One of my first assignments as a journalist, when I was sixteen years old, was to cover Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park. There are at least a few reasons why Occupy was effective. Occupy, at least in Zuccotti Park, offered a space in which people could politicize their lives together, in dialogue and resistance. It sent a message to the power elite that the population knows what the powerful are up to, and that the powerful don't always know what the population is up to. There were a few criticisms of Occupy from the mainstream media which, unsurprisingly, I saw as strengths when I covered it. One was that Occupy was not centered around one principle. There were anti-war demonstrators, education reformists, anarchists, communists, Democrats, some conservatives, students strapped with obscene debt and little to no employment, and environmental activists there. In the mainstream media and press, this was treated as a lack of organization. But all of these issues have to be railed against, and they have to be railed against as issues that result from the corruption of wealth inequality. Our culture of rebellion must be all inclusive and hyper aware of the apocalyptic and nonpartisan betrayal on the part of our elites.
Occupy created -- in the language of the critical pedagogues -- a "political space" in which people could confront and deny the forces of domination in this empire. It was a place where people could talk and listen to each other, where people could live in a politically motivated, class conscious, and in many ways sustainable community, a place where people could eat, sleep, create, and protest together. Additionally -- a detail which does not receive enough attention -- there were many aspects of Occupy focused on the education of the population, such as its newspaper and its peoples' library, a commendable book exchange and donation center. Educated students, drug addicts, out of work journalists and artists, activists and others could come together and talk about how and why they had been abandoned. It was the most organized, powerful, political and politically correct middle figure to the establishment we had seen in this country since the Vietnam War.
I want to end this piece by arguing that, fragmented throughout our society, we have the foundations for a genuinely powerful and permanently sustainable political rebellion. We need to bring them to each other in a more coherent way. If we can organize as a political community, and if small communities throughout the country can organize, radical change will be essentially inevitable. As Howard Zinn understood, "power of the people on top depends on obedience of the people below." The fact that power relies on obedience is why the purpose of the media and political establishment is to confuse, under-educate, and divide the public -- because once the public is united by a cause that has regard for human life the elites as we know them are finished. Once we unite, it is not we, but they who will have to obey us. The reverse of Zinn's comment is also true: the power of the people below relies on the obedience of the people on top. The foundations for this unity are in place in certain political spheres. I will simply list some of them below. Again, these spheres, to be sustainable and politically effective, must be endowed with the three following qualities: education, civil disobedience, and self and community based sustainability. The six political spheres I will list below all have at least one, but usually all, of these qualities. These six spaces are not the only political spaces that we ought to model our sustained rebellion after, but they are some of the most important, some of the most active in organizing people, and some both. I'll note that I include the Green Party as one of the most important, not because it is one of the most active but because it has the potential to be one of the most active. Considering that the 2016 elections offered some of the most disliked candidates in American history, considering that we are seeing the last gasps of the Democratic party right now -- who, by nominating a right wing candidate in Hillary Clinton have almost ensured that they will lose the election in the next four or eight years -- it is imperative and likely that voters on both the right and the left begin to build up the third parties.
In short, the six examples below are a good start to affirming life collectively by rebelling against the forces arrayed against us.
1) Developments in the world of journalism have been hugely important, especially in the age of the internet, in bringing people together around politically savvy, thorough, informative and honest reporting. Outlets like Counterpunch, Truthdig, Truth-out, Democracy Now!, TomDispatch, Common Dreams, The Intercept, Alternet, and many others provide first rate, factual, and radical news and analysis from some of the most respected figures in journalism, providing the groundwork and reference point for an ideological foundation on American the left. These outlets provide an important political space in which people can become educated about the forces controlling their lives and their society. They provide a language to the public mind that allows it to think critically and organize with others who speak out in a similar language. In the age of the internet, the floodgates have opened for advertising and vapid entertainment on the one hand, and conspiracy theories and other non-fact based analysis on the other, and these news outlets provide a dignified safe haven of solid information, rooted in fact and in institutions that are largely not beholden to corporate power. Writers like Henry Giroux, Sonali Kolhatkar, Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald and hundreds of others are now available for free to an enormous range of readers. It is not only a moral but an intellectual obligation -- particularly for those of us on the left -- to make sure that the mainstream media has to fight and fear extremely hard to compete with this alternative media.
2) Black Lives Matter is the most important group bringing bodies into the street right now, and the most powerful since Occupy. The critique of American politics and culture from the African American community has been the most consistent and thorough critique in our history. No ideology, group, intellectual, political party, or any kind of political opposition has offered as potent a criticism or resistance in this empire than the civil rights history of the African American community, from slavery to Black Lives Matter. Like Occupy, Black Lives Matter has the power of pulling people into the street. Another important aspect of Black Lives Matter is that it largely confronts the police, but it confronts police with nonviolent resistance even though it protests violent oppression. This is essential. Police are in between the power structures and the population. It will be hard to sustain rebellion unless the police are made aware that they are part of the population, too, unless they can be convinced to join the population over protecting the centers of power. Such confrontation is integral to this dialogue, even if that confrontation fails to change enough minds. In this way, coupled with its outreach, particularly through social media, Black Lives Matter is also an educational movement.
