Brainstorm: Nonviolent but Actually Effective Dissent Ideas

[FourthBase]

When you start being okay with the vine perishing, that's when you know you've become just another version of the same moral monstrosity you were trying to vanquish. When you start being obliviously, ironically, but no less abhorrently: Fascists, willing to throw hoards of un-evil people and their well-being under the bus (no shortage of children would be harmed by, say, a sudden general strike that abruptly crippled the national economy for X number of days) because fulfilling their grand narrative of universal justice for the obviously-oppressed (the less obvious, we give much less of a fuck about) demands sacrifices, eggshells, etc. And the basic defense is: "It's just too complicated to figure out a nearly-perfect route to a win-win, just too hard to even figure out a way that won't endanger masses, and the injustice is too severe to waste time doing anything more than second- or third-level thinking, it would be irresponsible to wait", even though it's been the same damn two or three levels of thinking and strategy and values for fifty years, five or ten or even fifteen decades of the fierce urgency of too-late-to-be-moral-perfectionists, must-hurry-and-act-now-or-all-hope-is-lost, must-do-something-hardcore-asap. Bullshit. It's just being too fuckin' lazy to think better, not wanting to think maybe 2 or 5 or 10 times as much, not feeling like being as hard on oneself as overcoming cognitive biases and really deconstructing groupthink requires. Being too impatient to prove one's manhood, even for the ladies. Misplaced and underthought machismo, even in the service of the fairest ideals, is grotesque -- worse, is the socio-psychological precondition for the worst of all societal transgressions everywhere. Simone Weil realized this, gradually. Camus pegs the worst of you/us leftists as just as capable of and prone to being callous, compromising, hypocritical, evil, tyrannical, conniving, bloodthirsty, powerhungry, brutal, and manipulative as the other guys. Is he wrong? (How about Orwell?) Why shouldn't Sacco and Vanzetti have been expected to spend about 99% less time shooting the shit about violence and 10000% more time figuring out shit to do and ways to do it in line with this thread's title? Why do any of us let ourselves off the hook for thinking that extra level or two or three? We spend so much time creating elaborate abstract justifications for not needing to be moral perfectionists, when all that time and more could be spent instead on the actual hard, uncomfortable, not-so-gratifying work of perfecting our analysis, our approaches, our norms, ourselves.

[FourthBase]

Do not underestimate the degree to which the left defers to an ugly math, too.

[FourthBase]

Let's pretend we are transported in time, per Quantum Leap, into the consciousnesses of Sacco & Vanzetti, per Being John Malkovich, and instead of choosing to be Galleanists who -- their subsequent railroading not withstanding -- were still motherfuckers who thought problems needed to be solved or were best solved by fucking exploding people and things with fucking bombs: We are in control of them, we can guide their thoughts, and guide them in different directions. What else could they have done, among the nearly innumerable other things they could have chosen to do instead? Our first impulse may be to call up to mind what other radicals and dissidents were doing at the time, which then forces an unnecessary juxtaposition, a false either/or that need not and must not be humored between What Those Not-Effective-Enough Do-Gooders Did and What These Aggro Dickheads Unilaterally Decided Was Imperative. There are always at least one hundred other options, and there is always time to conceive them.

[Sounder]

