Category Archives: Activism

Courage and Free Speech

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Throughout human history there have been individuals who have been ready to risk everything for their beliefs

By Timothy Garton Ash

Source: aeon

‘Nothing is more difficult,’ wrote the German political essayist Kurt Tucholsky in 1921, ‘and nothing requires more character, than to find yourself in open contradiction to your time and loudly to say: No.’ First of all, it is intellectually and psychologically difficult to step outside the received wisdom of your time and place. What has been called ‘the normative power of the given’ persuades us that what we see all around us, what everyone else seems to regard as normal, is in some sense also an ethical norm.

Numerous studies in behavioural psychology show how our individual conviction of what is true or right quails before the massed pressure of our peers. We are, as Mark Twain observed, ‘discreet sheep’. This is what John Stuart Mill picked up when he wrote in On Liberty (1859); that the same causes that make someone a churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Beijing. The same truth is gloriously captured in the humorous song ‘The Reluctant Cannibal’ (1960) by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, in which a young cannibal revolts against the settled wisdom of his elders and declares that ‘eating people is wrong’. At the end of the song, one of the elders exclaims, to huge belly laughs all round: ‘Why, you might just as well go around saying: “Don’t fight people!”’ Then he and his colleagues cry in unison: ‘Ridiculous!’

Yet norms change even within a single lifetime, especially as we live longer. So as elderly disc jockeys are arrested for sexual harassment or abuse back in the 1960s, we should be uncomfortably aware that some other activity that people regard as fairly normal now might be viewed as aberrant and abhorrent 50 years hence.

To step outside the established wisdom of your time and place is difficult enough; openly to stand against it is more demanding still. In Freedom for the Thought that We Hate (2007), his fine book on the First Amendment tradition in the United States, Anthony Lewis quotes a 1927 opinion by the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, which Lewis says ‘many regard as the greatest judicial statement of the case for freedom of speech’.

The passage Lewis quotes begins: ‘Those who won our independence… believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.’ This is magnificent, although it also illustrates the somewhat self-referential, even self-reverential, character of the modern First Amendment tradition.

Lewis cites Brandeis, who credits this thought to the 18th-century founders of the US. But those founders would have been well aware that they got it straight from Pericles’ funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BCE, as reported – if not invented, or at least much improved upon – by Thucydides. ‘For you now,’ Thucydides’ Pericles admonishes his ancient Athenian audience, after praising the heroic dead, ‘it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onset.’

More directly, the US tradition of courage in the defence of free speech draws on the heritage of the 17th-century English. People such as John Lilburne, for example. In 1638, while still in his early 20s, Lilburne was found guilty by the Star Chamber court of helping to smuggle into England a tract against bishops that had been printed in the Low Countries. He was tied to the back of a cart on a hot summer’s day and unremittingly whipped as he walked with a bare back all the way from the eastern end of Fleet Street to Westminster Palace Yard. One bystander reckoned that he received some 500 blows that, since the executioner wielded a three-thronged whip, made 1,500 stripes.

Lilburne’s untreated shoulders ‘swelled almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords’, and he was then made to stand for two hours in the pillory in Palace Yard. Here, in spite of his wounds and the burning sunshine, he began loudly to tell his story and to rail against bishops. The crowd was reportedly delighted. After half an hour, there came ‘a fat lawyer’ – ah, plus ça change – who bid him stop. The man whom the people of London had already dubbed ‘Free-Born John’ refused to shut up. He was then gagged so roughly that blood spurted from his mouth. Undeterred, he thrust his hands into his pockets and scattered dissident pamphlets to the crowd. No other means of expression being left to him, Free-Born John then stamped his feet until the two hours were up.

As an Englishman, I find particular inspiration in the example of Free-Born John, and those of all our other free-born Johns: John Milton, John Wilkes, John Stuart Mill (and George Orwell, a free-born John in all but name). More broadly, there is no reason to understate, let alone to deny, a specifically Western tradition of courage in the advancement of free speech, one that can be traced from ancient Athens, through England, France and a host of other European countries, to the US, Canada and all the liberal democracies of today’s wider West. But it would be quite wrong to suggest that this habit of the heart is confined to the West. In fact, there have been rather few examples of such sturdy defiance in England in recent times, while we find them in other countries and cultures.

Consider, for instance, the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment in 2009 for ‘subverting state power’. Both his written response to the charges against him and his final speech in court are, like many of his earlier writings, lucid and courageous affirmations of the central importance of free speech. He definitely does not draw only on Western traditions. For example, in his book No Enemies, No Hatred (2012), he quotes a traditional Chinese 24-character injunction: ‘Say all you know, in every detail; a speaker is blameless, because listeners can think; if the words are true, make your corrections; if they are not, just take note.’

After paying a moving tribute to his wife (‘Armed with your love, dear one, I can face the sentence that I’m about to receive with peace in my heart’), Liu looks forward to the day ‘when our country will be a land of free expression: a country where the words of each citizen will get equal respect, a country where different values, ideas, beliefs and political views can compete with one another even as they peacefully coexist’. The judge cut him short in court before he had finished speaking, but free-born Xiaobo, like free-born John, still got his message out. In his planned peroration, Liu wrote: ‘I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes. Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.’

Liu was by this time famous, and that great speech made him more so. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. But perhaps the most inspiring examples of all come from people who are not famous at all: so-called ordinary people doing extraordinary things. People such as the Hamburg shipyard worker who, at the launch of a naval training vessel in 1936, refused to join all those around him in making the Hitler salute. The photograph only achieved wide circulation on the internet more than 60 years later. There he stands amid a forest of outstretched arms, with both his own firmly folded across his chest, a portrait of stubborn worker’s pride. His name was August Landmesser. He had been a Nazi party member but was later expelled from the party for marrying a Jewish woman, and then imprisoned for ‘dishonouring the race’. After his release, he was drafted to fight in the Second World War and never returned.

Again, such moments are emphatically not confined to the West. During the Arab Spring of 2011, a ‘day of rage’ was proclaimed by dissidents in Saudi Arabia. Faced with a massive police presence at the appointed location in the country’s capital Riyadh, almost nobody showed up. But one man, a strongly built, black-haired teacher called Khaled al-Johani, suddenly approached a group of foreign reporters. ‘We need to speak freely,’ he cried, with an explosion of pent-up passion. ‘No one must curb our freedom of expression.’ A BBC Arabic service film clip, which you can watch on YouTube, shows a tall secret policeman, in white robes, headdress and dark glasses, looming in the background as he snoops on al-Johani’s speech. A little further away, armed police mutter into their walkie-talkies. ‘What will happen to you now?’ asks one of the reporters, as they escort the teacher back to his car. ‘They will send me to prison,’ al-Johani says, adding ironically: ‘and I will be happy.’ He was subsequently condemned to 18 months’ imprisonment.

In many places, we can find monuments to the Unknown Soldier, but we should also erect them to the Unknown Speaker.

If Americans Truly Cared About Muslims, They Would Stop Killing Them by the Millions

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By Glen Ford

Source: Black Agenda Report

In the most dramatic expression of insider opposition to a sitting administration’s policies in generations, over 1,000 U.S. State Department employees signed on to a memo protesting President Donald Trump’s temporary ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries setting foot on U.S. soil. Another recent high point in dissent among the State Department’s 18,000 worldwide employees occurred in June of last year, when 51 diplomats called for U.S. air strikes against the Syrian government of President Bashar al Assad.

Neither outburst of dissent was directed against the U.S. wars and economic sanctions that have killed and displaced millions of people in the affected countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Rather, the diplomatic “rebellion” of last summer sought to pressure the Obama administration to join with Hillary Clinton and her “Big Tent” full of war hawks to confront Russia in the skies over Syria, while the memo currently making the rounds of State Department employees claims to uphold “core American and constitutional values,” preserve “good will towards Americans” and prevent “potential damage to the U.S. economy from the loss of revenue from foreign travelers and students.”

In neither memo is there a word of support for world peace, nor a hint of respect for the national sovereignty of other peoples — which is probably appropriate, since these are not, and never have been, “core American and constitutional values.”

Ironically, the State Department “dissent channel” was established during one of those rare moments in U.S. history when “peace” was popular: 1971, when a defeated U.S. war machine was very reluctantly winding down support for its puppet regime in South Vietnam. Back then, lots of Americans, including denizens of the U.S. government, wanted to take credit for the “peace” that was on the verge of being won by the Vietnamese, at a cost of at least four million Southeast Asian dead. But, those days are long gone. Since 2001, war has been normalized in the U.S. — especially war against Muslims, which now ranks at the top of actual “core American values.” Indeed, so much American hatred is directed at Muslims that Democrats and establishment Republicans must struggle to keep the Russians in the “hate zone” of the American popular psyche. The two premiere, officially-sanctioned hatreds are, of course, inter-related, particularly since the Kremlin stands in the way of a U.S. blitzkrieg in Syria, wrecking Washington’s decades-long strategy to deploy Islamic jihadists as foot soldiers of U.S. empire.

The United States has always been a project of empire-building. George Washington called it a “nascent empire,” Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from France in pursuit of an “extensive empire,” and the real Alexander Hamilton, contrary to the Broadway version, considered the U.S. to be the “most interesting empire in the world.” The colonial outpost of two million white settlers (and half a million African slaves) severed ties with Britain in order to forge its own, limitless dominion, to rival the other white European empires of the world. Today, the U.S. is the Mother of All (Neo)Colonialists, under whose armored skirts are gathered all the aged, shriveled, junior imperialists of the previous era.

