The Stimulator Explains It All For You

I haven't linked to The Stimulator for a good long time, though I check in with him every six months or so. After the election he posted this little number (NSFW language and shit) that really helped explain what happened and what to do about it.



Then most recently, he's reposted a little effort from Global Uprising on the J20 actions in DC that were intended to disrupt the inaugural festivities...



These are some of the deeper currents of revolt in this country. They have not been able to gain more than momentary recognition from the public, and what recognition they get is typically bad. On the other hand, the "intersectional" nature of the growing revolt against Trumpism/Fascist USA has meant that even the most marginalized upriser may have a role to play in whatever is to come.

We shall see...

The Squeeze

After the coup fizzled out, it looked for a time like Our Betters were simply going to let things devolve under Trump however they might and say fuck it all. A reason why the coup may have fizzled out is that the factions have become too polarized and they have very different visions of what should come after The End. They couldn't agree on a path forward, the military didn't provide buy in, and the factions are too evenly matched power-wise for any of them to assert rule over the others.

So we get Trump getting more and more off kilter as the days go by -- how many has it been? two? -- and his defenders are flailing wildly to hold on to something solid before it all flies apart.

The Squeeze has taken the place of the Coup.

Maybe that's the better way to go, I don't know. If I had confidence that the golpistas had the best interests of the People in mind, I'd go with the Coup (reluctantly), but clearly they don't. It's all against all with them and we the Rabble are the Devil's Hindmost. But the coup-plotters seem to have given up on the project for now, so The Squeeze is coming into play.

Perhaps it's better because it is more populist. And it is closing in from all directions.

The Revolutionary Communist Party (RevCom, RCP, Bob Avakian's little pop stand) is in the vanguard -- of course -- and it makes me laugh a bit because they can't actually do a damned thing, but they're out there, and they're acting all radical and shit, and saying what has to be said: "We gotta stop this fascist shitshow once and for all."

Just putting it as bluntly as that can make a difference. Most commentators dance around the obviousness of what's going on, fearful perhaps that if things are what they look like, those who speak out will be caught up in the meatgrinder and their remains will be fed to the dogs. Yes, that's a real risk. And that's why, no matter how bizarre RCP is/can be (and there are times I don't know what they have to do with any political archeology or ideology, communist or not) their presence on the front lines can make a difference. Somebody has to do it.

RCP is out front. I would think the anarchists would be out there too, but apart from some Black Blocyness during the Inaugural Pageant, I haven't seen much anarchist involvement in the whole hoo-hah, "peaceful transition of power," yadda yadda.. It doesn't mean it's not there, I just haven't seen it, locked as I am in my prison of illness and disability. (Whine, whine). It's possible that anarchists are revving up for something else later on, but my sense is that they're essentially withdrawing into the shadows with perhaps occasional outbursts of Black Blocyness to keep the pot stirred. Survival mode.

Things aren't going to be pretty, after all.

No, the Squeeze isn't coming from the anarchists nor necessarily from the radical vanguard.

It's coming from a consolidation of domestic and international business and financial interests with the anti-Trump factions of the permanent government and from the rising and (more or less) genuine grassroots populist movement -- signified by the spectacular turnout for the Women's March -- on the other.

I don't think Trump will survive it -- but of course, he's pulled through many other efforts to kneecap him, so I'm not placing bets yet. It's risky for those involved, and there's no sign yet of what comes after.

If The Squeeze merely replaces Trump with Pence we're probably worse off than if nothing were done. But we might feel better about it. I don't know. I know I wouldn't, but that's me. I think a lot of anti-Trump activists would be much happier with Pence, though the anti-Fascists would puke. Myself, I'd prefer to see the entire cavalcade swept away, but I don't have much of a solution beyond that, either.

The inability to predict or describe what comes next is one of the chief impediments to action. I would think this was all gamed out long ago by the Ruling Clique, but apparently not. Signs are clear that they were not prepared, not even close, for what's happened. Thus so much wheel spinning.

We don't have an image of what comes next in part because we've been conditioned not to think that way. When people did think that way, we got utopian visions such as Communism, Fascism and Nazi-ism. I think Our Betters want to ensure that never happens again, so thinking through what comes next is almost impossible except for those with an apocalyptic frame of reference. No more utopias, in other words.

Trump was selling a different kind of dystopia, and enough people bought the snake oil to put him into the White House (if that's where he is, I kind of doubt he actually stays there. Not enough gold plate...)  But they're finding out it tastes awful and doesn't cure what ails them. It makes them sicker.

The media is part of The Squeeze, but note, plenty of formerly "progressive"ish websites among the New Media ("") have thrown in their lot with Trump, placing a bet that whatever happens under his rule, it will be better for them to be on the side of the winner than not. That will only work for them if he actually wins in the end. It's a calculated risk, of course, for the Internet as we've known it looks slated to go away sooner rather than later -- and that would be likely whether or not Trump were in the White House. Noncompliant as well as compliant websites and their proprietors are in the crosshairs no matter what. It really won't matter much whether a blog or website proprietor defended Trump or not. The point will be to stifle dissenting points of view and market only approved positions.

The coastal enclaves and their economic clout are part of The Squeeze. Trump ultimately can't do anything without them. And he's done his absolute best to alienate them.

Elements of the military and the MIC are part of The Squeeze. Of course the anti-Trump faction of the intelligence community is part of The Squeeze.

One of the more interesting factors of The Squeeze is that the professional bureaucracy that actually does the business of government is not just resisting, they're actively subverting many of his initiatives and desires. Not just saying "No," they're saying "Fuck you very much."

Oh my. Something like this happened with Reagan, too, but the bureaucrats were ultimately brought around, though it took quite some time and the Reaganites had to yield on many fronts before they were able to get their modified way. They thought they could just wave a wand and compel obedience. That's not how it works.

I don't think Trump will be given that kind of time to sort things out. And if the subversion is as extensive as it seems, he won't be able to mollify the resisters. Too many other things to do on too many other fronts.

The Squeeze is coming from the tech sector, the financial sector, as well as many other sectors which feel uneasy about the advent of this gross abuser in office, and it's coming from some who probably want revenge for some of his behavior in business. This is their chance.

Mob interest must be keen. Factions there, too.

Ultimately, it boils down to a popular revolt. All these interests and more will try to manipulate it, but we can't know in advance how it will turn out.

But recall that early on, the Trump defenders and loyalists were hyperventilating over some sort of Soros-funded Color Revolution their paranoias told them was under way when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets right after the "election."

There were millions in the streets on Saturday, and the color was pink pussy.

The hyper ventilating and paranoia was triggered once again. Soros! Soros! Soros! No doubt he and his money has something to do with the growing resistance, and maybe his idea is to underwrite a Color Revolution in the USofA. So? Not that I approve -- these Color Revolutions elsewhere have turned into disasters for the Rabble -- but when you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind, that's just the way it is. Trump opened this door, and if he doesn't like what's behind it, too fucking bad.

This might be a good time to post a link to Gene Sharp's directions on how to do a Color Revolution. 

Maybe the paranoia is justified as many of the elements Sharp says are necessary are in place.

Ahem.

There are alternatives. 

Take the Square provided the guidebook for Occupy -- one that's been expanded with lessons learned since then.

Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects the State is a good and useful reference for understanding just what all those cries for "nonviolent resistance" really mean.

Then there's David Graeber's Revolution in Reverse which turns the whole Revolution!! theory on its head. There are other ways to do it, people. Think!

These are some of the alternatives to a Color Revolution, there are many others, and we really haven't seen anything yet.

I'll close this long-winded screed with the observation that the Internet is designed to overwhelm any likelihood of action. It is filled to bursting with entertainment, fear, uncertainty and doubt. It is made to hold your attention and keep you from doing anything about your situation and condition but submit to what you are told to do. Ie: send money to candidates, vote for one shit-show or the other.

Decoupling is necessary.

Be careful of falling into the propaganda and argument trap. You'll never emerge!

Onward.

The Democratic Party Is Irrelevant

I saw Bernie on Charlie Rose last night. As he always does, he made a strong case for his policies and programs that he believes would control Wall Street greed and uplift the working class, curb the police state, and inspire confidence in America around the world. All well and good, but by pleading with Trump to do the right thing, he's essentially declared the Democratic Party irrelevant.

