"The Power Elite"

Economist's View

"The Power Elite"

Are the boards of major corporations, and the elite and 

powerful more generally, too interconnected to fail?:

Power elites after fifty years, by Daniel Little: When C. Wright Mills wrote The Power Elite in 1956, we lived in a simpler time. And yet, with a few important exceptions, the concentration of power that he described continues to seem familiar by today's standards. The central idea is that the United States democracy -- in spite of the reality of political parties, separation of powers, contested elections, and elected representation -- actually embodied a hidden system of power and influence that negated many of these democratic ideals. The first words of the book are evocative:

The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. 'Great changes' are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.

And a page or two later, here is how he describes the "power elite":

The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequence than the decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.

Mills offers a sort of middle-level sociology of power in America. He believes that power in the America of the 1950s centers in the economic, political, and military domains -- corporations, the state, and the military are all organized around networks of influence at the top of which stands a relatively small number of extremely powerful people. (It seems that Mills's description of the military is less apt today; perhaps not surprising, given that Mills was writing in the middle of the Cold War.) Power is defined as the ability to achieve what one wants over the opposition of others; and the levers of power are the great institutions in society -- corporations, political institutions, and the military. And the thesis is that a relatively compact group of people exercise hegemony in each of these areas. Moreover, power leads often to wealth, in that power permits firms and individuals to gain access to society's wealth. So a power elite is often also an economic elite.

The central thrust of the book stands in sharp opposition to the fundamental assumption of then-current democratic theory: the idea that American democracy is a pluralist system of interest groups in which no single group is able to dominate all the others (Robert Dahl (1959), A Preface to Democratic Theory). Against this pluralistic view, Mills postulates that members of mass society are dominated, more or less visibly, by a small group of powerful people in the elite. (See an earlierposting on power as influence for discussion of how power works.)

So what is Mills's theory, exactly? It is that there is a small subset of the American population that (1) possess a number of social characteristics in common (for example, elite university educations, membership in certain civic organizations); (2) are socially interconnected with each other through marriage, friendship, and business relationship; (3) occupy social positions that give them a durable ability to make a large number of the most momentous decisions for American society; (4) are largely insulated from effective oversight from democratic institutions (press, regulatory system, political constraint). They are an elite; they are a socially interconnected group; they possess durable power; and they are little constrained by open and democratic processes.

And, of course, there needs to be a theory about recruitment and the social mechanisms of steering given individuals into the elite group. Is it family background? Is it the accident of attendance at Yale? Is it a meritocracy through which talented young people eventually grasp the sinews of power through their own achievement in the organizations of power? We need to have an account of the social means of reproduction through which a set of power relations is preserved and reproduced throughout generational change.

What is interesting in rereading Mills's classic book today, is how scarce the empirical evidence is within the analysis. It is not really an empirical study at all, but rather a reflective essay on how this sociologist has been led to conceptualize American society, based on his long experience and study. The most empirical chapter is the section on chief executives of corporations; Mills provides an historical and quantitative narrative of the rise and consolidation of the corporation over the prior 75 years. But overall, there is quite a bit of descriptive assertion in the book; relatively little analysis of the social mechanisms that reproduce this social order; and very little by way of empirical validation of the analysis as a whole.

So how does it look today? To what extent is there a compact set of powerful people in contemporary America who have a disproportionate ability to bend the future to their interests and desires? One thing is strikingly clear: the concentration of wealth in America has increased significantly since 1956. Edward Wolff provides a summary graph for the percentage of wealth owned by the top 1% of wealth holders since 1920 inTop Heavy: The Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It. In 1955 the top 1% held 30% of the nation's wealth; from 1970 to 1980 this percent declined to about 22%; and from the Reagan administration forward the percentage climbed past its previous highs to about 38% in 2000. So plainly there is an economic super-elite in the United States. This is a group that benefits from durable privileges and inequalities of access to wealth and income.

But this isn't exactly what Mills had in mind; he was interested in a powerelite -- a fairly compact group of people who had the ability to make fundamental decisions in the three large areas of modern life that he highlights. And though he doesn't say very much about this point, he implies that it is an interconnected group -- through interlocking directorships in corporations, for example. So how can we assess the degree to which contemporary society in the United States is run through such a system? Is there a power elite today?

