Received: from monsoon.dial.pipex.net (monsoon.dial.pipex.net 
[158.43.128.69])  by newsgate.dircon.co.uk (8.8.7/8.8.7) with SMTP id 
KAA01365
 for <martin.howard@qnet.org.uk>; Wed, 10 Jun 1998 10:08:50 +0100 (BST)
Received: (qmail 21963 invoked from network); 10 Jun 1998 09:08:49 -0000
Received: from ken.fortunecity.co.uk (HELO fortunecity.com) 
(195.224.181.96)
  by smtp.dial.pipex.com with SMTP; 10 Jun 1998 09:08:49 -0000
Message-ID: <357E4E7A.32FF19D2@fortunecity.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 10:14:34 +0100
From: ken <ken@fortunecity.com>
Organization: FortuneCity Ltd
X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.04 [en] (Win95; I)
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: martin.howard@qnet.org.uk
Subject: Black Flag Article
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; 
boundary="------------6A9690D7BE5F05AF81D590A0"

Hi Martin,
Please find attached a copy of my article, its been edited to remove the
references to BF and one or two narrative jumps have been plugged
otherwise its the same. Its in a primitive version of Word Perfect (PC)
so should convert OK. I've got a graphic which I'll scan and send to you
later, its a cartoon from the 1930s so should be copyright free by now.

get back to me if there's a problme my number at home is:
0181 985 2083
--
Ken Peacock
ken@fortunecity.com


�WPC�

.PRS

d
���
pi Half-height


���
H
�t
�J��)R�J��C�C�P8˃7�Y<�i)�F�

On the 14th May 1998 just over three percent of the world's
population rose in open revolt against the business interests of
a single family. They took to the streets of one of the biggest
cities on earth and devastated it. The sacking of Jakarta by its
poor, swiftly followed by similar actions across Indonesia, has
demonstrated the unprecedented class divisions now appearing on a
global scale. The levels of social and economic polarisation
currently prevailing on Earth are approaching a critical point. Two
hostile classes will eventually face each other, a monopolist,
oligarchic bourgeoisie battening on a massive and desperate
proletariat beneath it. No conceivable situation could illustrate
this better than Indonesia. There a single family, the Suhartos,
concentrated into their hands almost the entire revenue of the
world's fourth most populous state, placing them, and many of their
friends, amongst the top hundred richest people on Earth. The zero�sum 
logic of such extreme wealth meant that this year's economic crisis, which 
left the poorest destitute and the middle classes ruined, was precisely the 
mechanism whereby the Suharto's wealth increased (now estimated at 
$20billion plus). Their eldest daughter Rukmana responded to the collapse 
of Indonesia's public economy in January by chartering a plane to the 
United States for an emergency �
 16.5.98O

Indonesia: A Tax Haven Established through Genocide
Indonesia has long groaned under an economy thrown open by the
Suhartos to global investment. Big business is largely liberated
from the burden of capital taxation (apart from bribes) so
regressive taxes on the poorest (based on consumption rather than
income) have been used to make up state revenue shortfalls (much
of which has also made its way into Suharto wardrobes). But
Indonesia is not an aberration. It is just an extreme example of
an economic structure which is becoming ubiquitous across the
planet. The structure of Indonesian capitalism is an advanced model
of the global economy, a fact attested to by former eulogists of
Indonesia's growth rate who now attribute its demise solely to a
"lack of transparency". This is disingenuous because the chief
beneficiaries of the Indonesian economy have always been as clear
as day, the Suhartos and their billionaire friends in the local
tobacco, lumber and finance industries. Behind them come Western
multinational investors (including Japan) who are currently
courting Suharto's rivals in order to save their investments.
Elsewhere monopolists have had more success in hiding their
dominance behind a mask of parliamentary democracy. Although some
single figure billionaires still choose to manage the impoverished
staff at their corporate headquarters directly (eg. Fidel Castro,
�

for them. If you are as large as News Corps or Microsoft for
example you can instruct a "statesman" like Tony Blair (estimated
wealth $450,000) to act as your European sales rep. (Recently some
super�rich have decided to try governing for themselves in the
West. Silvio Berlusconi's ($4.9bn) ill�fated neo�fascist government
in Italy, and the unwelcome attention it brought to his investment
activities, taught him why most of the ruling class choose to tick
the "no publicity" box). The Suhartos had to attain their position
somewhat more forcefully than did the Blairs (or the criminal
Berlusconi) hence the mammoth cream off they and their friends have
claimed as reward. Suharto Senior enthusiastically crushed any�
the mid-1960s which cost the lives of half a million people. A
further 200,000 died in the 1970s after the invasion of East
�

of life (those provided by the Indonesian army itself). Amnesty
International has suggested that the true figures might be more
than double in each case. �
waiting for them if they sought a different path to Suhartoism.
Since then, as Indonesia's malign guardian of global investment,
Suharto has had every indulgence lavished upon his regime by the
West. His genocide in East Timor finally reassured overseas
investors that he could deliver on his promise to make Indonesia
puke cash in their direction too provided they constantly supplied
him with enough sophisticated weapons of repression. This is why
so many governments ignored non�payment for arms shipments, writing
debts off as unavoidable business expenditures. So successful was
this strategy that by the 1990s the West's media, in particularly
delirious moments, were not above holding up Indonesia as an
economic model to be emulated by "backward" European nations still
overburdened by welfare systems and human rights. Indonesia's
crisis is a genuine crisis of capitalism itself. Unlike their
billionaire neighbours controlling the comparatively uninhabited
island of Brunei, the Suhartos owe their riches not to the
exploitation of oil reserves but to the exploitation of a huge
population. This savage contradiction could not last forever. The
entire trade off whereby the population either acquiesced to the
veneer of a booming, westernised Jakarta (which most could never
benefit from) or else faced the terror of the security forces was
hanging by an increasingly slender thread. It would take only a
single reverse to be suffered by Indonesia's middle classes to
bring home to the entire population that no illusory ladder of
opportunity existed for them. At this point Suharto's entire carrot
and cattle�prod confidence trick would collapse.

