PART ONE OF A SERIES.
 |
| President John F. Kennedy, The COM Library, 2009 |
Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793, but regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.
- Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951
The militarisation and regimentation of the Libya rebellion was in part the result of Gadaffi's framing of events as a civil war, as well as existing geographical grievances within the state structure. Civil disobedience only works when the state cares about the rule of law - hence, what worked in Tunisia and Egypt will not work in Libya nor Syria. In contrast, the anonymous, pseudonymous and fluid nature of the internet was subverted when Julian Assange became the "leader" of Wikileaks. In giving a face to the amorphous site for whistle-blowing he completely destroyed all the advantages as he went through the courts under charges of sexual assault. As Assange and Wikileaks are now indistinguishable in the public consciousness, he would be doing everyone a favour by shutting-up. Before him the enemy was truth, now it's a blonde egotist.
 |
| Assange / Tyler |
We're all waiting for deliverance - not spiritually, but politically. In all systems with pretensions toward democracy, political action is synonymous with voting, a regimented process permitted every four or five years by which the state maintains monopoly. It's a fallacy to say that voting is the wielding of political power, rather it is the surrender of power to an elite. The duopolistic vacillations of the electorate every few election cycles is a better illusion than a monopoly of the type that directs China. True power resides in elite circles while the nation is fed a pseudo-democratic façade. Representative democracy is the system by which decisions are made by someone else which hardly meets the definition of 'rule of the people' unless you add 'every now and then by consent' in Ancient Greek. When someone else makes all the decisions for you it's called childhood.
The apex of state authority is totalitarianism and direct democracy is the only means by which the state will be prevented from achieving that because there will be no state to reach so far. In order to implement direct democracy the problem of deliberation must be overcome. Where the state has a population of several million it is effectively impossible to assemble such a number to discuss legislation. The only solution is the decentralisation of government power, devolve and devolve again until it is possible to assemble and achieve reasonable and accessible debate. Corralling several million people to elect a few hundred and expect them to work towards delivering is the quandary we find ourselves and the frequently touted 'e-democracy' is nothing but an addendum that fails to address the real matter behind the lack of participation in liberal democracies: voting is not participation.
There are of course pre-requisites that must be met for this to be anything other than hypothetical, unlike the world of electoral politics where heaven on earth is just an election away. The two most important are that everyone have the education to participate cogently and purposefully, and everyone have the time to attend these functions. This would mean, firstly, the transformation of the education system away from producing minimally-informed automata for deployment in the workplace toward rational and critically-thinking citizens; and secondly, the reduction of the emphasis on economic activity as the only meaningful activity in society. These are naturally opposed as the entire point of the eight hour day/five day week in the 21st century is to explicitly dissuade (deny) participation, and that nothing will exist in society that does not also enrich the economic and political elites. All the national services have been or will soon be sold off to private groups, and in time society itself will exist to extract profit. This is why David Cameron's 'Big Society' is a non-starter, it's a ploy to alleviate the government of social obligations and simultaneously free up a chunk of the national budget. Here we see why action through established bodies (parliament, congress, etc) is unproductive - they have all been compromised.
This is not to say that any system of government will forever prevent elites from emerging. The United States in its revolution simply replaced British elites with their own colonial ones. Britain retained its aristocracy and gained another layer through the nineteenth century. The French and Russians wiped theirs out in bloody revolution only to gain entirely new ones. They all emerged from the concentration of capital through industrialisation. As political power can be bought, democracy has in all instances been subverted and the people dis-empowered. It doesn't matter what were the founding principles of the Chartism movement, the American Revolution, French Revolution, or Russian Revolution - we, today, cannot rely on the long-dead to save us with the systems they left us. The only solutions are our own reforms and revolutions.
A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.Where the checks and balances of the system fail or are undermined, it is the media that should immediately alert the people as expected of the fourth estate. Unfortunately the infantilisation of the media results in prolefeed. Had the Daily Telegraph spent less time with the circus element of 'bread & circuses' maybe it would have noticed the expenses scandal a bit earlier.
If it all sounds insurmountable (if, for example, there is no hope of the North Koreans deposing the Kim dynasty), remember the citizenry never need rise up, as is their natural right, if they never divest power. To return to the Arab Spring; I think, from a worldwide perspective, it should be understood as a regional manifestation of a larger loose movement against authoritarianism whether it be governmental or corporate.
···
The King has said he's gonna put a tax on tea, and that's the reason y'all Americans drink coffeeAs an outside observer it's difficult to pass accurate or impartial comment on political developments in the United States, but it would seem the bizarre 'Tea Party' could only be produced in a country with a warped media and severely crippled education system - two things Thomas Jefferson, of Founding Fathers fame, warned against. Amongst all the world's movements railing against elitism, the Tea Party may well be the only one of note being funded and controlled by another faction of that very elite. Despite appropriating revolutionary-era symbology, they are in fact a restorationist movement attempting to put their (right-wing) man back on the throne. They are not a movement out to destroy the throne. The elites they wail about are simply the Democrats in the White House, as if the nation only went to shit the minute Obama walked through the door.
It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.- Thomas Frank, BBC News Online
···
We see that the greatest opposition to transformation comes from the economic elite, which is the other side of the coin, so to speak. Follow the money...[1693;23;6.15]
No comments:
Post a Comment