In one sense it is obvious what the answer is. Corporations continue to have enormous influence on our society -- banks, energy companies, pharmaceutical companies, food corporations. In fact, the collective power of corporations in modern societies is surely much greater than it was fifty years ago, through direct economic action and through their ability to influence laws and regulations. Their directors and CEOs do in fact constitute a small and interlocked portion of the population. And these leaders continue to have great ability to determine social outcomes through their "private" decisions about the conduct of the corporation. Moreover, as we have learned only too well in the past year, there is very little regulative oversight over their decisions and choices. So the existence of a "power elite" is almost a visible fact in today's world.

But to get more specific -- and to make more precise comparisons over time -- it seems that we need some way of identifying and quantifying the idea of a sociologically real "power elite." One way of trying to do that is by making use of the tools of social network analysis. For example, here is a network graph of corporate America compiled by kiwitobes. What the graph demonstrates is that the boards of America's largest corporations are populated with directors who overlap substantially across companies; there is a high degree of interconnectedness across the boards of directors of major corporations. So this bears out part of Mills's thesis in today's corporate social reality.

But even more compelling would be a study that doesn't exist yet -- a social network map that represents something like the whole population of a community, linking individuals to the institutions in which they occupy a position of power. The vast majority of the population would exist in single points at the bottom of the map; most people don't have a position of power at all. But, if Mills is right, there will be a small subset of people who are interconnected through many relationships to institutional sources of power: memberships in boards, offices in corporations, directorships of banks, trustees of universities. And we might give our thought experiment one additional feature: we might look at snapshots of the same data for each generation identified by families. Now we have Mills's hypothesis in a nutshell: at a given time there is a small subset of the population who occupy most of the positions of power; and the probability is great that the sons and daughters of this group will occupy similar positions of power in the next generation. And in fact, it is perfectly visible in our society that the likelihood of occupying a position of power in one generation is highly influenced by the power status of the antecedent generation.

Regrettably, we don't have a direct ability to carry out this experiment. But we might consider a test case invoking an important decision and a large number of "stakeholders", large and small: the current effort to reform the health care system in the United States. Will this issue be resolved in a fully democratic way, with the interests of all elements of society being represented fairly in the outcome? Or will a relatively small group of corporations, political interests, and professions be in a position to invisibly block reforms that would be democratically selected? And if this is in fact the case, then doesn't that speak loudly in support of the power elite hypothesis?

With the advantage of fifty years of perspective, I think two observations can be made about Mills's book. First, he seems to have diagnosed a very important thread in the sociological reality of power in America -- albeit in a way that is more intuitive and less empirical than contemporary sociologists would prefer. And second, he illustrates a profoundly important ability to exercise his sociological imagination: to arrive at a way of looking at contemporary society that allows us to make sense of many of the observations that press upon us.

(Another important voice on this subject is G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? Power, Politics, and Social Change (1967). Domhoff has a very nice web version of his theory on his web page.)

Sanders v. Clinton = Democracy v. Oligarchy

Sanders v. Clinton = Democracy v. Oligarchy


By angel d  





Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning "few", and ἄρχω (arkho), meaning "to rule or to command")[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, education, corporate, religious or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who typically pass their influence from one generation to the next, but inheritance is not a necessary condition for the application of this term.

Throughout history, oligarchies have often been tyrannical, relying on public obedience or oppression to exist. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich,[4] for which another term commonly used today is plutocracy.

Democracy, or democratic government, is "a system of government in which all the people of a state or polity ... are involved in making decisions about its affairs, typically by voting to elect representatives to a parliament or similar assembly," as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary.[1] Democracy is further defined as (a:) "government by the people; especially : rule of the majority (b:) " a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections."[2]

According to political scientist Larry Diamond, it consists of four key elements:

1.    A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections.
2.    The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life.
3.    Protection of the human rights of all citizens.
4.    A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.[3]

The term originates from the Greek δημοκρατία (dēmokratía) "rule of the people",[4] which was found from δῆμος (dêmos) "people" and κράτος (krátos) "power" or "rule", in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Athens; the term is an antonym to ἀριστοκρατία (aristokratía) "rule of an elite".

While theoretically these definitions are in opposition, in practice the distinction has been blurred historically.[5] The political system of Classical Athens, for example, granted democratic citizenship to an elite class of free men and excluded slaves and women from political participation. In virtually all democratic governments throughout ancient and modern history, democratic citizenship consisted of an elite class until full enfranchisement was won for all adult citizens in most modern democracies through the suffrage movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. The English word dates to the 16th century, from the older Middle French and Middle Latin equivalents.

