“…The corporate leviathan, which is global, is freed from the
constraints of a single nation-state or government. Corporations are beyond
regulation or control. Politicians are too anemic, or more often too corrupt,
to stand in the way of the accelerating corporate destruction. This makes our
struggle different from revolutionary struggles in industrial societies in the
past.
“Our revolt will look more like what erupted in the less
industrialized Slavic republics, Russia, Spain and China and uprisings led by a
disenfranchised rural and urban working class and peasantry in the liberation
movements that swept through Africa and Latin America. The dispossessed working
poor, along with unemployed college graduates and students, unemployed
journalists, artists, lawyers and teachers, will form our movement.
“…It is not the poor who make revolutions. It is those who
conclude that they will not be able, as they once expected, to rise
economically and socially. This consciousness is part of the self-knowledge of
service workers and fast food workers. It is grasped by the swelling population
of college graduates caught in a vise of low-paying jobs and obscene amounts of
debt. These two groups, once united, will be our primary engines of revolt…
“Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan examined 100 years of
violent and nonviolent resistance movements in their book ‘Why Civil Resistance
Works.’ They concluded that nonviolent movements succeed twice as often as
violent uprisings. Violent movements work primarily in civil wars or in ending
foreign occupations, they found. Nonviolent movements that succeed appeal to
those within the power structure, especially the police and civil servants, who
are cognizant of the corruption and decadence of the power elite and are
willing to abandon them…
“The most important dilemma facing us is not ideological. It
is logistical. The security and surveillance state has made its highest
priority the breaking of any infrastructure that might spark widespread revolt.
The state knows the tinder is there. It knows that the continued unraveling of
the economy and the effects of climate change make popular unrest inevitable.
It knows that as underemployment and unemployment doom at least a quarter of
the U.S. population, perhaps more, to perpetual poverty, and as unemployment
benefits are scaled back, as schools close, as the middle class withers away,
as pension funds are looted by hedge fund thieves, and as the government
continues to let the fossil fuel industry ravage the planet, the future will
increasingly be one of open conflict. This battle against the corporate state,
right now, is primarily about infrastructure. We need an infrastructure to
build revolt. The corporate state is determined to deny us one…
“Most of the citizenry detests Wall Street and big banks. It
does not want more wars. It needs jobs. It is disgusted with the subservience
of elected officials to corporate power. It wants universal health care. It
worries that if the fossil fuel industry is not stopped, there will be no
future for our children. And the state is using all its power to stymie any
movement that expresses these concerns…
“[R]esistance needs a vibrant cultural component. It was the
spirituals that nourished the souls of African-Americans during the nightmare
of slavery. It was the blues that spoke to the reality of black people during
the era of Jim Crow. It was the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca that sustained
the republicans fighting the fascists in Spain. Music, dance, drama, art, song,
painting were the fire and drive of resistance movements...
“The degradation of education into vocational training for
the corporate state, the ending of state subsidies for the arts and journalism,
the hijacking of these disciplines by corporate sponsors, severs the population
from understanding, self-actualization and transcendence. In aesthetic terms
the corporate state seeks to crush beauty, truth and imagination. This is a war
waged by all totalitarian systems…”
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