Watermelon Slim Addressing President Obama from Lafayette Park 3/19/2011 by self
Yesterday, one of the few remaining soi-disant conservatives left on my regular discussion forum asked the question: what will the Left do if US troops stay in Iraq after the agreed-upon exit date? Secretary of Defense-to-be Leon Panetta has strongly signalled that that will be the case on his watch.
It is 12:52
PM here in Clarksdale, and I am having the first of what looks like
two-and-a-half cups of Burundian organic coffee. It is so-o-o-ooo balanced. Wish
you were here, I'll bet a student like you are likes a good cup of coffee, and I
may make the bestcup in Mississippi, to say nothing of Clarksdale.
What
will we do? Well, not to set the bar too high for us, but we will act according
to the post with which I started a thread day before yesterday, titled "The
Great New Jersey Turnpike Stall."
This historical event from 1971 was the freest and most spontaneous act of revolution in which I ever had the slightest reason to claim success. But the event deserves its own relation as part of an article suggesting ways in which Americans can resist the war machine today.
The bottom part of that post is a description of and call to action October 6 and thereafter. It can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/06/07-2 .
October 6 is the 10th anniversary of the US entrance into Afghanistan. Dreadfully mishandled, of course, by a man who had no more business being CIC than my Aunt Bobby.
What? The Left do? Well, the Left will act non-violently and hopefully en masse, though as a movement planner, I can better ensure the first, through training and through vigilance at every level against co-option or betrayal, than the second, which is a function of how bad people feel bit.
One thing to remember about "The Left" in America is that a whole generation is coming to maturity now that never lived under the threat of The Cold War. By the time the people born in the 1990s were old enough to think about it, the Soviet Union had toddled off to the ol' historical dust-heap, and Russia wasn't even the big bad boogah-woogah it was when it had the other name.
"Communism" as those who knew its face during
the Cold War saw it has been abandoned by nearly every nation in the world-- one is
only holding on out of Latino respect for two mucho hombres, Fidel and Raul, and another is an international pariah.
There is no nation to which senior leftists can point as an example of a Communist success story, in the way that there arguably was before World War Two.
There isn't a breeding ground for Leftism of the traditional variety
here. Although a socialist, I have never been anything like the
kind of doctrinaire Marxist leftist that pretty much folded their tents under an
overwhelming barrage of behavioral modification against anything that even might be thought of as leftism years ago.
Marx is even
correct about who ought to own
the means of production and all that, it's just that at this stage of world capitalism's ugly progress from industrial development to post-industrial consumerist
profit-skimming what constitutes a "worker" is far beyond anything Marx might
have contemplated, in a world between 7 and 8 times more populated than it was
at the time of the writing of the Communist Manifesto.
Now we have
BILLIONS of hungry mouths, for which there is no machine to put hands to.
We're worried about 9 percent unemployment in America? Get RE-E-EAL used to it.
Those
jobs are never coming back under this Old Paradigm of unregulated consumerism.
What work can a person do, under the old paradigm of everyone, ultimately, out
for himself-- i.e. capitalism as classically described by Smith?
What
work can a refugee in Darfur ever have?
How tight can you screw the
spring of investor earnings until there's just no way that more and more value
can be gotten out of less and less resources, in a dirtier and dirtier
environment, with a largely unchecked doubling rate of world population, before
it snaps?
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