The dictator thing, that’s a little tricky, ’cause he did cross the line. But put into context of the destabilization funded by USA, the interests of the corporate class and the power they demonstrated by coup attempt . . . I think we have to give the guy some credit for being realistic about how drastic a remedy it takes to buy the time to empower his population with health, education, economic footing. I have no worries that he will morph into Stalin, or Kim Jong Il. The Venezuelans seem to feel that they are in good hands for now, I think so too, and it is an experiment worth seeing through. I am interested to see how it pans out in 10-15 years . . . that is if I am allowed in USA (if there is a USA) to have a view outside the corporate media. Ugh.

Peace,
Melissa

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Wendy, I am interested to hear specifics as to why you abhor Sheehan. I think she has been an important figure, gutsy and persistent, for questioning the lies and people behind the Iraq war, as well as “impeachment’s off the table” Pelosi. I might agree that she has fashioned a career out of anti-war activism, but I don’t think she could command the amount of exposure she has gained without abandoning other time-intensive earning efforts.

Does this make her a sell-out? Or, is her focus too narrow? Please explain. I don’t invest time here to attack, I am interested in perspectives, yours, mine and theirs.

Peace, Resistance, Hope,
Melissa

http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/11/clueless-at-campaign-headquarters/

How many people does it take to make a Party? Do we really need political parties? There were 8 candidates for president on my ballot, plus a write-in option. The problem is that too many uninformed voters cast a ballot. Those who have not studied the issues should be encouraged to stay home on election day. How many times have you heard the statement that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote. Voting has consequences.

Compared with the satanic and pathological killers of Obama, Palin, Bush and Mccain. Cindy Sheehan and Chavez are saints.

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It has nothing to do with “the left” that (SUPRISE!) much of the anti-war movement was actually an anti-republican one who took the message seriously that conditions were the fault of Nader supporters and the independent left that managed to live during the Clinton years, rise up against the WTO, etc.

Sorry lichen but that is not entirely accurate. There was a HUGE riff on the left especially between International Answer and UFPJ. That riff was on the Israel/Palestine question and UFPJ’s refusal to make that a key issue. Answer did and UFPJ would rather oversee the weakening and diffusion of the anti-war movement than have the focus of the Iraq War towards Israel/Palestine (and Zionism) from the “war for oil” mantra.

I posted in one of my former messages that the Middle-Classes, including the lower part of the middle classes (Lower middle classes) always side with the mainstream political parties, because from the middle-class’s point of view they think that any revolutionary political-change would be a threat to their relatively stable lifestyles. The US, Europe, Asia, and even many nations in Latin America still have a large middle-class. A big proof of this is that Argentina has a large middle class and elected right-wing candidates in their congress election just recently.

So my theory is that we will just have to wait for people to pass from the middle class to the lower-class for them to wake up. I mean we just got to wait for a rise in poverty levels in this world to see a real hunger for change in the majority of people. In other words, as long as this world has a large middle class we won’t see a change.

So think psychologically and sociologically and economically in order to be aware of why many people still vote for capitalist imperialist fascist political parties.

http://thomaspainescorner.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/the-machinery-of-hopelessness/

By David Graeber

5/17/09

We have reached an impasse. Capitalism as we know it is coming apart at the seams. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. Organized resistance is scattered and incoherent. The global justice movement is a shadow of its former self. For the simple reason that it’s impossible to maintain perpetual growth on a finite planet, it’s possible that in a generation or so capitalism will no longer exist. Faced with this prospect, people’s knee-jerk reaction is often fear. They cling to capitalism because they can’t imagine a better alternative.

How did this happen? Is it normal for human beings to be unable to imagine a better world?

Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced. To understand this situation, we have to realize that the last 30 years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus that creates and maintains hopelessness. At the root of this machine is global leaders’ obsession with ensuring that social movements do not appear to grow or flourish, that those who challenge existing power arrangements are never perceived to win. Maintaining this illusion requires armies, prisons, police and private security firms to create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity and despair. All these guns, surveillance cameras and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and produce nothing – they’re economic deadweights that are dragging the entire capitalist system down.

This hopelessness-generating apparatus is responsible for our recent financial freefalls and endless strings of bursting economic bubbles. It exists to shred and pulverize the human imagination, to destroy our ability to envision an alternative future. As a result, the only thing left to imagine is money, and debt spirals out of control. What is debt? It’s imaginary money whose value can only be realized in the future. Finance capital is, in turn, the buying and selling of these imaginary future profits. Once one assumes that capitalism will be around for all eternity, the only kind of economic democracy left to imagine is one in which everyone is equally free to invest in the market. Freedom has become the right to share in the proceeds of one’s own permanent enslavement.