When you start being okay with the vine perishing, that's when you know you've become just another version of the same moral monstrosity you were trying to vanquish. When you start being obliviously, ironically, but no less abhorrently: Fascists, willing to throw hoards of un-evil people and their well-being under the bus (no shortage of children would be harmed by, say, a sudden general strike that abruptly crippled the national economy for X number of days) because fulfilling their grand narrative of universal justice for the obviously-oppressed (the less obvious, we give much less of a fuck about) demands sacrifices, eggshells, etc. And the basic defense is: "It's just too complicated to figure out a nearly-perfect route to a win-win, just too hard to even figure out a way that won't endanger masses, and the injustice is too severe to waste time doing anything more than second- or third-level thinking, it would be irresponsible to wait", even though it's been the same damn two or three levels of thinking and strategy and values for fifty years, five or ten or even fifteen decades of the fierce urgency of too-late-to-be-moral-perfectionists, must-hurry-and-act-now-or-all-hope-is-lost, must-do-something-hardcore-asap. Bullshit. It's just being too fuckin' lazy to think better, not wanting to think maybe 2 or 5 or 10 times as much, not feeling like being as hard on oneself as overcoming cognitive biases and really deconstructing groupthink requires. Being too impatient to prove one's manhood, even for the ladies. Misplaced and underthought machismo, even in the service of the fairest ideals, is grotesque -- worse, is the socio-psychological precondition for the worst of all societal transgressions everywhere. Simone Weil realized this, gradually. Camus pegs the worst of you/us leftists as just as capable of and prone to being callous, compromising, hypocritical, evil, tyrannical, conniving, bloodthirsty, powerhungry, brutal, and manipulative as the other guys. Is he wrong? (How about Orwell?) Why shouldn't Sacco and Vanzetti have been expected to spend about 99% less time shooting the shit about violence and 10000% more time figuring out shit to do and ways to do it in line with this thread's title? Why do any of us let ourselves off the hook for thinking that extra level or two or three? We spend so much time creating elaborate abstract justifications for not needing to be moral perfectionists, when all that time and more could be spent instead on the actual hard, uncomfortable, not-so-gratifying work of perfecting our analysis, our approaches, our norms, ourselves.

Wow Fourth Base, your first sentence really nails it.

As Iamwhomiam said to me, although in a different spirit; Dang, you think to much.

[ultramegagenius]

It can probably be agreed that what we all primarily seek is a de-coupling from the Moral-Monstrosity machine. This means a movement towards the gradual crystallization of every modality that honors the inalienable right to choose life and peace. The most fundamental right at the heart of this movement is the right to live in harmony with the Earth and sentient beings in the fullness of co-operation rather than commodification. This is the choice that would seem to be denied in every instance where the reasonable necessities of sane human life are made subservient to the sanctity of commodities. The immense tension between these pro-biotic and anti-biotic philosophies is well described by John McMurty.

The reasonable necessities of sane human life are most succinctly summed up by permaculture's core slogan, "Earth care, People care, Fair share." That is to say, without functional interlocking ecosystems, human life is not possible. Without a fair distribution of our productive surplus, the systems of life cannot function sustainably, let alone regeneratively. It is not hard to see that permaculture is diametrically opposed to the obvious trajectory of the Moral-Monstrosity machine: an inter-planetary rapacious empire of cancer-ridden cyborg half-men slaving away inside the confines of a black Saturnian cube, a la the Borg. If you are familiar with the work of Joseph Farrell, you know his theory that our imperial expansion into space is most likely driven by the fact that it has already been collatoralized, i.e., the great power factions have already borrowed untold trillions against the future domination & commodification of outer-space. In retrospect, this logic similarly applies to the fashion in which the world was colonized by the Great Powers and delineates some of the unspoken sub-structures that continue to impel our subservience to commodities.

We do not stand in opposition to the social edifice that rests upon the secret agreements of the cryptocracy. Our relationship to the Moral-Monstrosity machine is one of pure coincidence; a familiar concept to its apologists. The movement of de-coupling does not have to be declared in any court, in any fashion whatsoever because the Nazi Death Cult of late modern Capitalism is a total aberration in every possible regard and is unworthy of address. Likewise, participants in the movement are under no obligation to respond to the summonses of the cryptocracy; we never were nor ever shall be its subjects (cf., Louis Althusser). There can be no elaboration of the defense that living beings have a right to supersede an anti-biotic system because anything else presents an intolerable ontological contradiction. The sanctity of life is a priori to all forms of language and expression.

Insofar as the rotting, zombified vestiges of Capitalism must be rhetorically engaged with during the transition process, it is best to keep a few tenets in mind. The private/public distinction (well elaborated by John Rawls), is a cynical fabrication as is the supposed separation of values from facts. These mythical separations are little more than psyops conducted in a multi-generational class war. Subscription to this mythology need not be professed nor contested, and should not impede the vigorous co-ordination of the movement at any level desired for the strategy or tactic in play. Responding to the cryptocracy's legal codes and appellations will be necessary for many of the movement's operations, but this expediency can be shed as the real material base of the relations of production reaches pro-biotic maturity.

