The Problem With the Sanders Campaign

...is Sanders.

I don't know how else to say this, but he's an old man who comes across too often as if he were the crazy uncle in the attic. Sorry, he just does.

By and large, he advocates for policies and programs that would have been ideal in 1980 -- or 1950 -- but now they seem inadequate and anachronistic. We can't go back to some halcyon past when things were or could have been better.

The mess we're in is the result of cumulative decisions by policy-makers and their sponsors over the last several decades. Both major parties have been complicit. Bernie has not been able to stem the tide. Sometimes he hasn't tried.

Comes now his campaign which has been resonating strongly, particularly among the young, and it almost seems like something out of the mythological past. Things could have been so much better if only...

If only, yes. The problem is that "if only" notes what's been lost, not what can be -- will be? -- made manifest in the future. In other words, as I see it, Bernie's campaign is a lament, not a manifesto.

I won't even mention Hillary's campaign, as it's too dreary. "No you can't have nice things -- ever!" is hardly an inspirational message, no?

It's my hope that the Sanders campaign will be a catalyst for that missing manifesto for the future, but I don't think the necessary political, economic and social adjustments will come through the ballot box.

We're way past that.

What I Learned This Year -- Part The Third

Activism works.

Of course I knew that from long experience, but we have been living under a system which insists that only "approved" activism works. Color revolutions only, you see?

The revolt against police violence and abuse seemed to take the Powers That Be by surprise (putting it mildly), and they still haven't figured out what to do about it. My sense of the situation has been that they will try to crack down, hard and all at once, much as they did with Occupy, but something tells me now, before the New Year, that they may try a different tactic:

Taking out or buying off the "leaders" who aren't slippery enough to escape their grasp.

I've seen many signs of it already.

The massing of military style police forces, just like an occupying army would do, after James Boyd was killed in Albuquerque, then after Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson, along with the massing of police-troops all over the country to counter the protests that ensued became something of an embarrassment to Our Rulers given the constant rhetoric about freedom of expression and assembly and so on.

No, it wouldn't work.

Military-style forces were told to stand down, and for the most part they did, though in St. Louis they were held in reserve "just in case" the Negroes got too far above themselves. Faith leaders and even the New Black Panthers were recruited to manage the protest crowds instead. The police continued their false claims of being fired on and assaulted by members of the crowds of protesters, but for the most part, protests went on relatively unimpeded, except when the feelings of the police were hurt -- as in Berkeley (CA), Oakland (CA), New York, and St. Louis, where the po-po are always butt-hurt over something or other.

Direct assaults against protests were limited; the snatch and grab tactic along with arrests and/or smears of protest "leaders" were substituted. By taking out the most outspoken or the most eagerly followed activists, it was thought that the protests would collapse. Didn't happen though.

I remember at one point, Antonio French, who was seen as a leader of the protest movement -- he isn't though -- was arrested and held for quite a while, but it only further inflamed the protests, it didn't cause them to collapse. That was because Antonio French wasn't leading the protests.

A concerted effort was launched to smear Mustafa Hussein who had been valiantly livestreaming the protests for Argus Radio News.  So far as I can tell at this point, Mustafa has stepped back and is no longer in the vanguard of livestreamers from Ferguson. He was clearly hurt by the smears and other assaults he faced. But it didn't end the livestream coverage of the protests. If anything, there are more streamers now.

Another livestreamer, Bassem Masri, is currently being smeared. He's also been arrested a number of times on bogus charges, and there have been reports that he's been offered "something" to turn against the protesters or to serve as a mole of some sort. Whether any of that is true, I don't know. But he's still out there covering the actions as best he can, and not solely in Ferguson and St. Louis. He's been traveling quite a bit around the country, and has made a number of mainstream television appearances.

An outspoken member of the Ferguson Commission was arrested for something, I forget what, the day after he was at the White House meeting with the President; another outspoken activist was arrested for arson and burglary for setting fires the night Antonio Martin was killed in Berkeley (MO).

A livestreamer in Los Angeles, Bryan Hayes, was run down by a driver from Rhode Island the other night -- no consequences to the driver, apparently. The running down/running over of protesters has become one of the "things" anti-protesters do, as the protests have been blocking streets and freeways as civil disobedience tactics.

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of protesters have been arrested since August. Some have been charged with felonies for trivial offenses. That too is part and parcel of the government tactics against this uprising

There have been reports that all of the protest "leaders" are being monitored by the FBI -- COINTELPRO on steroids.