In order to reconcile the massive contradiction between America’s predatory nature and its mythical self-image, however, the mega-hyper-empire must masquerade as its opposite: a benevolent, “exceptional” and “indispensible” bulwark against global barbarism. Barbarians must, therefore, be invented and nurtured, as did the U.S. and the Saudis in 1980s Afghanistan with their creation of the world’s first international jihadist network, for subsequent deployment against the secular “barbarian” states of Libya and Syria.

In modern American bureaucratese, worrisome barbarian states are referred to as “countries or areas of concern” — the language used to designate the seven nations targeted under the Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 signed by President Obama. President Donald Trump used the existing legislation as the basis for his executive order banning travelers from those states, while specifically naming only Syria. Thus, the current abomination is a perfect example of the continuity of U.S. imperial policy in the region, and emphatically not something new under the sun (a sun that, as with old Britannia, never sets on U.S. empire).

The empire preserves itself, and strives relentlessly to expand, through force of arms and coercive economic sanctions backed up by the threat of annihilation. It kills people by the millions, while allowing a tiny fraction of its victims to seek sanctuary within U.S. borders, based on their individual value to the empire.

Donald Trump’s racist executive order directly affects about 20,000 people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees. President Obama killed an estimated 50,000 Libyans in 2011, although the U.S. officially does not admit it snuffed out the life of a single civilian. The First Black President is responsible for each of the half-million Syrians that have died since he launched his jihadist-based war against that country, the same year. Total casualties inflicted on the populations of the seven targeted nations since the U.S. backed Iraq in its 1980s war against Iran number at least four million — a bigger holocaust than the U.S. inflicted on Southeast Asia, two generations ago — when the U.S. State Department first established its “dissent channel.”

But, where is the peace movement? Instead of demanding a halt to the carnage that creates tidal waves of refugees, self-styled “progressives” join in the macabre ritual of demonizing the “countries of concern” that have been targeted for attack, a process that U.S. history has color-coded with racism and Islamophobia. These imperial citizens then congratulate themselves on being the world’s one and only “exceptional” people, because they deign to accept the presence of a tiny portion of the populations the U.S. has mauled.

The rest of humanity, however, sees the real face of America — and there will be a reckoning.

 

Media, Mind-Control, & Meditation: Plato’s E-Cave Panopticon and Beyond

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By Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)

Source: Axis of Logic

“Relax,” said the night man,
”We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like, 
But you can never leave!”

 – The Eagles, from “Hotel California”

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, people saw a shadow play on the wall and perceived it as reality. Today that Cave has morphed to provide umpteen TV channels and mini-screen gadgets; and the once sanctified living room cave has expanded into a free-range bubble of consciousness – heads bowed before an electronic altar, seemingly oblivious to the outside world.

“The “panopticon” refers to an experimental laboratory of power in which behaviour could be modified, and Foucault viewed the panopticon as a symbol of the disciplinary society of surveillance.”[1]

In Plato’s E-Cave, not only are the people watching a shadow play, they, and the shadows they watch, are being watched.

HyperNormalization
With a veneer of calm aplomb, the masses communicate 24-7, often in a frenetic urgency of the mundane, hence one interpretation of HyperNormalization. In all the years of overhearing cell-phone conversations in public, I can’t recall one snippet of philosophy or practical advice, rather stuff like, ‘yeah OMG I’ll get the chips!’ and ‘I’ll be there in like 30 seconds!’; if you’re old enough, you’d remember the days when, you got there when you got there! That said, a cell-phone can be a helpful even life-saving device.

The USEmpire election appears to have both proven and disproven the main theory of Adam Curtis’ fascinating new documentary “HyperNormalization.”

“Curtis argues that since the 1970s, governments, financiers, and technological utopians have given up on the complex “real world” and built a simple “fake world” that is run by corporations and kept stable by politicians.”[2]

The California cyber-tech-boom was a love-child of LSD-consciousness that found refuge in E-wizardy all the while looking to escape repressive politics. In his book “2030” Pepe Escobar describes it as: “Digital network capitalism would then shape post-modern globalization, from the New Economy before the end of the millennium to every digital wall to be broken beyond. California cosmology forged our world.”

According to Wikipedia:

“The term “hypernormalisation” is taken from Alexei Yurchak’s 2006 book Everything was Forever, Until it was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, about the paradoxes of life in the Soviet Union during the 20 years before it collapsed. A professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, he argues that everyone knew the system was failing, but as no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens were resigned to maintaining a pretence of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the “fakeness” was accepted by everyone as real, an effect which Yurchak termed “hypernormalisation”.”[3]

First off, I see HyperNormalization as a half-truth because while the self-referential, gossipy world is fake, it is a veneer for a very real world of resource extraction and the violence perpetrated to maintain the status quo – and that is what the fakers ignore. As far as the election, many expected the Clinton dynasty to prevail as the corrupt, business as usual lesser of two evils. Breaking snooze: Where’s  the headline news that Melania Trump plans to focus on helping women and children?; I saw that mentioned on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, such a perfect antidote for Hillary’s loss and The Donald’s anti-feminist track record.

Even though WikiLeaks revealed the DNC (Democratic National Convention) was rigged against Sanders and leaks of Podesta/Clinton e-mails may have been proverbial straws for Hillary’s campaign camel, the prevailing media sentiment was that she would win – despite the fact that the day before the election some polls indicated a shrinking 3-4 point lead, thus with the typical margin of error, it was, in effect, tied. Yet the mass hyper-surprise!; and all that after the corporate media and comedy shows had simultaneously bashed Trump and given him more air-time than a kite on a windy day – both disdaining and elevating him, a media-mindfuck if ever there was one.

And there was little uproar when Gary Johnson and Jill Stein were excluded from debates and virtually banned from all corporate news, thus proving (if you didn’t know already) that it’s not a truly democratic election. Yet carry on we must and do the best we can with what we got, was the general sentiment, in other words, “the “fakeness” was accepted by everyone as real” aka HyperNormalization.

Yet the non-coastal, poor and middle America White working class (with sides of KKK and minorities!), which reportedly was the key demographic for The Don’s victory, was voting out of bare-bones needs; in effect they were not HyperNormalized. Then again, if Trump, who promises to challenge the status quo, caves-in to Deep State pressure, we will have an answer to an interesting article’s titular question: “President Trump: big liar going to Washington or Tribune of the People?”[4] And if that answer is the former, then the mostly White working poor will also have been duped/HyperNormalized.

You see, it’s hard to know what’s what; which all seems to prove HyperNormalization as the dominant societal charade; which screen is real, if any?

What you perceive is what you get
Another key phrase in Curtis’ documentary is “managed perception” – akin to Chomsky and Herman’s  “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (1988) which showed how opinions and desensitized agreement to the status quo became a product to be mined and marketed. Witness CBS Chairman Les Moonves’ comment from February 2016:

“Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? … The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this [is] going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” [5] And, if i might satirically add, like an orangey topped Duracell battery, The Don does seem to have a lot of energy.

HyperNormalization is also akin to Sheldon Wolin’s theory  of “inverted totalitarianism,” where the faceless corporate machine wields so much entertainment and bureaucratic power that the people barely notice they are being played hook, line, and sinking feelings.

Some of Curtis’ info, however, is inaccurate or questionable. For examples, he blames the demise of the Occupy Movement on lack of vision and planning yet neglects to mention the FBI coordinated systemic crackdown on the ‘camps’ across the country. [6]

About Syria he says that President Bashar al-Assad retaliated with a “vengeful fury,” whereas Assad has defended his actions as self-defense for his people; numerous journalists back the Syrian President’s claim.

Post-election, I wonder: Why were so many liberals, lefties, and women more surprised that Trump won than that the DNC/HRC rigged it against Sanders? Were they simply feeling impotent due to HyperNormalized shadow play? Whatever the case, his victory revealed a crack in the smooth screen of HyperNormalization.

According to Patrick Caddell’s survey before the election, the populace seems to be hip to what’s happening:

“Powerful interests from Wall Street banks to corporations, unions and political interest groups have used campaign and lobbying money to rig the system for them. They are looting the national treasury of billions of dollars at the expense of every man, woman and child. AGREE = 81%; DISAGREE = 13%…

“The country is run by an alliance of incumbent politicians, media pundits, lobbyists and other powerful money interests for their own gain at the expense of the American people. AGREE = 87%; DISAGREE = 10%

The real struggle for America is not between Democrats and Republicans but between mainstream American and the ruling political elites. AGREE = 67%; DISAGREE = 24%.” [7]

This makes it seem it is the ‘how-to bring about change’ that is the deeper conundrum of the HyperNormalized world. Then again, people too often seem to have only their own best interests at heart. Approximately 90% of Americans want their food labeled so as to know if they contain GMOs etc. or not, yet hardly a peep out of anyone that climate change or the “environment” aka Mother Earth & Nature-beings were deliberately excluded as a main topic of the presidential debates. This makes it seem that, in general, Americans want clean food for themselves, they want a clean environment so they can go ‘play in the park’ by themselves. And that brings us to the Great Disconnect and Standing Rock.

Flow like water, be steady as a rock
Part of HyperNormalization is a disconnect from Nature and from being self- and community-guided, and therefore disconnected from the Original Peoples of Turtle Island. While many people are certainly aware of what’s happening with Standing Rock, the corporate media’s lack of attention, let alone empathy, fosters lack of concern for the outcome, lack of being outraged by the violent and racist treatment of those in prayer and peacefully protecting the main source of water for the Standing Rock Sioux and other Natives as well as approximately 17-million people downstream. The real-fake outrage is over the outcome of a fake election.