Since the economic bubble was built on the future, its collapse made it seem like there was nothing left.

This effect, however, is clearly temporary. If the story of the global justice movement tells us anything, it is that the moment there appears to be any sort of opening the imagination springs forth. This is what effectively happened in the late ’90s when it looked for a moment like we might be moving toward a world at peace. The same thing has happened for the last 50 years in the US whenever it seems like peace might break out: a radical social movement dedicated to principles of direct action and participatory democracy emerges. In the late ’50s it was the civil rights movement. In the late ’70s it was the anti-nuclear movement. More recently it happened on a planetary scale and challenged capitalism head-on. But when we were organizing the protests in Seattle in 1999 or at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings in DC in 2000, none of us dreamed that within a mere three or four years the World Trade Organization (WTO) process would collapse, “free trade” ideologies would be almost entirely discredited and new trade pacts like the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) would be defeated. The World Bank was hobbled and the power of the IMF over most of the world’s population was effectively destroyed.

But of course there’s another reason for all this. Nothing terrifies leaders, especially American leaders, as much as grassroots democracy. Whenever a genuinely democratic movement begins to emerge, particularly one based on principles of civil disobedience and direct action, the reaction is the same: the government makes immediate concessions (fine, you can have voting rights) and then starts revving up military tensions abroad. The movement is then forced to transform itself into an anti-war movement, which is often far less democratically organized. The civil rights movement was followed by Vietnam, the anti-nuclear movement by proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the global justice movement by the War on Terror. We can now see the latter “war” for what it was: a declining power’s doomed effort to make its peculiar combination of bureaucratic war machines and speculative financial capitalism into a permanent global condition.

We are clearly on the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. The problem is that our perceptions have been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda and we are no longer able to see them. Consider the term “communism.” Rarely has a term come to be so utterly reviled. The standard line, which we accept more or less unthinkingly, is that communism means state control of the economy. History has shown us that this impossible utopian dream simply “doesn’t work.” Thus capitalism, however unpleasant, is the only remaining option.

In fact, communism really just means any situation where people act according to this principle: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. This is, in fact, the way pretty much everyone acts if they are working together. If, for example, two people are fixing a pipe and one says “hand me the wrench,” the other doesn’t say “and what do I get for it?” This is true even if they happen to be employed by Bechtel or Citigroup. They apply the principles of communism because they’re the only ones that really work. This is also the reason entire cities and countries revert to some form of rough-and-ready communism in the wake of natural disasters or economic collapse – markets and hierarchical chains of command become luxuries they can’t afford. The more creativity is required and the more people have to improvise at a given task, the more egalitarian the resulting form of communism is likely to be. That’s why even Republican computer engineers trying to develop new software ideas tend to form small democratic collectives. It’s only when work becomes standardized and boring (think production lines) that becomes possible to impose more authoritarian, even fascistic forms of communism. But the fact is that even private companies are internally organized according to communist principles.

Communism is already here. The question is how to further democratize it. Capitalism, in turn, is just one possible way of managing communism. It has become increasingly clear that it’s a rather disastrous one. Clearly we need to be thinking about a better alternative, preferably one that does not systematically set us all at each others’ throats.

All this makes it much easier to understand why capitalists are willing to pour such extraordinary resources into the machinery of hopelessness. Capitalism is not just a poor system for managing communism, it also periodically falls apart. Each time it does, those who profit from it have to convince everyone that there is really no choice but to dutifully paste it all back together again.

Those wishing to subvert the system have learned from bitter experience that we cannot place our faith in states. Instead, the last decade has seen the development of thousands of forms of mutual aid associations. They range from tiny cooperatives to vast anti-capitalist experiments, from occupied factories in Paraguay and Argentina to self-organized tea plantations and fisheries in India, from autonomous institutes in Korea to insurgent communities in Chiapas and Bolivia. These associations of landless peasants, urban squatters and neighborhood alliances spring up pretty much anywhere where state power and global capital seem to be temporarily looking the other way. They might have almost no ideological unity, many are not even aware of the others’ existence, but they are all marked by a common desire to break with the logic of capital. “Economies of solidarity” exist on every continent, in at least 80 different countries. We are at the point where we can begin to conceive of these cooperatives knitting together on a global level and creating a genuine insurgent civilization.

Visible alternatives shatter the sense of inevitability that the system must be patched together in its pre-collapse form – this is why it became such an imperative on behalf of global governance to stamp them out (or at least ensure that no one knows about them). Becoming aware of alternatives allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. We realize we’re already communists when working on common projects, already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, already revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.

