Outside the Asylum
I keep thinking that someday I'll be able to write on a topic that doesn't feel like a venomous sea urchin lodged in my throat. Before the latest explosion of racist tyranny, and the explosive (and in my view, largely justified) reactions by the people, before the horrible spectacle of murder, injury, and abuse being used as fodder for what amounts to a series of pro wrestling angles launched by the elites' various booking committees, I fully intended to start transitioning to the positive. What we could do on our own. What we could do with each other on a local level. Where we needed to create new practices and organizations, and where we could make use of existing efforts. Perhaps, even, ways we could network our local actions across distances.
COVID-19 threw a wrench into my ruminations (chewing on a wrench is hard). It's difficult to come up with ways to do local, populist, truth-based organizing when you can't come within six feet of anyone outside your immediate family. And while I'm the first to appreciate what digital organizing and politics does well, I'm also well aware of its limitations. Two limitations in particular stand out: one, that it's difficult to build an actual IRL community online. Occupy did it best, but Occupy, from the moment 300 people walked out to Zuccotti Park, always had a physical, face-to-face, persistent presence that co-existed with its digital connections. You could say that we don't need any stinkin' IRL communities, we're twenty-first-century people and we can do everything digitally, but I don't think I've ever seen an even slightly successful political movement or campaign that functioned solely online. I'm willing to learn, if people know of one. (I'm not including movements or campaigns whose sole aim is to destroy another movement or campaign, such as David Brock's Million Troll March).
The second limitation is that no one knows you're a dog on the Internet. It's obvious that IRL movements are infiltrated by saboteurs, often from multiple sources: the government, political groups hostile to the movement or indifferent to its success, and, over the last forty years, an increasing number of private, corporate actors. Despite the efficacy of these forms of sabotage, an IRL environment cannot compare to the advantages a digital environment offers a saboteur. For one thing, a single saboteur can manipulate multiple identities on the internet. He can use those identities to argue on both sides of a debate, leaving no "side" independent of his influence. She can thus steer the entire conversation away from certain areas, leaving them unexpressed and unexamined; she can steer it toward other areas of maximum profit to her employers.
She can use this power over discourse to manipulate people's expectations and assumptions about far more than the discussion at hand. With repeated use of this technique, he can teach people to form different habits of conversation, different assumptions about social intercourse. He can even train people to think in certain ways, and not in others. The mutilation of the concept of trigger warnings is a good example. Fifteen years ago, no one would have thought of trigger warnings as anything other than a response to the deeply serious problem of trauma--especially the trauma that comes from war. Now "trigger warnings" are used to announce that one might encounter disagreement that might hurt one's feelings, and both those in favor of such things and those opposed assume that that's what a trigger warning is. The original idea of deep and crippling trauma has been lost altogether.
That's just one example. I could spend an entire essay talking about how social media is destroying the concept of reason-based, evidence-based analysis, and the concomitant damage it has done to independence of mind, mainly by constantly presenting people with binary oppositions and getting them to choose "sides." Reason and independence of mind tend to languish in groupist, sectarian environments, where loyalty, not accuracy, is the paramount virtue. Enforcing each side's acceptable boundaries of thought and speech is also far easier to do on the internet than in person. It's harder to get human beings to "swarm" another human being in person, just because they disagree. It's also clearer, IRL, that the standards of a group are not the standards of all people everywhere. You can walk away from a group that demands that you do not hold certain opinions, that requires a subservient loyalty of you that cannot co-exist with the truth. You can walk away and find others to talk to who don't converse that way. How do you walk away on Twitter or Facebook? You don't, except by leaving Twitter or Facebook, which is tantamount to falling silent.
You could, of course, create your own forum which allows for independence of thought. But once that forum appears to be significant in the eyes of those who hire online saboteurs, it will be subject to attacks; attempts made, more or less frequently, to take control of discourse and create yet another environment where accuracy and honesty are not valued, and protestations of loyalty and groupthink are; above all, where only certain, predictable topics and positions are voiced, and where people can only choose between 1 and 0. No third, fourth, or hundredth options. I believe, obviously, that it is worth while building a forum that values reason, accuracy, and independence of thought. But there's no denying that a campaign or movement that resides solely, or even primarily online is making its home in an environment which, for all its beauties and efficiencies, is ideally suited to sabotage.
So COVID-19 threw a wrench into my notions that we could start brainstorming about what actions we could take, rather than talking about the ones we can't take. The idea that we should focus on ourselves a little more often, rather than merely (and rightfully) presenting an accurate account of the actions of the rich, famous, and powerful, becomes more difficult when having a meeting is a life-threatening proposition.
