Lech Walesa was once asked how Solidarity began. He answered that Solidarity started by talking loud at the bus stops.
Now that Shakespeare's Sister (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2005/09/coalition-of-left.html) and others (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/10/1/154154/364) are beginning to talk about an American Solidarity, it might be good to remember the Hungarian writer Konrad Gyorgy and his great book Antipolitics.
My notes below the fold.
Antipolitics by George Konrad
NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984
(82) "The greatest act on behalf of freedom is to behave toward everyone as though we were free men - even toward those whom we fear. If we act that way with them, they will think we are not really afraid of them."
(96-97) "I am speaking out because I feel confined by the Iron Curtain and the web of censorship restriction that has grown up along with it. I know I may be locked up if tensions mount and the regime becomes more stringent. Most of the world is poor and military waste infuriates me. I loathe a culture that represents preparation to kill millions of people as a patriotic obligation."
(109) "How great a role the state budget is to play in redistributing national income - a large one (as in communism), a moderate one (as in social democracy), or a relatively small one (as in liberalism) - is not the sort of question that can be answered by force of arms. The debate between communism and liberalism will not be decided by the death of one human being or a billion. Whether market economy or redistributive economy is more productive, and by how many percentage points, is a matter of empirical study."
(111) "Our technicians are experts in weaponry; our social scientists are experts in ideological war. Bright people acting like moral imbeciles. Unless the academic world can acquire economic, moral, and intellectual autonomy, a third world war seems to me inevitable. In an immature world, someone has to assume the mantle of responsible adult authority. Our political and military leaders do not much aspire to this role."
(123) "Autonomy and solidarity are the root values of every democratic ideology."
(129) "I know of no way for Eastern Europe to free itself from Russian military occupation except for us to occupy them with our ideas."
(132-133) "We have to do without democratic political institutions, and so we do without them. Whether or not we give a name to our friendly get-togethers is unimportant. If they have no name, they can't be banned. We have no Solidarity, but we can still have solidarity, which can't be suspended. Friendship can't be outlawed. Our organizations are networks of sympathy; we have no headquarters and no leaders, so it is harder to touch us. We are crafty, cautious game; we don't make it any easier for the hunter to bag us."
(137-138) "Workplace and local community self-government, based on personal contact, exercised daily, and always subject to correction, have a greater attraction in our part of the world than multiparty representative democracy because, if they have the choice, people are not content with voting once every four years just to choose their deputy or the head of the national government. That somehow seems very little when people hope that, by taking a part in the affairs of the community, they can gain a voice in their own destiny.
"When there is parliamentary democracy but no self-administration, the political class alone occupies the stage. The people's role is limited to choosing, from among various candidates, those who will shine upon this stage. The visible part of the stage is the screen. The politician talks, the viewer listens. Until the next election, the viewer has only the same rights as the citizen of Eastern Europe: he can turn off the television. The interesting thing about direct democracy is that the audience takes an active part, too.
"The message is clear in the resolutions drawn up by the workers' councils during the Hungarian revolution of 1956: multiparty parliamentary democracy is essential; self-governance in every concrete community is essential. democracy is essential at every level. It occurred to no one to expatiate on how this would be a good thing at some levels but a bad thing at other levels. It was the dramaturgical function of 1956 to state the essential, without beating around the bush. Democracy is needed in factory management, in the government, and in relations with other governments. We need it in self-defense, so that others will not be able to humiliate, ruin, occupy, and terrorize us.
"The notion of self-governing factories and cities, not subject to Party authority, is at least as attractive as that of a division of the political class into two or more party leaderships which would then compete for ministerial posts, appealing for votes by means of advertising, media publicity, and sonorous speeches.
"We can defend ourselves against the political class's monopoly if we ourselves manage our real business as far as possible - we whose lives are directly affected, we who know something about it because we live in the midst of it. We may sometimes mistake our interests, but less often perhaps than those who know better than we do where our interests lie and who use informers to remind us that we had better believe they know better."
