Uh-oh.
Sound familiar?
If you ever want to get away with oppression, fear, or various other institutional evils, it is simple: question the patriotism, the devotion, the very loyalty, of the people doing the protesting:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
There you have it: the anti-capitalist/anti-exploitation protests around the world are being carried out because we "hate democracy, hate voting".
It takes a special kind of disconnect to do this, but bear in mind that this is America, land of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Every time someone says "it couldn't happen here" we inch a bit closer to it actually happening here.
Alarmist? I don't think so, really. I think the Wall Street crony capitalist class, the ones who have been riding us into the ground, are beginning to realize that the herd is getting restless, and starting to transform. So they reach into the grab-bag and find good ol'-fashioned McCarthyism.
Global protests share contempt for democracy
--the headline screams. Oh, such ungrateful communists!
But even in India and Israel, where growth remains robust, protesters say they so distrust their country’s political class and its pandering to established interest groups that they feel only an assault on the system itself can bring about real change.
They don't get it, do they? When democracy is hijacked --corporate "persons" that can spend unlimited money to subvert the system to get what they want and to hell with the rest of us-- those of us on the short end of the stick get mad. What we want is not to destroy democracy, but to "reset" it to the default setting where one flesh-and-blood person gets one vote.
Increasingly, citizens of all ages, but particularly the young, are rejecting conventional structures like parties and trade unions in favor of a less hierarchical, more participatory system modeled in many ways on the culture of the Web.
Well, here's the thing: as soon as an organization is formed, its primary focus is, #1, the sustainment of the organization. That makes sense, to an extent-- a labor union is powerful because resources are put into it by the members, and in order to accomplish what it wants, it must remain powerful and continue to draw in resources. But eventually, even organizations with the best of intentions become more interested in maintaining itself. It may even resort to finding (or manufacturing!) new problems in order to justify its continued existence. People become entrenched; folks at the top of the roganize don't want to relinquish their power, and folks at the bottom have hitched their wagon to something they believe in, so they don't want it to go away.
Sometimes, the worst thing in the world can be for a mighty organization to win their goals, because after the victory party, they have to answer the question, "now what?" Do they really expect to just go get jobs, and reflect on the glory days of the campaign?
That's what happens in parties and other "conventional structures" of power are proven to be subverted, corrupted, or no longer fully trustworthy.
“You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,” said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.”
In other words, a sort of return to actual, Athenian democracy, but writ large-- and potentially doable, because of technology.
...the Asian financial collapse of 1997, the Internet bubble that burst in 2000, the subprime crisis of 2007-8 and the continuing European and American debt crisis — and the seeming inability of policy makers to deal with them or cushion their people from the shocks.
Frustrated voters are not agitating for a dictator to take over. But they say they do not know where to turn at a time when political choices of the cold war era seem hollow.
But the system as it is set up does nothing to protect the very people who make it happen. It is upon our backs that success is built, but we enjoy little of it's largesse-- we are, however, expected to endure the brunt of it when it comes crashing down.
No one is saying "end democracy", and no one is saying "do away with money". What people want is a system where money is no longer the sole measure of a human's worth, or in fact where monetary value is the sole measure of worth for anything to be held by. A tree can be useful and valued as a tree, not just as an equation of lumber value + jobs vs. potential carbon sequestration. Judging worth and value based on monetary value or monetary potential is as unethical as judging worth and value based on a person's skin color or gender-- or, as it was in the Cold War, by their political ideology.
The political left, which might seem the natural destination for the nascent movements now emerging around the globe, is compromised in the eyes of activists by the neoliberal centrism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The old left remains wedded to trade unions even as they represent a smaller and smaller share of the work force. More recently, center-left participation in bailouts for financial institutions alienated former supporters who say the money should have gone to people instead of banks.
The article wants to pretend it is about the global protests, but it is certainly a smear on our own, home-grown anti-Wall Street protests here in the United States.
In the eyes of many, the "traditional" left has been subverted. They can't be counte don to help, not completely. The "traditional" left has been found to be useful by the moneyed interests, and if they "greenwash" things enough (for example) they can tap into a marketable resource-- the thriving market of liberal-leaning consumers, who want to consume with a conscience.
But "made of 20% recycled fiber" isn't enough to buy loyalty. It's a step in the right direction, but it is just a step. And it is a blatant ploy to tap into our buying power, the only thing they are truly interested in. Capitalism funnels wealth to the rich, and democracy is a coat of paint that makes it look legitimate. We're tired of covering up real problems and real faults with the veneer of democracy's approval.
But no, it is easier to say that the protesters "hate democracy", which sounds too much like the old "they hate our freedoms!" battle cry of the War-of-the-Month-Club. And it goes back to the earlier dogwhistle of "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?"
They are trying to draw lines. Don't let them. Capitalism destroys human lives, and democracy that is perverted to that end is a mockery of the principle. And anything that questions that, or challenges it, is patriotic.