For many Native reservations where poverty and PTSD are prevalent, the people are anything but HyperNormalized; they are struggling to survive – as with Standing Rock, they are not asking for much: clean water and the space to live their lives with ancient traditions timelessly connected with the land, the water, the stones…

Plato, imagining a prisoner getting outside of the Cave, wrote: “Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First he can only see shadows. Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, he is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself .” [8]

Standing Rock is bringing people together, raising consciousness at many levels. As one example from a little over a week ago:

“In a “historic” show of interfaith solidarity, 500 clergy members prayed along the banks of North Dakota’s Cannonball River on Thursday where they “bore witness with the Standing Rock Sioux Nation,” which has faced intimidation, violence, and arrests for protecting their sacred land and water supply from the threats of a massive oil pipeline. According to the Episcopal News Service, “The interfaith group spent more than five hours on site, marching, singing hymns, sharing testimony, and calling others to join them in standing with the more than [300] tribes who have committed their support to the Sioux Nation as they protest the route of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL).” [9]

This solidarity is in stark contrast with the election where a typically 51/49 system determines an outcome for a society literally programmed for exciting close-call winners – think sporting events,
reality shows, awards ceremonies.

Outside in and inside out
There are many ways to get outside the Cave. One of those is by going within. When I first started to meditate, as is common, I became aware of the constant chatter in my head and soon realized that the mind left unattended will rattle on endlessly. Meditation then showed me that once the chatter quiets, one then has access to other frequencies, other ‘channels’ – what happens then is a very personal matter yet also impersonal because one becomes connected with another source of thinking-seeing-feeling. Chatter, like cell-phones, has it’s usefulness, say, if you forgot to turn the stove off. My point to the personal anecdote is that the corporate media is too much chatter, endlessly looping itself. The gadgets, too, though useful, seem hard-wired for HyperNormalization.

Some of the chatter we must live with, yet by learning to follow our intuitions, listening to and connecting with Nature, talking with elders and little children we can better tune-out from the shadow-play, we can find new and ancient ways for more people – and that includes trees, rivers, etc. –  “to look at the stars and moon at night” and “look upon the sun itself.”

“Sin filo ya y derrotada se quejó: Soy más fuerte que ella, pero no le puedo hacer daño y ella a mi, sin pelear. me ha vencido.’”

“Without sharpness and defeated, it [the sword] complained: ‘I am stronger than the water, but I cannot harm her. And the water, without fighting, has conquered me.’” [10]

NOTES:
1.    Panopticism here and here.
2.    Ibid.
3.    HyperNormalization
4.    See here.
5.    “Les Moonves: Trump’s run is ‘damn good for CBS’”. See here.
6.    “Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy”
7.    “Patrick Caddell; The Pollster Who ‘Got it Right’”
8.    “Allegory of the Cave”
9.    “A Prayer for People and Planet: 500 Clergy Hold ‘Historic’ Mass Gathering for Standing Rock”
10.    “Questions & Swords: Folktales of the Zapatista Revolution” as told by Subcomandante Marcos, Cino Puntos Press, El Paso, Texas, 2001, p.82.

To watch “HyperNormalization”, click here.

Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is an essayist and resident poet on Axis of Logic. In addition to his work as a writer, he is a small press publisher and Turtle Islander. His new book of genre-bending poetic-nonfiction is “Musings With The Golden Sparrow.” You can contact him via his literary website.

  

Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works

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Nonviolent action is extremely powerful.

Unfortunately, however, activists do not always understand why
nonviolence is so powerful and they design ‘direct actions’ that are
virtually powerless.

I would like to start by posing two questions. Why is nonviolent action
so powerful? And why is using it strategically so transformative?

When an activist group is working on an issue – such as a national
liberation struggle, war, the climate catastrophe, violence against
women and/or children, nuclear weapons, drone killings, rainforest
destruction, encroachments on indigenous land – they will often plan an
action that is intended to physically halt an activity, such as the
activities of a military base, the loading of a coal ship, the work of a
bulldozer, the building of an oil pipeline. Their plan might also
include using one or more of a variety of techniques such as locking
themselves to a piece of equipment (‘locking-on’) to prevent it from
being used. Separately or in addition, they might use secrecy both in
their planning and execution so that they are able to carry out the
action before police or military personnel prevent them from doing so.

Unfortunately, the focus on physical outcomes (including actions such as
‘locking-on’ and its many equivalents), and the secrecy necessary to
carry out their plan, all functionally undermine the power of their
action. Why is this? Let me explain how and why nonviolent action works
so that it is clear why any nonviolent activist who understands the
dynamics of nonviolent action is unconcerned about the immediate
physical outcome of their action (and what is necessary to achieve
that).

If you think of your nonviolent action as a physical act, then you will
tend to focus your attention on securing a physical outcome from your
planned action: to prevent the military from occupying a location, to
stop a bulldozer from knocking down trees, to halt the work at an oil
terminal or nuclear power station, to prevent construction equipment
being moved on site. Of course, it is simple enough to plan a nonviolent
action that will do any of these things for a period of time and there
are many possible actions that might achieve it.

But if you pause to consider how your nonviolent action might have
psychological and political impact that leads to lasting or even
permanent change on the issue in question but also society as a whole,
then your conception of what you might do will be both expanded and
deepened. And you will be starting to think strategically about what it
means to mobilise large numbers of people to think and behave
differently.

After all, whatever the immediate focus of your action, it is only ever
one step in the direction of more profound change. And this profound
change must include a lasting change in prevailing ideas and a lasting
change in ‘normal’ behaviour by substantial (and perhaps even vast)
numbers of people. Or you will be back tomorrow, the day after and so on
until you get tired of doing something without result, as routinely
happens in campaigns that ‘go nowhere’ (as so many do).

So why does nonviolent action work?

Fundamentally, nonviolent action works because of its capacity to create
a favourable political atmosphere (because of, for example, the way in
which activist honesty builds trust), its capacity to create a
non-threatening physical environment (because of the nonviolent
discipline of the activists), and its capacity to alter the human
psychological conditions (both innate and learned) that make people
resist new ideas in the first place. This includes its capacity to
reduce or eliminate fear and its capacity to ‘humanise’ activists in the
eyes of more conservative sections of the community. In essence,
nonviolent activists precipitate change because people are inspired by
the honesty, discipline, integrity, courage and determination of the
activists – despite arrests, beatings or imprisonment – and are thus
inclined to identify with them. Moreover, as an extension of this, they
are inclined to change their behaviour to act in solidarity.

It is for this reason too that a nonviolent action should always make
explicit what behavioural change it is asking of people. Whether
communicated in news conferences or via the various media, painted on
banners or in other ways, a nonviolent action group should clearly
communicate powerful actions that individuals can take. For example, a
climate action group should consistently convey the messages to ‘Save
the Climate: Become a Vegan/Vegetarian’, ‘Save the Climate: Boycott
Cars’ and, like a rainforest action group, ‘Don’t Buy Rainforest
Timber’. A peace group should consistently convey such messages as
‘Don’t Pay Taxes for War’ and ‘Divest from the Weapons Industry’ (among
many other possibilities). Groups resisting the nuclear fuel cycle and
fossil fuel industry in their many manifestations should consistently
convey brief messages that encourage reduced consumption and a shift to
more self-reliant renewable energies. See, for example, ‘The Flame Tree
Project to Save Life on Earth’. Groups struggling to defend or reinstate indigenous sovereignty should convey compelling messages that explain what people can do in their particular context.

It is important that these messages require powerful personal action,
not token responses. And it is important that these actions should not
be directed at elites or lobbying elites. Elites will fall into line
when we have mobilized enough people so that they are compelled to do as
we wish. And not before. At the end of the Salt March in 1930 Gandhi
picked up a handful of salt on the beach at Dandi. This was the signal
for Indians everywhere to start collecting their own salt in violation
of British law. In subsequent campaigns Gandhi called for Indians to
boycott British cloth and make their own khadi (handwoven cloth). These
actions were strategically focused because they undermined the
profitability of British colonialism in India and nurtured Indian
self-reliance.

A key reason why Mohandas K. Gandhi was that rarest of combinations – a
master nonviolent strategist and a master nonviolent tactician – was
because he understood the psychology of nonviolence and how to make it
have political impact. Let me illustrate this point by using the
nonviolent raid on the Dharasana salt works, the nonviolent action he
planned as a sequel to the more famous Salt March in 1930.

On 4 May 1930 Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin, Viceroy of India, advising his
intention to lead a party of nonviolent activists to raid the Dharasana
Salt Works to collect salt and thus intervene against the law
prohibiting Indians from collecting their own salt. Gandhi was
immediately arrested, as were many other prominent nationalist leaders
such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel.

Nevertheless, having planned for this contingency, under a succession of
leaders (who were also progressively arrested) the raid went ahead as
planned with hundreds of Indian satyagrahis (nonviolent activists)
attempting to nonviolently invade the salt works. However, despite
repeated attempts by these activists to walk into the salt works during
a three week period, not one activist got a pinch of salt! Moreover,
hundreds of satyagrahis were injured, many receiving fractured skulls or
shoulders, and two were killed.

But an account of the activists’ nonviolent discipline, commitment and
courage – under the steel-tipped lathi (baton) blows of the police – was
reported in 1,350 newspapers around the world. As a result, this
nonviolent action – which ‘failed’ to achieve the stated physical
objective of seizing salt – functionally undermined support for British
imperialism in India. For an account of the salt raids at Dharasana, see
Thomas Weber. ‘”The Marchers Simply Walked Forward Until Struck Down”:
Nonviolent Suffering and Conversion’

If the activists had been preoccupied with the physical seizure of salt
and, perhaps, resorted to the use of secrecy to get it, there would have
been no chance to demonstrate their honesty, integrity, courage and
determination – and to thus inspire empathy for their cause – although
they might have got some salt! (Of course, if salt had been removed
secretly, the British government could, if they had chosen, ignored it:
after all, who would have known or cared? However, they could not afford
to let the satyagrahis take salt openly because salt removal was illegal
and failure to react would have shown the salt law – a law that
represented the antithesis of Indian independence – to be ineffective.)