Strategically, the movement must take a two-pronged approach to the liberation of sentient beings on Earth. This derives from the fact that the Neo-liberal Tapeworm is above all else an inexorable apparatus of centralization and simultaneous expansion, i.e., permanent growth. The most important strategic objective is to establish local, sustainable relationships with real people and places. Insofar as these relationships become established, they become nodes in a network that surges organically. These relationships will require local currencies, the shareconomy, total transparency of institutions, freedom of assembly, the positive rights to clean food, air, water, bandwidth, and biodiversity, etc. One rule of permaculture is to cycle through the resources on site before resorting to importation or waste disposal. This applies politically in the sense of maximizing every possible alliance and coalition to pick all of the low-hanging fruit before resorting to the obverse side of the movement's strategy. Which is, that when the organic growth of the grassroots movement cannot circumvent, co-op, undermine, sufficiently reform, or politely ignore an obstacle set out by the anti-biotic power structure, give it a nudge.

The pace, tempo, and severity of nudging operations must take a couple of factors into account. Firstly, would toppling a barrier in a given time-frame qualitatively improve the reach and function of the movement's network, would it clear the way to establishing a parallel institution within the framework of de-coupling, and/or would it serve the "controlled demolition" of one of the Neo-Liberal/Nazi Death Cult's odious appendages? Secondly, can it be reasonably assumed that the people and places potentially affected will have recourse to novel or customary support systems, as well as avenues of political redress? If the preceding pre-conditions are reasonably met, then nudging operations may commence. The mindset is not to shatter the obstacle, but to redirect its forces deftly, put it off balance, make it sway ponderously in the winds of public discourse until seeming to teeter over of its own accord. This is where the adherence to non-violence can be stated unequivocally, in its proper context. The context I speak of is the agonic tradition elaborated by Hannah Arendt. It would have been premature to endorse non-violence as situated within some "Left" tradition, rather than in a pro-biotic movement that is as fresh as the challenges of our present moment.

All speech acts and their derivatives being performances within the metaphorical agora, there can be no limit, provided that the lives of sentient beings are not placed at undue risk. The best basis for consensus within the movement's expanding network is to adhere to its principles while deploying its tactics for specific goals. Raising awareness, demanding entitlements, occupying hostile ground, and the like, have proven to be ineffectual if not inspirational missteps by so-called progressives. The permanent growth, debt-as-money pyramid scheme as well as the central vanguard party are both relics of history's dustbin. The strength of the strategy presented here can best be encapsulated by the flash-mob. While Eugene Sharp & co. may have given it a go in Egypt and Kiev, the paucity of their progress is directly correlated to the opaque and nefarious ends of their puppet masters. In the domestic case, the flash-mob as well as the full tool-kit of activist tactics serve a deeper agenda, without hidden loyalties to foreign provocateurs.

For example, let's imagine that in the same county someone got busted for selling raw milk, the cops beat a homeless man to death, the utility company is forcing smart-meters on everybody, and the mayor's talking some austerity smack about closing libraries and whatnot. Panic and hold a big protest rally against everything? I think not. You can see your coalition forming issue by issue: foodies, minorities, pro-privacy penny-pinchers, AARP/PTA/etc. Now what? Construct your agent net and start gathering intel: who has connections, and who has skills? Each sub-group within the broader coalition will have a unique surge potential for each operation. Maybe the IT guy only cares about half the issues, or a sympathetic member of the town council holds a grudge against another coalition member, and so on. That's where an organizer's skills are most valuable. As a couple of your campaigns build momentum, the coalition will take shape and reveal its hidden potentials as well as pitfalls. The success of more than one campaign will serve as proof of concept and leave an impression on everyone involved.