So, today, I want to merely present a small response to Battle of Blair Mountain's excellent essay, "The Lesson to Be Learned By This Latest Police Murder." https://caucus99percent.com/content/lesson-be-learned-latest-police-murder
Blair's thesis, backed up by historical evidence, is that non-violent action provides the powerful with the opportunity to maintain the status quo, while violent action causes the powerful to change. In short, power concedes nothing without a demand, and the demand had better be made with at least the threat of imminent violence, or power will delay, obstruct, and obfuscate its way to continuing business as usual. I agree (mostly). But I go through a whole process before deciding whether violence or non-violence is called for. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that my choice of tactics is not absolute, nor for all time.
For me, it's a matter of tools, tasks, and environments. In other words, there are whole categories of questions that need to be answered before you decide which tactics you will employ in political struggle. First, there's your environment. What kind of government are you dealing with? What kind of culture? What kind of economy? What kind of people? Who is involved? What resources do you have, and what resources do you lack? Who is hurting you? Who is helping you? Second, there's the task. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to build something, trying to destroy something, or both? What would the world look like if you succeeded? Only after asking all these questions (and probably others I haven't thought of here) should one proceed to the choice of tactics, because tactics--and strategy too--are essentially the place where your goals and your environment intersect. Where the rubber meets the road.
I believe Gandhi may have started the habit so many people have of judging the question of violence vs non-violence in the abstract, as an ideal, or as a measure of one's personal character and morality. For all my admiration of Gandhi as a political activist and movement leader (he was a highly intelligent and effective one), I regret this particular habit of thought. It has so dominated people's thinking that the questions I raised above are usually resolved hastily, even automatically: sometimes so automatically that the person doing the analysis may not even be aware of having asked and answered questions.
For instance, just to give one example: it's quite possible that non-violent protest could have been (and was) a highly effective tactic in the fifties or sixties in this country. It's also possible that non-violent protest and violent protest, co-existing in those decades, created a sort of one-two punch that the system had difficulty dealing with and that those two types of movement, in tandem in effect if not in intention, forced a great many concessions out of an unjust system, maybe more concessions than either would have extracted alone.
However, it's also possible--quite possible--that the historical changes in the United States between the late sixties and, shall we say (rather arbitrarily), 9/11 made it extremely unlikely that any peaceful protest would extract concessions of note from the government. Even that doesn't imply that non-violent protest is currently useless. I would not call Occupy useless, for instance, and it was overwhelmingly non-violent. But it does imply that nonviolence, as an absolute position, is ill-suited to make any impression on 21st-century American government and politics. And if it makes little impression on the public sector authorities, you can guarantee that the private-sector authorities, being, as they are, even less accountable to the little people than the government is, will be unimpressed.
I guess I'm speaking up for consideration, reflection, and analysis. I am not, just so you know, telling black people that they should wait around before acting. A movement can act and consider almost simultaneously. There's almost always times of meeting and organization that exist in counterpoint to the actions themselves. But the more we believe that our actions and our political philosophies exist as absolutes, in a political and material vacuum, the less effective they will be. I believe that wholeheartedly.
Comments
Thank You, You should be very proud of yourself
being able and willing to do all this writing. Kudos and respect. I am so kaputt meanwhile that I can't read anymore.
Some sort of healing must be done first.
Wanted to give you a rose, but it's not showing properly, so I have to give you a kiss.
aahhh, here comes the rose, the kiss was not lazy loading, but now the rose keeps running again.
https://www.euronews.com/
Well, thanks, mimi!
I honestly didn't think much of my own essay this week, as it seemed to me I was making a small and rather obvious point. I'm glad it was of help to you.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
To be honest, I just have read it now, when I woke
up this morning (German time) with heavy headaches and saw your long essay, I just wanted to say something nice and uplifting. These days I think we all need that.
Now I have read all of it. I can just say something simple and short: In real life (IRL) means to me in a life with physical presence and contact, No digits involved in a real life, but molecules .... Sorry. I am forced to have to live through lots of long-distance digital life relations. It's awful and damaging and almost self-destructing.
Therefore:
If you one day might write this essay, I can't wait to read it.
Lol:
Well, now you know why I talk so much here and nowhere else. I have never twittered (may be one time with Thomas Drake, but I had seen and listened to him in person in a small gathering before, and that's the way I got interested in his life story) and never used facebook (I can't stand this billionaire 'Milchbubi'). Imagine I would twitter, I guess I would spend twittering with Trump 24h/d and be dead after one day. No, thanks.
