Call for Revolution speech

[Zen Ben]

This speech at the MoveOn rally in Sonoma on Monday by SRJC professor Marco Giordano made a hundred people stop time together. It was a kairos moment. This speech is a direct challenge to the the core assumptions of what passes for politics on the American Left. I'd like to get the WACCO community response to this challenge.
Ben Boyce

Call for Revolution
One must wonder whether there has ever been wonder like ours in any other era at the course of its events, at the course its history was taking. Today one event after another points to a conflict which unites the local with the global in a struggle which has never seemed so close to final nor so total in its stakes. We come here this time to protest not the burden of our taxes but the outrageous distribution of that burden, not that we should pay them, but that we should spend them to support theft, torture, and perpetual war, not that we should support our government but that it should be our government which we support,not that our nation, from the blessings of our labor, should be but what it means to be our nation.Everywhere, and on every occasion like this, the question is the same.

Under the ground of every demonstration being held today for this cause across what used to be the country we would have willed to our children the question is the same. From Cairo to Canton, Ohio,from Madison to Morocco, from the streets of London and Washington DC to the rooftops of Tehran and Tripoli, from town squares named Freedom, to those named Sonoma the question is the same. Whether it be taxes or the wars or the assault upon the rest of us by one small class,whether it be the foreclosed future of a generation or the foreclosed future of a planet the question remains the same, "What does it mean to be a world at this hour in the history of the Human Race?"

We sense that the hour is late but know not how late. It seems to be striking on the face of one of two clocks we cannot see--one, the clock of economic, social, political and environmental catastrophe or the other the clock of our necessary victories. We cannot see the face of that clock because it is upon our faces that the clock is striking. The only hands it has left are our hands, the only hours our lives. It is not saying much about the world we would prefer to chant that it is possible and to take comfort in that when it is perfectly clear that another world is necessary and that we may have to sacrifice our comfort to achieve it. It lives or dies in our daily judgments,depends upon what we turn the face of that clock towards and what we turn it from.

When we turn it to the other side of the struggle we find that the corporatocracy are perfectly willing to sacrifice our comfort to achieve their other possible world. They are doing it everyday. And they not only have a perfectly good idea of how they would like that world to look, they have the whole planet on an express train to there and they seem not to care that there is a train wreck. Because there is not a world anybody can have, it is a world where the haves can have as many have-nots as possible. Today the concentration of wealth up at the top is twice what it was in the depths of the Great Depression. That economic power not only buys political power but thanks to a Supreme Court's declaration of corporate personhood, that economic power can now buy out a whole form of government. Every local election in the country is now subject to the overwhelming spending might of the corporate feudality under whose massive lobbying effort the parties become mannequins and elections a charade. We do not so much have a democracy as a little bit of noise imitating the noise of one--amplified endlessly.

And while the fair weather liberal concentrates on the process,the corporate feudality will concentrate on results. They will have an answer to our question,"What does it mean to be a world at this hour in the history of the Human Race?"

It will look like a gated community with an open air prison attached whose oppressed inhabitants are marketed the air they breathe and charged for the water that falls out the sky onto their roofs into their troughs where none of them will have the slightest power against their exploitation by the Marketplace: no unions, no affordable higher education or housing, no health care system with any obligation to anything but profit, no MediCare, no Social Security, no Living Wage. It will entail the cancellation of a social contract which was the single greatest contributor, after the Revolution and the Civil War to the identity and greatness of this country, the contract of Roosevelt's New Deal and it will entail the destruction of an entire class.

For surely what we are witnessing is as our Declaration of Independence observes a long chain of"abuses and usurpations evincing one intent." Not class warfare--collective bargaining is class warfare--but class cleansing--across the generations. The irony will not be lost on history that the grandchildren of those who fought against the worldwide domination of the corporate state, Mussolini's other word for fascism, and won, their grandchildren will become its attack troops. And we of the middle generation, could this all be the enmity of a class that resented the sixties, that hated us for stopping one war, securing civil rights for the oppressed among us, shepherding in a liberation of women, smoking dope?