You will need to establish multiple tracks according to what areas require legislative reform, economic redirection, special investigation, cultural outreach, and regional coordination. Let's say you've sussed out the usual coterie of politicians, law firms, bondholders, and special interests. In phase two, present your demands to whomever is offering resistance. When they're not met start the escalation: flash-mobs at town hall meetings, recall elections, e-mail hacks, protest vigils at their front doors, custard pies, boycotts and counter-adverts for non-compliant businesses, lawsuits involving the ACLU and EFF, abortion clinic safety corridors for raw-milk customers and library volunteers. If the local news station wont cover it, storm the station. The bag of sticks is full to bursting. There are plenty of carrots too, though. Did a target comply? Throw them a barbecue, walk their dog, assemble a week long labor surge to build an addition to their home, fund raise for them through your web portal-- once compliance and follow up are assured. The key is to demonstrate to your coalition that with their combined talents a variety of progressive goals can be met through precisely, methodically applied pressures and rewards. Document everything and everyone because the entire regional, national, and global networks will always need good intel to be effective.

It's a dirty job but there's a kajillion other planets you could've chosen to incarnate on if you weren't up to it. The above example is at the town or county level, but it doesn't end there. As a pulse and rhythm are established between the two prongs of the strategy, debt jubilee, public banking, fungal bio-remediation of superfund sites, 3-D printed adobe passive solar housing for all, decentralized electric production, truth & reconciliation, and so much more will become feasible projects. The scope and scale of the movement's objectives will grow as each local node in the network comes online. The true power of no-limit agonics derives from the natural human tension between conformity and self-liberation. Freedom is an eternal memory, whereas conformity will rupture as the fractures in today's modernity become as preposterous as they are pernicious. As the no-limit agonists boost our message throughout the media and cultural landscape, every problematic institution we see today will begin to quiver and liquify. This is because grasping our innate right to tune out the irresponsible fools that have been prancing about for decades, instead of playing their language games, is the very definition of leadership. As Arendt describes, true vision and leadership are far more powerful than mere violence. It's already started, you just have to learn to see from an ever so slightly new angle.

[FourthBase]

I'm used to hitting home runs, and basking a little in the appreciation of teammates, and best of all I love instigating a rally, a streak of great thought in others, triples, doubles, walks, productive outs, and occasionally back-to-back-to-back home runs. I had never before imagined someone following up a bases-clearing home run of mine with...a 10-run super-slam? That was awesome beyond my capacity to respond yet. I'll need some time to truly comprehend that, ultramegagenius, it deserves as much time as needed for 100% absorption.

Clubhouse talk:
Can ultramegagenius think?
(Obligatory pause.) Yes, lol, he or she most certainly fucking can!
Any claims to being RI's thinking-champion I have ever toyingly entertained...
Conceded for the foreseeable future to ultramegagenius.
The bar has been raised, ladies and gents!
Get yer umbrellas out!

[ultramegagenius]

Wow, high praise Mr. FourthBase. Thanks very much for reading & responding, within your timely and pertinent thread. I see some issues that could use some editing above, but I'll stop rambling and see what engagements follow instead.

[slimmouse]

Amongst other things, Id probably be throwing our money ( which equals our time,and labour which they now almost completely, yet somewhat miraculously own - if you don't believe that try looking at the numbers)) into some serious think tanks of independent Scientists, scholars, accountants, lawyers - the full spectrum almost, into finding ways of slowing down the raping of the planet, whilst at the same time fitting the overall "real world" economics of the situation into the equation.

The ultimate goal of course being every last individuals " inherited-through-evolution" birthright to free, clean, renewable- energy technology .

I would also like the naysayers to appreciate that despite their claims that such wonders dont currently exist, they actually do.

They just dont get the chance right now.

Oh and just another little ditty that sprang into my mind courtesy of the next collapse of quantum concsiousness which certainly influences, if not wholly dictates "quo vadis ?" ( where goest thou?)

"Revolution is revolting. Evolution is evolving."

[Sounder]

ultramegagenius, I knew you were smart, but now I’m thinking you really are ultra mega genius. What I like best is your writing is 100% in keeping with OP intentions.

The key that you guys share here is the notion of the sanctity of all life. Unfortunately the concept of sanctity feels a bit foreign to modern sensibilities.

I say keep on it, help bring sanctity back into fashion.



I know it's not 'dissent', but it connects with the sanctity issue so I expect it's OK for the thread.

http://www.infiniteunknown.net/2014/01/ ... ple-homes/

From the article:

“In eight years, Utah has quietly reduced homelessness by 78 percent, and is on track to end homelessness by 2015.