Which ones? Oppression is what oppression does. It needs a catalyst to start rising up against the oppression. The catalyst must have happened in real life with real life persons, not someone, who is rising up digitally. I mean we may be stupid folks, but so far we can distinguish between a digital murder and a real one, right?
Rising up digitally feeds the wrong people, shadow ghosts who play a role online for a purpose that hasn't fed anyone with real food. If the organizational power of the digital world would work, I guess homelessness and poverty would long ago been solved and a thing of the pre-internet time. Strangely enough it has done absolutely nothing of that sort.
Just saying ... Have a good one.
https://www.euronews.com/
Reasonable debate certainly has its limitations,
particularly when the establishment you are trying to bend owns all of the major media outlets and is well versed in manipulating public opinion to suit its purposes. With the internet well on its way to being subsumed by the Borg through censorship, shunning and swarms of ‘Lord of the Flies’ protégés, there are few compliant methods left with which to leverage meaningful change.
When peaceful voices for change are neither heard nor respected, other methods of expressing dissatisfaction and compelling change become necessary, even those methods that are non compliant and disruptive.
The only other path would be one of acquiescence, which is no help at all.
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all."
- John Maynard Keynes
Since I'm not black,
obviously I don't experience the violence, oppression, and indignities this system inflicts constantly on black people. But let's just say I have my own quarrel with the system and its owners, and, in my experience, you're absolutely right about this:
the establishment you are trying to bend owns all of the major media outlets and is well versed in manipulating public opinion to suit its purposes. With the internet well on its way to being subsumed by the Borg through censorship, shunning and swarms of ‘Lord of the Flies’ protégés, there are few compliant methods left with which to leverage meaningful change.
As for me, I'm just trying to maintain a space, any space, that's 1)open to all comers until they prove themselves to be bad actors, 2)based on reason, evidence, and truth, and 3)mostly civil in its discourse. Others, especially JtC, have given a great deal to make that hope a reality.
Wow, I just used the word "hope" without irony. I haven't done that many times in the past ten years. It's hard to reclaim a word from a slogan, even a failed one.
Anyway, I hope nobody interprets this essay as any kind of finger-waving at black people generally, or black protesters specifically. I have no quarrel with them using violence, given that they are coldly and systematically killed more or less continuously, in what I can only describe as state-endorsed murder. And maybe I didn't make this clear--but when I run through that list of questions I mentioned, I come to the same conclusion you did:
When peaceful voices for change are neither heard nor respected, other methods of expressing dissatisfaction and compelling change become necessary, even those methods that are non compliant and disruptive.
If libertarians were honest actors, they would be out in the streets fighting alongside those black people. Where's their contempt and distrust of the state now?
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
We are tribal creatures
For the most part we cooperate within the tribe and compete with other tribes. The Creek nation was a loose confederation of tribes which largely cooperated. (Though they warred with the Cherokee). I've been thinking how that might serve as a model.
I recently revisited SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL by E. F. SCHUMACHER
https://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/student/~pdarshan/SmallIsBeautifulSchumacher.pdf
https://www.supersummary.com/small-is-beautiful/summary/
As a result I rediscovered the origin of my belief in small, local communities. I feel that we must act local in the needed redesign of our failed system. I can imagine communities mainly using bikes and electric buses for transportation, all having local market gardeners and regenerative farmers, living simply in small homes powered by the sun, wind, and earth, creating products in worker owned coops, networking with other communities for trade of locally produced goods...a modern tribal network.
I know its rainbows and unicorns, but it similar to my current lifestyle.
Thanks for the OT, I enjoyed your essay.
We need to walk away from the oligarchs' corporate system and find a path in harmony with the natural systems.
“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I totally agree with you and have been thinking
along similar lines.
I should re-read Small is Beautiful as well. I'm also struggling to remember the title of a book of which I only remember one quote:
"If we're all dreaming of a quiet, green town, where the hell is it? Who's dreaming of industrial waste, constant war...etc."
However, until there's a vaccine we are limited in what we can do. Kate and Nick have plans (somewhat advanced) to put in a large garden and make it a community garden. We also want to get chickens. Our yard is, happily, rather large. We also want solar, but large expenses like that require the help and consent of my mom.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Good morning CSTMS. Wonderful essay. There is much
there to ponder, including the suggestion that pondering things is a preliminary step to action. You bring up violence, as well you may and arguably must, and I'd like to discuss the word or concept just a bit.
Grab a search engine and enter "violence" and among the hits will be some definitions. Here are a couple that came up for me:
(my emphasis added in both cases.)