In summary, nonviolent activists who think strategically understand that
strategic effectiveness is unrelated to whether or not the action is
physically successful (provided it is strategically selected,
well-designed so that it elicits one or other of the intended responses,
and sincerely attempted). Psychological, and hence political, impact is
gained by demonstrating qualities that inspire others and move them to
act personally too. For this reason, among several others, secrecy (and
the fear that drives it) is counterproductive if strategic impact is
your intention.

If you are interested in planning effective nonviolent actions, a
related article also explains the vital distinction between ‘The
Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’.

And if you are concerned about violent military or police responses,
have a look at ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent
Repression’.

For those of you who are interested in planning and acting strategically
in your nonviolent struggle, whatever its focus, you might be interested
in one or the other of these two websites: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

And if you are interested in being part of the worldwide movement to end
all violence, you are welcome to sign the online pledge of ‘The People’s
Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Struggles for peace, justice, sustainability and liberation often fail.
Almost invariably, this is due to the failure to understand the
psychology, politics and strategy of nonviolence. It is not complicated
but it requires a little time to learn.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?‘ His email address is flametree@riseup.netand his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford
Victoria 3460
Australia
Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

“Why Don’t You Just Get a Better Job” and Other Dumb Shit People Say to Low-Income Earners Stuck in Precarious Work

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By Chloe Ann King

Source: The Hampton Institute

For most of my working life I have been stuck in the hospitality industry which is lowly paid, painfully precarious and poorly regulated. In New Zealand, where I live, hospitality employers mostly treat you as nothing more than an easily replaceable unit to turn-over-profit. I have spent over a decade in this industry and as such I have become acutely aware of the fact that no matter how many shifts I work or how many poorly paid jobs I undertake; I will never have enough money to meet rising living costs.

Sometimes, my life is a bit depressing. You know what I mean? I get up, I go and work one of my multiple jobs and I come home. Each week I check my bank balance and I feel pretty put-out about how low my pay is as compared to how hard I worked for it.

Obviously, working hard at minimum wage jobs is never going to land me economic security. No matter how hard I have worked in the hospo industry I have never ever received a pay-rise, not once. The lie of “hard work” serves to convince us that if we fail to achieve happy, healthy and joy filled lives which are economically secure thanks to well paid jobs, it is because we failed to work hard enough for it. Constantly we are told that external factors do not affect us. This type of pervasive ‘positive’ rhetoric isendlessly used by many self-help Gurus such as Tony Robbins, one of America’s most well-known motivational speakers.

The lie of “hard work” is pitched to us – those from the working and lower classes, by not only self-help gurus and spiritualists but politicians and well intentioned high school teachers and even our parents, as being one of the best paths to prosperity. This myth is perpetuated and disseminated by the mainstream media as motivational newsworthy ‘human interest’ stories. However, there is very little which is human about these types of stories. The core of these news pieces has nothing to do with humanity or being human and everything to do with selfishness and individualism and play on insecurities and our need to compare our lives to others who we think or we are passive aggressively told, have it better than us.

A few months ago the NZ Herald (New Zealand’s most read newspaper which controls the national narrative) ran yet another one of these “motivational” articles on a young landlord named Gary Lin. Who has managed to buy up a staggering eleven properties citing “hard work” as a reason for his success. He told the NZ Herald,

“Work hard, work smart, save hard, and invest smart. Wealth creation is not rocket science – perseverance and hard work can get you there.”

As if wealth creation is something we should as young people, be aspiring to. In times of great wealth inequality, we should be demanding wealth dispersal not setting out to create and covet wealth for ourselves. Gary, unlike most of us, was given a hefty “leg up” or what we poor folk call a “handout” by his father in the sum of $200,000 as a wedding gift which allowed him to buy his first home which cost him $175,000. I guess for some people money really does grow on trees.

I hate to break it to you Gaz – can I call you Gaz? But “hard work” had nothing to do with your successes in life.

Gaz got lucky. He won the genetic lottery and was born into wealth – he did not earn the money that helped him buy his first home. It was given to him. Instead of using his unearned wealth to help others he made the choice to punch-down and profit off the growing number of people stuck in the rental trap by hoarding properties. Gaz has engaged in predatory behavior by renting his properties out at market rental rates. In an unregulated rental market the odds are never in favor of tenants. As George Monbiot wrote for the Guardian, “Rent is another term for unearned income.”

People like Gaz rarely acknowledge their economic success is at the expense of those from the lower and working classes. To recognize this Gaz, might have to feel a little bit bad about how he came into his millionaire property portfolio. He might have some kind of world shattering epiphany that he is not as smart as he believes and his successes are owed more to an ability to stomach the ruthless actions and attitudes needed to ‘make it’ in a society that is quickly turning into a dystopian one. Which makes The Hunger Games, look like child’s play. Sociopathy and luck had more to do with Gaz’s successes in life than actual “hard work”, talent and intelligence.

Lawyer and anti-poverty activist David Tong, responded to Gaz’s flawed belief that anyone can own property if they just “work hard” enough, with these words:

“Motivational read from the NZ Herald: You too can be a rich property investor. If dad gives you a $200,000 gift”

“Hard work” and motivation don’t mean shit in a broken economy that was built on the blood, backs and bones of the working class and the most marginalized and vulnerable. Increasingly, accessing upward mobility – which buying property can help you obtain as well as a better quality of life, is becoming an impossible task because of low wages, insecure work and a flooded job market. People are just struggling to get off minimum wage let alone save for a house.

***

The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions states that “At least 30% of New Zealand’s workers – over 635,000 people – are in insecure work. We believe it may well cover 50% of the workforce.” No matter how hard you work it is impossible to get ahead when your employer only offers you inconsistent hours and denies your basic right to a guarantee of minimum hours.

Casual contracts are used widely within the hospitality and service industries and state that your employer owes you “no minimum of hours.” But the expectation is that you will cover and come in when needed and if you refuse you are often faced with penalties. Such as having your shifts cut the next week. Having the stability of a salary as opposed to waged work is a far off dream for so many of us. You can’t budget let alone save money for a house when you never know what your pay-check is going to be from one week to the next.

Economic insecurity because of cut shifts and insecure hours has been a major feature of my working life. For example, last year just before Christmas I had my shifts cut in half. I went from working between four and five shifts a week down to only two. I was given six days’ notice and when I pointed out how hard this would hit me economically to a Duty manager I was told, “I should go and find a second job” and reminded that “I was only on a casual contract so there was not much I could do about it.”

For the last few months I had been back-breakingly flexible for this employer. I had come in whenever I was needed and covered shifts at short notice. I had worked hard to make every customer’s experience an enjoyable one, all this for minimum wage. I spent most of December desperately scrounging around for a second job, as did two other workers who had suffered the same fate.

I popped into the same work soon after my shifts had been cut to collect my tips and one of the regulars who had been drinking, accosted me verbally and demanded to know why I was in such vocal support of the recent rolling strikes of Bunnings Warehouse workers. These workers had been subject to Zero Hour contracts, eternal bullying and harassment from managers and no guarantee of shifts or rosters. He said “why don’t these Bunnings workers just go out and get a better job”. This statement coming from a white male Baby Boomer who enjoyed free tertiary education and did not start his working life off in debt. All is crimson and gold in middle class Whiteywood, I guess.

“Why don’t you just go and get a better job?” This singular narrative epitomizes the ignorant attitudes of people like Gaz and the regular from my work whose name is ironically Gary, as well. It also puts the sole responsibility of finding well paid and meaningful work onto the worker, while absolving a government’s responsibility to push for job creation which serves their citizenry and the environment and to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, in New Zealand.

If over 30% of the workforce is stuck in precarious work and large sectors of the workforce earn below Aotearoa’s living wage of $19.25 an hour, finding “better work” is statistically impossible for a vast majority of us. There are thousands of hospitality businesses in Auckland, New Zealand, and only a handful pay a living wage and nearly none offer a guarantee of hours. As such telling people to “get a better job” is like telling them to buy a lotto ticket and live in hope they take out the jackpot.

***

No matter what the Gaz’s, Gary’s and the self-help superstars such as Tony Robbins of this world have to say on the myth of “hard work” and perseverance paying off one day, the reality is our ability to access upward mobility; buy a house; obtain a decent standard of living is tied to what type of work you can access. External factors not only deeply impact people’s lives they oppress those who do not benefit from certain types of privilege. Not all roads lead to Rome. More often than not for us poor folk they lead to roadblocks and hurdles that increase based on the colour of your skin, the class you were born into and/or your gender, how bodily abled you are and your sexuality or a combination of all of these.

People’s situations are complicated and difficult and cannot be curtailed into passive aggressive motivational “one liners” that nearly always punch-down and not up. Our working class struggles cannot be solved by a set of self-help rules or keys or steps which are meant to guide anyone to economic stability and lead you to the life of your dreams and a perfect job. In the book, The New Soft War on Women, the chapter entitled ‘Doing Well May Not Work Out So Well’, Caryl Rivers and Rosaling C. Barnett, write,

“We like to believe that the workplace is fair and that if we do a good job, we will be rewarded. After all, that’s the American way. But this belief is less true for women than it is for men. Indeed, too often women’s performance which is stellar gets fewer rewards than men do – even men who are less than outstanding.”

During a major speech at Wellesley College, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, talked about the role women can play in politics and public life, she said,

“We know we’ve got to keep pushing at that glass ceiling. We have to try and break it… Obviously. I hope to live long enough to see a woman elected president of the United States.”