(Both of the above definitions are from Wikipedia.)

Friends (and frenemies), I believe we are truly at a precipice with regard to the future of democracy in America.  How much money are the Koch brothers sinking into this election cycle? MILLIONS.  $889 million, in fact.  To put it in perspective, over 15 years, $700 million dollars were spent to fund the New Horizon mission to Pluto (and beyond).

Eight-hundred and eighty-nine million dollars can buy a lot of political access, yes?  And yet, for all their money, the Kochs really don't have a candidate to back now, do they?  Lucky for us that party is in full-implosion mode and I have no doubt that either of our candidates could handily beat any one of the Republican clowns, hands down.  

Oh, speaking of our two candidates, there is the issue of one of them accepting millions in corporate cash, most notably, from Wall Street.  You may recall the "savvy businessmen" of the "Street," the guys who through all sorts of unethical machinations managed to not only tank the economy, but then get rewarded for it in the form of tax-payer funded bailouts.  It was the biggest heist in human history.  People lost their jobs, their homes, their retirement savings accounts.  Some people never recovered.  Our middle class is decimated.  Yet the financial sector was rewarded, rather than punished, for their crimes.  That is a tragedy that will resonate for years to come.

Many of us were appalled by the wanton greed of sociopaths like Jamie Dimon, to name only one, and many of us suffered as our treasury was drained, our homes repossessed, our jobs gone, and those of us lucky to get back to work are making pretty much the same we were making before the economy tanked, while rent, food, utilities and everything else rise steadily upward.  No ifs, ands or buts about it, they are criminals and should have been locked up.  The banks that were too big to fail then are even bigger now.  The banksters are richer than they were before the economy tanked.

And that leads me to the next point I'd like to bring up.  I know it's a sore spot for some of you, but Hillary Clinton, in some form or other, has accepted piles of Wall Street cash.  Just take a look at the list of her donors at OpenSecrets.Org.  Citigroup is number one, next comes Goldman Sachs, the mega law firm DLA Piper, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley.  In that order, mixed in with a few other corporate donors and huge law firms we also have Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse Group.

Granted, the sums aren't nearly as astronomical as the money the Kochs are sinking into the insanes on the right, but it's significant.  It's also significant to note that Bernie Sanders, who speaks out against the corrupting influence of cash in politics (and boy, do I love it when he names names), does not accept cash from Wall Street.  Why?  Because he does not want to be beholden to them.  In fact, he wants to break up the too-big-to-fail banks.  And I think that's admirable, good and right.

If you care anything at all about democratic principles, and I don't mean just the Democratic party but democratic principles, as in what it means to be a democracy, then perhaps it would be prudent to think twice about supporting the candidate who accepts piles of cash from the Wall Street criminal class.  Maybe, the guy you aren't supporting, the one who refuses to take Wall Street money on principle, deserves another look with regard to your support.  

Oligarchy and Democracy are Not Compatible Constructs

Does voting for a candidate who accepts millions of dollars from the criminals that decimated the backbone of our nation, the middle class align with your core beliefs?

Does supporting a candidate who serves the interests of the oligarchy align with your world view?  

If you answered yes to either of the above questions, then I daresay, you cannot expect people to believe you also support democratic principles, as the two concepts don't synch up.  If you support the oligarch over the principled candidate, you can't have it both ways and say "I'm progressive!  I'm a liberal!" if you are voting against the very principles of democracy, as outlined above.  Well, technically you can, but no one will believe you, or take you seriously.  

I don't have to respect your choice if I feel that your choice is detrimental to me, my family, to American democracy, our country and this planet.  You are not only voting against your own best interest (unless, of course, you're of that ilk yourself), but you are voting against MY best interests and my child's best interests, and I'm not going to be all nice about it and bend over backwards to treat your decision with kid gloves when it's the wrong decision.  

On the one hand, you have an experienced statesman who, by all accounts, if we are to believe the words coming out of his mouth when he speaks at his rallies, wants people to take matters, to take democracy, back into their own hands, where it rightly belongs.  For Sanders understands what an elected official truly is, a servant of the people.  We pay our servants at that level quite nicely, they get round the clock protection, a big mansion to live in, the best health care money can buy for the rest of their lives, even while so many of us go without, or with plans that don't really do much in the face of catastrophic injury or illness.  In return, we expect them to serve us, not the sociopaths on Wall Street, or any of the corporate donors who expect something for their money.