To me, and I think many of us, there is, or should be a clear distinction between destruction of property and harm to humans or animals. Property is non-sentient, and is often, to some extent, something that has been expropriated or created through exploitation.
There is also a difference, IMO, between destruction of various types of property. Destruction of artwork, and or something built by somebody through their own labors is somewhat of a personal injury of a type, as, to a lesser extent, is something acquired by members of the working classes through long arduous wage slavery. At the other extreme is some extravagent, lavish property acquired with inherited funds by some member of the investor/rentier class or something acquired for the purpose of further exploiting the hoi polloi with funds generated from such exploitation.
That's merely something for consideration. In reality, any attack on property will be met with a counter attack directed at the humans causing such damage which will definitely be intended to be injurious to them personally, so it may all be somewhat of a distinction without a difference.
You correctly point out that:
That is perfectly true and correct, as a matter of principle, but the sad fact is that we, as a populace, don't. There are two pieces of that predicament. We are raised, taught, inculcated and brainwashed to avoid situational thinking and to rely on simplistic rule based thinking. You note the propensity of social media to call forth and propose binary thinking, but it is our whole damn culture. Scratch almost anybody, random post-doc fellows or whomever, and poke around a bit outside of their specialty, and perhaps (and, for some, especially) within it and you'll hit a rule based system. Rather than puzzling things out by following complex algorithms full of variables, we are taught to think by checklists that point to binary decisions. If it is fish you may eat it, if it is pork you may not. Stop on red, go on green. Do not () cheat, lie, steal, dishonor the tribe, chicken out, fight, cry in public, break shit, etc. There's a couple of problems right there. So, nobody wants to select "always get violent" and thus the "civilized" default is "always stay non-violent", because from birth it is, for most people, yes or no, true or false, just answer the question. Sure, you finally get multiple choice, but they usually resolve to a) yes, b) something ludicrous, c) something impossible and irrelevant, d) no, e) all/none of the above.
Thinking past those proclivities, there is also the real world problem of action versus reaction. The Oakland, CA "Stop the Draft Week" was meticulously planned to start with total non-violence & peaceful action to the point that agitators, radicals and activists were to stay home so as to avoid any provocations. The cops rioted anyway, causing a major bloodbath and putting the whole thing on hold for a day. It was then meticulously re-planned, in an open meeting as to both strategy and broad tactical vision and then a closed session for discussing tactical details. It was to be confrontational and involve a form of quasi-armored resistance to police assaults (sort of sun-tzu style flow and regroup behind). That was carried out and pretty successfully too, but, in part because there was something of a hierarchical organization. There were designated coordinators in charge of blocks and squads of protesters who were in contact by runners with central planners who could maintain an overview of what the hell was going on and coordinate our side of it. There were instances of property damage, but with day-long mass demonstrations, that is going to happen, especially as the evening arrives and the coordinated action and those coordinating it disperse. There we had a long term goal and an immediate objective towards that goal and it was pro-active in that we decided time, place, and manner.
People's Park, to the contrary, was spontaneous. A speaker at a rally, ostensibly trying to assert that there should be a goal of taking back the park articulated just that, in just those words, and it was on. Before the day was over, the cops were shooting people. The people still arguably picked the time, place ,and manner, but not in a reasoned fashion. There was no planning and no organization and the police, anticipating that there might be trouble, were more than ready to respond with force which led to counter-force and it escalated. These are the situations that can arise from spontaneous and reactive actions. Even a peaceful, organized march, that does not include contingency plans for dealing with police attacks that might occur in a strictly peaceful manner can turn into "riots" in an instant whether or not the overriding "strategic" plan for the event was peaceful and non-violent. If the environment, the situation and everything else dictates non-violence, there must still be a cadre organised and enlisted to absorb and deflect any police attack in order that the mass of demonstrators can maintain their cool including some whose job it is to ensure that the mass of the demonstrators ton't react with violence themselves. Otherwise, the decision is very much out of the hands of the planners and organizers.
I guess my point is that it's nice to decide contextually what is appropriate for the situation, but you need to get a buy-in from all involved, and you do need some structure and on the ground tactical point men to keep it to the plan or coordinate deviations and/or reactions.
be well and have a good one.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
What a marvelous response.