Of course.

Democrats have been yielding power to the Rs for decades, truly since Reagan, but they weren't so savvy about wielding power after Nixon defeated Humphrey either. Nixon was practically a Communist compared to Trump, and the Republicans in Congress in Nixon's day weren't anything like today's radical reactionaries who call themselves Republicans. But Nixon's election signaled the end of the New Deal/Great Society coalition headed by Democrats and progressives, and the coming reversion to prior theories of what it was appropriate for government to do.

As things have devolved from that point, the Democratic Party has reverted more and more to its roots as an aristocratic and deeply conservative party not particularly intent on rule so much as it is on influence. Democrats have adopted populist and/or progressive positions periodically throughout the long history of the Party, but they've also been perfectly willing to throw them away.

During the most recent campaign for president, it appeared that Hillary was attempting to pull off something Democrats have long yearned for -- the union of the Democratic Party with top level Republican "moderates," those Republicans who had rejected Trump.

I think she thought she had achieved her objective, but lo and behold, she hadn't. The R "moderates" went right back to the fold once Trump was declared the victor. The power that Rs can wield by holding the White House and both houses of congress is truly intoxicating,  They won't let this moment pass unexploited. Oh no.

Trump's apparent EC victory was stunning because it wasn't expected or planned for. The shock waves ran through the Ruling Clique, just as they did through the media and the public; it was in its own way an even greater shock than the Supreme Court's lawless interference in 2000 to give the presidency to GW and his bloodthirsty cohort. It makes no sense, and it is "illegitimate" from the get. Just as GW's elevation was. GW was forced upon an unwilling but also largely unresistant public and he caused the very horrors his opponents warned he would. Wars and economic collapse being the highlights -- or lowlights as the case may be.

Democrats, to their undying shame, did not serve as an opposition party but were instead enablers, co-conspirators, and willing victims. Even when they were given back Congress in 2006 they sat on their hands and essentially pretended that everything was OK, and Bush and Company would not be more than ritually challenged. For some, it was a shocking revelation: Democrats were useless.

And in 2008 when Obama was elected in a landslide and congress had a filibuster proof Democratic majority, guess what? Obama's prime objective was rehabilitating the Rs, resuscitating them from their near-death experience, and carrying on the Republican lite programs and policies the Ds had been notorious for since the victory-debacle of 2006.

To say the public was disappointed is to put it gently, and the Ds were given their punishment in 2010. The interesting thing to me is that the Ds didn't even try to reverse the trend. They essentially conceded state houses all over the country without a fight, knowing full well that by doing so, Republican gerrymandering would ensure R political dominance for at least ten years and possibly much longer than that. The Ds knew what would happen and they let it, if they didn't actually help engineer it.

They lost most of their Congressional majority as well.

As long as they had the White House, apparently the Ds didn't care. Of course the policies which essentially favored Rs, Wall Street, and the financial elites were enacted right and left (intentional pun) to the horror of many Americans who simply wanted fairness and justice from their government and got something else entirely. Disappointment? Ha.

Government obviously was totally out of the hands of the public, governing contrary to the public interest was the operating theory of both parties, and for all intents and purposes, there was no alternative. NeoLibCon capture was complete.

There was nothing We the Rabble could do about it. Elections in 2012, 2014 and now 2016 confirmed the People's powerlessness.

But this time, instead of the stability and continuity that would have been Hillary's direction in office, we get another shock to the system, equivalent to, maybe even greater than that of 2000, and literally nobody knows for sure where we go from here. I'm convinced that's designed and deliberate, not an accident of the voters' unexpected preference. I think the voters had very little to do with it. And it is obvious from Hillary's increasing, indeed unprecedented, lead in the popular vote (now up above 1,000,000 it seems and headed toward 2,000,000 maybe even 3,000,000 or more) that the voters chose stability and continuity -- even if they didn't like Hillary -- not whatever radical upheaval is in the works.

But it doesn't matter. What the voters want in any given election is of no interest or consequence to the Ruling Clique. They want what they want, and they will get it by hook or crook. The trouble is, until the outcome was announced, they obviously wanted stability and continuity, though not for the same reasons the public did.

So what happened?

Somebody or some faction which could do so pulled the plug.

Given the tiny margins in some of the battleground states that switched the outcome, and given the exit polls showing a substantial Hillary victory in those same states -- much like Gore's exit poll victory in Florida which was conveniently overruled -- it's pretty obvious that the count was interfered with (somehow) by a faction that wanted shock and destabilization rather than stability and continuity.

Crisis-opportunity, right?

Crisis=Opportunity.

We've been through this so many times, we should understand it by now. And we should have some way to counter it. But no.

Every time is like the first time. "Whut?!" And the cycle repeats over and over.

That is one of the ways Our Rulers keep their grip on power no matter the wishes of the public.

But it's a factional rulership, not a monolith, and the factions are constantly contending for the upper hand.

The fact that Hillary, Obama, and nearly all the Democratic hierarchy went along with the... odd... outcome without question and rank and file Democratic office holders are stunningly mute about it indicates to me -- having observed these things over the years and having had an inside view of DP operations for a while in California -- that the Dems really don't care, never did, and as far as they're concerned, it's no problem -- for them. In other words, they're useless and irrelevant as a political opposition, for they do not oppose; they enable.

Of course I and many others have known that for years, but seeing it so obviously presented in this case is still a shock.

But that's the intention.

Shock the public and get away with god knows what while they're fighting among themselves.

Works every time.

So far anyway. This time it may run into a few speed bumps, but what needs to happen are spike strips at least.

That can happen if the results in the battleground states are investigated thoroughly enough to discover the kind of jiggering I suspect went on. But I don't see that on any agenda. I don't think anybody wants to do it for fear of what they'll find. This is essentially complicity in fraud but that's hardly unusual in American politics and elections.

If it were discovered that the results actually were jiggered in Trump's favor just enough to clinch the EC, that would essentially cancel the election. The whole thing, the vote in its entirety would have to be reviewed (which wouldn't bother me) and the transition schedule would be thrown into chaos. What would be found would likely be appalling to everyone. One shock would follow another. Our Rulers would find that unacceptable because the whole system would shudder and potentially collapse. A crisis indeed, but one which the Wrong People could use as an Opportunity. The Wrong People being the Rabble.

The Rabble want fairness, justice, economic comfort/prosperity for themselves, and a sense of self-worth. Our Rulers do not want the Rabble to have those things because if they do, they can't be exploited to the extent they must be to please and pleasure their Betters.

What the Trump cabal appears to be preparing to do is to restore White Supremacy pretty much as it was in the 1950s and before, as a sop to some of the Rabble to make them think they're getting what they want while exploiting and robbing them to the hilt.

It's a nasty tactic, but it worked back in the day, so I suspect the Trumpists think it will work again. Why not?

The rest of the Rabble, the ones who will suffer the most under this scheme, "deserve their punishment" according to the principles of White Supremacy. They are inferior. Period. End of discussion. Some of them are Good Mexicans, Good Darkies and such, and so they can be rewarded, but the rest? They're lucky to be alive, they can bow down and shut up. Or leave. Or die. Their choice.

No, this isn't Nazi-ism or straight on Fascism. This is the way the US was ruled and operated from its origin until the mid Sixties and LBJ's Great Society when many of the disabilities imposed on Out Groups began to be removed.

The Trumpists want to restore America's Greatness by reverting to the white supremacist principles that they believe made America "great" in the first place.

Whether the Ruling Clique is down with that, I don't know. Some of the factions aren't, but some are.

The Democrats, in the end, though, will go along with whatever faction wins.

The Rabble can have a say, if they take the reins and force the issue, but in the meantime, the Trump cabal can get away with a lot of mischief while the issue of White Supremacy is serving to distract the masses.

Oh, these people know how to run cons all right, and they know most people are marks. Breaking free of this crap is what the People need to do. Whether they or we can, I dunno....

More later. I'm tired.

The Revolution Continues... ?

While I've been otherwise engaged, events in St. Louis have taken on quite a broad-based character leading to protests and demonstrations and violent police reactions in the city and surrounding areas.

