narco-states and decadence

some months ago there was a shootout in front of my mexcan house. Also theres been a lot of deaths in my hometown and a lot of upper class folks - who many of them have their hands dirty concerning affairs with the drug lords - are terrified of the war going on. The war has finally gotten into my original hometown, and everybody feels it in different ways. Whether you hear the bullets going on while you are having a beer in your backyard or whether you were the poor sap who happened to be driving in one of the main streets when a shootout is going on.

i think my country is in some sort of mini-civil war right now. this whole shit going on claims the deaths of thousands of people per year and it seems its not gonna stop for a while. the cops are terrified and nobody goes outside to have fun at nights anymore. The american national guard is moving to the border because apparently the violence is spilling to american border towns.

ive always seen the rise of the narcos in latin america as a sign of both decadence and decomposition. There biggest "armed groups" in mexico are not of ideological nature, but their motives are explicitly pragmatic and they are not like the old guerrilla left who had pretty clear ideological and political programs. Before, in the time of the cold war, the "war" was waged between the left and the right with the manifestation of guevarist guerillas and right wing paramilitaries. there was always before some adherence to some form of "justice" - however feeble and hypocritical it was.

What do you people think about the rise of non-ideological criminal syndicates and their relation to decadence? With the fall of the soviet union, mafia gangs have gained a lot of ground in places like Russia. Also, it seems that the civil wars going on in africa have a weaker ideological mantra to them than they did perhaps decades ago-They are increasingly explicit in their criminal intents. I think a discussion of the emergence of groups like this might be interesting because it my opinion, it is a major sign of ideological crumbling and the putrefaction of social relations.

There was some discussion on this on Libcom recently:
http://libcom.org/forums/news/civil-war-mexico-10032009

What do you people think about the rise of non-ideological criminal syndicates and their relation to decadence? With the fall of the soviet union, mafia gangs have gained a lot of ground in places like Russia. Also, it seems that the civil wars going on in africa have a weaker ideological mantra to them than they did perhaps decades ago-They are increasingly explicit in their criminal intents.

I think in some ways the point here maybe that it was only ever a mantra anyway, which they repeated because the boss repeated it.

Devrim

of course it was. the issue is not that though. the issue is that they were more clear in their "politics" considering that before they had bigger more cohesive bosses, like the soviets. now, everything is in flux and there is less justification for the crimes.

I agree with Marmot - there is a real 'degeneration' even of bourgeois movements in the phase of decomposition. The situation is similar in Africa where the 'rebels' rarely have any semblance of ideological coherence. This also tends to increase their random, irrational brutality.
We are seeing a tendency towards the gangsterisation of society - even in Britain masses of young people are being sucked into gang rivalries over patches of turf.
The class struggle is the only force that can offer these layers of the proletariat a way out.

Just to add to the discussion. It seems to me this is what happened with the so called middle eastern "anti-imperialists". My father came from a generation of social secularists, taught under the pretenses of enlightened rationalism in the old days of young post-independence algeria. Today, the anti-imperialist bourgeois movements have degenerated into reactionary obscurantism, reminding one of boxer rebellions of a writhering asiatic mode of production. There is no pretense of "progressive" ideas anymore, just some fetish of some past.

I find this really interesting but worrysome. Reminds one of that post-wwi era when western civilization felt like it was about to collapse except with the periphery states.

Marmot: What city do you live in? I live in Puebla and the violence has not extended all the way down here. From what I have heard, the United States is sending out warnings to any travelers to Mexico from the States and urging them to change plans.

i live in coahuila which is pretty bad right now

I agree with the comments about decomposition being a factor in aggravating the rise of gang and drug culture. However, we must also remember that narco-states directly impinge on the imperialist arena as well and can't be analysed apart from that.

Don't forget the role the CIA had in developing the heroin trade in South East Asia during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the role of opium in the funding various factions in Afghanistan stretching back at least to the early 80s (and probably beyond). The US "War on Drugs" in Latin America also, paradoxically, supported several drug lords and governments with connections to them. Noriega springs to mind.

Of course, much of this took place in the context of the Cold War, but the drug trade remains an important component of imperialism certainly within Afghanistan when the US coalition basically kicked out one bunch of drug dealers operating through Pakistan (the Taleban) and put in another (the Northern Alliance) who trafficked mainly through Russia.

hey everyone:

id just like to add a few things to the discussion. first of all, by early 2001 the Taliban had virtually destroyed most of the opium crop in Afghanistan. they came to power in '96 so the drug trade did carry on for a while...

one major thing I'd like to point out is that in the US, after the collapse of the Black Panther Party and the movements of the 70's, young people became less and less ideological and what used to be organic forms of proletarian organization broke down and lost whatever ideological nature they had. a good film on the subject is "bastards of the party" done by HBO. so this gangsterization is happening in the US too.