Once again Chris Hedges sets forth an article steeped in reason and
common sense. It should be read several times by all of us.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/16/17, M Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Truthdig
>
> Building the Institutions for Revolt
>
> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/building_the_institutions_for_revolt_201
> 70115/
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> Posted on Jan 15, 2017
>
>
> By Chris Hedges
>
>
>
>
> Mr. Fish / Truthdig
>
> Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to make power
> elites afraid do not succeed. All of the movements that opened up the
> democratic space in America-the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor
> movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists and the civil
> rights movement-developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the
> centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality and
> democracy are just that. Only when power becomes worried about its survival
> does it react. Appealing to its better nature is useless. It doesn't have
> one.
>
> We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions-the press,
> labor unions, third political parties, civic and church groups, public
> broadcasting, well-funded public universities and a liberal wing of the
> Democratic Party-that were capable of responding to outside pressure from
> movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to
> save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of
> capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never addressed white
> supremacy and institutional racism or the cruelty that is endemic to
> capitalism. But they had the ability to address and ameliorate the
> suffering
> of working men and women.
>
> These liberal institutions-I spend 248 pages in my book "Death of the
> Liberal Class"
> (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131166027)
> explaining how this happened-collapsed under sustained assault during the
> past 40 years of corporate power. They exist now only in name. They are
> props in the democratic facade. Liberal nonprofits, from MoveOn
> (http://front.moveon.org/about/#.WHwG5FzRHfY ) to the Sierra Club, are no
> better. They are pathetic appendages to the Democratic Party. And the
> Democratic Party, as the community organizer Michael Gecan said, is not a
> functioning political party but "a permanent mobilization." It is propped
> up
> with corporate money and by a hyperventilating media machine. It practices
> political coronations and manipulates voters, who have no real say in party
> politics. There are, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin
> (http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sheldon_wolin_and_inverted_totalitarian
> ism_20151101 ) reminded us, no institutions left in America that can
> authentically be called democratic.
>
> But, even more ominously, the militant movements that were the real engines
> of democratic change have been obliterated by the multi-pronged assault of
> communist witch hunts and McCarthyism, along with deindustrialization, a
> slew of anti-labor laws and deregulation, and corporate seizure of our
> public and private institutions. This has left us nearly defenseless.
>
> The corporate state ignores the suffering of the majority of Americans. It
> rams through policies that make the suffering worse. This is about to get
> turbocharged under Donald Trump. Institutions, the courts among them, that
> once were able to check the excesses of power are slavish subsidiaries of
> corporate power. And the most prescient critics of corporate power-Noam
> Chomsky, Ralph Nader and others-have been blacklisted and locked out by
> corporate media, including a public broadcasting system that depends on
> corporate money.
>
> We will have to build movements and, most importantly, new, parallel
> institutions that challenge the hegemony of corporate power. It will not be
> easy. It will take time. We must not accept foundation money and grants
> from
> established institutions that seek to curtail the radical process of
> reconstituting society. Trusting in the system, and especially the
> Democratic Party, to carry out reform and wrest back our democracy ensures
> our enslavement.
>
> "Power is organized people and organized money," Gecan told me when I
> interviewed him
> (http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_talks_with_michael_gecan_
> build_organizations_empower_20170109 ) in New York recently. "Most
> activists stress organized people and forget organized money. As
> organizers,
> we stress both."
>
> "We think the issues are, in a sense, the easy part," said Gecan, who is
> the
> co-director of the Industrial Areas Foundation
> (http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org/ ) , the largest network of
> community-based organizations in the United States. He is also the author
> of
> "Going Public
> (http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/58847/going-public-by-michael-gecan
> /9781400076499/ ) : An Organizer's Guide to Citizen Action." "When we go to
> a place like East Brooklyn, or South Bronx, or the west side of Chicago,
> you
> can take a ride around the neighborhood and see many of the issues right up
> front. What we can't see is-is there a fabric of relationships among
> institutions and leaders in those areas? We spend the first year, or two,
> or
> three, building that. Identifying leaders. Identifying institutions that
> are
> actually grounded in those communities. Doing training with leaders.
> Raising
> money so that the organization doesn't run out of money right at the
> start."