To see this as the culmination of the resentment of the culture wars shortchanges both the enmity the corporate class feels for democracy--which should be obvious by now, and our unwitting complicity in what may be its impending demise. For if we turn the face of the clock once again onto the question"What does it mean to be a world at this time in the history of the Human Race?" and we look at the world we have been living in all our lives, I'm afraid we will find that very few of its assumptions will help us answer that question.

Most useless will be what we assumed political life amounted to:"talking truth to power," instead of unseating it, "being the world we want to see," instead of seizing it, assuming that politics was about who we are not about who we have to defeat. All our lives we have mistaken the ground of politics for a parade ground, not what it was--a battle ground. The other side has not made that mistake and now the battleground is about to be a graveyard with a mass grave yawning behind a staggered American democracy on the verge of being bulldozed into it.

I should tell you that when the young hear us congratulating ourselves for showing up at occasions such as these, their lips curl. They need not affective but effective politics and they, the clear-eyed among them, see many of our assumptions as alibis for a self-evident failure. We have laid upon them the burden, almost the requirement, to be one of the greatest of all American generations. I have been teaching them for quite some time and believe they, no less than the youth of Egypt, have it in them. But we had better start talking about how we can help them and not assume that we already know. Perhaps that entails not paying your taxes and then complaining about them, but not paying them at all. Perhaps it entails not negotiating over working conditions but not going to work for the profit of those who are stealing our country from us. One good reason to be here today is to talk about such matters and to earn a contempt for those who say they sympathize but never show. Tell them to visit their own country once in a while here where it lives and help make it live here. If American democracy is to survive, if a new America is to be born, it will be in the streets, not in the voting booths. It will be in the answer we struggle to realize in this most important of all conflicts, a conflict that is happening everywhere "What does it mean to be a world at this hour in the history of the Human Race?" This time mere revolt, if it ever did, will not serve, there will be no next time;this time the revolution is necessary, for every issue is connected, every issue group one party of resistance, the front is everywhere, the battle final and the time is never if not now.

[Gene]

A successful revolution is only possible with an overwhelming majority of the people in support. Non violence, civil disobedience in the tradition of Ghandi is, I believe, the only way. Look to the historye of this country in the sixties and you will find that the government will assassinate, frame, imprison, break into homes without warrants, plant undercover agents in your organization, spread lies and do just about anything to stop you. They will say you are being led by foreign enemies which will give intelligence the right to attack you with any and all means through covert operations. Sorry but that's the reality. Only with the overwhelming support of the people can you be successful. So turn your back on violence, when two hundred million people refuse to go to work and sit down in the street the revolution is won and the people will stand as one. Until then all you can do is make your own place and life a garden of peace, do the right thing, and convince others to join you. Just my opinion, take it or leave it, I will not respond to those on wacco who just want to debate anything, believe in little, and are counterproductive to accomplishing anything.

["Mad" Miles]

Gene,

You've stated explicitly that you're not interested in reading criticisms of your response. So I'll start by saying I'm not writing this for you, but for anyone else reading this.

Gene claimed: "A successful revolution is only possible with an overwhelming majority of the people in support."

This is not factually true. The American Revolution was supported by no more than a third of the population of the British colonies, it was opposed by about a third and the other third remained neutral. One half of the population of the newly founded U.S.A. left after the victory. Either because they were driven out as Loyalists, or they didn't think the "new experiment" was viable.

My surname got spread across the English speaking world, and parts beyond, as a result of that diaspora. Although enough remained for it to be found in every major American (U.S.) population center and and quite a few other less populated places in this country.

I agree that the "Revolution" in the sixties was crushed. But the counter-culture never constituted more than twenty percent of the populace. And most of them were "fashion" hippies, like what we called "fashion Punks/Poseurs" in the late seventies and early eighties (up until today). Granted the "No Future!" scene was nowhere near as popular as the revolution of Peace & Love. Punk wasn't revolutionary as much as it was rejectionist and nihilistic, and a reaction to the failure of Hippy.. Another big difference being, Demographics is a Beeaaatttccchhhhh!!!!!!

