Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - Part II

Northern Shoveler wrote:

  A message for working people is a good idea but when the people take to the streets the only chance for success is in non violent protest led by all of the community.

Not the only chance, and as desirable as it might appear, it is questionable as to whether desirable is the right word.  Such a determined movement would have to at least steel itself for initial casualties as the state experiments with different methods of control.  It was enough for the security forces to fire into crowds of people in Winnipeg and Regina.  In essence, the movement would have to understand that certain sacrifices will have to be made up front, if not throughout, until the stench of state violence reaches the nostrils of everyone, including as a necessary pre-condition to an eventual success, the ones actually doing the shooting, to the extent that they throw down their arms and replace the demonstrators who have just been shot.  It is when you run out of people who are willing to fire into crowds of peaceful demonstrators that the days of the state become numbered.  Other questions here would need to be asked at this point, such as who would organize such a strategy, and if they are not to be found among the first victims, we would have to suspect their willingness to send other victims to other situations that might arise once they consolidate power as a new organization or 'organizers.'

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So the question is how to get to mass peaceful protest without a long history of illegal civil disobedience as they have in many countries.

Here it will have to await the spread of deprivation everywhere.  Comparatively speaking, we're far from that at the moment.  Elsewhere of course the conditions for mass organization of any sort couldn't be better.  For us however, at least in the memory of most people; these things have always taken place somewhere else, concerning people we do not know. 

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The MSM does not address issues and without the disruptions there is no consciousness building among the people. 

Most movements recognize early on that airways and other media sources have to be denied to the traditional sources of information.

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The Occupy movements in North America and the protests across Europe are to me the beacon of hope. I have faith in the people of places like Greece, Spain and Italy because fascism is within living memory especially in Greece and Spain.  They have elders to tell them they have seen this shit before and it does not end well for the people. In Canada we are like the proverbial frog in the water. The pot was a nice cool temperature in the 1970's but it has been slowly heating since and now it is hot enough to boil us but we are so lethargic that we can't jump out. Maybe the Occupy movements will be the cold water required to wake up us dozing toads.  If nothing else they have forced the debate.

I would share your optimism were it not for the fact that all of these outbursts, at least in North America, share the common characteristic of obeying local ordinances almost to a tee, and have collectively done very little in response to the ongoing campaign of state violence, beatings, mass arrests etc, ordered up by their democratically elected representatives.  Unless these challenges are met I'm afraid we can't entirely avoid the sensation that comes from witnessing a farce being played out.

I should be clear as well that I don't think the answer is to summon everyone to oil up their machine guns and head out into the streets.  I would just say that in considering the totality of the levels of violence routinely employed by corporatist states, one could at least begin to understand why people might be driven to those particular means of response.  I would also argue that there is more understanding to be acquired here, objections aside, than there is for people who label rock throwers and molotov cocktail slingers as troublemakers and assholes, as if they were the final arbitrators of what constitues proper decorum in a corporatist world that stinks for a lack of it, and where its rule is felt more directly in so many areas.

Gaian wrote:

I'm after coherence, Sj, for a message that working folks can understand. Nothing, above, points to a believable approach to changing the economic structure now in thrall to the powers that be. Pored over, it's a description of our situation, but contains no hint of a solution.

The same could be said of the occupy movements, as you suggest. I think if we were to examine the effectiveness of parliamentary politics in terms of its potential to effect change to the existing economic structures, similar descriptions could apply. It seems to me that with the question you keep repeating in terms of solutions, you are looking for an answer that is quite similar to that which has already been given ample space for on this board alone, and which you have already provided it seems on more than one occasion; one where if its maximum effectiveness were deployed within the existing avenues provided to it, would in the best case scenario amount to preserving in the short term, a matter of a few decades if we were to draw a little further on optimism, what there is to preserve in the wake of neo-liberalism’s passage.

To envision a major shift to the way in which things are structured from within the order, to me appears as a question without an answer that one might apply to the long term. On the other hand, if the scope of the discussion with all of its implications is too broad to contemplate, because it might be just as well not to look too far, or perhaps for some other reason, then we are essentially reduced to the present and to short term preservation at best. We’re talking then about a combination of today’s creature comforts, pensions, day to day sustenance, health care in all of its precariousness these days, what have you.

When European and North American austerity measures and bail out arrangements only serves to temporarily shore up the daily drama played out in the market, we should already know the answer as to where future growth is coming from. In any event, I think it is possible to see these near term examinations as having just as much work cut out for it as any utopian opinion.