>
> "We don't take government money," he said. "We want independence. We want
> ownership. We want people to have skin in the game. We want people to be
> able to walk away from any situation they want to, to confront anyone they
> want to, without worrying about having their budget being slashed or
> eliminated. So we stress both. Organized people and organized money is
> essentially building the foundation of the organization first. And then,
> once that's fairly solid, we begin identifying issues through a real,
> deliberate process of house meetings, individual meetings, soliciting to
> people. And not just doing a poll in the community. [We find out] what do
> you care about? What are you concerned about? By asking people what they
> are
> concerned about and are they willing to do something about it."
>
> This process of institution building permits organizers and activists to
> eventually pit power against power.
>
> "The decision-making in those situations is not about merit, how nice you
> are, or how deep the need is," Gecan said. "It's about do you have enough
> power to compel a reaction from the state or a reaction from the corporate
> sector. When people say what are you building around, I say we're building
> around power. People who understand power tend to have the patience to
> build
> a base, do the training, raise the money, so when they go into action they
> surprise people."
>
> The corporate press echoes the pronouncements of the power elites. It is
> blind to the undercurrents and moods of the wider society. It did not
> anticipate the election of Trump any more than it did the financial crash
> in
> 2008. It does not report on the lives of ordinary men and women. It shuts
> out their voices and renders them invisible. And it-like the power
> structure-will be among the last to know that the bankrupt social and
> political systems that sustain it are collapsing. Once the ruling ideology,
> in our case neoliberalism
> (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-proble
> m-george-monbiot ) , is understood by the public as a tool for corporate
> and
> oligarchic pillage, coercion is all the state has left.
>
> I asked Gecan what characteristics he looks for in identifying leaders.
> "Anger," he shot back. "It's not hot anger. It's not rhetorical anger. It's
> not the ability to give a speech. It's deep anger that comes from grief.
> People in the community who look at their children, look at their schools,
> look at their blocks, and they grieve. They feel the loss of that. Often,
> those people are not the best speaker or the best-known people in the
> community. But they're very deep. They have great relationships with other
> people. And they can build trust with other people because they're not
> self-promotional. They're about what the issues are in the community. So we
> look for anger. We look for the pilot light of leadership. It's always
> there. It's always burning. Good leaders know to turn it up and down
> depending on the circumstance."
>
> If we are to succeed we will have to make alliances with people and groups
> whose professed political stances are different from ours and at times
> unpalatable to us. We will have to shed our ideological purity. Saul
> Alinsky
> (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-is-saul-alinsky/ ) , whose successor, Ed
> Chambers
> (http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/edward-chambers-community-organizin
> gs-unforgiving-hero ) , was Gecan's mentor, argued that the ideological
> rigidity of the left-something epitomized in identity politics and
> political
> correctness-effectively severed it from the lives of working men and women.
> This was especially true during the Vietnam War when college students led
> the anti-war protests and the sons of the working class did the fighting
> and
> dying in Vietnam. But it is true today as liberals and the left dismiss
> Trump supporters as irredeemable racists and bigots and ignore their
> feelings of betrayal and very real suffering. Condemning those who support
> Trump is political suicide. Alinsky detested such moral litmus tests. He
> insisted that there were "no permanent enemies, no permanent allies, only
> permanent interests."
>
> "We have to listen to people unlike ourselves," Gecan said, observing that
> this will be achieved not through the internet but through face-to-face
> relationships. "And once we've built a relationship we can agitate them and
> be willing to be agitated by them."
>
> The homogenization of culture in the wake of the death of the local press
> and local civic, church and other groups has played a large part in our
> disempowerment, Gecan argues. We have lost connection with those around us.
> We do not fully understand the corporate structures of power that wreak
> havoc with our lives both nationally and in our communities. And this is by
> the design of the corporate state.
>
> "Over seventy-five years the process of community dissolution that took
> place in Back of the Yards has been mirrored in thousands of U.S.
> communities," Gecan wrote of Alinsky's first community organization, Back
> of
> the Yards Neighborhood Council
> (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/100.html ) , founded in
> 1939 in Chicago. "Everywhere the tightly-knit worlds of a dozen or so
> blocks-where workplace, church, neighborhood, recreation, tavern, and
> political affiliation were all deeply entwined-have given way to exurban
> enclaves, long commutes, gathered congregations, matchmaker websites, and
> fitness clubs filled with customers who don't know one another. A world
> where local news was critically important and closely followed-often
> delivered by local publishers and reporters and passed along by word of
> mouth-has been replaced by the constant flow of real and fake news arriving
> through social media. A world of physically imposing and present
> institutions and organizations has morphed into a culture of global
> economic
> dynamics and fitful national mobilizations built around charismatic
> figures."