Anyway, my main point is that revolution does not come when expected. They are seldom, if ever, predictable. It's always a shocking surprise. It was in Tunisia, Egypt and in 1989 when the people of Eastern Europe voted with their feet and the wall came down. Tienamen in '89 was also a complete surprise, and a shocking slaughter when it was suppressed with overwhelming brutal force. Current events in Syria are similar. (Not to mention Bahrain, Doha, Morocco, Algeria and Yemen.)

Nobody expects the Global Revolution! Our weapons are fear.... strike that!

NOBODY expects! The Global Revolution!! Our weapons are FEAR, Surprise and moderate popular participation....

Wait! That's wrong... Try again,

OK? Ready?? NOBODY EXPECTS THE GLOBAL REVOLUTIONS!!!

Our weapons are Mass Non-Violent Direct Action, organized, sustained, coordinated and experienced...

A Lutta Continua.

One thing I know for sure, the Revolution Will Be Televised, and Tweeted, Facebooked, YouTubed, IM'd, MySpaced, and if they shut down the net, by hand courier among a new generation of really pissed off net savvy kids who will be outraged that their social networking has been messed with!!!

Interesting times ahead. Maybe by the time it happens we'll all be ported. If it's not too late by then....

By the way, counseling we all wait around and tend our own gardens until the time is right and ripe? Revolutions are not made by the passive and acquiescent. Never have been, never will be.

[Star Man]

I support Professor Giordano's assessment of the state of the world. He uses the word "corporatocracy," which is accurate. I have been using the word for several years to describe the global system of political and economic control that unites governments, militaries, bureaucracies, corporations, political parties, and many so-called service organizations into a profit-driven system that seeks to maximize returns on investment without any consideration for the cost to people, other species, or the environment.

Giordano's call for revolution is misguided, however, because it represents an attempt to solve the problem of the corporatocracy at the same organization level as the corporatocracy. Revolution is political and contends with a perceived enemy for power. No problem is ever solved by solutions at the same level of organization as the problem.

A better model than revolution is recovery. A recovery model is based on the belief that almost all citizens of the planet are addicted to the basic premise of the corporatocracy: money, property, profit, competition, and extraction of minerals and food from the oceans and earth. A wise recovery model is based on a developmental model for the abusive disorder that threatens the survival of our species and of all other living things on the planet. This model states that our abusive disorder originated in the violent conditions in which we evolved. The model notes that we become in adulthood what we experienced in childhood. Children from the beginning of our species' history were conditioned by the violence and scarcity of their existence and by their parents' ways of managing to live long enough to reproduce under those conditions. The violence of cavemen begat the violence of the Roman Empire begat the violence of Wall Street, the corporatocracy, and its war machine.

A recovery model takes individual responsibility. This is a fundamental teaching of all 12-Step groups. AA never claimed it could eradicate alcoholism, and it never declared a revolutionary war against the disorder. AA has helped one alcoholic at a time stop drinking, and the total of all sober alcoholics numbers in the tens of millions. 12-Step is a program of attraction, rather than promotion. 12-Step has Traditions that prevent the very kind of takeover from the inside by agents provocateurs that destroyed the Green Party. Leaders of 12-Step groups are trusted servants, they do not govern. That is utterly opposed to the principles that drive the corporatocracy.

There is a program, Humanity Rising, that is founded on the principles I have briefly described. Humanity Rising (HR) seeks to help one human being at a time to recover from the awful socialization we've all been subjected to just by being raised in the dominant culture. HR's First Step says, "We admitted we were powerless over what happened to us in childhood as a result of which our lives became unmanageable." Professor Giordano and many others have articulated the unmanageability on planet Earth today: endless wars, overpopulation, nuclear catastrophe, machinfication of all domains from cell phones to Predator drones, species extinction, global warming, pollution of water, land, air, and space, and the commodification of everything needed to sustain life. HR is areligious, believing that religion is part of the disordering. HR makes recovery a power greater than the self. HR promotes a spiritual awakening which is a change of personality sufficient to maintain freedom from the abusive system. HR seeks to awaken human beings. The politicians, generals and troops, CEOs and workers, and the vast majority of citizens around the globe are unconscious.

