http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/our_invisible_revolution_20131028
Our Invisible Revolution
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."
<http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bright/berkman/iish/idea/ideathing.html>
"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
public's 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 tyranny-as attempted by the book
"Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA" and the website Popular
Resistance-is, 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 ideas-in our case free market
capitalism and globalization-that 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 democracy. I prefer a system in
which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently
dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions
are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not
live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. Ruling elites,
once the ideas that justify their existence are dead, resort to
force. It is their final clutch at power. If a nonviolent popular
movement is able to ideologically disarm the bureaucrats, civil
servants and police-to get them, in essence, to defect-nonviolent
revolution is possible. But if the state can organize effective and
prolonged violence against dissent, it spawns reactive revolutionary
violence, or what the state calls terrorism. Violent revolutions
usually give rise to revolutionaries as ruthless as their
adversaries. "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the
process he does not become a monster," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote.
"And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back
into you."
Violent revolutions are always tragic. I, and many other activists,
seek to keep our uprising nonviolent. We seek to spare the country
the savagery of domestic violence by both the state and its
opponents. There is no guarantee that we will succeed, especially
with the corporate state controlling a vast internal security
apparatus and militarized police forces. But we must try.
Corporations, freed from all laws, government regulations and
internal constraints, are stealing as much as they can, as fast as
they can, on the way down. The managers of corporations no longer
care about the effects of their pillage. Many expect the systems they
are looting to fall apart. They are blinded by personal greed and
hubris. They believe their obscene wealth can buy them security and
protection. They should have spent a little less time studying
management in business school and a little more time studying human
nature and human history. They are digging their own graves.
Our shift to corporate totalitarianism, like the shift to all forms
of totalitarianism, is incremental. Totalitarian systems ebb and
flow, sometimes taking one step back before taking two steps forward,
as they erode democratic liberalism. This process is now complete.
The "consent of the governed" is a cruel joke. Barack Obama cannot
defy corporate power any more than George W. Bush or Bill Clinton
could. Unlike his two immediate predecessors, Bush, who is
intellectually and probably emotionally impaired, did not understand
the totalitarian process abetted by the presidency. Because Clinton
and Obama, and their Democratic Party, understand the destructive
roles they played and are playing, they must be seen as far more
cynical and far more complicit in the ruination of the country.
Democratic politicians speak in the familiar "I-feel-your-pain"
language of the liberal class while allowing corporations to strip us
of personal wealth and power. They are effective masks for corporate
power.
The corporate state seeks to maintain the fiction of our personal
agency in the political and economic process. As long as we believe
we are participants, a lie sustained through massive propaganda
campaigns, endless and absurd election cycles and the pageantry of
empty political theater, our corporate oligarchs rest easy in their
private jets, boardrooms, penthouses and mansions. As the bankruptcy
of corporate capitalism and globalization is exposed, the ruling
elite are increasingly nervous. They know that if the ideas that
justify their power die, they are finished. This is why voices of
dissent-as well as spontaneous uprisings such as the Occupy
movement-are ruthlessly crushed by the corporate state.
"... [M]any ideas, once held to be true, have come to be regarded as
wrong and evil," Berkman wrote in his essay. "Thus the ideas of the
divine right of kings, of slavery and serfdom. There was a time when
the whole world believed those institutions to be right, just, and
unchangeable. In the measure that those superstitions and false
beliefs were fought by advanced thinkers, they became discredited and
lost their hold upon the people, and finally the institutions that
incorporated those ideas were abolished. Highbrows will tell you that
they had 'outlived' their 'usefulness' and therefore they 'died.' But
how did they 'outlive' their 'usefulness'? To whom were they useful,
and how did they 'die'? We know already that they were useful only to
the master class, and they were done away with by popular uprisings
and revolutions."
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