>
> "You have to organize who is in front of you," Gecan said. "Not who used to
> be in front of you. In places like Chicago, Cleveland or Baltimore, the
> congregation used to be very robust. Congregations that were strong are
> weaker. We're still organizing with them but still looking at different
> institutions. Schools are institutions. They're more complicated, but
> they're institutions in those neighborhoods. We're recruiting schools in
> many places; sometimes it's housing groups. Sometimes we build new
> institutions called East Brooklyn Congregations or United Power for Action
> and Justice. We're recruiting the best of the existing, we're working with
> the existing to reconnect with people and expand. And we find new
> institutions. It has to be institutional in some way."
>
> Gecan concedes that America's future under a Trump presidency, and amid
> democratic institutions' collapse and climate change, is bleak. But he
> warned against falling into despair or apathy.
>
> "In 1980 in New York, all the liberal establishment, the entire
> establishment, was saying New York would never be as strong as it once
> was,"
> he said. "It was called benign neglect. They wrote off parts of New York
> permanently in their minds." But community groups, including Brooklyn
> Congregations, which built 5,000 low-income homes, organized to save
> themselves.
>
> "Our organizations and our leaders simply didn't accept that judgment from
> the elites," Gecan said. "Things are tough, hard, but we're going to build
> an organization. We're going to identify things we can correct and correct
> them-with government if we can, or without it. We'll raise our own money.
> We'll figure out our housing strategy. We'll hire our own developer and
> general manager. It's about being more flexible and plastic about
> solutions.
> It's not relying on what the state or market says is possible. It's
> creating
> your own options."
>
> Institution building is possible only if you "engage institutions or create
> newer and better ones-whether it's churches or civic unions," he said.
> Without these, the power in the other two sectors-corporate and
> governmental-dominates.
>
> The state, he said, has learned how to manipulate familiar protest rituals
> and render them impotent. He dismisses as meaningless political theater the
> kind of boutique activism in which demonstrators coordinate and even
> choreograph protests with the police. Activists spend a few hours, maybe a
> night, in jail and then assume they have credentials as dissidents. Gecan
> called these "fake arrests." "Everyone looks like they've had an action,"
> he
> said. "They haven't."
>
> He called the choreographed protests sterile re-enactments of the protests
> of the 1960s. Genuine protest, he said, has to defy the rules. It cannot be
> predicable. It has to disrupt power. It has to surprise those in authority.
> And these kinds of protests are greeted with anger by the state.
>
> No movement will survive, he said, unless it is built on the foundation of
> deep community relationships. Organizers must learn to listen, even to
> those
> who do not agree with them. Only then are organization and active
> resistance
> possible.
>
> "Three things have to be happening in great organizations: people have to
> be
> relating, people have to be learning, people have to be acting," he said.
> "In many religious circles, there's some learning going on, there's a
> little
> bit of relating going on, but there's no action. There's no external
> action.
> And it's killed many institutions. In a lot of activism, there's a lot of
> acting but there's not much relating or learning, so people make the same
> mistakes again and again."
>
> "I was in Wisconsin during the [Gov. Scott] Walker situation
> (http://www.occupy.com/article/protesters-descend-madison-rejecting-gov-scot
> t-walkers-anti-union-law#sthash.2xjY28Ft.dpbs ) and the reaction to it,"
> he
> said about the 2011 protests by union members and their supporters. "They
> did 23 major demonstrations. Fifty [thousand], 70 [thousand], 100,000
> people. After the second or third I said to those people, why are you doing
> all this? Because as you do these, you can't be building relationships in
> local communities. And you don't know what your own members are thinking
> about this situation. It ended up being unfortunately the case."
>
> "Can we rebuild unions?" Gecan asked. "We can. It takes time. And we're
> doing it in some parts of the country. Can we rebuild civic life in our
> cities? We have and will do more. Can we take these people on? I know we
> can. But it will take different tactics. It will take some very
> unconventional allies that will surprise people."
>
>
>
>
>
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