Encouraging women to break the glass ceiling is all well and good but what if moving off minimum wage and accessing a living wage, is no easy feat? In America alone, 6 out of every 10 women are stuck on minimum wage.

The Glass Ceiling is so high up most of us can barely even see it. Researchers at the non-profit group Catalyst point out, “[…] when you start from behind, it’s hard enough to keep pace, never mind catch up-regardless of what tactics you use.” Both Rivers and Barnett went on to write,

“Doing all the right things to get ahead-using those strategies regularly suggested in self-help books, coaching sessions and the popular press-pays off much better for men than it does for women.”

As women, we do not struggle to “get ahead” because of personal failings but this struggle is born from structural sexism which creates gendered inequality.

Telling white women and women of colour to be more ambitious and just “work harder” if they want to smash the Glass Ceiling and obtain a decent standard of living is almost laughable. Considering many women, in particular, indigenous women and women of colour, are still struggling to make it out of the basement. Still, self-help gurus such as Tony Robbins preach to millions that none of what I am writing about actually matters: race, gender… whatever you were born as, and into, does not have to hold you back. You just have to believe in yourself and follow the Tony Robbin’s step-by-step guide to snagging a life beyond anything you could ever dream of. Which he has called: ’12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life’. You couldn’t make this shit up. He said at a recent event:

“I don’t care if you are young or old, I don’t care what your colour is, what your gender is, what country you come from, if you understand the science of building wealth you can have an abundance of it. If you violate those rules [of the 12 keys to an Extraordinary Life] either because you’re ignorant to them or you don’t apply then, you are going to have financial stress”

Tony, who sounds uncomfortably like Gaz in his belief anyone can become a millionaire, may as well have just said “we are all one”! “Everyone can make it no matter what grinding and economically depressive situations you come from”! And be done with it.

Financial stress is not brought about because you have unknowingly violated one or more of the ’12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life’ which Tony has made tens of millions off. Violating female stereotypes of passivity have a lot more to do with our failure or success in the workplace than how hard we do, or do not, hustle for top positions and top earning brackets. Rivers and Barnett write, “Competent women violate the traditional female stereotype of passivity. And that violation can trigger a reaction of fear and loathing [in the workplace].”

Financial stress is brought about because of injustices such as the pay-gap and the coloured pay-gap. Something Tony, has clearly gone out of his way to ignore. Self-help gurus and people like Gaz and Gary tend to, “displace questions of social justice and frame their rhetoric by the individualist and corporatist values of a consumer society,” as both Jeremy Carrette and Richard King wrote in the book, Selling Spirituality: the silent take over of religion.

Both Rivers and Barnett point out in relation to the American pay gap,

“Hispanic/Latino women have the lowest median earnings, earning just 55 percent of the median weekly earnings of white men; black women have, median weekly earnings of 64 percent of those of white men.”

The pay gap for America’s first nation indigenous women also sits at 55 cents in the dollar compared to white men, as non-profit AAUW reports. Indigenous women are faced with earning nearly half of what white men do in America.

Similarly, in Aotearoa indigenous Maori and Pasifika women, face significant coloured/indigenous pay-gaps compared to white men and women. TheDominion Post, reported last year, “Maori and Pasifika women are more likely to be in the lowest paying jobs, which increases the poverty in their lives and communities.” The Human Rights Commission has been tracking unfairness and inequality at work and cites that Pasifika women on average earn $57,668 while white men earn $66,900. What this data shows us is that, “Men are paid more than women overall and within ethnic groups. The effects increase when combining several factors as is the case between New Zealand European men and Pacific women. These patterns have persisted over time.”

These “patterns” of women of colour and Indigenous women being paid significantly less than white men and women, to do the same damn jobs have “persisted” all over the world from America to Aotearoa. Injustice and oppression is locally and globally connected.

A more accurate description of what the aspirational metaphor of the Glass Ceiling is made out of is to say it is made from lead. So many women are much more likely to fall off what Rivers and Barnett have labelled the “glass cliff” than triumphantly smash the glass ceiling into a million little pieces. Following Tony Robbin’s guide to obtaining some magical, fairy-tale life, or any other pseudo bullshit glittery guides to financial freedom, aren’t going to be very effective for women born into a system which was built to silence and eradicate them.

The only thing I am aspiring to “smash” is white imperial patriarchal systems that at best disempower women and at worst, brutally and often violently oppress them.

***

As workers we are criticized for our behavior whether we are told we need to be “more ambitious” or we “just need to work harder” in response to our perceived failure to land a great job with good pay and consistent hours. I am so tired of listening to people who endlessly tell me to go and get a “better job” or a “real job” (what does that even mean?!). And I have lost count of the times I have been told by people who hold anti-protester positions to “go and get a job” while I am on the picket line or the protest ground. As if the low waged work I do counts for absolutely nothing. As if service industry work is some kind of phantom job.

This is for anyone who has ever told a service worker to go and get a “job” or a “real job”: why don’t you make your own double shot soy latte, flip your own burgers and pour your own damn beer and make your own designer espresso martini, which costs more than I make in an hour.

When as a worker, I refuse to put up with horrible workplace conditions and hit the picket line or call the Union as a form of resistance I have been called a “trouble maker”, “dirty hippy” and an “inconvenience”. I am proud to be all of those things. I am glad I stood up and was brave and risked job loss (sometimes I have lost my job for speaking out) and arrest in an attempt to better my workplace conditions. The only people who are “dirty” are those who seize on disaster capitalism and economically benefit from the oppression of others… I am looking at you Tony Robbin’s and Gaz.

We need more workers collectively rising up and following the lead of Health Care workers, Bunning Warehouse and Supermarket workers and more recently Bus drivers. Who have all relentlessly hit union backed picket lines to demand ‘fair pay for fair work’ and better work conditions, in New Zealand. And less people thinking magically one day their lives will get better if they just play by the rules and perform their duties at work without complaint. This is nothing but blind faith. It is like believing in god: no matter how long you patiently wait he is not going to come and save you.

People from the working classes and those who have been in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, disenfranchised from the middle and upper-classes can save each other. But we need to refuse to allow those who hold power to continue to pit us against one another in some kind of Capitalist Death Match. Where the only prize you get is some demeaning job where the wages are so low you have to pick between buying food or paying the electricity bill. Starving or freezing does not sound like much of a “win” to me. It sounds like bullshit.

The more people who push against injustice in staggering numbers the harder it is for the media to ignore us and distort our messages of resistance.

Many people’s grinding situations have nothing to do with individual ‘bad choices’ or laziness or you know, violating the ’12 Steps to an Extraordinary Life’. No matter how many times we hear rotten rhetoric like this we must refuse – absolutely – to accept these types of pervasive and dominant narratives. At their core these narratives use shame and ruggedly focus on the individual as a method to pacify and silence. We must disrupt language that is designed to disempower and divide workers while seeming to empower. We need to seek out ways to elevate the voices of our most vulnerable and the messages of people of conscience who can envision a better world and whose political imaginations outstretch the dominant reality.

Lastly, we need to fight and stand with other workers against employers who exploit their employees and view them as nothing more than units to turn-over capital. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, went on to write in their before mentioned book:

“We are never obliged to accept the dominant version of reality (however conceived throughout history) without question.”

We Still Want Everything: The Politicisation of Anti-work

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By Hans Rollman

Source: PopMatters

If there is such a thing as a ‘revolutionary novel,’ Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything is as good an example as any. The novel, first published in Italy in 1971, recounts in dramatic narrative form actual events that occurred in late 1969 in Italy: a massive mobilization and strike against Italian auto-maker Fiat that erupted into civil violence and came close to political revolution.

Balestrini—a poet, visual artist and writer—was himself personally involved in these struggles. In 1979, explains Rachel Kushner in an introductory essay, he had to flee the country on skis through the Alps in order to avoid arrest on charges of insurrection and terrorism, later dropped. But more than offering a dramatic recount of the events of 1969, the book offers a potent political analysis of today’s ‘mass worker’ and the struggles they face, couched in everyday language and dramatic action.

The novel offers a fast-paced first-person narrative. The language is blunt, unadorned and honest; the action sticks to key points and races along without detours from the main theme. The narrator comes from southern Italy, and like others from the region, he is lured north by the promise of easy quick cash in the newly modernising factory towns.

The context of this historical moment of capitalist development in Italy is important. For centuries Italians, particularly in the south, had lived an essentially feudal subsistence lifestyle. They eked out a living working the fields and farms of petty landlords, meeting their needs with relative ease but living in a constant state of abject poverty. They could gather food from the forests and fields around them; they could live in fairly basic housing and even sleep comfortably outdoors for much of the year. They wore simple clothing, handed down and patched up.

But then the factories arrived, luring young people off the land with the promise of cash and all that it offered: things their families had never even dreamed of. Stylish clothes, cars, modern homes of their own. At first the lure seemed attractive. But once they left their traditional lifestyles, they discovered they had new needs as well that they had never had before: the need to pay for housing, for food, for clothes for their families. To meet these needs, they had to work, and work hard; they no longer had the right to take a day off whenever they wanted to sit at the beach. To obtain the consumer goods they wanted and needed, they had to surrender to the tyranny of bosses and to the tyranny of work itself.

But they didn’t go without a fight, and that fight is the subject of Balestrini’s classic novel.

Kushner makes an important point in her introduction: the struggle depicted in the novel is predominantly depicted as a masculinist struggle. Women have very little presence in the novel and are objectified when they are. This is an ironic oversight, as Kushner notes, because women more than anyone had call to demand everything. It’s an unfortunate oversight too, she observes, since “it’s accurate to say that feminism had the most lasting and successful impact among the demands made in the revolts of 1970s Italy.”