For just as the Kochs aren't giving hundreds of billions of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts, neither is Wall Street bestowing millions upon Clinton because they're just so liberal and progressive and seek nothing in return.  If you believe that, you are incredibly naïve, and if you don't believe it and still support it, then you are not to be trusted with the power to vote against the interests of the vast majority of this country.

There was a recent diary comparing the stark differences between Bernie and Hillary encapsulated in a single day in New York.  Bernie marching with Verizon employees striking for fairness, and Hillary accepting $2,700 from the likes of Martha Stewart who, as you may recall, was convicted of insider trading (although that never stopped me from buying an issue of "Living" once in awhile, she does have some good recipes), and fashion designers.  The difference between the two candidates is clear and as stark as the difference between Democracy and Oligarchy.

These are not "normal" times and this is not time to fall in line behind the pushers of the status quo.  Humanity may very likely face its extinction event within a generation or two, our government has become so corrupt it's barely recognizable as a democracy anymore, and the people are weary of the same old, same old.  Trust me, America neither wants nor needs another Clinton or another Bush in the White House.  Been there, done that.

We are being given the choice to vote for someone we've been waiting for since, oh gosh, since we found out Obama was not the change we were hoping for.  He was better than Bush on some things, but he was also appointing Wall Street hucksters to advise him, and even after their perfidy became known, he referred to them as savvy businessmen.  On matters of the encroaching oligarchy, and letting the Wall Street criminals get away with destroying tens of thousands of American lives, yes, he did disappoint.

I sincerely hope that the more thoughtful Clinton supporters among you rethink your vote for Wall Street.  You really don't want to have to carry that around with you for the rest of your life, do you?  When we were at the tipping point and had the opportunity to turn things around, we went backwards instead.  

I believe that a lot of her support comes from people who sincerely think that she is a safer bet against Republicans.  I say, malarkey, because not only do the polls indicate Sanders has a better chance of beating any Republican currently running, but he has also enthused a large swathe of Americans who, heretofore, for whatever reason, didn't vote, or didn't engage in politics.  Perhaps they felt like six of one, half a dozen of the other, either way they are screwed.

Does backing the Wall Street candidate align with democratic principles?

I believe in democratic principles, and I am afraid of the encroaching oligarchy which means that, as a people and as a nation, we have surrendered our power to those who not only do not deserve it, but should be completely stripped of it.  We will have lost our voice, and the principles upon which our democracy is based.  I also believe that if we elect a politician in the service of the oligarchs, whether it is one of the Republcians or Hillary Clinton, then we might as well kiss democracy good bye for good.  

I know, sometimes I sound PUMAish when I say "I'll never vote for Clinton!" but really, I'm being a Democrat who wants to vote for someone who espouses democratic principles.  When I see Wall Street buying Clinton's favor with OUR money, it makes me ill.  It tells me that our political process has become so corrupt, that no one in good conscience could continue to support it.  Okay, that was harsh, there are a lot of people of conscience who are misled or browbeaten into submission by the pushers of the status quo who use fear as a cudgel.  

Political corruption is corrupt, no matter which party engages in it.  Corruption is bad, it's bad for people like us, and by us, I don't mean the "limousine liberals" and the Wall Street Democrats, I mean the 99% of us who don't have $2,700 to buy access to a candidate.  I have made the decision to not participate in this corruption any longer.  Therefore, I will not cast a vote for Clinton should she win the nomination.  I'm not going to not vote, I'll probably look at other candidates, but most likely, I will write in Senator Bernie Sanders.  I'm not taking the ridiculous pledge.  Goldman Sachs, Walmart, Monsanto, the MIC -- they are not getting my vote.  Ever.  They are wicked, they are unjust, they are cruel and do not have your best interest in that place where a heart should be.  

Because I support and believe in democratic principles, I cannot participate in the corruption in which Clinton is mired and honestly call myself liberal or progressive.

Won't you join us in this much-needed and long-awaited political revolution spearheaded by Bernie Sanders?  Won't you join us on the right side of history?  We're the guys in the white hats, and we don't take money from the bad guys.  We'd love to have you aboard.  Peace.

How America Became an Oligarchy

How America Became an Oligarchy

American democracy no longer exists. Instead, America's political system had transformed into an oligarchy, with the wealthy elite steering the direction of the country, regardless of the will of the majority of voters.