I've watched a bit of Rebelutionar_Z's livestream recordings from the Shaw demonstrations and the sit-down at the Quik Trip, and it's inspiring. People are taunting the police, and the police are reacting with their usual intimidation and violent tactics, and as we saw in Oakland during the Occupy protests, the upshot is that authority loses legitimacy.

The QT action overnight demonstrates how the process works.

The video below is long, but it's easy to scroll through. At about 33 minutes in, the po-po's tank arrives to threaten the demonstrators, and from that point, things get intense. At about 50 minutes in, the videographer is pepper-sprayed in the face -- again, he says it's the second time in three days that he's been sprayed -- and several in the crowd are sprayed as well. Listen for calls of "Medic!" The police follow crowd clearing protocol without resorting to tear gas, but there are reports of "snatch-and-grabs" and violent arrests. These are typically intended to frighten members of crowds into leaving. They usually work reasonably well. But in this case, the crowd refuses to be intimidated after the confrontation, they walk away.



Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream

The police tactics are routine by now, but in this case there's a quality of absurdity made manifest by the police outnumbering the protesters at some points, with the appearance of the tank and the police challenge of camera people. The police claim to be threatened by people with cameras. Indeed.  They are violently arresting sit-down, nonviolent protesters. They hide behind shields, but not everyone in the police line has a shield. One of their vehicles has to be jumpstarted in the street. It's just ridiculous.

"Who do you serve? Who do you protect?"

Obviously, it's not The People.

More videos here.

Others on scene include Tim and Luke. Bella Eiko is in town.

Some mainstream coverage has been occurring as well.

Thousands of people are participating in demonstrations, a fair contingent of youthful anarchists as well as a large group of local and national activists.

The tipping point isn't here yet, but it's coming.

Is That All There Is?

There's a long well-written piece over at the now nearly moribund Intercept that informs us that five prominent and well-connected Muslims (or four and and atheist, accounts vary, even within the piece) had their emails intercepted and spied upon by the NSA -- or maybe it was the FBI using technology provided by the NSA, accounts are unclear -- from about 2003 to about 2008, though it's neither clear nor certain when the interception started and whether it has stopped.

What is apparently clear is that the email interception and surveillance happened, and that these five men agreed to be interviewed for the Intercept, and their stories are interesting.

As I say, the article is quite long, some 8,000 words, and there are embedded videos that continue their sagas in some detail. All of these men were and are well connected in the American Muslim community, and most were very well connected with Power. Some were fairly frequent visitors to the White House and one ran for office. The idea that these men were subjected to surveillance -- by having their emails intercepted and read -- is apparently supposed to shock our consciences, as it is patently obvious that these men were not deserving of such scrutiny, even if it was legal, which is not entirely clear. It may well have been legal, but even if it was, these men of all men did not deserve the dishonor and humiliation of being surveilled by the state.

They were and are prominent, important people, you see. Men of substance, gravitas. Leaders among men. High ranking staff of important elected officials. Lawyers. These men, of all men, did not deserve to be treated like the common herd.

Should these men have been exempt from surveillance by reason of their status? That seems to be the upshot of the long anticipated story "naming names."

That only five names are named -- out of a list of several thousand email addresses that was provided by Edward Snowden -- and all of those named are Muslims (or four Muslims and an atheist) has caused something of a stir among the rabble who were so eagerly awaiting the post that would "name names" and be a "fireworks finale" and so on and so forth. Greenwald hyped this thing to the heavens in numerous teevee and print interviews over the past few months, waxing rhapsodic (well, as rhapsodic as he can wax) over the spectacle he was preparing to unleash around the end of June/Fourth of July.

Some of his thunder was stolen by Bart Gellman at the WaPo who wrote -- before the release by the Intercept -- that the NSA actually sweeps up many hundreds of thousands of emails in their surveillance dragnet, and most of them -- more than 90% -- are in no way related to investigations into terrorism or various prioritized criminality. They are "innocents."

Just as Greenwald's named names are.

Of course, in the minds of many Americans, Muslims, per se, are not innocents at all, and the more scrutiny and surveillance they are subjected to, the better. This is pure bigotry in most cases, and the article describes a somewhat astonishing level of crude bigotry that informed the actions of the FBI at the time these men were being surveilled. Good heavens! How unprofessional! Indeed. It was the Cheney era. What does one expect?

Which leads to a consideration of the letdown this supposed "fireworks show" and finale represents for many who have seen it and read it.

If that's truly all there is, it's pretty much a nothing-burger.

Airy but not very nutritious.

Everyone knew, did they not, that American Muslims were being spied upon,  sometimes very intrusively, and in great numbers, said to be justified by the threat they supposedly posed to the good order, peace and security of Regular Americans, thanks in large measure to the attacks on 9/11/2001 which killed several thousand innocents.

Their actual innocence can be disputed, but that's another issue.

The Muslim threat was and is considered real by the malefactors of the State. The threat is not to "innocents"-- the threat is to the State and to the Power of the State.

When Cheney was running things, paranoia was rampant within the government to the point where he ordered a bunker built under his mansion at the Naval Observatory. Thousands were rounded up, protesters were encaged, innocents were rendered and tortured, wars of aggression were ordered and undertaken against peoples who had nothing to do with the attacks, millions have died or been displaced.

That's the legacy of what happened one day in September so many years ago. That's the Cheney legacy, too, for Cheney let it happen -- whether deliberately or not is beside the point. He had and has another priority than the protection and security of the American people: his priority was his own protection and financial well-being and after the attacks, he concerned himself with the protection and security of the State and particularly its executive apparatus.

Anything and everything was fair so long as his priorities were met.

The loyalty he inspired and still inspires within the confines of the Government and its contractors is something of a wonder, especially given the nearly universal contempt with which his ostensible Boss, George Bush, is held.

The five men named and profiled in the long-awaited Intercept report were close to the Bush-Cheney White House, and given the paranoia of the times and the paranoid natures of the men and women in charge in those days, it's no wonder at all that these five men were placed under surveillance. They and many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of others were and are subject to the gentle kindness of State surveillance, on the basis of the lingering paranoia that seems to have wormed its way into the foundations of government today.

By no means were or are Muslims the only targets, any more than the NSA is the only or the primary surveillance outfit.

The problem with Greenwald's reporting on the topic all along has been its narrow focus and its obsession with the NSA. Well, that and the endless hype that leads... essentially nowhere.

The stories, when they are well-written as this one is, are interesting but apart from The Debate, they have led to no substantive positive changes in the surveillance state at all. In fact, the argument can be and has been made that the changes that have taken place and those to come have strengthened and expanded the surveillance state, not weakened it at all. The revelations have mostly been of "things we already knew" at least in broad outline. They've filled in details, but the details simply let us know how very pervasive corporate and government surveillance is. It hasn't provided us with tools to do anything about it; in fact, the revelations have essentially let it be known that "you can't do anything about it." And so, knowing they are under surveillance, Americans are more careful about what they say and what they do, aren't they? And isn't that the point of telling people they are -- or at least could be -- under surveillance?

These revelations serve the State, whether they are intended to or not. And this latest article does the same -- in this case by making clear to American Muslims that there is no exemption for even their highest ranking comrades. They are all considered suspect.

But we knew that, didn't we?

So really, is that all there is?

Then let's keep dancing...

Kiev Is Burning

See more US News from ABC | World News

They tell me this is yet another Color Revolution in Kiev, Ukraine, like that in Bangkok, one in which a militant and rising middle class demands that the more or less populist -- though oppressive -- government aligned with the 'lesser people' be gone and neo-liberal "democratic" government and economic policies be instituted.

When Gene Sharp's manual for Color Revolutions was being promoted heavily at Occupy events, I read it, tried to understand Sharp's philosophy about these things, and looked deeper into their results, and I said, "Whoa! Wait. Is this what you want? Is this what you really want from Occupy or any other revolutionary movement?"

Few knew what I was saying, or why, because very few understood the nature and purpose of Color Revolutions, nor did it ever occur to most of them that there were particular -- and highly exploitative -- economic interests behind every one of them, interests that were perfectly delighted to use whatever discontents they could find among the People to get what they wanted out of them, at whatever cost to the People it took.