One might object: a revolution cannot confine itself to this. That’s true. In this respect, the great strategic debates are really just beginning. I’ll offer one suggestion though. For at least 5,000 years, before capitalism even existed, popular movements have tended to center on struggles over debt. There is a reason for this. Debt is the most efficient means ever created to make relations fundamentally based on violence and inequality seem morally upright. When this trick no longer works everything explodes, as it is now. Debt has revealed itself as the greatest weakness of the system, the point where it spirals out of control. But debt also allows endless opportunities for organizing. Some speak of a debtors’ strike or debtors’ cartel. Perhaps so, but at the very least we can start with a pledge against evictions. Neighborhood by neighborhood we can pledge to support each other if we are driven from our homes. This power does not solely challenge regimes of debt, it challenges the moral foundation of capitalism. This power creates a new regime. After all, a debt is only a promise and the world abounds in broken promises. Think of the promise made to us by the state: if we abandon any right to collectively manage our own affairs we will be provided with basic life security. Think of the promise made by capitalism: we can live like kings if we are willing to buy stock in our own collective subordination. All of this has come crashing down. What remains is what we are able to promise one another directly, without the mediation of economic and political bureaucracies. The revolution begins by asking what sorts of promises do free men and women make one another and how, by making them, do we begin to make another world?

David Graeber is the author of Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire and Direct Action: An Ethnography

But ultimately, it really doesn’t matter; until we change the way elections are held, they will never have a chance as long as private wealth, the mainstream media, and the democrat/republican establishments control and decide who gets airtime and who wins. There is about a one in a million chance that anyone like Nader or Mckinney could break through and win with these rules, these conditions, this system in place. So it isn’t their fault that it won’t happen; and it really has nothing to do with this or that action that Nader or Mckinney took.

It has nothing to do with “the left” that (SUPRISE!) much of the anti-war movement was actually an anti-republican one who took the message seriously that conditions were the fault of Nader supporters and the independent left that managed to live during the Clinton years, rise up against the WTO, etc.

I have wondered about this for quite some time. Does anyone recall hearing an explanation as to why Nader didn’t promote McKinney’s efforts, or vice versa?

My feeling/observation was that McKinney and Clemente were really working to rouse the working poor, and to address the criminal “Just Us” system that loves to lock up people of color for profit. Their campaign was far more informal, anti-authoritarian and hip-hop, where Nader/Gonzalez was still suit and tie presentation.

They’d make a great ticket together.

Let’s recall that in 2004 it was at the apex of the anti-war movement against the Iraq War and it was an opportunity for the “Left” to build REAL opposition. Recall that Chomsky himself (who supposedly calls for organized) failed to give his support to an organization that could have REALLY challenged the war-party Democrats.

The question is WHY? The answer — Zionism. Many activist on began to raise the question of the Israel/Palestine question behind the War and that caused a real DIVISION on the Left. In order to prevent that question from really taking hold it was necessary to cripple the anti-war movement that that is what happened and WHY the so-called “Left” celebrities supported the Anybody But Bush (ABB) safe state strategy rather than build a REAL electoral challenge to the Democrats.

The failure and deliberate splintering of the Left in 2004 weakened the Left to such a degree that they could not mount any real opposition to Obama. Obama also help to keep people of color from looking for alternative outside of the Democrats. The Greens and Nader mounting separate efforts also didn’t help and only divided the Left further. Without any real alternative and strength, it became “pragmatic” to vote for the Democrats in 2008.

When it came time to put up you’ll see that the real threat is not the Democrats but the phonies among the ranks of the Left whose job it is to keep it discombobulated.

“Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis, that the proletariat is to be swindled. ” Karl Marx

“Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” John Quincy Adams

“I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and mis-representatives of the masses — you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms, that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks.”
Eugene Debs

Thank you for bringing my mistake to light. It is that (my) kind of carelessness that is contributing to the splinters probably. Reminders are good!

Anyway, since you are taking the time to consider the postings, thank you for the article. I agree that a larger umbrella has to draw all of us together to effect real shaping of policy within and without USA. If that is not going to happen . . . ? ? ?

Just to step back from my pessimism, the more people with whom I interact face to face, the more people I find who are seeing the futility and dishonesty in the current Dem/Rep paradigm. They are ready to recreate a government in this country that is NOT AGAINST the people, but works FOR the people. It is much harder to get them to drop single issues, but they are more ready to talk about a larger view.

Peace, Resistance, Hope,
Melissa

We need real third party candidates, but as long as we get third party candidates like $heehan, we’re stuck with the Dems and the GOP.

Peace on Earth.
Wendy