Going Beyond Class Warfare
Revolutionaries have always maintained that capitalist oppression
will eventually lead to the world's poor violently forcing their
way back onto the stage of history and that no army, however well
equipped, can ultimately hope to resist them. That Indonesia
experienced one of the greatest eruptions of class warfare in human
history demonstrates this point. But no�one should sing in praise
of simple class war. The wanton destruction by the poor of
Suharto's hypermarkets, toll roads and luxury hotels, whilst it
proves once again how effortlessly and swiftly the revolutionary
poor can paralyse a state, nevertheless appears to have gone no
deeper. Class warfare is an ultimately wasteful expression of
hatred, a rage against mass poverty which, though it can be
expressed through mass uprisings such as in Indonesia on the 14th
of May, remains individualised. The vacuum which follows when the
poor flee back to the slum districts inevitably opens the way for
a resurgent bourgeoisie to reposition itself, commandeering the
uprising as its means of redistributing monopoly power amongst its
excluded members. Just as looting only satisfies the immediate
wants of the poor as individuals, rioting against the rich only
dislodges the wealthy individuals currently occupying positions of
power (who are immediately substituted by their rivals, or the army
if their rivals are divided). As an outlet for accumulated personal
grievances, class war occasionally ends up even finding common
cause with an urge for racial violence (especially where race and
economic stratification coincide). Unless it breaks out of
individualised mass action and becomes a truly social revolt,
unless that is the poor rediscover their class consciousness, a�
Indonesia, will simply serve as a tool for middle class reformers
to modernise, intensify and rescue a capitalist society in crisis.
This is why it is vital to advocate social revolution, to highlight
the spontaneous revolutionary organisation which the masses have
increasingly managed to assemble in uprisings this century. Workers
have transcended rioting and looting and begun to set out the basis
for a totally new form of society in revolutions stretching from
Spain in 1936 through to Albania (briefly) in 1997. But for their
spontaneous organisation to be effective workers must draw upon the
theory and analysis of previous resistances. Rioting and looting
can destabilise the rich but it is the revolutionary seizure of
their means of production and state infrastructure which represents
the first step to permanently dissolving them as a class. The
mission of a revolutionary proletariat is not to destroy the
property of a Suharto, Gates, Murdoch or Buffett or that of any
other billionaire. It is to rid the world of the class system which
reproduces them. When we, the world's poor, make the power of class
hatred dialectical, when we subsume it within our historical
mission to abolish class society altogether, then we become a force
potent enough to sweep away the armies of the world.

Who's Next?
The economic crisis which has, in one year, spread from the weak
economies of central and southern Europe to devastate the
dictatorships of South East Asia is a crisis which is rapidly
climbing the world's economic pyramid. Global investors are losing
their nerve in the face of a growing proletarian revolt (though
they are sighing relief at the Indonesian poor's failure to
organise socially on 14th of May). Whilst the disintegration of
Indonesia was dominating the media's attention the global crisis
which sparked it was relentlessly continuing to mount, its next
target, Russia. Precisely as Yeltsin lurched toward his seat at the
top table of a newly expanded G8 his central bank was frantically
battling to save the rouble from oblivion. China too is under
growing pressure to devalue, initially able to resist speculators
but now haemorrhaging reserves because of the full blown Depression
�

19.5.98U
regularly predicts that this current round of devaluations will not
end until it has arrived back at the doorstep of the bubble economy
which exported it in the first place. The global meltdown of
1997-98 could be a report echoing around the world, the sound of
the American investment boom collapsing.

Our World: A Tax Haven Established through Genocide
Proclaiming itself the winner of the Cold War, America set out in
the 1990s to consolidate its victory by taking over the world for
its multinationals. This was after all the strategy for which the
Cold War was originally fought (and for which dictators such as
Suharto and his family were handsomely assisted to power). The
genocide which elevated Suharto was merely a fragment of a global
slaughter which raged across the developing world from the 1950s
to the 1980s. Mass murder was employed by America, the West, and
their proxies to establish a "New World Order" by 1991. But it has
taken just seven years for that Order to crumble and for America's
"emerging markets" to collapse in disarray. Now the chickens may
be flapping home to roost. Though it is impossible to predict when
or by how much the tottering economy of the USA will come to be
effected by this crisis it is enough to point to the
intense�
underclass held in check by televised state murders and a brutal
prison system which is approaching gulag proportions. The economy
is dominated by a billionaire clique comparative to that of Suharto
and his allies, their wealth increasingly derived as much from
exploitation at home as from abroad. These are conditions not
wildly dissimilar to those which lead to the 14th of May in
Indonesia. If American workers respond to their crisis not with
looting but with revolutionary action it will then fall to them to
begin the greatest adventure of all, to explore the possibilities
of human potential and thereby set an example to the world more
profound than that of 1776 itself.