What you're talking about, from my point of view, basically extends the critical-thinking idea forward into specific planning and action. and of course, any critical thinker worth her salt would acknowledge that plans often don't "survive" reality, if "survival" implies "no change." Planning for contingencies in which the plan fails or is subverted should be part of the plan. That's why a few years ago, I advocated for Occupy (in my case, Occupy D.C.) to plan for losing the encampments. Not to abandon them immediately; simply to make a contingency plan in case of being driven out of them, rather than making "losing the encampments" equivalent to "failure." Nobody wanted to hear it, because they couldn't bear the idea of losing the encampments. It wasn't just me, either; apparently some Spanish indignados told them the same thing ("Don't get too attached to the encampments.") It's not like I didn't understand why they *did* get so attached, but it was clearly both a tactical and strategic fail to allow the enemy to define "breaking up the encampments" as "movement failure," and accept those definitions.
And yeah, I don't know how to do any of this shit without hierarchies; maybe some people in the Yucatan or Barcelona or some kibbutz somewhere could help me with that (though I think the Zapatistas do actually have hierarchies of a sort). I am more than willing to admit it might be my own lack of intelligence, skills, or cultural resources that makes me unable to break away from hierarchies, which, I fully admit, are deeply flawed and often detestable things. But I have to also admit that, under these circumstances, I would conclude that trying to accomplish anything in a non-hierarchical way would be extremely likely to fail even before it started--at least in the United States.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
Two cents
Nothing wrong with temporary hierarchies, imo the main trouble with them is entrenched power, so they can be used, they just need to be sort-of ephemeral. Consider thinking of them more like canvas tents you can put up and take down and move around than like concrete buildings which offer no capacity for mobility and rearrangement.
Or, a little more into the abstract, consider thinking of the power you're trying to move kinda like chi and make sure you craft a structure that keeps it moving and flowing where you want it to go, rather than pooling up.
PS. Enjoyed this exchange of ideas between you and enhydra lutris, thanks & best wishes to you both.
This, in particular, is quite true:
If the environment, the situation and everything else dictates non-violence, there must still be a cadre organised and enlisted to absorb and deflect any police attack in order that the mass of demonstrators can maintain their cool including some whose job it is to ensure that the mass of the demonstrators ton't react with violence themselves. Otherwise, the decision is very much out of the hands of the planners and organizers.
I'm guessing that when Gandhi led his (mostly highly successful) non-violent protests, he must surely have planned these sorts of tactics, as opposed to simply being a bright beam of unalloyed morality in a shitty world and expecting that that would accomplish all necessary goals.
And by the way, I certainly have my own instances of rule-based thinking. For one thing, I think having NO rule-based thinking would mean that every small decision would take much too long. For another, of course, like most people, I think that some rules are good. So do you, probably. "Don't rape anybody" and "don't shoot children" and even, I think I would say, "don't torture," are probably good rules to have. Even some rules like that might be questioned, in corner cases; I guess I'm thinking of the Warsaw ghetto; I'm thinking of the scene in Schindler's List when the doctors at the ghetto clinic gave lethal injections to the bedridden patients, because they knew that in a few moments the Nazis would come through the door and blow them all away. (So murdering your patients could actually be acceptable under certain circumstances). I know plenty of people will argue about torture, because everybody can always come up with a corner case about that, but let's just say I'd be unlikely to be convinced by one of those "What if you knew that your city would be decimated by a chemical explosion unless you tortured the nefarious conspirator and extracted the information out of him before 0900 hours?" arguments.
I guess I'm saying I don't expect to entirely do without rule-based thinking, nor do I really think eradicating it would be a good idea; I just think that we should shrink its scope, and be ready to reconsider our rules if necessary. I don't like the ever-expanding circle of knee-jerkiness that seems to be infecting American thought, if not human thought generally.
We could probably talk about this all day!
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
For sure. One might even say that rules are the backdrop
against which thinking is performed. The looking for exceptions part of life requires that there be rules to find exceptions to.
and beyond, I suspect.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
I’m not sure what category boycotting falls under
in the violence/non-violence dichotomy, but that has also been a very effective tool to get people to listen.
There is always Music amongst the trees in the Garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it. ~ Minnie Aumonier
Indeed. I once thought of creating a website of boycotts
and who was boycotting, but I soon realized that it would be a truly massive undertaking even if I were really good at web design and maintenance and had a bucketload of really good tools for the task. And then there would be all the pushback to deal with as well.
be well and have a good one.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
In my book, it's non-violent.
Corporate mergers, monopolies, and cartels make it difficult, so I had more or less given up on it, but perhaps I should give it another look.
"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha
"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver
"Regime change and professional agitators"
[video:https://youtu.be/I36kU_Mjivk]
I am listening to it, may be you find that worth watching?
https://www.euronews.com/