Monday, November 08, 2004

Some musings on dissent...

As a follow-up to my post the other day, re: dissent, protest, and the future...here’s what’s on my muddled mind this chilly November morning.

Four Foundations for Resistance:

•Rapid Self-Education/Self-Awareness: The knowledge garnered from
independent study and critical research along with the experience gained
from collective efforts is a powerful combination. By demystifying the
problems and simultaneously serving as an example of resistance, more people will be inspired to visualize change...and thus move toward action. Every two seconds on planet Earth, a child starves to death...while many Americans agonize over how many carbs they ingested at their last super-sized meal. The time is long overdue to wake up and get busy ASAP....which brings me to:

•The Patience/Urgency Ratio: A successful social movement must walk the fine line between unrealistic expectations and being too patient. Not an easy
task...but a lot easier than submitting oneself to ever-increasing misery of
daily life in a capitalist society. We cannot expect masses of people to
suddenly embrace the concept of individual thought when everything they’ve
ever heard has denied its existence. Joe Citizen won’t make the leap from
watching Reality TV to challenging the capitalist power structure
overnight...and spontaneous insurrection by a dedicated few is doomed by
definition (smashed by state power and publicly mocked by corporate media).
A delicate balance of patience and adventure must be found before a system
of repression can be dismantled. Change involves time, planning,
provocation, and the sincere willingness to engage in ever-evolving direct
action...all blended with a sense of urgency and:

•Solidarity: The task can become less onerous once we realize that we’re not
alone. Despite efforts by the elites to marginalize dissent and disguise or
discredit any progress made through activism, plenty of people (from all
walks of life) desire fundamental change (only 20% of Americans voted for
Bush, for example). If we foolishly succumb to a fabricated feeling of
alienation or isolation, nothing will change. If we look down our noses at
Joe Citizen because he is not an enlightened as us, we deserve all the
contempt we get. Rather, we must seek out others with whom we can work and share ideas. The function of the elite media to make us feel isolated. When they get us thinking, “Am I the only one who thinks this way?” they’ve won. It is a debilitating error to assume you are alone and that others will not
work with you.

•Grand Unified Theory: Such a collective effort is difficult to sustain
without--at least--a loose guiding concept. So much time is spent today on
moves like raising money, registering voters, organizing marches, and so on,
but these are hollow gestures without some kind of cohesive, unifying theory
to support them. It’s not enough to know that we have gotten it all
wrong...we need to know why we have gotten it all wrong. Such a concept
begins with each of us...not in multi-syllabic words in a dusty textbook. It
begins when we ask ourselves how we really feel about what’s going on...but
it doesn’t fulfill its promise until we can articulate answers not provided
for us by the dominant commodity culture. “We know what we feel,” howled
Johnny Rotten. But do we? We must strive to construct a fluid revolutionary
self-theory…a unique way of seeing the world uncluttered by the influence of
the corporate agenda. No social movement can succeed until members of that
movement can see the world as it is, not as they’ve been taught it should
be. Revolutionary practice will merely exchange one type of oppression for
another unless participants have constructed a coherent set of guidelines
that eschew racism, sexism, classism, absolutism...and lesser evilism. This
does not mean an all-or-nothing theory that rejects anyone who questions
it...rather, a foundation upon which new ideas can be tried.

More soon…

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Posted on 11/08 at 05:30 AM
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