A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse
The piece is an excerpt from David Graeber's new book, "The Democracy Project," and contains a number of interesting bits. I'll snip out one for y'all, but it's worth clicking through and reading more.
The problem was that since those rules of engagement ensured that thousands of women, children, and old people would end up collateral damage in order to minimize deaths and injuries to U.S. soldiers, this meant that in Iraq and Afghanistan, intense hatred for the occupying forces would pretty much guarantee that the United States couldnt obtain its military objectives. And remarkably, the war planners seemed to be aware of this. It didnt matter. They considered it far more important to prevent effective opposition at home than to actually win the war. Its as if American forces in Iraq were ultimately defeated by the ghost of Abbie Hoffman.
Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure. But it raises an intriguing question: What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?
The thought first occurred to me when participating in the IMF actions in Washington, D.C., in 2002. Coming on the heels of 9/11, we were relatively few and ineffective, the number of police overwhelming. There was no sense that we could succeed in shutting down the meetings. Most of us left feeling vaguely depressed. It was only a few days later, when I talked to someone who had friends attending the meetings, that I learned we had in fact shut them down: the police had introduced such stringent security measures, canceling half the events, that most of the actual meetings had been carried out online. In other words, the government had decided it was more important for protesters to walk away feeling like failures than for the IMF meetings to take place. If you think about it, they afforded protesters extraordinary importance.
Read more: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/practical_utopians_guide#.UV706VJxLI8.twitter
Turbineguy
(37,324 posts)Instead we have to face the fact that recovering from GW Bush will take longer than a decade.
marmar
(77,078 posts)....... and you know what happens to an unstable structure, eventually.
Newest Reality
(12,712 posts)might be more insidious than a mere collection of financial foibles and orgies of unchecked greed.
One does not have to be a "conspiracy theorist", (now a pejorative term whenever it is used) to ascertain that there is a certain method in this madness and that, for the first time in history, a collapse of a system could be a functional tool and boon for the small percentage of pathological oppressors dictating a large part of the collective now.
It would be nice to think that the insights that can be gleaned from access to so much information and the works of some very insightful academicians, modern philosophers and such, would at least make the results of a collapse less palatable to the regal movers and shakers who claim the right to consider us as livestock in their totally manipulative simulations via abstraction -- television presenting a version of hyperreality that, when examined, is more real than real.
So, we still have a government that is now merely a metaphorical tool that in one way functions as governments do, but serves, more and more to distract us from the nature of the game while it takes the heat for the other side of the bundle of sticks that represents the combined power of state and commerce. The government now also serves as a means to induce as sense of choice or participation that is currently butting heads with the fact that we collectively have less and less of both. The trumpets sound each time a poll of popular opinion conflicts with legislation and even diverges totally with anything we thought was a democratic form. It is becoming an obviously hollow shell that still holds sway via the persistence of habitual belief in itself as if Mesmer were the God of modern media.
So, look past that Oz head blathering loudly and notice that your self-styled masters have been and currently are mostly the Fortune 500 companies. You can see that simply by watching your television with a bit of alert and aware critique about how manipulation works today and why it is so successful in making prisoners think and feel they have any real freedom at all.
Can you imagine how they might smirk and deride the willful and imposed ignorance that allows subjugation and tyranny to be hidden in plain site and that remains entrenched like a giant parasite at our our jugular vein threatening to cut off our blood supply if we try to pick it off?
Demeter
(85,373 posts)QED: Vietnam War, Corporate Domination of the World, Imperialism, etc.
If it isn't life-affirming and equality-spreading, it will fail; guaranteed.
And all that we have learned from the 60's has not gone away...our grandchildren are listening avidly. And they are going to synthesize their present and our past, to make a future worth having.
bananas
(27,509 posts)A related good read:
"When America Came 'This Close' to Establishing a 30-Hour Workweek"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101659781
bananas
(27,509 posts)Apartheid divestment spurs Beyond Coal campaign
By Sarah Niss | The Daily Tar Heel
Updated: 03/21/13 10:45pm
Students calling for UNC to divest from coal are looking to the 1980s for inspiration in their ongoing campaign asking administrators to take a moral stance on climate change.
<snip>
The Anti-Apartheid Support Group was formed on campus in 1985 and worked with other groups until the University committed to divestment in October 1987.
Among other protests, students built a shantytown in Polk Place to demonstrate the conditions the black population of South Africa faced.
You had to be almost willfully blind to not be caught by the sight of it, Leloudis said.
Robert Reid-Pharr, who graduated in 1987 and was active in the campaign, said about 10 students lived in each shanty at a time.
Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, co-president of the Campus Y during the time of the campaign and now a professor of anthropology at UNC, said the shantytown was essential in inspiring campus awareness of an international issue.
<snip>