The narrator—based loosely on a real figure, Alfonso Natella, to whom the author dedicates his work—is a happy-go-lucky southerner who comes north looking for easy cash. He gets it, drifting through a series of jobs, filling his wallet and then quitting jobs just as quickly as he gets them in order to enjoy the cash he’s earned. Then he finds new jobs, and becomes quite adept at scamming employers, as well.

The point of his continuous lies and scams is this: work is not something to be respected. He wants to have a good time, a natural human inclination, and so wants money, but sees no reason to respect the principle of work. At first his hatred of work is primal and intuitive; he has no real political analysis, just knows he wants to enjoy life and is happy to take the quickest route to get there. He’s willing to work for money—and only as long and as hard as it takes to get some—but understands there is nothing intrinsically worthy or noble about work. His views crystallize after he obtains one of the coveted jobs at Fiat, the Italian automaker. There, he eagerly joins in with students, union organizers and other activists who are vying with each other to gain adherents among the Fiat workers.

So I started stirring things up at the gates. Comrades, today we must stop work. Because we’ve fucking had it up to here with work. You’ve seen how tough work is. You’ve seen how heavy it is. You’ve seen that it’s bad for you. They’d made you believe that Fiat was the promised land, California, that we’re saved.

I’ve done all kinds of work, bricklayer, dishwasher, loading and unloading. I’ve done it all, but the most disgusting is Fiat. When I came to Fiat I believed I’d be saved. This myth of Fiat, of work at Fiat. In reality it’s shit, like all work, in fact it’s worse. Every day here they speed up the line. A lot of work and not much money. Here, little by little, you die without noticing. Which means that it is work that is shit, all jobs are shit. There’s no work that is OK, it is work itself that is shit. Here, today, if we want to get ahead, we can’t get ahead by working more. Only by the struggle, not by working more, that’s the only way we can make things better. Kick back, today we’re having a holiday.

The Politicisation of Anti-work

Gradually he comes to develop a political analysis as well. It’s not just that work is bad and pointless: it’s hypocritical as well, with arbitrary determinations of whose work is valued over others, and who gets paid what.

But organizing the workers and inciting them to go on strike is challenging at first. One of the barriers is what the narrator refers to as workers’ ‘neurosis’.

What is this neurosis? Every Fiat worker has a gate number, a corridor number, a locker room number, a locker number, a workshop number, a line number, a number for the tasks they have to do, a number for the parts of the car they have to make. In other words, it’s all numbers, your day at Fiat is divided up, organised by this series of numbers that you see and by others that you don’t see. By a series of numbered and obligatory things. Being inside there means that as you enter the gate you have to go like this with a numbered ID card, then you have to take that numbered staircase turning to the right, then that numbered corridor. And so on.

In the cafeteria for example. The workers automatically choose a place to sit, and those remain their places for ever. It’s not as if the cafeteria is organised so that everyone has to sit in the same place all the time. But in fact you always end up sitting in the same place. It’s like, this is a scientific fact, it’s strange. I always ate in the same seat, at the same table, with the same people, without anyone ever having put us together. Well this signifies neurosis, according to me. I don’t know if you can say neurosis for this, if that is the exact word. But to be inside there you have to do this, because if you don’t you can’t stay.

The narrator’s point is clear: the regimentation and routinization of work tasks generates a tendency to accept the routinization of daily life—a hesitation to question or challenge norms; an inclination toward accepting the status quo, even when there is no rule saying they have to.

We Challenge Everything

Two aspects of the workers’ struggle are impressively articulated and conveyed in We Want Everything. The first is an abject hatred of work—a clear indictment of the pointlessness and myth of work. Work is not noble, work does not contribute to the self or society; it is oppression and exploitation, pure and simple.

“Workers don’t like work, workers are forced to work. I’m not here at Fiat because I like Fiat, because there isn’t a single fucking thing about Fiat that I like, I don’t like the cars that we make, I don’t like the foremen, I don’t like you. I’m here at Fiat because I need money.”

The narrator is careful to emphasize that it’s not just manual labour, it’s not just certain kinds of work that are useless and disgusting—it’s all work. The narrator knows from the beginning, with an instinctive honesty, that he doesn’t like work, but it’s only as the novel progresses that he understands the oppressive and exploitative nature of all work, realizes the political and social nature of the demand—“Less work!”

The other refreshing dimension of We Want Everything is the perceptive critique of unions. Yes, this is a workers’ struggle, but it’s not a union struggle. The unions are portrayed as the enemy of the working class. They’re exposed as serving a mediating role for the company bosses; it’s a critique that is still appropriate to level at many unions today. The unions, in their efforts to retain their control over the workers’ movement, to ensure that they control the workers and members, connive and conspire to undermine autonomous and spontaneous workers’ struggles. They fear loss of control as much as the company bosses do. The bosses want to control the factory, and the union leaders want to control the movement.

What both fear is a spontaneous, grassroots, autonomous and democratic movement self-organized by workers themselves. Example: when the struggle starts, there are various categories of workers, each of which earns different salaries. Because the workers are demanding more money, the union and bosses negotiate the creation of new categories, to provide more pay scales. The workers reject this: they want the elimination of all the different pay scales, so that all the workers earn the same amount, and that it’s an acceptable amount for all. The narrator’s lesson is this: the unions want tangible victories to wave in the air; but the workers want a powerful united movement capable of taking on the bosses.

The Outcome of the Struggle Has Yet to Be Written

“The unions try to start the struggles one at a time, one finishing and another starting, to avoid the struggle widening and to stop the workers organising themselves in the factories from expressing their will autonomously. But the working-class struggle won’t be controlled this way. Almost every day a new struggle starts, and it’s the workers who start it. This is a big test of the working class’s strength… If workers end up divided and disorganised after the struggle, this is a defeat, even if something has been gained. If workers come out of the struggle more united and organised, this is a victory, even if some demands remain unmet.”

The narrator does a superb job of chronicling the gradual evolution of the unions’ role in the struggle: at first encouraging strikes and actions, but as the workers start organizing autonomously and making their own—often more radical—decisions, the unions begin to panic and escalate their own efforts to suppress the autonomous workers’ struggle. Eventually, they even cooperate with the bosses in this effort, each of them terrified that a system which benefits them both might actually be overthrown.

“Unionists, PCI bureaucrats, fake Marxist-Leninists, cops and fascists all have one characteristic in common. They have a total fear of the workers’ struggle, of the workers’ ability to tell the bosses and the bosses’ servants to go to hell and to organise their struggle autonomously, in the factory and outside the factory. We made them a leaflet that finished like this: Someone once said that even whales have lice. The class struggle is a whale, and cops, Party and union bureaucrats, fascists and fake revolutionaries are its lice.”

The Assembly

The varied themes come together in a workers’ assembly that takes place toward the end of the novel. Workers denounce the fact that the union, instead of fighting for equal wages for everyone, has settled for an even more convoluted hierarchy of pay. Workers point out that even though the bosses have conceded a pay increase, the price of consumer goods and housing is rising accordingly. What good is a pay increase, then? Others demand a guaranteed wage for all, regardless of whether they’re employed or unemployed.

The unions warn them against radical demands, since they could upset the country’s economic system. But the workers counter that’s precisely what they want: the destruction of an economic system that perpetually exploits them. Union reforms only strengthen that system. “We say no to the reforms that the unions and the party want us to fight for. Because we understand that those reforms only improve the system that the bosses exploit us with. Why should we care about being exploited more, with a few more apartments, a few more medicines and a few more kids at school. All of this only advances the State…”

But communism is no solution either, observe other workers—the communists are just as obsessed as the capitalists with making people work hard for no reward. What the workers want is an end to work. “Comrades, I’m from Salerno, and I have done every kind of work in the south as well as the north and I have learned one thing. That a worker has only two choices: a grueling job when things are going well or unemployment and hunger when they go badly. I don’t know which of the two is worse.”

“We started this great struggle by demanding more money and less work. Now we know that this is a call that turns everything upside-down, that sends all the bosses’ projects, capital’s entire plan, up in smoke. And now we must move from the struggle for wages to the struggle for power. Comrades, let us refuse work. We want all the power, we want all the wealth.”

The Struggle Continues

The struggle against work portrayed in the novel was sparked by a particular type of worker. Earlier in the century, Italian workers’ struggles (like elsewhere) were defined by skilled workers who could more effectively demand more wealth because of their highly specialised skills. And it was that type of worker around which left-leaning political parties and labour unions organised their strategies. But in the ‘60s a new type of worker appeared: “adept at a thousand trades because he has no trade, without a single professional quality even when he possesses a diploma, lacking a steady job and often unemployed or forced into casual service, who can’t find work and so seeks it in Turin, in Milan, in Switzerland, in Germany, anywhere in Europe. Who finds the hardest, most exhausting, most inhuman jobs, those that no one else is prepared to do.” It is on this worker, Balestrini points out, that the postwar economies of the West were built.

What is significantly different about this worker is that unlike the skilled worker of the past, who could often take pride in their sought-after technical skills, the new worker is defined by “his ideological estrangement from work and from any professional ethic, the inability to present himself as the bearer of a trade and to identify himself in it. His single obsession is the search for a source of income to be able to consume and survive… For him work and development are understood solely as money, immediately transformable into goods to consume.”

As Balestrini notes in his afterword, this worker is in many ways still the worker of today. In the ‘60s and ‘70s the state and the capitalist system hastily responded to the workers’ challenge with a series of measures which suppressed that struggle for a time—automation and robotisation of factories, outsourcing of production to the third world, co-optation of unions and where none of these strategies worked, brutal police repression. But the workers, the issues, and the struggle continues today.