How did Utah accomplish this? Simple. Utah solved homelessness by giving people homes. In 2005, Utah figured out that the annual cost of E.R. visits and jail says for homeless people was about $16,670 per person, compared to $11,000 to provide each homeless person with an apartment and a social worker. So, the state began giving away apartments, with no strings attached. Each participant in Utah’s Housing First program also gets a caseworker to help them become self-sufficient, but the keep the apartment even if they fail. The program has been so successful that other states are hoping to achieve similar results with programs modeled on Utah’s.”

[ultramegagenius]

Thanks Sounder. I tried to re-register with a less bombastic name but I couldn't figure it out.

Anywho, I was trying to think about "bringing the sanctity of life back into fashion." As best I can recall, that type of appreciation seems to be a more or less ineffable property emergent from 30+ years of experience on Earth. Searching for a way to convey that value mostly led me to formulate it as a series of negative reactions to tragedy and horror. Ex., my reaction to the first post I read on RI: all about McMartin Daycare. Sticking with the negative reaction to its conclusion, here we see John McMurtry et al. lucidly describing how people are literally kept in a death spiral so that the commodity form can cycle through perpetual growth: Zeitgeist Excerpt

However, negativity, fear-porn, and popular escapism are not novel subjects here. What struck me as the first ray of light ever glimpsed in the post-Bush v. Gore world was the following. Some people are pursuing lifestyles that can regenerate the environment as well as the invisible structures of social relationship. This isn't some green-tech delusion that freezing our current state would be sustainable, but an actual process of healing and regeneration. Here's Will Allen showing off his inner-city fish & veg producing green house: Growing Power

The latter affords one instance within a whole field of human activity that yields a positive vision worth striving for. Seeing that this is already happening in discreet pockets certainly had a very different vibe than all of the reactionary doom 'n gloom tunnel vision I was accustomed to. Seeing it up close in person is obviously way more moving. Nevertheless, here's some videos of other jazzy projects that are exhilarating and tantalizing:

Paul Stamets on using mycelium to reverse pollution on land

John & Nancy Todd on doing the same with wetlands plants in water tanks

Geoff Lawton on how to set up a self-perpetuating food forest

Some kids in Portland ripping out pavement in favor of community gardens

Some dude revives a metric fuckton of trees in the Niger Republic

Toby Hemenway performs an archaeology of knowledge regarding civilization's development during that tiny sliver of human evolution reverently referred to as "recorded history"

Cheers!

[Nordic]

Look what some places have decided to do to the NSA -- cut off their water and/or power.

I advocated this long ago, and when Occupy began on Wall Street I was really hoping somebody was going to be able to do this.

Cut their electricity. Don't let anyone in or out.

Just shut them down like that.

You know "they" have already thought of that, because guess what building shone like a beacon when all the power was out to NYC? Goldman fucking Sachs.

Even with them there's a way to shut them down. Their generators probably run on diesel, which has to be continuously supplied. Shut it off and the gennies die when they run out of fuel.

They're already waging war on us, full-scale. Fracking is destroying our water supplies, so they can enslave us even more by selling us water in bottles and trucks. Water they control. Nestlé has basically admitted this is their goal, and they're already starting the process.

This has become about self defense. Basic as that.

[ultramegagenius]

You seen 'dis? http://google-africa.blogspot.se/2013/03/announcing-new-tv-white-spaces-trial-in.html Piggybacking on unused analogue signal for ad-hock data transmission? Seems like a useful trick to learn.

[Luther Blissett]

The strikes sweeping Germany are here to stay
Wolfgang Streeck

As pay gaps widen and conditions deteriorate, German public sector and service workers are turning to once-unthinkable industrial action

German strikes once seemed like German jokes: a contradiction in terms. But no more: this year, Europe’s largest economy is on course to set a new record for industrial action, with everyone from train drivers, kindergarten and nursery teachers and post office workers staging walkouts recently. The strike wave is more than a conjunctural blip: it is another facet of the inexorable disintegration of what used to be the “German model”.

