Well burrowed, old mole!

In politics there is one question. Do we want to do everything right or do we want to win? Do we want to be ‘correct’ or do we want to actually achieve the aim? This divides idealists and materialists, reformists and revolutionaries.

In society we have reform groups that need to be ‘correct’ in terms of the dominant significations (i.e. “law”) in order to achieve credibility, a place at the table etc. These groups get grants and support for their role as loyal opposition within domination.

We also have direct action groups which do not recognize these dominant significations. Among them, there are some which are most feared by the establishment. Following Onyx’s lead, we can look to the film Menace 2 Society, the character O-Dog, described as “America’s nightmare. Young, black, and just don’t give a fuck.”  We can also look to the film State Property where we see Beans and his crew working by direct action and showing the most intense contempt for the law. This culminates in Beans’ idea of how things ought to be, with his people shooting up the courtroom; in this act throwing physical force against symbolic power. That would have been gangsta.

Deleuze and Guattari held that Capitalism produces the schizo as its gravedigger. Let us think again about what this system is producing. It is producing the gangsta and the gang. Today we would have to write Capitalism and Gangstas. Placing this in a slightly different relation, perhaps we could see the gang as the contemporary form of the soviet–the effective form of working class organization. However we come to it, this is of the greatest importance for emancipation.

For too long we have allowed the law enforcement apparatus to code the phenomenon of gangsterism. Despite the systems efforts to mark and separate ‘workers’ and ‘criminals,’ the truth is plain. Most gangsters are working class people who take matters into their own hands, the legalism common to the system and the left is sickening, the gangsta’s rejection of this bullshit indicates an approach to emancipatory activity. The gang is the alternative to the party. This insight is nothing new. We can look to the “affinity group” which we find defined as a “street gang with an analysis.”

The prison is the most important institution of bourgeois society.  The gangs have discovered means of negating this form of social violence. Gangs have developed advanced underground cultures that make the left appear very naive. There is an incredibly inventive realism that we can find in criminal organizations. Knowledge of the strategies and tactics of law enforcement, the modes of exercise of power in society, the real map, requires a thorough knowledge of the underworld, the unmapped portions of the economy or social reality, the ‘there be dragons’ of state cartography. The victory of working people only occurs through a recognition of the community that demolishes the walls surrounding the ghetto, that storms the Prison Industry, the Bastille-function, that is the prime term of bourgeois power.   

The gangster is a worker with a gun without allegiance to the state. Dangerous. A gang is an armed working class organization. The genesis of gangs is from the system’s vain attempt to calculate superfluous lives. The system attempts to plan that certain people will not live, that certain social sectors will not be supported. The gangster rejects this and fights the system in order to live. Thus, everyday life becomes a sort of revolution in which the conditions of survival have been declared illegal and in order to live one must ignore and break the law.