Published: April 8, 2015 | Authors: Ellen Brown | Ellen Brown | Op-Ed

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. . . . You have owners.                                                                                                — George Carlin, The American Dream

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.

“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?

The Magna Carta, considered the first Bill of Rights in the Western world, established the rights of nobles as against the king. But the doctrine that “allmen are created equal” – that all people have “certain inalienable rights,” including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – is an American original. And those rights, supposedly insured by the Bill of Rights, have the right to vote at their core. We have the right to vote but the voters’ collective will no longer prevails.

In Greece, the left-wing populist Syriza Party came out of nowhere to take the presidential election by storm; and in Spain, the populist Podemos Party appears poised to do the same. But for over a century, no third-party candidate has had any chance of winning a US presidential election. We have a two-party winner-take-all system, in which our choice is between two candidates, both of whom necessarily cater to big money. It takes big money just to put on the mass media campaigns required to win an election involving 240 million people of voting age.

In state and local elections, third party candidates have sometimes won. In a modest-sized city, candidates can actually influence the vote by going door to door, passing out flyers and bumper stickers, giving local presentations, and getting on local radio and TV. But in a national election, those efforts are easily trumped by the mass media. And local governments too are beholden to big money.

When governments of any size need to borrow money, the megabanks in a position to supply it can generally dictate the terms. Even in Greece, where the populist Syriza Party managed to prevail in January, the anti-austerity platform of the new government is being throttled by the moneylenders who have the government in a chokehold.

How did we lose our democracy? Were the Founding Fathers remiss in leaving something out of the Constitution? Or have we simply gotten too big to be governed by majority vote?

Democracy’s Rise and Fall

The stages of the capture of democracy by big money are traced in a paper called “The Collapse of Democratic Nation States” by theologian and environmentalist Dr. John Cobb. Going back several centuries, he points to the rise of private banking, which usurped the power to create money from governments:

The influence of money was greatly enhanced by the emergence of private banking.  The banks are able to create money and so to lend amounts far in excess of their actual wealth.  This control of money-creation . . . has given banks overwhelming control over human affairs.  In the United States, Wall Street makes most of the truly important decisions that are directly attributed to Washington.

Today the vast majority of the money supply in Western countries is created by private bankers. That tradition goes back to the 17th century, when the privately-owned Bank of England, the mother of all central banks, negotiated the right to print England’s money after Parliament stripped that power from the Crown. When King William needed money to fight a war, he had to borrow. The government as borrower then became servant of the lender.

In America, however, the colonists defied the Bank of England and issued their own paper scrip; and they thrived. When King George forbade that practice, the colonists rebelled.

They won the Revolution but lost the power to create their own money supply, when they opted for gold rather than paper money as their official means of exchange. Gold was in limited supply and was controlled by the bankers, who surreptitiously expanded the money supply by issuing multiple banknotes against a limited supply of gold.

This was the system euphemistically called “fractional reserve” banking, meaning only a fraction of the gold necessary to back the banks’ privately-issued notes was actually held in their vaults. These notes were lent at interest, putting citizens and the government in debt to bankers who created the notes with a printing press. It was something the government could have done itself debt-free, and the American colonies had done with great success until England went to war to stop them.

President Abraham Lincoln revived the colonists’ paper money system when he issued the Treasury notes called “Greenbacks” that helped the Union win the Civil War. But Lincoln was assassinated, and the Greenback issues were discontinued.

In every presidential election between 1872 and 1896, there was a third national party running on a platform of financial reform. Typically organized under the auspices of labor or farmer organizations, these were parties of the people rather than the banks. They included the Populist Party, the Greenback and Greenback Labor Parties, the Labor Reform Party, the Antimonopolist Party, and the Union Labor Party. They advocated expanding the national currency to meet the needs of trade, reform of the banking system, and democratic control of the financial system.

The Populist movement of the 1890s represented the last serious challenge to the bankers’ monopoly over the right to create the nation’s money. According to monetary historian Murray Rothbard, politics after the turn of the century became a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers.  The parties sometimes changed hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players.

In All the Presidents’ Bankers, Nomi Prins names six banking giants and associated banking families that have dominated politics for over a century. No popular third party candidates have a real chance of prevailing, because they have to compete with two entrenched parties funded by these massively powerful Wall Street banks.