Good economic conditions play a part, but unions in the thriving export industries are not the ones that are striking these days. Strikes cluster in domestic services, especially the public sector, and indications are that they are here to stay.

In the old days, the powerful unions of the metalworkers set the pace for wage increases throughout the economy. But the last time IG Metall went on a nationwide strike was in 1984. In the 1990s, its members, in particular those in the large car factories, learned the hard way that manufacturing jobs could more easily than ever be moved abroad, to China or the formerly communist eastern Europe.

International competition is now no longer just about market share, but also employment. It did not take long for the union leadership to notice this. Fear of unemployment, incidentally, accounts also for German manufacturing workers’ unwillingness to contribute to macroeconomic balance under European monetary union by pushing for higher wages in order to bring down the German export surplus.

Today, the action has shifted to services, where job export is more difficult. But other factors also account for the rise of industrial disorder. Since unification, public employers, in pursuit of fiscal consolidation, have broken up Germany’s peculiar public sector collective bargaining regime, which covered everyone from refuse collectors to professors and generated, essentially, the same yearly wage increases for all. Moreover, several occupations – including train drivers, teachers and postal workers – lost the uniquely German employment status of Beamter, of civil servants without a right to strike but with lifelong tenure and guaranteed pay raises in line with the rate of economic growth.

Furthermore, progressive privatisation of public services, combined with unemployment and the de-unionisation that came with it, increasingly placed public sector wages under competition, leading to hitherto unknown problems for trade unions, caused by what was rapidly becoming a two-tier wage system.

Another development that contributed to industrial conflict was the rise of new occupations, especially in childcare and care for the elderly. Government rhetoric on the indispensability and moral virtue of their work notwithstanding, they tend to be poorly paid and their employment is often precarious. Care workers have to seek their place in a wage structure that is profoundly in flux. Unless they organise – for which they can turn to Verdi, the vast public and private service sector union – they may have to make do with the warm words of politicians who, hard-pressed to balance their budgets, will not necessarily follow up with pay and employment conditions in line with the skills required for quality service in the new occupations.

Add to this the fact that technological progress offers employers opportunities to put pressure on previously privileged occupations, such as airline pilots, air traffic controllers and train drivers. Typically, they are asked to accept lower pay, inferior working conditions and less secure employment on the grounds that their jobs are being deskilled by advancements in information-processing technology. In the longer run, they may even be made redundant altogether – a prospect that paradoxically contributes to wage militancy as severance pay and unemployment benefit are calculated on a worker’s final wage.

All of this results in a broad erosion of formal and informal wage norms that for several decades kept the peace in German capitalism. Rising wage differentials and a changing occupational structure cause potentially explosive disagreements on relativities. Where there used to be equal increases for everyone, following the settlement in the metal industry, there is stagnation in exposed sectors and declining wages in large segments of the service sector.

Another part of the picture is enormous, Anglo-American-style increases in top management salaries, especially, but by no means exclusively, in finance. This in a country where income differentials between workers and management used to be low. Skyrocketing managerial pay is out of joint with the experience of the vast majority of households, who suffer not only from stagnant or declining wages and deteriorating employment conditions, but also from cuts in public services and benefits. This makes appeals to workers for wage restraint for the benefit of the public and the economy sound hypocritical to many.

The German wage-setting system is approaching a condition of normlessness, similar to what Britain experienced in the 1970s. Then, the Oxford sociologist John Goldthorpe diagnosed a state of industrial anomie: a fundamental absence of consensus on legitimate principles of distribution between capital and labour, as well as between groups of workers.

The German government, with its social-democratic labour minister, is trying to suppress surging industrial conflict by curtailing the right to organise and strike by making strikes of sectional trade unions – like the train drivers – illegal. But this will fail, very likely in the constitutional court and certainly in practice, in a world in which the structure of firms and sectors is no longer supportive of industrial unionism and its doctrine of “one workplace, one union”, and where train drivers, pilots and others will feel entitled to defend themselves if necessary by going on strike, whatever the law may say.

[norton ash]

Nonviolent but Actually Effective Dissent = GENERAL STRIKE and Targeted Boycott. So close, and yet.

[FourthBase]