Those who did understand what I was asking wanted nothing more than to shut me and anyone else who questioned the semi-divinity of Gene Sharp up.

Where I saw the Sharp methods and revolutionary practices had value was in their systems and organization -- which any movement can adopt and utilize, even anarchist ones. The problem is that any movement can adopt them, and that includes counter-revolutionary and reactionary ones. Sharp's directives and directions for carrying out a Color Revolution, and the Revolution itself, are not required to be "leftish" or carried out on behalf of the People (though they are always "in the name of the People.")  Yet that's a marketing slogan. It doesn't have to be -- and typically isn't -- real at all. It's marketing. Bernays on steroids.

In fact, the whole "Color Revolution" schtick is marketing. That's what Sharp was selling. How to organize and market your uprising so it will be successful in the marketplace, how to sell it. Not, by any means, how to achieve the revolutionary ends most beneficial to the greatest number of People. Apart from some yammering about "freedom" and "democracy" the ends are never discussed in Sharp's extensive work. I even dared to ask why that was so. If you don't know why you're having an uprising -- apart from some vague concepts of "Freedom" (for whom, from what?) and "Democracy" (In what way?), then why are you having it?

So I glance every now and then at what's been going on in Kiev and Bangkok, and ponder the disasters in the aftermath the Arab Spring, the general failure of the populist movements in Spain and Greece (among other places), and I see a common pattern. We can go all the way back to the Philippines insurrection against Marcos, or the numerous "Color Revolutions" in Eastern Europe and the eventual destruction of the Soviet Union and any hint of popular resistance to the looming economic and political catastrophe Soviet citizens were being forced to endure,  and see a common thread: these "populist" uprisings were all -- every one of the them -- conducted on behalf of a nascent 'new' oligarchy which wanted to replace the sclerotic 'old' one, using the discontents of a rising but blocked middle class and the often suppressed longings of the poor to gain the leverage necessary to overthrow the Old Order and institute a New one -- a new one that is as bad as, or even worse than, what it replaces. Every. Single. One.

And it is always all about the marketing in Sharp's vision.

Of course, it's supposed to be nonviolent, with nonviolence used as a weapon against internal opposition and against the Old Order, but on the margins, these successful "revolutions" -- or reactionary movements, which is what I came to believe they were -- were remarkably not non-violent at all. The "peaceful revolutionaries" always -- ALWAYS -- held the threat of violence over the state or oligarchy they wished to replace, while simultaneously claiming otherwise, and they sought ways to precipitate or initiate violent repression by the police and authorities so as to gain sympathy for their cause. This is not non-violence; it's an embrace of violence. In Kiev -- and in many other sites where this sort of double-tracking goes on -- there is a lot of violence initiated by the state to be sure, but there is also sabotage and violence initiated by the reactionary-revolutionaries, whether it is burning down symbols of the regime (as happened over and over again in Cairo, for example) to actually burning members of the police force with Molotov cocktails (Kiev, Athens, etc.) .

By comparison to almost any revolutionary movement in history, Occupy was almost preternaturally non-violent. Yet it was met with extraordinary levels of state violence that was widely approved by the general population in large part because they were convinced that Occupations were dirty and disgusting hotbeds for disease, rape and murder.

That, too, was marketing -- by the authorities -- to ensure that Occupy could not become a successful Revolution against the oligarchy that rules the world with rod and staff. Many of the same tactics that were used in the United States (and elsewhere) against Occupy and similar demonstrations are being used against protesters in Kiev and Bangkok, whereas in Cairo, the authorities just shoot into crowds, killing and maiming many thousands so far -- with no apparent end to the mayhem in sight.

But what is it for?

Some loud and energized Ukrainians would would rather be under the thumb of EU Bankers, Neo-Liberals and Technocrats than be aligned with (ick) Russia? Oh Kay, then. Let's have a Revolution!

They say that this year will mark another in a series of years of rage and rebellion around the world. We shall see, shan't we?


-------------------------
UPDATE: This video has been making the rounds. It shows a phalanx of police in Kiev confronting a large and enthusiastic crowd, members of which are hurling rocks, bottles, paving stones, smoke bombs, and Molotov cocktails at the police who are arrayed behind barricades and shields. Someone in the crowd is driving a front-loader repeatedly into the police line and appears to break through at one point but retreats. The version that is going around stops as the front-loader retreats, but there is another one that shows the action from the ground level, and that's the second one posted here.





You'll note that members of the crowd are attempting to stop the driver of the front-loader and try to speak/reason with the more militant members of the crowd. Others have pointed out that if anything like this demonstration were to happen in the United States, the front-loader driver would be taken out by a police sniper, and the crowd would be gassed and bludgeoned and shot by the police who would promptly arrest any survivors.

Though we're given to believe that the uprising in Kiev has wide popular support, some observers and commenters in this country and elsewhere have noted that much if not all of the violence has been instigated by what amount to Neo-Fascists whose determination is not at all in the interests of the Ukrainian people. In addition, the Ukraine apparently has a broadly divided population, with Eastern populations widely supporting closer ties with Russia (many ethnic Russians live in the Eastern areas) while Western populations widely support closer ties with Europe.

Eventually, this may lead to the break up of the Ukraine -- which wouldn't be the first former Soviet sphere republic to split apart or even engage in civil war.

Cannot. Stop. Laughing.

But yum, the soup is good!

Some Occupy Stuff

Nathan Schneider has been flogging his book, "Thank You, Anarchy" since September. He was on Democracy Now!



and did a Book Salon at FDL today:

http://fdlbooksalon.com/2013/12/15/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-nathan-schneider/

and has written a number of Occupy themed articles and posts for a range of publications including Waging Nonviolence, and his own blog, The Rowboat.

I certainly had my differences with him during the Occupy heyday, but he seems to have come around to a much more positivist view than he had then. It's difficult to describe, but these days, as he talks and writes about how Occupy developed and evolved, he seems to recognize just how deeply rooted in community this Movement has become, and how evolution has strengthened it.

Also, as an aside, but it may be an important one, Nathan seems to be a genuinely nice person, something increasingly rare in today's media landscape.

On the Anniversary of Teh Revolution(!)

Haven't had time to get caught up with the News of the Day this morning; don't even have the radio on -- somewhat unusual for me.

I spent a few minutes watching Nate's streams from New York last night before going to sleep, and it was a fairly dismal recapitulation of NYPD's usual thuggishness toward OWS or anything that might resemble OWS or might be construed as OWSish or hint at support for OWS -- or, most horribly, show a pup tent. Nate was clearly distressed at what he was witnessing and documenting. The videos were titled "March against OWS" -- which I thought was odd, but after opening one of them the full title was revealed, "March Against OWS Suppression." Ah, of course. Naturally, suppression had to occur.

From what little I saw, the suppression consisted of the now time honored police tactic of "snatch-and-grab," literally pulling people out of the march at random and arresting them. NYPD did this hundreds if not thousands of times during the later stages of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and it was clear then, as it is now, that it is a terror tactic designed and intended to suppress protest and dissent. "Snatch-and-Grab," along with mass arrests, infiltration, non-stop surveillance, intense police violence and brutality, public torture, and other methods were used successfully to shut down the encampments and prevent the emergence of a unified and coordinated revolutionary force.

These efforts to shut down OWS in New York were mirrored by (sometimes led by) similar efforts on the part of police departments throughout the country. It's striking that there is still debate over whether the federal government coordinated the crackdown against Occupy. Of course they did. It was obvious. Tactics of suppression were tried out in various cities (including my own fair city); "what works" and "lessons learned" were shared widely -- and quite openly -- through federal channels, and the the information was archived and no doubt studied intensely -- by DHS and the many other agencies that support the National Security State.

We live in a Police State.

And yet it is still debated -- because it's not as "bad" as the rest of them.

Of course the whole "(non)violence" debate served the purposes of that State nicely. By essentially claiming that the presence of people wearing black or bandanas or shouting at the police (or on very rare occasions breaking windows or committing other acts of vandalism) was "justification" for the police crackdowns or at least lost the Movement the Moral High Ground, the self-proclaimed "nonviolence" advocates actively split the Movement everywhere they could and in as many ways as they could, performing their role to ensure that the Occupy Movement did not become an effective Revolutionary Movement.