(217) "We have an interest in seeing that intellectual ability is valued most highly. This is the global conspiracy of the international intellectual elite - the first conspiracy in history that doesn't need to be kept secret. It is a conspiracy against the global coalition of aggressive imbecility. Let no one deceive us into thinking that the aggressive imbeciles mouth their vicious inanities against each other. They are allies; two dictators making war on each other are hand and glove to the extent that they jointly call attention to themselves and use the other's existence as an excuse to silence opposition at home."
(226) "It is my impression today, at the end of the second millennium, that we have to be adults; otherwise there's going to be trouble. This time it is not a matter of noble adolescents rebelling against wicked adults. The last rationalized adolescent rebellion, that of the 1960s, has been weighed and found wanting. I don't see in youth culture an alternative to the prevailing claustrophobia. The open meditation of mature men and women is needed. It won't bother me if the adolescents aren't interested. The time is coming, quietly but perceptibly, for the learners to start teaching, as soon as they are ready."
(230-233) "Antipolitics is the political activity of those who don't want to be politicians and who refuse to share in power. Antipolitics is the emergence of independent forums that can be appealed to against political power; it is a counterpower that cannot take power and does not wish to. Power it has already, here and now, by reason of its moral and cultural weight. If a notable scholar or writer takes a ministerial post in a government, he thereby puts his previous work aside. Henceforth he must stand his ground as a representative of his government, and in upholding his actions against the criticisms of democratic antipolitics he may not use his scholarly or literary distinction as either a defense or an excuse.
"Antipolitics and government work in two different dimensions, two separate spheres. Antipolitics neither supports nor opposes governments; it is something different. Its people are fine right where they are; they form a network that keeps watch on political power, exerting pressure on the basis of their cultural and moral stature alone, not through any electoral legitimacy. That is their right and their obligation,but above all it is their self-defense. A rich historical tradition helps them exercise their right.
"Antipolitics is a rejection of the power monopoly of the political class. The relationship between politics and antipolitics is like the relationship between two mountains: neither one tries to usurp the other's place; neither one can eliminate or replace the other. If the political opposition comes to power, antipolitics keeps at the same distance from, and shows the same independence of, the new government. It will do so even if the new government is made up of sympathetic individuals, friends perhaps; indeed, in such cases it will have the greatest need for independence and distance.
"In his thinking, the antipolitician is not politic. He doesn't ask himself whether it is a practical, useful, politic thing to express his opinion openly. In contrast with the secrecy of the leadership, antipolitics means publicity; it is a power exercised directly over society,through civil courage, and one that differs by definition from any present or future power of the state.
"Antipolitics means perspicacity; it means ineradicable suspicion toward the mass of political judgments that surround us. Often these judgments are simply aggression in another form. We shouldn't forget that older men whose physical and nervous energies are failing are especially prone to intellectual aggression of the most savage and relentless kind, though always in the name of noble ideals. Spiritual authority is the practice of this kind of antipolitical understanding.
"But what does spiritual authority have to offer that is positive? How is it anything more than sheer negativity? It asserts the worth of human life as a value in itself, not requiring further justification. It respects human beings' fear of death. it views the lives of people of other countries and cultures as equal in value to those of our countrymen. it refuses to license killing on any political grounds whatever. I regard the commandment `Thou shalt not kill' as an absolute command. I have never killed, I want to avoid killing, yet it's not impossible that situations may arise in which I will kill. If I do, I will be a murderer and will consider myself one. Murderers must expiate their crimes.
"Antipolitics looks kindly on the ecumenical variety of religions and styles and doesn't believe that the condition for the existence of one cultural reality is the extinction of another.
"Antipolitics prefers qualitative competition to silly quantitative questions about the who is stronger. Who is stronger is really of no interest. For the antipolitican, it is more interesting to know whether a community produces an intelligent and honest portrait of itself, not how much technical power it commands.
"Antipolitics asserts the right of every community to defend itself, with adequate defensive weapons, against occupiers. It is a great misfortune to have to fire on occupiers. We would becomes murderers ourselves in so doing, but it may happen that we will decide we have to be murderers."