Our Invisible Revolution
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/our_invisible_revolution_20131028/
Posted on Oct 28, 2013
By Chris Hedges
Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism
continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in
the world? the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay The Idea
Is the Thing. If you did, then your answer must have been that it is
because the people support those institutions, and that they support them
because they believe in them.
Berkman was right. As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that
justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve
our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered,
the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The
battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the
corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are
getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They
recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil
liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and
surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in
poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown,
will join them. These truths are no longer hidden.
It appears that political ferment is dormant in the United States. This is
incorrect. The ideas that sustain the corporate state are swiftly losing
their efficacy across the political spectrum. The ideas that are rising to
take their place, however, are inchoate. The right has retreated into
Christian fascism and a celebration of the gun culture. The left, knocked
off balance by decades of fierce state repression in the name of
anti-communism, is struggling to rebuild and define itself. Popular
revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a
question of which ideas will capture the publics imagination.
Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances,
be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But
once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an
insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or
movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption
will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now
that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to
address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the
abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic
unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is
crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread
despair, means that blowback is inevitable.
Because revolution is evolution at its boiling point you cannot make a
real revolution any more than you can hasten the boiling of a tea kettle,
Berkman wrote. It is the fire underneath that makes it boil: how quickly
it will come to the boiling point will depend on how strong the fire is.
Revolutions, when they erupt, appear to the elites and the establishment
to be sudden and unexpected. This is because the real work of
revolutionary ferment and consciousness is unseen by the mainstream
society, noticed only after it has largely been completed. Throughout
history, those who have sought radical change have always had to first
discredit the ideas used to prop up ruling elites and construct
alternative ideas for society, ideas often embodied in a utopian
revolutionary myth. The articulation of a viable socialism as an
alternative to corporate tyrannyas attempted by the book Imagine: Living
in a Socialist USA and the website Popular Resistanceis, for me,
paramount. Once ideas shift for a large portion of a population, once the
vision of a new society grips the popular imagination, the old regime is
finished.
An uprising that is devoid of ideas and vision is never a threat to ruling
elites. Social upheaval without clear definition and direction, without
ideas behind it, descends into nihilism, random violence and chaos. It
consumes itself. This, at its core, is why I disagree with some elements
of the Black Bloc anarchists. I believe in strategy. And so did many
anarchists, including Berkman, Emma Goldman, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail
Bakunin.
By the time ruling elites are openly defied, there has already been a
nearly total loss of faith in the ideasin our case free market capitalism
and globalizationthat sustain the structures of the ruling elites. And
once enough people get it, a process that can take years, the slow,
quiet, and peaceful social evolution becomes quick, militant, and
violent, as Berkman wrote. Evolution becomes revolution.
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of
revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a
functioning