Old-line Socialists and a very diverse community of anarchists collided from the very beginning of the OWS efforts in New York and many other places, with the Socialists insisting that the anarchists were "doing it wrong," and the anarchists insisting that if the Socialists were an effective revolutionary force, we wouldn't be in this mess now. Many mutual anathemas ensued.

And yet the Movement inspired a raft of experiments in Future Living, something that we haven't seen in this country for decades. The Future, after all, was cancelled by the Reaganites back in the day, and there have been few public efforts to revive the concept of a Future. Now that Occupy provided a framework for the coalescence of Futurist visions and efforts -- yes, even the Zeitgeist and Venus Project people -- the most valuable and ultimately useful outcome of the initial phase of the Movement-Becoming-Revolution is the idea that there can be a Future, and that it will be better than today -- if we want it.

Another World Is Possible.

People all over the world are making it happen.

There is a march going on in New York right now highlighting the environmental degradation caused by fracking and the many other resource extraction and transport activities, including pipelines (Spectra in New York). Environmental issues have been at the top of the list of Occupy interests, along with civil liberties, democracy, ending wars, preserving and enhancing communities, preventing the systemic abuse of everyone who isn't part of the "1%", and so on.

I encapsulated the values of Occupy -- some growing out of the values expressed during the Arab Spring uprisings -- as:

• Dignity


• Justice


• Community


• Peace

 Seems those are still the guiding values.

Still working on the implementation phase...

We are unstoppable, another world is possible.

[Back to the packing for the big move for me... my friend may have been right. This is harder than I thought and I can't do what I used to be able to... old age is a bother..]

The Philadelphia Scene

I've been following what I can of the #Occupy National Gathering events in Philadelphia on Nate's livestream -- and catching up with his archives. Some of what's been going on has been surprisingly moving, some of it not so much. But that's how these things go.

What was striking yesterday was the huge turnout for a march through downtown Philadelphia in support of labor and human rights in the face of implacable indifference. What I saw reminded me not of marches from "my day" (anti-Vietnam War era) but of solidarity marches of long before that. This was a good thing.

I was briefly involved in some of the planning discussions for the National Gathering through InterOccupy this spring, and it is gratifying to see how it has come together. It's largely amorphous and informal seeming -- at least from the narrow view I get through Nate's lens -- and yet it seems to be very well organized and attended.

There was a funny incident last night -- well, sort of -- at Independence Mall when a woman from Brooklyn got up to mic check and announce a global peace treaty or truce project through the United Nations; as she was beginning to explain how it would work, another woman mic checked the crowd some distance away saying that she wanted everybody to "sit down." The first woman said nothing, but the crowd was perplexed to say the least. Finally, one spoke up and said, "Who are you to be ordering us around?"

Shortly, someone else mic checked the crowd saying "the Veterans" requested that people leave the enclosed area of the park and assemble outside the barricades where "the Veterans" requested that people sit down on the sidewalk in solidarity with the Veterans (whose tent in the park was under threat by the police due to an expired or conflicting permit, though that wasn't explained by the mic-checkers). After people said, "Oh, I get it," the mic checking continued with several updates and details of what was wanted by "the Veterans" and why. What seemed odd to me was that so far as I could tell, "the Veterans" (meaning Veterans for Peace, who had had a tent and information tables onsite since the beginning of the Gathering) never spoke for themselves about what they wanted or needed from the crowd or about what was going on.

What I gathered from Nate's commentary and his interviews with some of the participants, including veterans, was that the police were assembling in riot gear to evict the Veterans for Peace because their permit expired at 9:00pm. A crowd assembled with the intention of thwarting any such eviction and there was a tense standoff for a few minutes as police and park rangers, with shields and helmets, formed a skirmish line facing the crowd, some of whom were quite rude about the whole thing. Others were not so rude. In fact, some were expressing their love for the police and their understanding of how difficult their job was, etc. etc. For their part, the police seemed either indifferent or embarrassed about what was going on, and Nate reported on one he saw leaving the skirmish line who he overheard saying "I have ethics."

Well.

Ultimately, there was negotiation between legal observers, possibly members of Veterans for Peace (though they didn't appear on camera) and the atmosphere of tension changed: the police skirmish line seemed to evaporate, shields and helmets disappeared, most of the police officers and park rangers left, and the report was that the Veterans for Peace tent would be allowed to stay until 9:00am this morning (about 4 hours from now) when "another permit holder" would be given access to the park and the Veterans would be allowed to assemble at another park nearby. Who this "other permit holder" was was never clarified, but I recall other reports that indicated the Tea Partiers were having a gathering at Independence Mall, on or about the Fourth of July, and I wondered... could it be? Well, maybe.

The crowd largely dispersed, but there were rumors that the police would raid the park anyway, despite their assurances that they wouldn't, at 12 midnight, and though Nate shut down his stream, he said he would be available to cover any developments and he had a network of people who would alert him if anything "happened."

I haven't checked yet this morning to see if there have been any developments since last night, but I thought the whole sequence was interesting.

While police mindlessly continue their essentially futile effort to suppress Occupy, the point of doing so has been largely lost. The violent evictions and suppression of Occupy since last fall demonstrated clearly that the nonviolent nature of the Occupy Movement is not any sort of physical threat to the Powers That Be, and that despite an abundance of Revolutionary rhetoric and frequent episodes of marching in the streets without a permit, Occupy does not represent the kind of armed insurrection or civil disturbance that would call for the kinds of militarized violence and intimidation that we have seen used against encampments and demonstrations again and again. Consequently, though the police still assemble en masse and continually threaten violence against Occupy -- and as in Philadelphia the night before last, they continue to make impressive numbers of arrests of demonstrators -- they are fighting an image of their own creation. Occupy is something else again. The more the police mindlessly overreact -- as they continue to do -- to the presence of Occupy, the more they delegitimize themselves and their owners and sponsors.

In Philadelphia, there seems to be the glimmerings of comprehension that the continued efforts at suppression are ridiculous. Especially around the Fourth of July. Consequently, while there are periodic shows of force and intimidation as well as arrests, there is no clear police strategy involved. Anti-Occupy efforts appear to be ad hoc, uncoordinated, chaotic and frequently futile.

From my perspective, this is an important development that will be largely ignored within the Occupy firmament. Delegitimizing authority is a fundamental part of any uprising. When it is successful, however, those engaged in uprisings (such as the Oakland Commune and Occupy Movement) seem to be unable to accept the victory and to consolidate their gains. I saw Oakland's Occupy and commune almost immediately dissipate its clear victory at delegitimizing OPD on Move In Day (Jan 28), just as students and faculty at UC Berkeley and Davis almost immediately gave back their victory against UC Police and administration oppression last November.

This phenomenon has happened more or less routinely, and I attribute it to the fact that no one engaged in Uprising or Revolution at this point knows what to do should they achieve "victory" over the forces of darkness and oppression. That other world that's possible is not ready to go into operation.

That's fairly normal, but it becomes problematic -- severely so -- when some other enterprising uprising and/or Revolutionary movement recognizes (indeed, enhances) the systemic instabilities of the situation and takes advantage of it for their own purposes.

If there is a fly in the Occupy ointment, that's it in a nutshell. While all sorts of Visioning and experimentation is going on to create Another World of the Possible, there are other forces at work taking advantage of the destabilization and delegitimazation that is occurring.

Will anyone pay attention before it is too late?

Meanwhile, I'll go check Nate's stream for any updates.

Still the Most Dangerous Object In Amercia

I was watching a bit of Nate's coverage of the Occupy National Gathering in Philadelphia yesterday, and sure enough, there were a series of extraordinarily ridiculous confrontations -- violent on the part of the police --over the erection of pup tents in the park being used for assembly by what looked like a couple of thousand Occupy enthusiasts and participants.

This was proof, if any was needed, that the Occupy tent remains the most dangerous object in America. You would think, after all the violent police raids on tents and tent encampments last year and into this one, all the tens of thousands of arrests, all the police violence against dissent, all the violation of basic rights, the authorities would be a little more circumspect in Philadelphia during Independence Week. But no.