Democracy Succumbs to Globalization

In an earlier era, notes Dr. Cobb, wealthy landowners were able to control democracies by restricting government participation to the propertied class. When those restrictions were removed, big money controlled elections by other means:

First, running for office became expensive, so that those who seek office require wealthy sponsors to whom they are then beholden.  Second, the great majority of voters have little independent knowledge of those for whom they vote or of the issues to be dealt with.  Their judgments are, accordingly, dependent on what they learn from the mass media.  These media, in turn, are controlled by moneyed interests.

Control of the media and financial leverage over elected officials then enabled those other curbs on democracy we know today, including high barriers to ballot placement for third parties and their elimination from presidential debates, vote suppression, registration restrictions, identification laws, voter roll purges, gerrymandering, computer voting, and secrecy in government.

The final blow to democracy, says Dr. Cobb, was “globalization” – an expanding global market that overrides national interests:

[T]oday’s global economy is fully transnational.  The money power is not much interested in boundaries between states and generally works to reduce their influence on markets and investments. . . . Thus transnational corporations inherently work to undermine nation states, whether they are democratic or not.

The most glaring example today is the secret twelve-country trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If it goes through, the TPP will dramatically expand the power of multinational corporations to use closed-door tribunals to challenge and supersede domestic laws, including environmental, labor, health and other protections.

Looking at Alternatives

Some critics ask whether our system of making decisions by a mass popular vote easily manipulated by the paid-for media is the most effective way of governing on behalf of the people. In an interesting Ted Talk, political scientist Eric Li makes a compelling case for the system of “meritocracy” that has been quite successful in China.

In America Beyond Capitalism, Prof. Gar Alperovitz argues that the US is simply too big to operate as a democracy at the national level. Excluding Canada and Australia, which have large empty landmasses, the United States is larger geographically than all the other advanced industrial countries of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) combined. He proposes what he calls “The Pluralist Commonwealth”: a system anchored in the reconstruction of communities and the democratization of wealth. It involves plural forms of cooperative and common ownership beginning with decentralization and moving to higher levels of regional and national coordination when necessary. He is co-chair along with James Gustav Speth of an initiative called The Next System Project, which seeks to help open a far-ranging discussion of how to move beyond the failing traditional political-economic systems of both left and Right..

Dr. Alperovitz quotes Prof. Donald Livingston, who asked in 2002:

What value is there in continuing to prop up a union of this monstrous size? . . . [T]here are ample resources in the American federal tradition to justify states’ and local communities’ recalling, out of their own sovereignty, powers they have allowed the central government to usurp.

Taking Back Our Power

If governments are recalling their sovereign powers, they might start with the power to create money, which was usurped by private interests while the people were asleep at the wheel. State and local governments are not allowed to print their own currencies; but they can own banks, and all depository banks create money when they make loans, as the Bank of England recently acknowledged.

The federal government could take back the power to create the national money supply by issuing its own Treasury notes as Abraham Lincoln did. Alternatively, it could issue some very large denomination coins as authorized in the Constitution; or it could nationalize the central bank and use quantitative easing to fund infrastructure, education, job creation, and social services, responding to the needs of the people rather than the banks.

The freedom to vote carries little weight without economic freedom – the freedom to work and to have food, shelter, education, medical care and a decent retirement. President Franklin Roosevelt maintained that we need an Economic Bill of Rights. If our elected representatives were not beholden to the moneylenders, they might be able both to pass such a bill and to come up with the money to fund it.

Exiled on Main Street: Urban Utopian Insurrection

Exiled on Main Street: Urban Utopian Insurrection

by Mark Mason and Susan Cain / May 18th, 2016

The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.

— Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 1959

Is There No Alternative? Thinking Outside the Ballot Box

Are we happy yet?  Where is the democracy we were promised? Where is the hope and change we were promised? How can we transform society when we are discovering, to our dismay, that we’re doing everything wrong? What means can people use to rid themselves of abusive governments controlled by a wealthy elite serving only themselves to the detriment of the many and the teetering ecosystem? What new social structures can replace the authoritarian and plutocratic states? How shall we struggle against the forces of illegitimate power? They’ve got the guns, violence being the language of the state.

The formal political system exhorts us to vote for change, but the electoral system has been captured by the wealthy.

Shall we carry signs and protest for a day or a week, whine and beg for our corporate-owned politicians to listen to our pleas and address our grievances, and then return home to sit in front our TVs every evening after slaving each day making the rich richer, while we struggle paycheck-to-paycheck?

