'Canadians it's time to wake up' about the postal workers dispute, says labour specialist

In addition to the other underlying objectives of taking aim at the postal service is to round out corporate control over all personal communications. They already own the telecommunications sector, broadcast/online media and internet access. By adding to those powers an ability to control physical communication among the masses, the corporate sector will take charge of their ability to organize against its interests.

Beyond that comes the elimination of the rights of people to gather in large numbers, attempts at which cannot help but be made in plain sight and, thus, within easy reach of the various power-enforcement agencies. We're already treated to such scenes almost daily everywhere in so-called "free" societies. So there is far more than just a slavish devotion to a market-dominated societal model at work, here.

People need to appreciate that the complex economic rationales that will be offered in abundance by the coprorations' talking-head employees are simply intended to distract, befuddle and beguile us, playing on peoples' reflex tendencies to take those in authority at their word and to cling to the safety of the status quo. Those voices will seize control of the debate, pretending to spell out all the available options but - to a person - carefully excluding any reference whatsoever to mass, organized and effective counteractions, except, perhaps, to denounce them. In so doing, they will be providing intellectual cover for what is, in reality, a stark and well-planned assault on each and every one of us, an assault designed to hobble us even before we realize what's happening and can possibly mount an effective resistance.

The one thing they have to fear about us are our numbers; and so they are organizing their capital and the self-interested power they derive therefrom to prevent us from organiziing our numbers to promote our own self-interests. That capital-led initiative is well underway - has been for many, many years. It has been advancing relentlessly on the sly by taking small, incremental steps, each building on the others before.  Its intention is persistently to establish a "new normal", a constantly narrowing frame of reference within which society still fancies itself as having freedom of choice without realizing that the only "choices" it's being presented are those that, either way, favour those already in control. Anything else will simply be dismissed as "not viable" or "un-economic" or "inefficient" or "unrealistic" or (insert other, similar term of dismissal here).

Tremendous time, talk and ink will be devoted to examining what are actually immaterial differences among the sanctioned choices after which - and upon a decision having been arrived at in some purportedly democratic fashion - the masses will be appeased by believing they have opted into their own fate and must, therefore, accept it. Self-herding sheep: could there be an easier type to own?

Incrementalism is deliberately designed to pass undetected from step to step. A move like this one against the postal workers, for example, can be depicted as something unique, self-contained and justifiable because it comes wrapped within a fearful and fabricated current context of dire economic news and warnings. By that depiction, it becomes a product of its unique time and place (for which only uncontrollable forces are purportedly to blame) and not another deliberate step forward for an agenda that, if one were to cast his view back across the past two decades or more, would become clearly evident. And, by keeping the present ever more immediate, dangerous and distracting, incrementalism denies the intellect of the perspective required to detect all the pieces and put them together. Such thinking as does occur is reduced, instead, to a "fight or flight" sub-rational process.

Just because it is nearly imperceptible in immediate terms doesn't mean incrementalism is not at work in the case of the postal workers and in the situations of countless other workers. And just because it will be downplayed as too incidental to warrant a concerted and strategic response (rest assured that stiff resistance will be portrayed as an unjustified overreaction), doesn't mean the time is not upon us to draw a line in the sand and stand against an overarching scheme to subjugate the many all the more intensely to advancing the interests and welfare of the few, scary and inconvenient though that prospect might be.

If not here and now, people, then where and when? What happens next is up to you.