Here we go again. The sight of a tent -- even if only symbolic -- enrages the authorities still, and scrums between clearly befuddled police and Occupy  National Gathering people occurred again and again, resulting in a few violent arrests (the universal tactic seems to be to throw the target to the ground, pile several officers on top of the nonresisting suspect -- who quite likely is a random member of the crowd -- wrench his or her arms, while screaming at the suspect to "stop resisting!", and truss him/her up like a roasting chicken).

This is not to say that the Occupy participants were filled with grace, or that their assembly in the park was particularly well organized or that Nate's live stream connection was adequate to the scenes before him.  It was quite a mess, really. But the point -- so far as I could tell -- was that there was no harm being done by the Occupy participants, and the tents were erected as symbols of The Resistance, perhaps provocative to be sure, but hardly threats to the Republic. Maybe threats to the nascent Empire, but that's another topic altogether.

How Authority responds to such things is an indication of how seriously the Powers That Be regard the "threat" before them. The violent response in Philadelphia, against unarmed, rather disorganized, and clearly nonviolent resistance, tents, and protest tells us pretty much all we need to know. Given that there are calls for violent insurrection by armed and demonstrably dangerous rightists (some assembling at the Independence Mall under the TeaBag banner) over the ACA (and the nigra in the White House)  which apparently the police pay no attention to, the confrontations in Philadelphia yesterday take on quite a sinister aspect.

Fascist in a word.

(And can someone teach the "Anticapitalista" chant, please? When I heard the pathetic rendering of it at the Philadelphia gathering, I was initially convinced it was the work of a provocateur. Oh wait. Maybe it was...)

In between all the other things I'm trying to get done while in New Mexico this trip, I'm reading "The Peril of Fascism," by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, International Publishers, 1938. It is horrifyingly evocative, regardless of the fact that it is straightforward AntiFa agitprop from the CPUSA. The insights of the authors are spot on, something the mainstream media at the time -- much of which was openly enamoured of fascism and even Nazi-ism -- simply couldn't accept. Fascism was on the march, it had nearly complete control of Europe, and it was coming to America. Truthfully, it was already here.

Occupy is not strictly speaking ideological, unlike CPUSA or the 'Baggers for that matter. But it is forthrightly and often quite eloquently anti-fascist. It is not necessarily anti-capitalist, despite the mangled chants. But it is very definitely anti-fascist. (At one of the Occupy meetings I attended in the spring, a debate arose over whether "fascists" should be allowed to participate; many, of course, said "NO!" but there was a large contingent who insisted that Occupy's open door accommodated everyone, even "fascists", and it was a simple enough thing to counter their ideas, so why not let them participate if they wanted to? Maybe they'd be convinced to change their evil ways. The matter was tabled for lack of consensus. But I thought it was interesting...)

Magil and Stevens argue that among all its other faults, fascism is forthrightly anti-democratic, and it is that aspect, perhaps most of all, that constituted the "peril" of which they spoke. Fascists act to silence the People's democratic voice. This has nothing to do with CPUSA practice and policy; it has to do with what the fascists do, and why they do it.

Silencing the democratic voice of the People -- or rather, making it irrelevant -- has been the priority of both Government and its witting and unwitting handmaidens in this country at least since the 2000 Judicial Coup. Sometimes it's done with finesse, by pretending that some obnoxious policy is the "real" voice of the People, but often it is done brutally and violently with the intention of frightening and intimidating open dissent against obnoxious policies.

Fascism, though, isn't exactly the correct description for the radical global reorganization, destruction and reconstruction that's been going on since the demise of the Soviet Union and the International Communist Conspiracy. The Neo-Liberal economics, the Neo-Conservative ideology, and the Neo-Colonial foreign policy all resemble classic fascism, especially in the union of Government and Corporate interests and the dismissal of the public interest. But it's something else, something in some ways worse, as if we could wrap our minds around something worse than fascism.

The fight is engaged. The Revolution is under way. But in fact, there are two Revolutions occurring simultaneously, and the Neo-Fascist Revolution is winning easily at this point (much as the fascists were rolling roughshod over Europe prior to WWII and initially after starting the War.)

There's no Communist counterweight this time. There is only the People themselves.

And their tents.

On Marketing vs Reality

The video above features Amalia of (un)Occupy Burque, one of two Occupy efforts in Albuquerque (it's a long story). She's speaking to a group of people on the edge of the campus of the University of New Mexico, but her pointed comments are directed at Mark Rudd and his perspective on "nonviolence." In the background are some of the police present that day (I believe it was a Friday). As far as I know, there were no arrests that day -- though police repeatedly pushed the Occupy effort off the campus. Amalia mentions the fact that during the police push that morning, one of the officers put his hand on her, and it was all she could do to keep from socking him. Such is the depth of feeling of many oppressed peoples toward those who do the oppressing.

Such is the blindness of those who would play a marketing game with regard to Occupy or any other movement. They cannot fathom that depth of feeling on the part of anyone. Everything seems to be a game to them, with only the most tenuous connection to reality. I'm reminded of the pimple-faced youths who sit in darkened facilities in Florida, Virginia and Nevada (among others) watching the video feeds from the various drones deployed over the global battlefield -- the whole earth being the Official Theatre of War these days -- and pushing whatever buttons must be pushed to fire rockets and drop bombs on unsuspecting suspects, blowing them and theirs to smithereens as if they had exactly the same reality as the figures in a video game. Which is to say none at all.

Our systems are broken, our institutions are broken, our world is broken in part because of the attitude of the maketeers that seems to permeate and objectify everything, such that there are no more "people" any more, no more "society," no more "institutions" for that matter. There are only "products" and "consumers."

And even they seem to be losing their basis in actuality. A question naturally arises: What happens then?

Maybe people like Amalia can help explain. When you and yours become objectified to the point non-existence, as many American Indians became and are still, especially in the eyes of the institutional players of our world, you do what you have to to defend yourself and become real again.

Marketing is not reality. Marketing is a game.

Nearly all the complaints about Occupy that I've been running into for about as long as there's been an Occupy to complain about have to do with its marketing faults -- as well as some of its surprising marketing successes. These complaints come from people who tend to see Occupy as a brand with marketing value, not as a genuine People's movement based in the reality of their lives.

The theory seems to be that unless you can mount a successful marketing campaign, your effort, whatever it is, will fail (generally miserably). Everything is reduced to a commodity in other words.

In the video above, Amalia is addressing the group but is speaking specifically to Mark Rudd's point about so-called "violence" with regard to Occupy, and how to him and many others in the "nonviolence" community, even a hint of potential violence (such as wearing bandanas as masks) can be used to discredit the Occupy movement and thus have no "strategic" value. Such hints of potential "violence" are "violence" in his view and cannot "build the movement."

And "building the movement" is code for branding and marketing a product to be sold to the masses.

This is an idea that Gene Sharp and his followers (as well as other "revolutionary" minded folks) are devoted to. They believe in and promote "revolution" as a product to be sold, and they see the campaigns associated with "revolution" as marketing campaigns, in no way different from product/candidate introduction and marketing campaigns in the commercial or political realm, and they measure the success or failure of campaigns on their market penetration and level of popular "support" -- or product purchase.

Amalia and others point out that that is not what Occupy is primarily engaged in.

But, claim the marketeers, Occupy must become primarily a marketing campaign selling a branded product ("revolution" or what have you) or it is a failure by definition.

(About my use of scare quotes in this installment: I have long been skeptical and cynical about marketing and the campaigns that go with it, whether they are commercial or political. I don't see marketing efforts as much more than superficial activities. Thus the scare quotes.)

By those standards many of the movements and revolutions of the past (such as the Civil Rights Movement) were failures because they were never Mass Movements, and at the time of their political success, they were not popular successes in a branding/marketing sense.

The Communist and Fascist revolutions of the 20th century were failures, not because of any intrinsic flaws or external pressures, but because they were not Mass Movements and popular marketing successes. Or maybe people tired of those brands...

They weren't sold properly in other words.

The Marketing Theory of Everything, I would argue, is part of the problem of our times. We have to get past it somehow, and simply repeating the marketing strategies of the past and calling it "revolution" won't do for the revolution this time.