What you have there is a rehash of the same trickle down mumbo jumbo from the 80s...and a half assed re-stirring at that of the same crock of leftover shit that people are still being forced fed, with the analytical assistance of what has to be seen today by any nincompoop as coming from a half assed academic discipline without a shred of credibility. Africa is once again being re-engaged with neo-slavery in mind as corporatism's latest ‘on the cheap' frontier.  If that weren't bad enough; without the ability to look into the mirror while fooling ourselves with notions of an eventual rescue from somewhere within the current paradigm, we'd be better off facing the reality of there being absolutely nothing in the domain of politics as we know it that is capable of representing itself as a solution and an alternative, and there likely never will be.  It's a bitter pill to swallow there's no doubt about that.  What you see is all we're ever going to get as a species from it...and then some in the years ahead.

Gaian wrote:

And then there's this kind of academic comprador/prostituting his profession for a tidy pay packet and pension.  Posted yesterday in a political thread. The Globe reader comments following it do not fit your idea of a Globe reader...

If there's any justice...they'd be his present and former students carrying on with their revolt outside of the lecture hall.

I normally don't link to this website because of some of the reader comments which often accompany the articles, but I suppose if CBCNewz.ca articles keep getting linked on the board, and in considering the peanut gallery of comments there...I suppose it should be ok this one time.

Argentina:  Why President Fernandez Wins and Obama Loses

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Between 1998 - 2002, Argentina experienced the worse socio-economic crises in its history....The economy nose-dived from recession to full scale depression, culminating in double digit negative growth in 2001 - 2002. Unemployment reached over 25% and in many working class neighborhoods, over 50%. Tens of thousands of impoverished middle class professional lined up to receive bread and soup only blocks away from the Presidential palace. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, ‘piqueteros' (picketers), blocked major highways and some raided trains shipping cattle and grain overseas. Banks closed depriving millions of depositors of their savings. Millions of middle class protestors organized radical neighborhood councils and linked up with unemployed assemblies. The country was heavily indebted, the people deeply impoverished. The popular mood was moving toward a revolutionary uprising. Incumbent President Fernando De la Rua was overthrown (2001) scores of protestors were killed and wounded, as a popular rebellion threatened to seize the Presidential palace. By the end of 2002, hundreds of bankrupt factories were ‘occupied', taken over and run by workers.....The most popular slogan, of the multitudinous movements occupying the financial districts, factories, public buildings and the streets was "Que se vayan todos" ("All politicians get out'). The entire political class, parties and leaders, Congress and presidents were rejected outright. But while the movements were vast, militant and united in what they rejected, they had no coherent program for taking state power, nor national political leadership to lead them. After two years of turmoil, the populace turned to the ballot box and elected Kirchner with a mandate to produce or perish. Kirchner heard the message, at least the part which demanded growth with equity.

Today of course represents a vastly different picture for Argentina.  What it says about today's circumstances in 2011 and heading into 2012 is that in the absence of a traditional line of coherence that the elite typically ignores every other day at any rate.....just like every well thought out and well sourced academic argument put to them these days about poverty, inequity and the environment....they appear instead to react more quickly when directly confronted by their own fear, which is a far more effective motivational message....at least it would appear to be the case in Argentina.  Fear = coherence.  The Argentineans provided a coherent message to power after all.  And so in North America we witness these polite attempts to find the ways and means of making power understand the predicament....with the boot heels of the corporate police never positioned very far from the people's necks...and we still have people who have never read enough to understand the reality staring them in the face, challenging others about answers and solutions which would otherwise never occur to them.

Yes, the 'in living memory' point is the issue here.  Slightly beyond that however we do have instances of police firing into crowds of demonstrators in Winnipeg and Regina, and where coincidentally and after the fact, the government of the day placed a few popular demands on the agenda for consideration.  The motivation to enact some structural reforms seem to flow from deliberating whether to continue shooting people in the streets and how long such a strategy could be sustained, or trying something else.

Lessons from the Crackdown

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Even respectable Left-media reports on the OWS movement reflexively resort to this crude dichotomy, identifying protestors as either "peaceful," and therefore legitimate, or "violent" and therefore not. Chris Hedges, an outspoken supporter of the movement and a reasonably good journalist, is a case in point. In his column from yesterday, he offers a vigorous denunciation of the American capitalist-imperialist system. But then, advancing his own completely ahistorical understanding of the process through which the security apparatuses of the state begin to internally dissolve and switch sides, he advances the following argument, which relies on a complete non sequitur: "The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence [sic], a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies."

