pals, that shit just doesn’t hold water any more. American workers are hereby declared “fucked”.

We find that the usual outcome of capitalist hierarchy is a totalitarianism+ war=fascism. Spain, Germany, Italy, England, (thatcher on up), Israel, (please add yours here) and the USA (beginning with the arrival of the whites and the genocide of the Indigenous on up). Mussolini called it corporate government. Carl Rove calls it democracy.

This thing, this totalitarian political economy, this vicious hierarchy, I have witnessed it and I am here to say: YOUR BOSSES, YOUR GOVERNMENT REPS., YOUR BISHOPS, CARDINALS, PRIESTS AND RABBIS, PATRIARCHS AND IMAMS, YOUR GURUS, YOUR DEPARTMENT CHAIRS, YOUR PROFESSORS (with few exceptions), YOUR JUDGES, YOUR FOREMEN, YOUR MANAGERS, YOUR COMMUNITY POLICEMEN, YOUR BUSINESS-ENTERPRENEURS AND OWNERS , YOUR (add yours here) - THEY ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS!!! (You know this already).

My pot-smoking friends – the pacificists- keep thinking they can make common cause with the managerial class: if one only speaks rationally enough, doesn’t lose temper, is a good listener… Let us agree that while we argue the blood continues to spill, for which these pacifists care nothing! As the Critical Arts Ensemble has shown, 140 million people a year die from simply lack of clean water and basic antibiotics. (Marching Plague, 2005).

The pacifist line goes like this: “revolt only causes more harm than good”. But let’s never forget the daily madness of THIS hierarchy, what IT has done and does everyday…the managers are willfully ignorant and don’t want to hear about dead women and children, the poor, the refugees…this is nothing less than micro-fascistic.

European Friends!!! Middle Eastern, Asian and African Friends!!! Central and South American Friends!!! Let us never forget who these decision-makers were and who their servants are!!! The American Management Class is a vicious, brutal and hysterical servant of this mad hierarchy!!! (Completely setting aside the organized crime syndicates, the mobs, the narco-traffickers, the covert ops and the offshore, grey economies)… AND WE’RE NOT GOING BACK TO BREZHNEV!!!

WHAT DO HIERARCHIES LOOK LIKE HORIZONTALIZED? COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ENTITIES!!!

We’ve had enough of the pathological bitching of the management class, whose hysterical crying can be heard in every well-to-do neighborhood. The country clubs are full of the “smug americans”…Fitzgerald showed us who they are (Great Gatsby), they haven’t gone away, they only mutated with the baby boom…they need to be called what they in fact, are: enemies of the people. The state internalized creates cops – capitalism internalized creates nazis – look at Dick Cheney, a good businessman.

Let us use this opportunity, wherever we are to encourage and support the leveling, the flattening, the horizontalization which must take place…long live the anarchist collectives of Chicago!!! Watch out for that MANAGER!!! Vive los Caracoles!!!
With love,
jones.