Something else, something truer and closer to the People, is necessary, and that's what many of those involved in the struggle are searching for.

Movement vs Revolution

Occupy is a Movement. Occupy is a Revolution.

Occupy is both. Occupy is neither.

Thus, Occupy is fascinating. It is a species of revolt that no one has ever seen before; what to make of it is a constant topic of discussion and debate, sometimes very heated. Some of the same debates and discussions that were going on before the first appearance of Occupy Wall Street last September are still going on today, no closer to resolution in the vast eternal conversation than they ever were.

If Occupy is both a Movement and a Revolution, and it is neither, then how can one understand it? Perhaps one is obligated not to grasp or understand it but simply to let it be. Or, if one is so inclined, to try to understand it while humbly acknowledging the futility of the effort.

The same forces -- though not necessarily the same interests -- are trying to overcome the internal resistance of an organic, evolutionary, international Occupy in order to shape it to their personal needs, whether they be for authority or for ego support or enrichment (typically all three at the same time.) They see this thing that has "so much potential" and they want to own it or to make it their own, to shape and control it, to drive it in their preferred direction, and to profit from it; or if they cannot, they might well seek to destroy it.

That may have been what happened to Chris Hedges when he saw "his Revolution" -- ie: OWS in New York -- go off in directions he not only couldn't control, he didn't even know of. He saw on the "news" the fearsome images of what was going on in Oakland on January 28, which for him and many others was not the image of Occupy they wanted seen by the multitudes. When "his Revolution," OWS, then endorsed and expressed solidarity with Our Brothers and Sisters in Oakland, he had a meltdown.

Despite all the hullabaloo over violence, Oakland remains the energy center for the Movement and the locus for Revolutionary activism within the Movement. Despite the keening and rending of garments over violence, vandguardism, and insurrection, Occupy Oakland's efforts and activism remain fully within the umbrella of nonviolent resistance. The resistance is more militant in Oakland than in many other places, and because it is militant, rather than passive, it can be frightening, and not just to the more traditionally minded nonviolence believers. It's frightening to the Powers That Be for the simple reason that militant nonviolence can be highly effective against an entrenched, corrupt and decadent established Power.

Such Power is very brittle. It does not require an armed insurrection to overcome or indeed to overthrow it. It takes concerted, persistent, militant resistance. The act of resistance, if done mindfully, can be enough. Militancy almost always does the trick sooner or later, even against the most entrenched Powers.

The questions that have yet to be answered in any comprehensive fashion are whether the Movement aspects of Occupy are sufficient for most purposes, and how strenuously should its Revolutionary aspects be pursued.

A Movement, after all, is content with reform of existing institutions and structures; a Revolution seeks to replace them with something else again.

In Oakland, the task (Movement and Revolution) has gone farther than anywhere else, and from what I can tell from the outside, the question of what to do now is a daunting one that the participants in Occupy Oakland, the Oakland Commune, and the community at large are seriously grappling with.

What do we do now?

Is it enough to reform existing institutions and rejigger the personnel charts? Or is it necessary to sweep them all away and start over?

Note: when the Overclass considers these matters -- and acts on them -- it is widely considered (and certainly it's propagandized) as "appropriate," viz: Greece, but there are many other examples closer to home. When the Lower Orders do it, however, it is considered by many to be an Existential Threat that must be crushed...

If the answer to the Question of "Movement or Revolution" is truly Revolutionary, that the Operating System needs a thorough clean out and replacement, then the further question is How?

The Instructions for performing this task are badly written and poorly worded, subject to endless interpretation, confusion and error in the process of implementation. Thus, given their druthers, most people, let alone most activists, have little or no inclination to proceed down the path of total replacement of broken systems (ie: Revolution).

Reform is quite good enough for most purposes most of the time, and for most people nearly all the time.

But sometimes Revolution is necessary. The Overclass recognized this fact long ago and have been implementing their revolutionary programs with abandon. A People's Revolution has yet to occur in the United States. Whether it can take place is a big question.

A big part of the internal discussion and discovery going on within the Occupy Movement is over the extent of Necessary Change. The Revolutionary current in these discussions and this discovery process is being resisted ever more strenuously by those who not only didn't sign up for a Revolution, they are not even much inclined toward Reform.

Many seem to be content with a middle path between the current status quo and the ever harsher proto-fascism that we're being pushed into. In other words, it would be sufficient for many people -- including quite a large contingent of activists -- to simply slow down the descent we're on and perhaps mitigate some of its worst effects.

The basic premise of this viewpoint is that our Systems work, not perfectly, but well enough for most purposes. Radical change of any kind is dangerous and unnecessary. Marginal reforms are achieved incrementally through standard forms of political organization and action including the development of leaders and a unified message; Revolution is out of the question. Marginal reforms can be accomplished by adherence to proper and customary forms and procedures, and most of all by maintaining strict adherence to the Principles of Nonviolence as adopted by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

There. Is. No. Other. Way.

Submit.

More and more, that premise is being challenged and rejected by a broader and broader cross-section of Americans; what should be adopted in its place is not at all clear, but there is a growing recognition that these formulas of the past don't work any more and can actually be counterproductive in the current circumstance.

By all means, honor Gandhi and King (or not, depending on your preferences), but don't imagine that strict emulation or adherence to their models today will gain the kinds of results they were able to achieve generations ago. The world moves on, and the Overclass tends to learn their lessons as well as, sometimes better than, the rest of us.

And a primary lesson the Overclass learned was how to thwart the Gandhian/King form of resistance. They're very good at it, too. In fact, these days, for them it's a cinch.

Resistance must evolve beyond Gandhi and King, and it has. As resistance has evolved, however, so has the ability of the Overclass to thwart the popular will. We are living in a period in which the Overclass seems to be intent on -- even relishing -- governing contrary to the will of the People in all matters but those least important to the principles of economic extraction and the arbitrary imposition of authority the Rulership deems essential. We did not enter this period yesterday; we've been living it so long now, we've become conditioned to it as "the way things are." Perhaps the way things are supposed to be.

Something like Occupy, with its Jell-o-like patterns of resistance and defiance that can never quite be categorized and confined, despite the best efforts of the Power Structure -- including many segments that see themselves as the "correct" or appropriate avenues for resistance (I'm thinking of the militant Socialists here, but there are many others) -- to tame it, restrict it, and control it is ultimately a serious threat to the Powers That Be. And they know it.

Because Occupy is both a Movement and a Revolution, and yet in some ways it is neither, and it seems to spread the more it is cracked down upon, no one in a position of authority -- at this point anyway -- quite knows what to do about it. There are those who come up with "solutions" all the time, who insist that their way is the right way to deal with Occupy and the problems it presents, but in the end, none of it seems to matter.

Because it is organic and evolutionary and international, but not rigid or defined, with no Central Office or Headquarters, and no actual leadership nor a single generally adopted statement of demands, Occupy is in that Space Between that can't quite be got at by those who would control or abolish it.

Because Occupy is by definition a nonviolent resistance campaign, no amount of obsessing over its alleged "violence," of Occupy (especially that of the Bad Children of Occupy Oakland) will make the claims true.

Occupy simply isn't a violent resistance campaign, nor is it likely to become one, regardless of isolated incidents of vandalism and throwing things. Tightening the definition of "violence" -- the practice currently engaged in by Power -- reaches the point of absurdity very quickly ("Linking arms is not non-violent!" Remember? Berkeley? Davis?) Black Blocs in association with Occupy are so vanishingly rare as to be nonexistent, but I wouldn't be surprised if one day an entire peaceful protest was composed of people wearing black and covering their faces and styling like Ninjas -- but harming no one and nothing -- as yet another tweak to Arbitrary Authority and Decadent Power.

There are so many ways that haven't been tried or explored yet.

As I've said many times before, The Demonstration is really the key to the ultimate success of the Occupy Movement cum Revolution (or whatever it evolves into.) The Demonstration of Alternatives to the corrupt and decadent Powers That Be is fundamental. Preliminary Demonstrations were being developed in the encampments, most of which have been destroyed (violently let it be said) by Authority. Now the Demonstrations are spreading further and further as they must once their central foci are destroyed. As they spread, more and more people will get some idea of what's possible and necessary in the face of What Is.