Should you wish to know more, please visit HumanityRising (dot) net

["Mad" Miles]

Star Man,

You wrote: "the very kind of takeover from the inside by agents provacateurs" (Sic.) "that destroyed the Green Party."

This is not true. The reasons for conflict and dissension within the GPUS are complex and multivalent. Much of it has to do with intelligent, well educated, tendentious people arguing for various viewpoints from the best of intentions. Sound like any other political milieu we know about? Hint: It's called The Left.

That you think you coined the word "corporatocracy", well, that speaks for itself.

I recall we had a previous go round sometime a year ago. I'll leave my critical comments about the rest of your recent contributions in the discussion of current political events alone for now. I don't see much percentage in a debate with you.

You seem a sincere fellow. Well intended and engaged. But I would watch the sweeping unfounded generalizations, and claims to originality. (Perhaps you were kidding about making up corporatocracy and I missed the wink?) Such statements do not do your calls for reform and political change any service.

Peace Out

[Star Man]

Star Man,

You wrote: "the very kind of takeover from the inside by agents provacateurs" (Sic.) "that destroyed the Green Party."

This is not true. The reasons for conflict and dissension within the GPUS are complex and multivalent. Much of it has to do with intelligent, well educated, tendentious people arguing for various viewpoints from the best of intentions. Sound like any other political milieu we know about? Hint: It's called The Left.

That you think you coined the word "corporatocracy", well, that speaks for itself.

I recall we had a previous go round sometime a year ago. I'll leave my critical comments about the rest of your recent contributions in the discussion of current political events alone for now. I don't see much percentage in a debate with you.

You seem a sincere fellow. Well intended and engaged. But I would watch the sweeping unfounded generalizations, and claims to originality. (Perhaps you were kidding about making up corporatocracy and I missed the wink?) Such statements do not do your calls for reform and political change any service.

Peace Out

Dear Mad Miles,

Thanks for your feedback. I have taken your advice and edited out my claim to creating the word "corporatocracy." i also corrected the spelling of "provocateur."

I have been around the Left since Berkeley in the 60s. I watched the government's spies and agents provocateurs infiltrate meetings and create dissension in the Free Speech Movement and the Vietnam Day Committee. The "intelligent, well-educated, tendentious" group (GPUS) you speak of is fertile ground for the agents to sow their seeds of discord in. The fact that the Left is as addicted to a world-view that entails competition and a struggle for power as the perceived enemy makes it difficult for the Left to recognize the process.

Thanks too for not seeing "much percentage" in a debate with me, because I am not interested in debate. I have stated the point of view of HR as I understand it. HR is a program of attraction, not promotion. A debate would be a promotion. A debate would imply trying to solve a problem at the same level of organization as the problem itself. A debate would be a struggle for power. A debate would entail going unconscious.

When one citizen at a time gets sick and tired of the system and comes to realize that any participation in the system, even revolution against it, is participating in the system, then recovery is possible. Of course, as AA and NA say, "Sometimes the alcoholic or addict has to die." Sadly, the exponentially increasing devastation to our environment may be the terminal, fatal outcome of our addiction to power. Every recovering substance abuser has a "moment of clarity" when they knew the addiction wasn't working any more and they had to find a new way. What will our species' moment of clarity be?

["Mad" Miles]

Star Man,

Thanks for your kind and respectful reply. Good to see you can recognize issues when they're pointed out to you. I have an opinion about applying a 12 Step approach to social, economic and political problems. But I'll leave it aside for now.

While I suspect I'm a few years younger than you, I am very familiar with the history and reality of political policing in our country. Over its entire, especially modern, history.

Your claim about the Green Party being taken over by provocateurs is slander. Have you been active in the GP for the last ten years? Are there specific facts you are willing to share that back up your sweeping claim?

I ask this because I note that you didn't retract that claim in your reply. You merely sidestepped the issue.

I've been a member of the Green Party since 1987. I am intimately familiar with our internal problems, and the conflicts from which they arose. It's complicated.

But to dismiss the entire problem as a takeover by wrecking police agents, is bunk. Entirely and totally. And it's sliming the hard work of a lot of dedicated and well meaning people.

