| AFter the G-8 summit, a debate goes on within the movement over the legitimacy of the use of violence as a tool of social action ... Sick of non-violent Rhetoric ... About the 'BlackBloc' ... The future of the U.S. Left ... Some personal commentary... When faced with institutionalized violence that destroys hundreds of millions of human lives, and when confronted with the indifference and lack of answers of the pure capitalist system, is rock throwing and the destruction of property and other methods of armed resistance justified. Today's 'violent criminal revolutionary' is tommorrow's 'leader of the revolution and the war of Independence.' (If they win, that is - consider the American revolution, the one revolution that even the most conservative media and political groups have no trouble celebrating.) On the otherhand there are those who argue that such tactics as rock throwing and confrontations with police just bring 'collective punishment' and alienation and also play into the hands of the opposition. After considering the matter it is hard for me to come to any sort of facile conclusion about all this myself. On the one hand, one of the assumptions of violent protest is that 'the powerful' are solely responsible, and being the prime beneficiaries of unbridled capitalism, it is easy to see how they would have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. However, power does not exist in a vacuum. In truth, human 'power' is some kind of illusion (to borrow Chomsky's phrase power, and the consent that creates 'power' must be manufactured). Now given that 'power' is actually a product of the consent of the majority, and that 'power' dissolves when the consent which underlies is destroyed, simply targetting 'the powerful' is an inadequate strategy, since in and of themselves they have no real power (as you can tell by looking at history, most of the world's most 'powerful' people have been 'eaten by worms' and are no more, and I have never seen anyone, no matter how 'powerful' exercise any real 'power', other than the power to manufacture this consent, which is real power on this planet). Now given that power is in truth nothing more than consent, any strategy that does not involve undermining the power to do what is not right, what is inhumane or blatantly unjust is a strategy that cannot achieve success (unless forced consent (tyranny) and terror is substituted, for this type of 'power' is the only effective substitute for willing consent as a tool of 'power'). It seems to me, and has always seemed to me, that the worst impediment to structural and social reform on this planet is spiritual malaise. What I mean is that people in their great masses adopt a form of the attitude that one should 'eat, drink, and be merry, for tommorrow we die.' Now if you give such spiritually deadened people 'bread and circuses' then you can more than likely gain their consent. As for becoming involved in causes, the average type has only so much time in the day, and so many days to live, and so I see that a lot of kids, for example, will not be found out protesting, but rather will be found at parties, or in the bars and nightclubs, because life is short and youth is fleeting, and the most a person can hope for is to 'eat, drink, and be merry'. Now historically 'the left' has been antagonistic towards this 'spiritual' outlook, and to borrow a phrase from Marx, have considered such things to be the 'opiate of the masses' and a tool for 'spell casting' and a means of inculcating docility in a population, and this is not something I would entirely disagree with, if we are considering only institutional priestly religion throughout history, and in many forms, even today. Such religion produces extremely conservative people more concerned with spreading religion, and thus keeping priests employed, and considers 'salvation' for the planet to consist of the spreading of religion and religious indoctrination. This does tend to keep them 'out of trouble' and in most cases actually makes them hostile to social change (they look backwards and consider a religous form of the totalitarism to be the ideal social system). All this being said, it is still true that by disparaging the spiritual side of the equation, and offering ordinary people only struggle with only noble sentiment as a reward, the left has marginalized themselves, and the right, while offering a sort of 'spirituality' in the form of conventional (right wing) religion, target this vacuum, and even when it proves to be true that most people are no longer interested in this religion, the right can fall back on those 'bread and circuses' so it proves to the case that they have 'something for everyone'. Coming from where I come from, and considering all my accumulated expereinces, and my resulting 'ideological position', I would suggest that there is little 'future for the left' if it fails to understand or address this spiritual malaise. (It really is the core problem, the big issue.) People are 'sick' (and I would argue that this, in of itself, is highly suggestive of some real vacuum that can be filled by something very real at the end of it all) and it seems that only the right and capitalism itself, while neither can really do much to address this underlying condition, are the systems that are able to exploit the resulting apathy and this goes a long way to explain why you find them with 'power' and the 'left' perpetually involved 'in the struggle'. This seems unlikely to change until 'the left' is mobilized on the 'spiritual front' and people can be energized by something more real and much more potent than the delusive comforts of the falsehoods of this conservative, right wing religion (and a falsehood it really is, something I go to great lengths to attempt to demonstrate). As for the truth, it simply is what it is, and a left that is stripped of what I would call its 'birth right' is a left that shoots itself in the foot you might say, and winds up being the left we have become so familiar with, the people with the good cause facing down an apathetic system that needlessly destroys human life, and nevertheless is marginalized and debating and discussing whether or not it has a future, when confronted after all by this spiritual malaise and all that 'bread and circuses' that people are offered to fill the void. Now as for the whole issue of violence or non-violent resistance, a violent solution that targets only the 'powerful' is not much a solution, because it is founded on the false notion that somehow the 'powerful' really are powerful, when actually the problem is with those great 'masses' who are the ones who empower the system by giving their consent. The destruction of this 'power' could be achieved by non-violent means, leaving only the issue of dealing with the potential for terror and violence in response (the last resort of illegimate 'powers'). Once such a system reveals itself as this corrupt and is hated by most people, then one would suppose that revolutionary resistance becomes not only morally justifiable but also more probable than would be the case today, where violent resistance only serves to alienate uninvolved (and even apathetic) people and in the end can only serve as the expression of the outrage and anger of the few. In that sense it plays into the hands of those they struggle against, and they find themselves perpetually portrayed as violent trouble makers, and given that they find no sympathy among the masses of spiritually deadened apathetic types, it does little to change the status quo or to destroy the consent which is the real source of the power of the powerful against whom they struggle. Perhaps we could say that in certain contexts (take Latin America as an example, or consider the example of Vietnam) it turned out to be the case that resistance was justified only because the system was recognized as corrupt by great numbers of ordinary people, something not true in the north, so perhaps we could say that the small segment of the population who believe in violent resistance are proposing a solution which is out of step with the mood of the larger population as a whole, and to quote one anarchist, in the end perhaps they serve to make 'Martin Luther King look reasonable when compared to Malcolm X'. (They certainly get a lot more publicity for a movement that would otherwise probably find themselves completely ignored.) The Campaign to Impeach George W. Bush Click here for more information |
A Unified Field Theory
The Unified Field Theory
is also available as a zip file -> unified.zip
Introduction :The Pioneer Effect and the New Physics. A brief description of the new physics required to explain the 'Pioneer Effect', which is the constant deceleration of space craft as they fly through space.