You Say you want a revolution

I just read across a rather depressing article on MSN about how, even if Revolution was totally justified and every single citizen of the United States believed it was needed, it could never actually happen. Needless to say, I disagree, but i think the writer raises some interesting points.

One of the most worrying parts of the article comes when he’s discussing Hurrican Katrina and the public response to it:

Americans are not particularly motivated to overthrow their government. But what if they were motivated? Would that even matter? In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, countless media whores criticized the government for not doing enough for the people of Louisiana. But let’s imagine that the government had done even less; let’s imagine that the president and most of Congress decided that New Orleans was a lost cause, barricaded all the roads into the city, and gave up. Let’s pretend they made no attempts to relocate the survivors or deliver aid, and New Orleans was allowed to devolve into a rogue dystopia that was no longer recognized as part of the union. One assumes this would prompt cataclysmic outrage; it would be no different from the state-sponsored execution of random poor people, which seems like a revolt-worthy offense. Yet if such a nightmare scenario had actually happened, what could the average middle-class resident of Boise, Idaho (or anywhere else), have done? He’d lose faith in the democratic process, and he’d possibly update his blog. But that’s about it. He has no options. He’s twenty-two hundred miles from the ruins of Bourbon Street, he’s twenty-four hundred miles from Washington, D. C., and he’s got to be at work by 9:00 a.m., because he has a house (and he likes his house).

He goes on to say that even if some individual DID want to start a revolution they would have no idea who to shoot, seeing as how the American Empire is so fucking huge that most Americans would have to drive for days just to get within shooting distance of any federal official.  And, of course, once they got there it’d be damn hard to figure out which one to shoot first.  It’s an interesting argument, not so much for what it actually says as for what it assumes about the nature of revolutions and how they happen.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t that Americans are incapable of Revolution, it’s that Americans have little or no understanding of what Revolution actually entails or how one could (should) unfold. Revolutions don’t (usually) start with a single isolated individual getting pissed off at how grossly unfair the system is and looking for someone to kill. That might be how things work in hollywood, where a lone protagonist with a gun can bring the system to its knees matrix-style, but not in the real world. In the real world Revolution, or at least any revolution worth having, is the product of countless hours of long slow boring organizing at the community level as people who are being negatively impacted by the government find a place of strength from which they can challenge existing power structures. At first that expresses as activism, often reform-oriented, but eventually – if the networks stay strong and resist co-option, people realize the limitations of the system and move to replace it with something better. Revolution requires destruction, of course, but the main work of building one is constructive. it’s only when the State decides to move in and attack the popular counter-institutions that threaten to make it irrelevant that violence plays a role.

long story short – revolution is 100% possible, we just have to want it and to be willing to turn off the television long enough to talk to our neighbors and do some serious work to build it.

Posted: August 2nd, 2007 under politrix.
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