It was because of this new and unpredictable type of worker—who wasn’t fooled by the notion of a ‘work ethic’ and was uninterested in the elitist machinations of unions and political parties—that unprecedented revolts broke out across Italy (and elsewhere) during this period. The novel ends with a dramatic street battle between workers and police, the end of which is left hanging. Throughout that dramatically depicted battle, which rages throughout the city, it becomes clear that the workers’ strength comes from the self-empowered, self-organised movement they have been building in the weeks and months previous.

These weren’t workers following union instructions, or students playing at textbook revolutionary. These were workers who had challenged their bosses face-to-face in the factory; who had walked off the assembly lines in solidarity when one of their fellows was fired. It was their unity that was their strength—not their union or their political ideology. And as the battle rages, they realize that this unity can bring them real power.

“People kept coming from all around. You could hear a hollow noise, continuous, the drumbeat of stones rhythmically striking the electricity pylons. They made this sound, hollow, striking, continuous. The police couldn’t surround and search the whole area, full of building sites, workshops, public housing, fields. People kept attacking, the whole population was fighting. Groups reorganised themselves, attacked at one point, came back to attack somewhere else. But now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy. The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.”

The aftermath of the battle is left hanging, uncertain. Balestrini’s message is clear: the outcome of the struggle has yet to be written. “Capital only appeared to have won a victory; it has triggered a process that leads unavoidably to a confrontation with the underlying issue, expressed clearly 30 years ago in the struggles of the mass worker with the slogan ‘refusal of work’,” writes Balestrini in his afterword.

More and more the automation of production, and also the possibility in general of trusting almost every type of work and activity to machines and computers, requires a laughably small quantity of human labour power. Therefore why shouldn’t everyone profit from the wealth produced by machines and from the time freed from labour? Today, absurdly, work that is no longer necessary continues to be imposed because only through this is it possible to conceive of the distribution of money, allowing the continuation of the cycle of production and consumption and the accumulation of capital.

It’s surely no coincidence that Balestrini’s novel is undergoing a renewed popularity, at a time of mass mobilizations by a public whose ideological estrangement from work echoes so strongly with that of the characters in his 45-year old book. As demands arise again that echo the demands of the period—less work, more pay, more leisure, guaranteed income—We Want Everything sends a stirring reminder that these are not new demands, and that although it is a new generation rising to the challenge, it is the same fundamental struggle that continues.

“A new era is waiting for humanity, when it will be freed from the blackmail and the suffering of a forced labour that is already unnecessary and the enslavement to money, which prevent the free conduct of activity according to the aptitudes and desires of each and steal and degrade from the rhythm of life, at the same time that there is the real possibility of widespread and general wellbeing. This was the meaning, and could again be the meaning today and in the future, of that old rallying cry: Vogliamo tutto!” We want everything!

10 Signs Of Our Global Awakening

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By Paul A. Philips

Source: Activist Post

Since time immemorial, under the ruling thumb of the world’s dark overlords, humanity has been hacked, stymied, suppressed and coerced into submission through mind-controlling, soul-destroying atrocities. Those unable to see that just about every subject under the sun is a deception and how their family and friends are affected don’t yet realize the extent to which the dark overlords have us snugly stitched up.

However, alternative media sources tell us that people are awakening exponentially to the realization that they’re being stitched up and in the swathe of these awakened souls, more and more are playing their dutiful part in enlightening others.

So, here are 10 signs of our global mass awakening.

1. The fall and further fall of the mainstream media

Trust in the mainstream media has fallen to an all-time low and continues to plummet. Much of this has to do with an increasingly aware and disgruntled public: More and more people are able to discern a mainstream media totally lacking in integrity, thanks to the rising popularity of the independent/alternative media exposing the dishonesty.

Unlike the alternative/independent sources, the servile corporate-controlled mainstream media has been a highly effective tool used to manipulate the consensus reality of the masses for a number of powerful individuals having political and financial self-interests. A number of us know we have seen attempts by these elitist individuals controlling the mainstream media to thwart the rising popularity of the independent/alternative media through false, baseless accusations of ‘fake news.’  Indeed, it’s an attempt to discredit because it exposes the truth about the elite and reveals their hidden agendas….

Essentially, the unjust ‘fake news’ labelling of the independent/alternative media has backfired on the manipulators: Instead of achieving censorship it has given rise to further increasing support for the alternative/independent media, while the mainstream media has taken an even bigger fall. As many of us know, the real fake news exists in the mainstream media with its propaganda and mind control…

Given that these 2 paradigms cannot live side by side each other, which one will win the information war?

Besides the mainstream media, worldwide, an increasingly aware public show a growing distrust for Big Government and Big Business institutions from multiple polls.

The distrust and unpopularity implicitly expressed by the public on these crooked institutions with their resident crooks mainly come from the truth revelations put out by the alternative/independent media.

Further, this is what happens when Big Government and Big Business not only ignores the people’s voice in decision making, but also demonizes their dissension and public opinion, which only serves to fuel the public’s uprising.

3. Marches against Monsanto have intensified

There couldn’t be a better example of the public’s growing distrust in Big Business than Monsanto. As the years roll by marches against Monsanto from people of many different backgrounds all over the world have risen significantly and don’t look to be cooling down….

Although there are signs of Monsanto clawing back, in recent years earnings have plummeted. The earnings drop for the biotech company suggests a growing public disdain for their GM seeds as more and more people realize the dangers of GMO and its glyphosate herbicide.

More and more realize that Monsanto are out to patent, own and control every seed in the world. This threatens the destruction and diversity of every natural God-given seed….

4. Increasing health awareness

Although still very popular, people’s awareness of the dangers of fast food has increased, as indicated by recent erratic share prices in some of the major fast food corporations who’ve had to pull out all marketing stops to claw back on fallen share prices.

Reports indicate that last year people have shown more interest than ever in organic non-GMO healthier food options. Besides how these choices affect health, people’s increased interest and awareness has extended into concerns over the environment, animals and the workers involved in food production.

5. Increasing recognition of disinformation

People are increasingly seeing right through those various media sources with their dogmatic unhealthy skeptics, shills, trolls, pseudo-debunkers, controlled opposition agents, biasing, filtering and in-your-face lies intended to sell you the spin of disinformation to keep you ignorant, deceived and helplessly anesthetized in the matrix control system…

6. Increasing support for social media

The social media outlet has greatly contributed to our awakening. It has indeed provided a unique and effective platform for the people’s voice. No wonder the mainstream media and elitists are unpopular:  It has allowed us to spread the word on subjects such as PizzaGate and the Clinton conspiracies….

Along with the alternative/independent media, the explosive interest in the social media outlet has not only changed our views but also continues to redefine journalism and how information is shared. How this is redefining media is a subject for another piece.

Simple to say we’re in a golden age of alternative/independent and social media which has contributed greatly to our global awakening.

7. Changing viewpoint towards the ‘Conspiracy Theorist’

Another blatant indicator confirming our awakening is a change in how the term ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ is now generally viewed.

Used frequently over the years in mainstream media the term ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ was invented in the ’60s by the CIA (Crooks In Action). It has been used as a cover up to discredit those aware of the facts on how the dark overlords and their associates have been involved in criminal activity….

No longer generally viewed as a label to slap on crazy kooks believing Richard Nixon was a werewolf… etc… Conspiracy Theory has become more generally viewed as either conspiracy fact or at least something worth investigating rather than flatly dismissing.

For more on this see: 9 Indisputable Truths about “Conspiracy Theorists”

8. Increasing attempts to shut us up

Our global mass awakening has got the dark overlords greatly concerned as they question the effectiveness of their control systems over us. How can they deal with our awakening in growing overwhelming numbers?

Desperately, in cahoots with their associates, they’re throwing everything at us ranging from the grossly suppressive, the extremely petty, the violent and the ridiculous to try to shut us up and deny our self-expression, keep us mentally, spiritually and physically enslaved in the matrix controlling system.

9. Awakening through unknown/unforeseen processes

Our awakening goes beyond the specific and measurable: We cannot simply quantify our awakening: There are circumstances occurring on a spiritual level that go beyond our limited understanding. Such as, for example, claims have been made recently of energetic emissions from our galactic centre that could affect our spirituality and transform us….

10. Rise in local meet-up groups

As already mentioned, the Internet and social media has indeed been great for exchanging information to wake people up but what if these set ups become censored? Further, large groups, virtual or real, run the risk of infiltration for dumbing down and deliberate disinformation.

So the solution lies (in part) in the forming of local community-based in-person groups to cultivate the resistance and humanity; and local meet-up group numbers are already growing.

In conclusion

Will our mass awakening to the deception produce a turnaround — a world that makes a difference for everyone? A world where there are no predators, no controlling hierarchy, no blood-sucking vampiric slave-drivers at the top ruling the numerous enslaved at the bottom… no more fight for self-sufficiency because it’s already been achieved in the communities… etc.

It is up to us all to play our part.

 

You can read more from Paul A. Philips at his site NewParadigm.ws, where this article first appeared.

Phantom Democracy in the Age of the Internet

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By Nozomi Hayase

Source: Dissident Voice

After the Electoral College vote, the Trump presidency is now official. As denial and blame games continue, it becomes clear this was not a foreign government coup d’état. The truth is that democracy in America has been rotten to the core for decades. It is meddled with by corporate lobbyists, Big Pharma, Big Oil and Wall Street –those who are addicted to money and power.

American democracy is hollowed out, veiled with a loud media echo chamber, bringing feigned solidity to its emptiness. Out of this vacuum emerges a madness for power. U.S. politics is a contest of those who are driven by insatiable hunger – the most callous, cunning and manipulative people in society.