Is it possible to have a People's Revolution that never takes Power? We see how the Overclass manipulates so-called "democratic" governments from behind the scenes, and we know that it is done through threats and bribery. Thus governments all over the world follow the commands of the Overclass (indeed, only a tiny segment of the Overclass at that) no matter what the People do or have to say about it. The People are irrelevant in the equations of Governments and their Owners and Sponsors. But the Overclass itself does not rule or take direct Power into its own hands. It merely directs the actions of its bought and paid for politicians in defiance of the People's Will.

So what would happen, I wonder, if the People reversed this dynamic? And how could they do it? Without actually becoming the governing Power?

It's too soon to get into that consideration very deeply, but Occupy Time moves very fast.

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!

"Carmen" and The Vanguard and the Insurrection of Mutual Aid...

"Carmen" is, of course, what it is, and for generations it's been one of the most popular operas ever created, if not truly the most popular ever. It was jeered initially in Paris in part because it didn't fit the pattern opera patrons had come to expect.

"Carmen" violated the rigid class divisions so apparent in the arts of the day; it wasn't about elevated people meeting or failing their honor and duty to one another and the gods, it was about ordinary people, and gypsies, tramps and thieves, the lowest of the low in Europe at the time, framed in terms of passion, love, longing and betrayal, utilizing the full range of operatic tools to tell its tale.

At its root, it is a tale of rebellion against the arbitrary imposition of authority -- and what to do about it.

Such tales were subversive at the time, as they still are. This is not a tale that opera patrons, then or now, would want told to the masses, that's for sure. It is one they can barely comprehend themselves.

The story came out of a post-Napoleonic Europe which was riven with rebellion and revolution right through to the extermination of the Paris Commune in 1871. Even that official horror didn't end the revolutionary fervor of Europe's peoples, let alone the rebellions in the colonial outposts of European empires. Try as they might, the Overclasses of the day could not keep the People down. Rebellion was assured; Revolution was likely. Massacre was not infrequent. But even massacre didn't work for long.

The panning of premiere of "Carmen" in Paris 1875, so soon after the liquidation of the Commune, has become the source opera-legend, in fact might make good opera in its own right, or at least a decent musical comedy. If one puts oneself in the shoes of the staid and very class conscious patrons of the Opéra-Comique at the time, however, it is not at all hard to imagine their contempt, and especially the contempt of the critics, at what they saw and heard. It must have felt almost like a slap in their collective bourgeois face.

"Carmen" was in some ways the story of what they feared most: wild and free people, in the person of Carmen, disrupting the calm and civilized society they were working so hard to restore after so much rebellion and revolution had so recently wracked Paris under the red banner of the Commune.

This was unacceptable.

The Commune was too recent a memory; what happened to it, though unmentionable, was too searing.

Conformity, conventionality, rules and order were the social requirements of the day, and not solely in Paris. Early versions of Marxist Communism were being worked out and tried. The Paris Commune was the first large-scale example that really seemed to work, if only briefly and haltingly. The potential of Marxist Communism was demonstrated, however temporarily, during the Commune, and that demonstration lived on in memory and legend long after the Commune was crushed and the Communards -- and a hell of a lot of random Parisians -- exterminated.

In today's world, the expiration of the Soviet Union and the transformation of the People's Republic of China into a capitalist dynamo was supposed to serve as the capstone to the triumph of the West and the end of History and all the rest of the reveries of the exploiters, plunderers and predators.

With the end of the Soviet "threat," and the transformation of China, the People's Struggle was supposed to be over: The People lost. For. Ever.

Yet The New World Order turns out to be far less substantive than even the rudest forms of Feudalism. It is, bluntly, a disaster of epic proportions. Not simply for the ordinary people -- let alone the Indignados and the Rebels and the Ignored Ones in every land -- it is a disaster for its makers. Those who have created this monstrosity of global domination are tied in knots by their own mindlessness and lack of even rudimentary judgement. That they have failed is cripplingly obvious. That they know not what to do now, except to lash out in fury at the phantoms of their misery, is plain.

Not only is another world possible, another world is critically necessary, because this one isn't working for anyone, and not for the Upper Orders, either. They have fucked up majorly.

The current social, economic, and political model is unsustainable by any measure.

The alternatives being developed are frightening to some observers who simply can't imagine there could be good faith attempts to rectify the situation in the midst of so much misery and carnage created by Our Betters.

They denounce the Vanguard, and they fear the Insurrectionists, both of which are essentially phantoms, because, like the bourgeoisie of Paris, they fear the liberation of what we might call the Gypsy spirit in human nature, to find and build a better future for all of us.

They are frightened to death that it just might work, and worse, there may be nothing salvageable from the wreckage of the past.

They are frightened, too, of the potential for violence in the transitional period.

A number of people have already been severely wounded by police fire and hundreds and hundreds have been injured while thousands upon thousands have been arrested and scenes of appalling destruction of encampments by the authorities have filled the airwaves during the initial phases of the Crackdowns on Occupy in this country alone. The numbers of dead and injured in the other uprisings and revolutions and civil wars around the world haven't even been counted, but it is on the order of many tens of thousands.

No matter how much we try, the transition to another world and a better future is not going to be a peaceful one. Whether it can stay mostly nonviolent is a question.

Where the global rebellions have turned into violent armed insurrection and civil war (Syria, Libya, eg.) it is painfully obvious that "international interests" are controlling both the conflict and the likely outcome, that without this sort of "helpful" interference, the People's Dictatorships being rebelled against would likely persevere against their domestic opposition. They are too frail now, and in many ways, too anachronistic, to survive in the face of the kinds of opposition arrayed against them.

But as we've seen in the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, even nonviolent People's Uprisings don't necessarily result in that Better Future the People set out to achieve. There is no miraculous transformation in other words. Removing the Dictatorship only to have it replaced with even greater levels of quasi-pseudo-"democratic" exploitation, blunder, plunder and control by our Neo-Liberal Overlords (viz: Greece as well) is shocking to be sure, but not all that surprising.

The rebellion and occupation in Wisconsin delayed for a time some of the impositions of the Walker Regime, but it didn't stop them. And the resort to the electoral process to recall members of the State Senate failed to shift the majority. While the recall of Walker will be spirited (if he doesn't resign first in disgrace and under criminal indictment) the signs are it will not succeed, not even if the ever-saintly and ever-reluctant Russ Feingold girds his loinal parts and takes up the cudgel.

The System is broken and the prognosis is the patient's condition is terminal.

Something altogether different is called for, and that's why, as frightening to many as it is to contemplate, the red-and-black flag of the anarcho-communists/anarcho-syndicalists has all but become the Flag of Occupy.

In many ways it's ironic, given the inner turmoil and hostility, the many mutual anathemas and purges between the Socialists (as in Communist) and Anarchists in times of yore. But let's be blunt: even the Social Democrats of Europe, the moderated Communists, have grossly failed the People in their mad quest -- so it seems -- to please the Gods of Global Finance. Europe is such a basket case now largely because of the abject failure of the Social Democrats to adhere to the principles of social and economic justice that are their foundations.

Communist FAIL. Socialist FAIL. The vacuum must be filled -- or as we see, the Neo-Liberals/Neo-Cons take over -- and with such cheery malice and destructive intent. "Creative destruction" they call it. North Africa, the Arab Middle East, Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland, much of the wreckage of Eastern Europe, all laboratories for even more destruction and exploitation than has already been accomplished by their economic and military shock troops.

Who's next?

Of course the "Creative Destroyers" will fail in the end, just like every other similar effort in the past.

The opposition turns to Anarchist options in part because they stand outside the common theoretical, political, and philosophical mindset that has brought us to this point -- and already thrown millions over the precipice.

That red-and-black flag and what it stands for is looking more and more appealing...

Somehow I suspect it is no accident that Carmen wears a diagonally divided red-and-black gown in the final scene of the Met's stunning "Carmen" from 2010 (or was it 2009?)

That damn Gypsy Woman is as subversive now as she ever was. And just as then, the People must take care of one another.

Kropotkin anyone?