How Berners Political Revolution Wants To Bury Old School Revolution

[ancianita]

When people get suspicious of either/or viewpoints, they get more flexible in their view of the world. They get out of smug bubbles and into a zeitgeist, feel a change in the air.
They become anti-doctrinal as they open themselves up to new and unexpected alliances and new networks of power.

These people are not about being IN movements. They are about movement.

To take control of the future lies at the root of nearly every historical social change strategy. And yet what we are seeing now are movements which believe that to “let go” is the most powerful thing we can do – to let go, walk away from power, find freedom.

Many people who want to walk away from this election are not about short-sighted resentment, or putting The Individual on a pedestal. They are about what John Holloway calls Changing The World Without Taking Power, which is the name of his book that describes that identity and process.

The notion of capturing positions of power, as the Hillers hold to in this electoral structure, misses the point of these people in movement. The aim of their (political) revolution, which will go on whether or not Clinton, Sanders or Trump gain the power of the presidency, is to fundamentally change the relations of power such that there is no one-way, top-down relation, but a fluid local, bioregional power.

There is a vast area of do-it-yourself activity directed toward changing the world that does not have the state as its focus, and does not aim to gain positions of power. It’s a place where the old distinctions between reform and revolution no longer seem relevant because the question of who controls the state is no longer the focus of their attention.

Theirs is a world of inching toward a revolution in the nature of revolution -- creation, movement, the certainty of doing well by doing good – they live with hopefulness that lies in the world’s unfinishedness, their revolution is openness to improvisation and participation.

The new activism we’re seeing turns “Think globally, act locally,” on its head to become “Think locally, act globally,” because the local is one way to describe what’s under assault by transnational corporations, but the resistance is often globally networked. Much radicalism of our time – be it ranchers, cowboys, Burners, college students, public school teachers – is in celebration and defense of the local. Not all local is good, since we’ve seen that often federal impositions on local customs -- of apartheid, genital mutilation, intimidation, voter exclusion – are needed to counteract a malignant local.

Today, we see a lot of local malignancy ignored by transnational capital's adherents, and the greatest devastations are wrought by transnational capital. What we are seeing is that the local serves as the counterbalance. The local is the arena of organic human, not fictional personhood, the places in which people are heard, make a difference, understand the dynamics of David/Goliath power, do things like tag walls, meet, hold street flash events, to shake up our perspectives and hold Goliath accountable – the local is the democratizing impulse of democracy.

Local power doesn’t have to mean parochial withdrawal, intolerance or wall building, either, only a coherent foundation for navigating the larger world. Argentina's severe economic crisis, for example, inspired a rise of neighborhood and community groups to replace failed institutions -- they call it horizontalidad, horizontality. Locals in movement worldwide know what they're about.

If we can have an identity embedded in local circumstance and a role in the global dialogue, interest in networks of connection, if we lose faith in defending clear-cut borders over imagined ‘security,’ we can have global justice movement coalitions where cowboys and environmentalists have actually sat down together, with an ease of difference that doesn’t need to be eliminated, and with a sense that if the essentials of principle or goal are powerful enough there is a 'we' of old school rivals who can now work together, and that our differences are a strength, not a weakness.

We hear old school being labeled ‘dinosaurology.’ We now see in this movement the dismantling The Big from the last century, so clearly, that this century may well be called the Century of The Small. Those in movement know that the best way to resist a monolithic institution or corporation like Monsanto is not with another monolithic movement but with multiplicity itself – in local farmers, farmers’ markets, seed diversity, organic crops, integrated pest management, farm-to-table restaurants, etc.

Taking care of the The Big Essentials – food, clothing, shelter, health and education -- so that the Local can regroup its democratic strength and identity, is what the Bernie political revolution is all about. The more that old school heads in Congress understand them, the more likely they are to join them to revive this soul of democracy. That America's government would see this movement's revolution as more sustainable for humanity than are corporations -- that's the gamble that youth make in their latest push into this electoral process.

[raging moderate]

1. This is an excellent piece of writing, very thoughtful and well-informed.

There are, indeed, so many factors operating in our world, and so many different kinds of people who all have a legitimate claim on our natural resources. I have been heartened to hear so many young people who have taken the time and effort to become aware of the problems of many other groups outside of their own little parts of the world. Saving the world will be a monumental task, and we will need every bit of strength, every bit of wisdom, every bit of ingenuity, that has ever been generated by anybody. We all need to love and respect each other, and we need to keep trying, as you say, to work together, using our differences as part of our strength.

Meanwhile, we have to keep the Republicons from consolidating their power into a form of fascism. One party has shown some willingness to move beyond the rigid authoritarianism of the past and consider the rights of individuals to work together to defend themselves, recognizing, as was written, that it is these purposes for which governments have been instituted among men. The leadership of the Democratic Party has sometimes swallowed GOP lies (maybe because of bribery, maybe because of threats) such as the so-called shortage of qualified American workers, the need to overturn various dictators (mysteriously only in places where top corporations see a chance to increase profits), and the fictitious "insolvency" of the Post Office currently forced by Congress to massively over-fund its pension plan and actually required recently to decrease the cost of postage). Hillary Clinton, it is documented, did the bidding of billionaires to talk Obama into an invasion. These people do need to strengthen their backbones and grow some guts in standing up to Goldman Sachs.

However, they are still much more willing to listen to reason than the GOP, and there is a chance that they will feel some obligation to look out for the civil rights and physical well being of all Americans. Furthermore, the GOP is not just allied but actually amalgamated with massive corporate interests who are ruthless psychopaths who will not hesitate to commit mass murder to increase their opulence. I would ask that my fellow Bernie supporters think about voting for the Democratic candidate, whoever that may be, this fall.