Having made such a sweeping and unfounded accusation, leads me to dismiss pretty much everything you have to say on any subject of import, at all. Back those claims up with some facts, and I might reconsider my stance.

But I know you won't because you can't. It's a lie. Or at least to your benefit, a naive and unfounded rumor that you're passing on without knowing anything about it. Your statement constitutes rank rumor mongering. There's plenty of that in politics, but from someone who takes the humanistic psychological stance that you do, and claims to be about the values you seem to be espousing, it's a very evident contradiction, to say the least.

You're a therapist, do you use lies in your practice? Or sweeping generalizations without any supporting evidence? I hope not. And if you do, does that work to help your clients figure out how to handle their problems, traumas and issues?

The last time I confronted you for some unmitigated BS that I'd have to research to recall the details of, you withdrew in a huff saying you felt threatened. I can assure you, I am not threatening you. I am responding to your egregious nonsense, harmful though it is, with direct statements and clear intent. I have no personal interest in you, or your career. I do have a personal interest in political and social change and the electoral political party I have committed to for the past twenty-four years. When you slander us, you get my personal attention. But that is the extent of it.

By the way, the, Mad, in my nom de keyboard, goes in quotation marks. It's ironic, a light-hearted joke, a play on British slang which connotes "passionate", not angry or insane, save ironically (and despite any appearances to the contrary! ;-D ). If you're going to use it, please spell it correctly. Without the quotation marks it might look like you are calling me angry and insane. And if you want you can drop the honorific and just call me Miles.

In the last sentence above, the use of honorific was also a joke by the way. Just in case you or anybody else reading this didn't get it.

In this case I am angry, evidently, but it is not my only emotional state, and it is not the meaning of my self-selected user name on this bulletin board. It serves as a kind of litmus test, those seeking to find fault where there isn't any, tend to focus on the least charitable interpretation. It sort of flushes the birds from the bushes, so to speak. That function was totally unintentional when I adopted it some five years ago, but it's turned out to be quite useful. Especially for ID'ing the irony impaired, thin-skinned and emotionally reactive among us. Sometimes accidents turn out to be very fortuitous!

[Star Man]

You've said it all, Mr. Miles. You have completely exposed yourself. I totally get that contention is your chosen path. I'm choosing recovery from fighting, not contention, so I'm not going to argue with you. I also totally get that the issue of the Green Party is a hot button for you. I get that you have a lot of hurt around that. For the record, I am registered in the Green Party and voted for Nader.

You said you didn't see "much percentage" in a debate, but apparently you do see a percentage in ad hominem attacks. Oh, well. I feel particularly sad at your references to my being a therapist and to your suggestion that I might lie to my clients. Ouch!! That really hurt. That kind of personal attack is also not acceptable. For the record, I am a Registered Marriage and Family Therapist Intern working under supervision of a licensed MFT. Also for the record, I am 72 1/2 years old. I figured I'd say that before you tried to use it against me.

I'm done trying to communicate with you, Mr. Miles. I will no longer respond to anything you have to say, and I respectfully request that you refrain from commenting on anything I post in the future. I learned in the program that an expectation is a premeditated resentment, so I will say that I do not expect you to honor my respectful request. Addiction, especially to violence in language and in interpersonal relations, is a pernicious disorder. I've also learned that it's pointless to try and talk to an addict who is still using.

["Mad" Miles]

Wacoons,

This is a reply for anybody who has cared to read this thread. StarMan clearly isn't interested. Although I thank him for the amusement. Projection is often entertaining.

Two quotes:

"12-Step has Traditions that prevent the very kind of takeover from the inside by agents provocateurs that destroyed the Green Party."

"...any participation in the system, even revolution against it, is participating in the system..."

As a student and participant in many things human, including psychology, humanistic and otherwise, social theory and political activism, I can assure anyone paying attention that a person who makes such statements has little or no direct knowledge of any of those subjects or experiences.

There are a lot of competing theories of revolution. I won't be arrogant enough to claim I know them all, but it has been one of the primary foci of what I read, discuss, present and practice. The second quote above demonstrates a profound myopathy on the matter.

And now,

"I also totally get that the issue of the Green Party is a hot button for you. I get that you have a lot of hurt around that."