3) Permaculture is perhaps the most practically important component of rebellion. It is permaculture that will most physically bring lives of rebellion together through community life while simultaneously protecting the environment. Permaculture is a form mainly of agricultural production, which stands on various principles of sustainability and community, such as working with others and making a good impact on the environment rather than making less of an impact. Industrial agriculture is one of the greatest causes of global warming, and the ability to feed ourselves will provide the most important break from corporate power. If, one day, we do not have to depend on corporate power for food and water, we may not have to depend on it for anything.
4) The Green Party, as I tried to outline in my last article, offers a decent alternative to the trap of the two party system, in which both parties serve the same private interests, illustrated most recently by Hillary Clinton, who did not have to pander to the Bernie base after he lost because she could steal enough votes from Republicans to cover the difference. Jill Stein is not a great presidential candidate -- something I should have been clearer about in my last article -- but the Green Party, and right now Jill Stein, offer the only platform and candidate with any substantial regard for human life. Ralph Nader, however, on the issues, had the ideas and political experience to make him the most respectable presidential candidate probably since George McGovern, and with integrity as great as any candidate in our country's history. There is a strong case to be made for Lesser of Evil (LEV) voting, but only in swing states, and even then one has to follow the third party race in those states to fully justify the LEV strategy. Furthermore, voting is the only democratic participation and distribution of power that the establishment still in any way encourages the population to use. You can use that power by voting how you like, or lose that power by voting how you are told. Not voting at all is also your right in a society that does not offer electable candidates, and this should not be dismissed. There are good reasons that voting is not a legal obligation. The Green Party is educational, providing information rather than advertisement and personality in its outreach. They are disobedient by engaging in activism and community service. Finally, it is self and community sustainable by not catering to corporate interests and by taking their voters seriously, much like the radical journalism outlets noted above, who do not depend heavily on corporate advertisers and who take their readers seriously. This is why they are the only outlets that give attention to third parties.
5) The environmental and anti-drilling and fracking culture -- which should be tied to permaculture and other forms of environmental sustainability and resistance -- can largely speak for itself. It should be noted, however, how powerful its message has become through Standing Rock, in which Native Americans have been protecting the earth. It should also be noted that the Standing Rock protests can be tied both to the journalism aspect through the heroic work of Amy Goodman, and, I would argue, to Black Lives Matter, in that the narrative of the struggle is largely, as it should be, the fight of a people against their neo-colonial oppressors.
6) Veterans for Peace in the United States is perhaps the most important organization in the world, because the US Military is in many ways the most frightening organization in the world. We cannot call ourselves a democracy as long as bombs bursting in air actually do call to mind the US flag to the world's oppressed populations. Our horrifying conflicts with Russia are caused by our usage of the US military and NATO. As Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at Kent University, has said, NATO exists solely to mitigate the threats that NATO itself poses by existing. By now, that statement is also true of the US military itself. The rise of ISIS and Islamic terrorism around the world can be unequivocally blamed on the usage of the tool of the US Military to expand and impose markets and protect corporate interests in the language of violence. There is no force as frightening and as worthy of resistance than the US military, especially because of the implications of nuclear weapons around the activity of world domination. Veterans for Peace, like Black Lives Matter and anti-drilling and anti-fracking, is active in bringing bodies into the street for protest. Many of the veterans involved in the movement also speak out quite effectively, appearing in both the mainstream and alternative news to comment on various political issues, writing books, and publishing important and timely articles on the website (hyperlinked above). The website for veterans for peace offers a compelling dialogue on the US military. In a world dominated through the US military, we owe Veterans for Peace a debt of gratitude we will never be able to repay.
It would be misleading to think of any of these political groups and spheres as "movements." We must instead think of them as ways of life, forms of and places for permanent rebellion and organization, to be passed on from generation to generation, to indefinitely reconnect us to one another and to the land.
In conclusion, it is imperative, for the sake of survival and morality, that the American population -- particularly the American youth -- align itself in stark defiance of a future of terrifying darkness. These political communities, along with countless others like them, are the spaces carved out in society within which we may live fully and resist. As my International Relations professor at Marlboro College, Lynette Rummel, taught, democracy does not happen in a particular country or place. It happens in a struggle. There is no point in dying without having engaged in this struggle.
(Article changed on October 23, 2016 at 14:34)
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