In this system, only people who lack empathy and advance self-serving agendas without concerns for others can rise to the top. The results of this year’s presidential election may mean that this person who many saw as ‘unfit to be president’ was better suited to play this dirty game than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Ascent of Trump

Donald Trump, a perceived outsider, seemed to appear out of nowhere. The former producer of the American game show The Apprentice sniffed the vulnerability of disfranchised Americans who are continually betrayed by the establishment. He then quickly moved in for the kill, turning the electoral arena into a new Reality TV show.

With social media as a hunting ground, this new Republican contender made direct connection with his audience, pouring out charm and grooming them with fake promises. By deploying words as weapons of control, he managed to garner favorable reactions from his followers. His language cast a magic spell where contradictory remarks and lies bypassed critical examination. Emotions triumphed over reason and under the grip of irrational logic, facts no longer seemed to matter. With a chameleon-like ability to shape-shift and say whatever voters wanted to hear, he was able to create a mirage and ensnare the populace into a grandiose fantasy.

What was the press, as a supposed watchdog of power doing during this Trump’s uncanny rise in popularity? Mainstream media did nothing to prevent it and instead facilitated this process. His bombastic comments hit jackpot high ratings in the corporate media and rhetoric not bound by facts was not only tolerated, but actively promoted with their shortsighted mentality of profit at any cost.

WikiLeaks and the Democratizing Power of the Internet

This same corporate media also buried a few important facts regarding the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This year’s election was an unprecedented phenomenon. This is not only because the lesser evil game was fought between two of the historically most disliked candidates, but also because of the role played by a new actor from outside of the U.S. electoral arena. Days before the election, a Forbes article acknowledged the significance of WikiLeaks’ DNC emails, calling them a “Holy Grail of understanding of U.S. electoral politics.” It noted how “few understand the importance of WikiLeaks in the eventual writing of the history of presidential politics.”

WikiLeaks has shown how elections in the existence of a truly free press will never be the same as before. U.S. politics sponsored by corporate masters creates a milieu of deception, lies and fraud that is fraught with corruption. These power driven politicians can only thrive in secrecy. When their actions are exposed, like Hillary’s highly paid Goldman Sachs speeches, crafted public images that suck the masses into their illusions of grandeur tend to shatter. Contrary to hysterical rants of ‘Russia hacked the election!’, the defeat of the Clinton dynasty was a testimony to the power of transparency.

WikiLeaks, the world’s first global 4th estate, which operates outside of any government was birthed on the Internet. It showed a potential for emancipation unleashed by this Net. Much of the force of democratization on the Internet is being subverted to create mass surveillance and censorship. Yet at the same time, its effect of empowering ordinary people cannot be denied.

In fact, Bernie Sander’s campaign was built on social media’s grassroots organizing. With independent campaign funding, this virtually unknown senator from Vermont successfully sparked the idea of socialism and raised issues of Wall Street corruption, economic injustice and poverty at a national level. Sander’s largest support came from millennials. It was these natives of the Internet that galvanized his political revolution.

Fake News and Fake Authority

Democrats appear to be disconnected with this new reality of the Internet’s bottom up spontaneous crowd gathering or even worse were adversaries to it. This was shown in their reaction to the corruption revealed in the DNC email database and Trump’s winning of the election.

On the second day of the Democratic National Convention, hundreds of Sanders delegates who learned about DNC’s rigging of the primary walked out in protest. Chanting “This is what Democracy looks like!”, they vowed not to go with Hillary. This crisis of the American political system opened up an opportunity for real democracy. But then, Bernie turned away, urging his supporters to nominate Hillary and sided with the corrupted Democratic Party. His failure to seize this historical moment helped throw the election to Trump, who the Clinton campaign had portrayed as a ‘pied piper candidate’.

After all this came the Fake News explosion. Some established liberal media, freaked out by the country quickly turning red in this Republican takeover, created a new red scare. On November 24, an article in The Washington Postmade wild accusations that Russia was engaging in propaganda during the election to spread ‘fake news’ in favor of Trump. The anonymous site that claimed to have identified these fake news sites that the author cited in the article, was shown to be nothing but a black list that labels anyone who challenges the official narrative as untrustworthy or even insinuating them to be Russian agents, spies or traitors.

Despite U.S. Intelligence Chief James Clapper’s claim that intelligence agencies lacked strong evidence for WikiLeaks’ connection with an alleged Russian cyberattack, it was way easier for progressives to ignore facts and spread paranoia, blaming the loss of Clinton on anyone but themselves.

In the age of the Internet, fake news can easily be manufactured and spread. Yet, at the same time it can also be shut down with countering views that surround them. Also, in this new environment, traditional media is losing its monopolizing power to disseminate information. They no longer can claim to be the sole purveyor of truth. In the case of the Washington Post‘s fake news scandal, The Intercept and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone quickly denounced and challenged its claim, halting this report on ‘fake news’. Social media networks also countered the gatekeepers who tried to dictate what is real through filtering views that challenge the official narrative. In the end, this fake news article was debunked, with Wapo issuing a correction on that story shortly after its publication. What this has shown is the publisher’s false authority and the establishment’s desperate attempt to reassert their shrinking legitimacy to keep people under their sphere of influence.

From Regime Change to Game Changer

The election is over and liberals’ hope to stop the rise of demagoguery is fading. The president elect began recruiting his rich buddies into his cabinet. Recently, he convened a group of Silicon Valley tech leaders to invite them into his new ‘construction project to rebuild America’. As this void of American democracy is being filled with more blatant patronage networks, new insurgencies of civic power are also arising. The potent and creative power of the Internet is already here. Those who have experienced it will not easily succumb to the reality being handed down to them from the teetering Trump Tower.

Just as the power of the Internet can be used by the oligarchic class to corral the masses, it can also be used to empower the people, through its open network. When the liberating force of a free net is claimed by citizens to create movements across borders, linking diverse struggles, it can give all a chance to not only change a regime, but to change the game altogether.

One game changer is WikiLeaks. With the creative use of technology, this Internet of the media built a robust network that is resistant to censorship, making it possible for the organization to be free from state and corporate influence, allowing it to truly serve the interests of the people. It has gained its own credibility through a perfect record of authentication of documents and rigorous scientific journalism that publishes full and verifiable archives. Despite corporate media’s smearing of the organization, public opinion polls indicate that Americans strongly approve WikiLeaks’ Podesta leaks.

Another democratic tool that is available to people everywhere is cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. With this new invention, ordinary people now have power to create their own money and peer-to-peer networks that are not intermediated by any governments, banks or corporations. Just as WikiLeaks distributes free speech beyond borders and lets truth be discovered through each individual’s participation, with Bitcoin, free speech becomes an app that can be downloaded from anywhere by anyone and values are created through people transacting freely, verified by a consensus of equal peers.

In Their Nothingness, We Find Our Power

On January, 20 2017, Trump will be sworn in with the Oath of Office. The White House will become his new executive boardroom. With this United States Incorporated, the Constitution may be slowly shredded off from his business contract. With the president elect’s proposal on Twitter to give penalties, including jail time or loss of citizenship for burning the American flag, coupled with his recent call for the expansion of nuclear weapons, many are rightfully fearful of the future.

Yet, wars and destruction of civil society are already happening around the world. Crackdowns on cash and schemes of demonetization are taking place in countries like Venezuela and India. When faced with the reality of their national currencies quickly disappearing or losing value, people are waking up to the fact that these claimed values are fake and that they are not backed by real economic activity or anything of true value. More and more people are seeing bubbles pumped up by toxic assets and fraud of financial engineering that rent-seeks earnings of hard working people and creates money out of thin air.

In his speech “Currency Wars and Bitcoin’s Neutrality”, technologist and author Andreas Antonopoulos spoke of how “cash is being eradicated around the world as a scourge.” He then pointed out how governments are waging currency wars against other countries and their own people in order to benefit from a crisis they artificially created. He emphasized how governments and central banks can’t win this game, because “cash is something that we can create, electronic cash, self sovereign cash, digital cash – Bitcoin.” He then noted how this math-based ‘Internet of money’ offers an exit from this old world of currency wars. He alerted the Bitcoin community that as the battle intensifies, those who create a new infrastructure as an exit from nation-state gated economies, and those who point to this exit will be called traitors, criminals, thug and terrorists.

This war on cash and censorship with Fake News memes are attacks on our fundamental freedoms. It is a battle for truth, involving the question of who will define our human reality. This war is now full on, yet mostly brewing beneath the radar. Just before Christmas, President Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. This included the ‘Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act’, which was presented to help counter foreign enemy propaganda, yet is actually a McCarthy era-style censorship law.

We live in a time when traditional authority and leaders have failed us and there is vacuousness in this space where a center used to hold. In the story of Faust, Goethe wrote about a universal man following his thirst for knowledge. In this journey, Dr. Faust meets Mephisto (the devil) who tried to trick and tempt him to come under his control. In the scene A Dark Gallery, Faust told Mephisto, “In your Nothingness I hope to find my All”. He then took the key and entered into this mysterious unknown.

Our quest for real democracy invokes this thirst for knowledge. It invites us all to enter into the realm of Nothingness. We no longer want to believe; we want to know. We no longer blindly accept a world conceived by a few elites. Now, in this chaos and abyss we are descending into, we may be able to find the real source of our own legitimacy. With knowledge that springs from deep within, we are able to penetrate the deception of those who seek to control us and recognize their actual emptiness. In their nothingness, we can find the creative power that has always been there, power that can bring life back to this phantom of democracy.

 

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., is a writer who has been covering issues of freedom of speech, transparency, and decentralized movements. Her work is featured in many publications. Find her on twitter @nozomimagine. Read other articles by Nozomi.