Huh? Aside from failing to provide an accurate description of how this process has actually unfolded historically- in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, etc.- there is absolutely no logical reason why the henchman of the powerful will begin to switch sides only if they see protestors endlessly enduring punishing cop brutality. One could just as well say, and much more plausibly, that cops, soldiers, and sailors will be inspired by revolutionaries scoring there own victories, refusing to sit back passively, and showing the ruthless security apparatuses of the state that they're prepared to fight for victory by any means necessary. But there's no logical connection either way.

It is understandable that Americans have such a strange fixation with non-violence. Every schoolchild grows up hearing about Gandhi and Dr. King and peaceful protest. For many, images of Dr. King speaking at the Washington monument represent the high water mark of American protest politics. These historical images, worthy in and of themselves of course, have infected the consciousness of many American political movements, and hampered the Left, forcing it to abide by an old, completely ahistorical American political myth, that non-violent protest is the sine qua non of protest movements, or a panacea applicable to all political situations. This plays right into the hands of the media-spectacle and the interests of the power-elite. The inherently unstable and imprecise definition of violence makes it possible for almost any behavior to be called violent, and, conversely, for any obviously violent act perpetrated by the state to be declared nonviolent. Again, witness Berkeley: it is apparently sometimes violent to hold hands.

Where does this guy get off referring to those gentrified elements of the left as tools of the power-elite.

There is no collective 'us' on one side, and a relatively smaller collective of 'them' on the other, although it certainly cannot appear that way when inhaling pepper spray, or when tasting a swing of the riot baton from other 99%ers. The fate of the hypothetical 99% and 1% are bound together, and only the 99% has the inherent power to cut the bindings. Neither can perish if the other is to maintain its current consistency. If the one percent were to be strung up on the lamp posts, and as desirable an outcome as that might be for some, the 99% would briefly disappear to become the 100%, until such a time, and in short order I would argue, as a newly reconstituted 1% emerges within the existing structures of governance, or within the potential variants which are required to support and direct governance.

With the way humanity typically engages in the political, new cycles of repression and revolt are inevitable and historical facts. Even as Marxism summoned people to appropriate the means of their subjectivity, namely the mechanisms and structures of work, such occurrences to date have only ever resulted at best in maintaining people as subjects within a system of quotas, surpluses and shortages, supervised by loyal individuals better 'suited' to such tasks; while being pandered to with recognition by supervisors and the political class alike as the best industrial furnace worker, or the most prolific widget maker, even if it means your poster adorning the factory wall...is in itself essentially nothing but another means of control.

The collective 100%, at least in the western context, has done nothing but build, support, maintain, widen and deepen everything that some have otherwise managed to be convinced and rightly so, to despise. The 99% and the 1% remain fused into one of several available paradigms, which for a significant percentage of them includes varying degrees, depending on ones relative position or station, of remaining unconvinced against all evidence of the system's detrimental effects, at least enough to despise it in the same way as the more politically astute say they do. Another alternative involves coming around enough to view Capitalism's unchangeably destructive nature, and seeing no viable way out except through cyclical and ritualized processes which are designed to promptly dispose of the applicant back to square one without ever making substantive progress; the fact of which remains oblivious to those who insist that another turn of the mouse wheel will make all the difference in the world if we would only apply ourselves within the system to the desired outcome. Then there are people who ditch out completely, having recognized the game for what it is, but who are nonetheless mired in the collective muck.

Expecting a pension from government for instance, within any conceivable modern economic construct, and having them provide one on the basis of ensuring the very bare essentials of survival, against the threat of an ‘or else' from the populace [and wasn't that the original purpose of social safety nets?...a stipend from the appointed managers of society...where in return the rest of the population would leave them in peace to continue their supposed work on our behalf?] on today's globalized terrain means supporting the ever widening and deepening processes of Capitalism and its attendant environmental effects, along with easy choices it seems these days between the exigencies of profit and the welfare of populations in general.

I think Chomsky had mentioned something about human nature, a slightly optimistic and perhaps mythical elaboration of which having been recorded long ago, comparatively speaking, in the Foucault debate up thread.  But pensions and social spending can hardly be described as a co-optation by Capital.  It seemed as though these things were the preferred choice of the planners in society, from that of continuing to shoot desperate people in the streets who might have otherwise been persuaded by Soviet style communism.  They were calming devices more than anything else.  Nowadays though control is nearly complete, and alternate repressive measures are available.  You just have to make people go away with a few arrests, bloody noses or lacerated spleens, and in any event there is no alternate theory or viable practice to experiment with, or indeed permitted to be entertained within contemporary corporate politics.