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“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
public’s imagination.
"It is certain now that a popular revolt is coming."
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.
© 2013 TruthDig.com
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author
of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
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