Add new comment

As long as everybody with a job keeps going to work like normal, absolutely nothing is going to change.  Oh, but that' s right -- you're rootin' and tootin' "ex-workers"  -- and current trust fund beneficiaries?  Fantasy projections aside you guys aren't Jacques Mesrine.  You're making a living somehow, and whatever it might be it isn't some imaginary uncompromising rebellion against the social order.  What actual revolutionary movement of the past two hundred years has not even bothered to acknowledge the world of work and of being coerced into work as a central focus of antagonism to capitalist society?!?

I have friends who have been going night after night to the Stumptown events: according to them there have never been more than ten thousand people on the right side of things -- I don't mean right-wing! -- participating in a city of 600,000-plus people within a greater Portland Metro region of more than a million.

What gets called anarchism in today's US, as Nietzsche diagnosed, tends to be a form of reactive morality: "...This inversion of the value-positing eye -- this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself -- is of the essence of 'ressentiment:' in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act -- its action is fundamentally reaction."  (Nietzsche, ' On the Genealogy of Morals')

You endlessly respond on the terrain and the terms dictated by your opponents -- Trump, the pigs -- whoops, law enforcement -- and the extreme right.  You cannot break out of isolation within generally short-lived exciting public theatre events that only a tiny, tiny fraction of the populace at large and a high ninety percent of most people who work for a wage pay any attention to, let alone take an active part in.  And if people go to rowdy demos again and again and then go back to work like usual something significant is, at least at this point,failing to ignite.  You are not escaping the compulsive need to be entertained of people who have been raised in and unfortunately very successfully social engineered by the most wealthy and wasteful consumer society of all time.

An actual mass liberatory social upheaval will undoubtedly involve big protest marches, rioting and whatever -- but this will be emerging from a vast spreading discontent among people who at this point have never been to a demo even once in their lives.  A broader and deeper opposition to this catastrophically failing social order won't jump off from the demos that have been taking place, no matter how wholly righteous they are.  The protest ghetto is exactly that -- a socially walled-off phenomenon.  

It's time to retool.  And it was time to retool a long time ago.