'Guns for Votes'

The Australian Broadcasting Commission has been under pressure to 'convert' to the right-wing paradigm that has consumed Australian political discourse over the last decades. Despite extreme cuts and constant political verballing, vestiges of independence have remained. However, reading this pathetic piece of political journalism on the ABC's website regarding the (in my opinion) intellectually and politically self-serving and hubristic David Leyonhjelm's love of guns, I fear that those last vestiges have finally been eroded.

This article is without an opposing view, does not even follow the basic tenets of fair journalism, and functions as an almost light-hearted romp with the senator as he goes in to bat for gun 'fun'. As the American election has taken the right into its fascist soul-lands and found it both ripe and willing, so has Australia lurched further and further into a far right inhabited by racist apologists, exploitative industrial-military 'libertarians' and religious bigots. This is the worst Australia of the many Australias I have experienced in my lifetime.

The weapons that have destroyed liberty in the United States for so many victims will also completely destroy liberty for many in Australia. These bastards who trade in 'talk' and 'votes' and 'opinions' care only for themselves, not for you. Yes, 'people kill', but guns make it a whole lot easier for them to do so.

I grew up with an understanding and familiarity with guns, and turned away from them in my youth in a very literal and specific way. My poetry is opposed to violence in all forms, though it often 'illustrates' it. Guns are not fun — we are only taught that they are fun. And when they become semantic ploys of right-wing libertarians, they are distributed as tools of ideological conflict. Tools that maim and kill.

John Kinsella

Elegy: Kalgoorlie 2016

Elegy: Kalgoorlie 2016

  

The distance between a Facebook page

and a mineshaft, where vigilantes threaten

to drop the murdered, is so very small.

Behind screens is only part of the damage,

it’s when bigots emerge from self-

illumination, self-images in their eyes,

that it all comes together: the running down,

the killing, the justifications. In a mining town

the burrowing down to what might be at the core

of belief is also an attempt at erasure: to mine

away souls. But desecrators unearth

their own demons, digging deep to find

the white goods they desire: as Dr Plot

conjectured in 1667: ‘lapides sui generis,

naturally produced by some extraordinary

plastic virtue, latent in the earth...’ this fossil

record we turn ourselves inside out for,

reaching too low. And so, frontiers

are made on the field of the screen,

and Kalgoorlie — out there — epicentre

of the goldfields, cutting edge of race riots,

Superpit-proud of the venal seams in the Aussie flag,

flexes its Midas touch on God’s Own Country

while a dead boy’s family grieve and grieve and grieve.

            John Kinsella

'Property is Theft' doesn't belong to Proudhon

By John, posted by Tracy


Equipage (via Rod Mengham at Jesus College, Cambridge) have recently brought out my anti-greed and pro-ecological long poem based on Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book, Rapacity. The cover is below.

I want to take this opportunity to qualify my thoughts regarding the notion of ‘property is theft’, which I have cited many times over the years.

First, this from an unpublished article on (anti-) capitalism and poetry:

‘I object to the rapacity and selfishness, and have always believed that ‘property is theft’ (in the literal sense, not in the hypocritical and contradictory sense embodied by Proudhon who, as Murray Bookchin points out, was not in essence against certain forms of private property under certain conditions).’

and this from a published chunk of (new) autobiographical writing that’s come out of living at Jam Tree Gully:

‘…onto our place. Our property. I reject the notion of property. Custodianship sounds too appropriative, and for a non-indigenous resident, all too convenient. Really, that’s the issue that burns below the surface of all I write about this place. Proudhon is only halfway there with ‘Property is theft’. Some theft is more theft than others. He fails to investigate the nature of such theft: that’s more the key to understanding the implications of surveying, gifting, selling, claiming.’

and from a piece collected in the book Activist Poetics:

‘So much poetry does this and convinces us it’s best for our health. It’s not so much that I can’t celebrate, it’s just that I want to know what the implications of such a celebration are. Yes, Tim, as Proudhon noted, “Property is theft!” And so much poetry, art, and music are theft as well. The most “original” work is often the most property-like. We can only be custodians, and it is incumbent on all to recognise larger, more concentrated, and more defined custodianships. Wheatbelt Gothic is a style that allows for an observation of these considerations — it has no materiality, no claim.’

[note: ‘Tim’ here is not Tim our son, but a radical artist acquaintance]

I cite each of these to show that whenever quoting what for me is a truism in so many ways, I’ve always felt the need to qualify its usage. Murray Bookchin writes, in The Third Revolution:

‘Despite his famous cry, ‘Property is theft!’ however, Proudhon was no socialist: he definitely favoured private property, advancing an economy structured around small privately owned enterprises that would be linked together by contracts untainted by either profit considerations or by exploitation.

By making a distinction between ‘property’ acquired by ‘exploitation’ and ‘possession’ acquired by labor, Proudhon essentially smuggled into his vision a belief in private property, albeit with a moral aura. His statement ‘property is theft’ did not refer strictly to tangible economic property; nor was it intended to lead to the abolition of private property…’ (39)

When a statement becomes an aphorism or a saying, you’ve got to be wary. Anything that easy is bound to be glib and separated from its cause and effect. For me, property is theft because it denies mutual access. But property can have very different meanings in different cultures, so one must be wary of using ‘property’ as a blanket all-encompassing term. Furthermore, I suspect that Proudhon’s use of ‘property’ and concerns over control were deeply affected by his anti-semitism, which anarchists should not try to brush aside or minimise. Proudhon was a pathological bigot, and none of his words can be separated from this evil. As a statement in itself, ‘property is theft’ lives without ownership, copyright, or subscription. It is its own fact, but it needs to be given context to give it life and meaning, and needs to be wrested from the foulness of Proudhon. And if you wonder about Proudhon’s racism, look no further than his diary entry of December of 1847 with its calls for extermination and destruction. A proto-typical Nazi in more ways than one.