The primary tactic, however, appears to be to wait out the protests on the premise that they will go away on their own. A few bones will be thrown now and again to divert attention from the problem of police violence and abuse, but nothing substantive will change.

Except that substantive changes are being made in the way the country is policed, and radicals are actually proposing and here and there implementing alternatives that will eliminate police as we have grown accustomed to them.

Big changes are afoot.

Peter Gelderloos has written a pretty profound manifesto regarding "A World Without Police." Whether we'll get there, I don't know. But his insight and powerful rhetoric on the topic will have an influence, no doubt.

Albuquerque's police culture appears to have changed dramatically in the last several months. New York's police unions are focusing on change there. We're seeing the spread of change throughout the national policing culture. Activism works.

It is a profound lesson that needs to be relearned from time to time.

A Video Manifesto

"Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine"



Note: On the road again today and tomorrow.

Who Are The Invisible Committee and Why Are They Saying Those Things?

Adbusters had something to say about "The Coming Insurrection"

"The Invisible Committee" was apparently discovered by Glenn Beck back when he had some sort of TeeVee Show that I never saw.

The (Alleged) IC produced a manifesto of sorts in France in 2005 called "The Coming Insurrection."

Supposedly, the Occupy is that Insurrection.

Well. "The Coming Insurrection" (2005) is so beautiful and so French, if you're old enough, you might think you've fallen into a François Truffaut/Jean-Luc Goddard collaborative movie written by Françoise Sagan on the set as it is being shot.

Yes, of course, our Vanguardists and Insurrectionists are no doubt immersed in its poetry and floating through its imagery.

A few passages will suffice to give a sense of the whole:

Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores and has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No “problems” framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of “pensions,” of “job security,” of “young people” and their “violence” can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signs of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive prospect to wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less humiliation and more advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their weapons, and prison won’t teach them to love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the desperate pleasure-seeking of hordes of retirees, making them stew and splutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of youth. And finally, no guaranteed income granted the day after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of a new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for that.

As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens, together with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify. The unmanned drone that flew over Seine-Saint-Denis last July 14th – as the police later confirmed – presents a much more vivid image of the future than all the fuzzy humanistic projections. That they were careful to assure us that the drone was unarmed gives us a clear indication of the road we’re headed down. The territory will be partitioned into ever more restricted zones. Highways built around the borders of “problem neighborhoods” already form invisible walls closing off those areas off from the middle-class subdivisions. Whatever defenders of the Republic may think, the control of neighborhoods “by the community” is manifestly the most effective means available. The purely metropolitan sections of the country, the main city centers, will go about their opulent lives in an ever more crafty, ever more sophisticated, ever more shimmering deconstruction. They will illuminate the whole planet with their glaring neon lights, as the patrols of the BAC and private security companies (i.e. paramilitary units) proliferate under the umbrella of an increasingly shameless judicial protection.

The impasse of the present, everywhere in evidence, is everywhere denied. There will be no end of psychologists, sociologists, and literary hacks applying themselves to the case, each with a specialized jargon from which the conclusions are especially absent. It’s enough to listen to the songs of the times – the asinine “alt-folk” where the petty bourgeoisie dissects the state of its soul, next to declarations of war from Mafia K’1 Fry – to know that a certain coexistence will end soon, that a decision is near.

I read it in English, but I hear it in French, and it's gorgeous. Horrible in its truth and gorgeous in its veracity. If this were the Manifesto of the Revolution, no one would ever rise, they would simply step out of their ordinary lifeways and into something else again, as easily as changing a sweater. And everything that used to be would suddenly stop dead in its tracks, like one of those movies, while you and the rest of the Insurrectionists assemble a New Reality in the midst of the frozen Old Reality from the excess and debris all around you. And then you dance.

It's a beautiful vision. Why would anyone want to resist it?

But then, there are always critics:

Just because someone expresses themself poorly and comes from France it doesn't mean they are somehow secretly saying something profound. This work getting a good review from Glenn Beck and various collegiate wanks might sell copies among supine and endlessly pliant Enemies-Of-All-Authority-With-A-Capital-A, but if it's possible to judge a work by the readers who are most enthusastic for it there will probably not be much of use in it in regards to collective class politics, among real people, who are forced to work for a living, in the real world, outside of a safe and cosy ideological hothouse of simultaneously sheepish and posturing riot porn consumers...

So there. Take that, ya Frenchy pooftahs.

And that's one of the nicer ones. Nonetheless, marchons! Marchons!