Starman doesn't get shit. If someone slanders, lies and paints with a large dismissive brush, a group that I care about, of course it angers me. That's not, "a lot of hurt", that's a normal, understandable and rationally justifiable emotional response. The fact that he doesn't "get" that, says much more about him, than me.

The language I would normally use to describe this exchange, and the "thinking" of those such as SM, is not allowable here. Suffice it to say, I've said it to myself enough.

It seems to me that our current society is on a downward spiral in many ways. (Hasn't it always been? Depends on who you listen to and read.) Including a lot of rumor, innuendo, anger, dismissal, paranoia, alarmism and other marginally pathological responses and behaviors.

I am at odds with many of my political allies, even more lately. I've argued with Marxist Leninists for thirty-five years, that's nothing new. But in recent times many of those with whom I am in general agreement, I find quite a few prone to exaggerated panic, paranoia and conspiracy mongering. Based on limited and flawed information.

I'll just reiterate. I'm not a Truther, Deather, and of course not a Birther. I find theories that devolve all of our problems from the founding of the Fed, in 1913, unpersuasive and mostly loony tunes.

That people feel free to claim as true, that which is at best speculative, based on limited information and narrow ideological grounds, is nothing new. It will probably always be nothing new. But it's no less ridiculous and irritating. I blame the internet. Among many other factors.

Good Luck to us all, we're gonna need it.

And by the by, basing the only hope for the future on some kind of spiritual awakening as a result of the personal, individual healing of all psychic wounds, resulting in a social transcendence of the existing structures of thinking, doing and being in the world? Ending conflict because it's merely a symptom of psychopathic ideation devolved from systemically induced traumas? Well, there are worse theories of social change. Not many, but a few. Magical thinking takes many forms.

Pangloss had a good line as well. But Volaire was being sarcastic, not prescriptive.

Oh, and telling the mass of people that they're sheep and just need to wake up? Just how successful has the Gurdjieffian movement been?

Insulting people and telling them they're stupid children who are denying reality, has never struck me as an effective message or method to mobilize them. I try to agitate, educate and organize. I guess that makes me old-fashioned.

Except, to disparage, insult and dismiss the many because they don't see the light that we enlightened few see, is also very old-fashioned. Archaic, in my opinion.

[Zen Ben]

"All our lives we have mistaken the ground of politics for a parade ground, not what it was--a battle ground."

That's the key phrase in this essay. That's the assertion that I had hoped that offering this dialog would address. There is a profound truth in that statement, and we have to confront its implications. There is a war being waged on our democratic institutions and the social gains of the 20th century. That is our reality. As Warren Buffett observed: "There is a class war, and my class is winning!".

Please respond to that observation.

~Ben

[Star Man]

Dear Ben,

I believe that politics is neither a parade ground nor a battle ground (although it often looks like one because of the violent acting out people do). Politics is motivated by deeper psychological issues, and it should be understood in the domain of psychology. Politics does not stand alone or separate from psychology. People's adult political positions and political behavior are conditioned by their experiences in childhood. The more secure their childhood attachment experiences, the more they will tend toward environmental awareness, negotiation, fairness, prosociability, empathy, compassion. The less secure their childhood attachment, the more they will tend to be avaricious, grasping, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, competitive, combative, and angry. Politics doesn't change people.

People find the politics that suits who they are, and if they can't find anything they become what the Marxists called "petite bourgeois individualists." Politics can sadly be a domain where people act out their unresolved developmental psychological issues through combativeness, contention, and adversariality regardless of the particular political concerns. Thus, some people on the Left will argue with others on the Left no matter what and damn the outcome. Same on the Right, so the Tea Baggers assault the Conservative Republicans in spite of the overall commonality of their approach. I watched Stalinists fight with Socialists and end up destroying all possibility of socialism. I watched factions within the Green Party fight over the issue of participation in electoral politics versus abstention from electoral politics and formation of an "anti-party party" that ended up destroying the effectiveness of the Greens (Reference: Green Party United States, Wikipedia).

Thanks for the question. It is a good one. I hope you receive many reasoned and thoughtful responses.