As we look around the world, powerful elites give us two options for large-scale social and political organization: 1) the corrupt state system, controlled by a ruling elite, far from the democracy we were promised, or 2) deadly chaos, created by direct US military violence (Iraq, Vietnam), or indirectly through covert political subversion (Ukraine, Chile). TINA. The ruling elites insist that “there is no alternative.”

We argue here for a third way — forged out of building decentralized democratic institutions intended to supplant corporate and state power. The challenge before us is to organize independent action, independent of the formal political system. Such a strategy substitutes illegitimate large-scale power with robust local direct democracy and also evades the chaos of a collapsing state initiated by capitalist economic implosion or external subversion. Let us begin an exploration of ideas by claiming internal, autonomous, psychological space for the purpose of imagining democracy-all-around.

The Failure of Armed Struggle

Armed struggles in the USA and Western Europe are a thing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The American Revolution resulted in the people removing themselves from a distant, established monarchy to one of an oligarchy constructed by and for educated white men of wealth and property. After more than two hundred years of sometimes deadly struggle tweaking that oligarchy, the US government still primarily serves the same class of wealthy men, and it can be convincingly argued that those men are the government, owning the politicians in Congress and the White House and whose corporate consultants and lobbyists write the legislation.

The wealthy aristocracy rid themselves of their visible thrones and crowns and titles, and replaced them with the rich and their hierarchies produced by capitalism in conjunction with an easily-controlled parliamentary system. Plutocrats called this system a democracy while reigning unseen behind a facade of legitimacy that the label democracy provided. The Civil War temporarily broke that parliamentary system into two like but competing systems. The ruling class won that war, too, and the system became one economic whole again. Human and natural resources and capital were once again united for them to control.

French Revolutionaries thought the “end of aristocracy” was achieved when they executed King Louis XVI, but this ending resulted in a dictator who made himself “First Consul for life” with the right to choose his successor, and then later crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I. After some back and forth conflict between Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces and those who wanted to restore the Bourbon kings to the throne, the monarchy was reestablished, although with limited power, as a constitutional monarchy. More years of power struggles ensued, but minus a popular movement. The struggles were between the upper classes vying for power— royals against deputies, politicians in the constitutional monarchy who falsely claimed to have the people’s interests at heart. These upper class power struggles and internal conflicts caused years of economic hardships for the lower class, finally resulting in another populist revolution, and eventually leading to a parliamentarian system. Today France has a fake socialist government that caters to the insatiable capitalist desires of the ruling class.

Recent armed struggles in Libya and Syria have had disastrous consequences for the people. Libya is a failed state with a decimated infrastructure, compliments of NATO. Four and a half years after the ouster and death of Muammar Gaddafi, the possibility of a unity government exists. Two other governments established during those four and a half years were both overtaken in Tripoli by various religious militia groups vying for power. If this unity government holds together long enough to be officially recognized, it’s possible the UN will send in an Italian-led “advisory and training” group of 5,000 troops to assist the establishment of the new government. Armed struggles for power still continue in Libya among different militia groups, some claiming to be a Libyan wing of ISIS.

Syria is an ongoing disaster as well. Syrians are unable to fend off the numerous “hirabis” trained and sent into the country by multiple governments with self-serving interests in the conflict. “Hirabah” is the Arabic word for unlawful warfare or terrorism. In Islamic law, it is illegal to commit publicly-directed violence. It is not “jihad” that is being waged by these hirabis who are funded and trained by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. These foreign-sponsored hirabis are waging “hirabah” against the Syrian people. Syrians are currently enduring the bombing of a US-led coalition. The Russians were asked by the Assad government for military assistance. They are bombing Syria, too. It is primarily the poor who suffer most in Libya and Syria, people who can’t afford to be smuggled out of the danger zones and, remaining behind, can’t afford the high prices for what little food can be had and must contend with the devastating lack of infrastructure.

Singularly important to the ruling class, armed struggles (limited domestic and foreign) are profitable. War is a highly profitable business because it benefits numerous industries, dozens unrelated to directly waging war but serving every need of armed conflict.

The US has a contingent of gun-toting, self-proclaimed right-wing patriots ready to use the abundant arms sold to them by profit-bearing gun manufacturers. Although the US has the highest number of guns per-capita on the planet, armed insurrection in the US is extremely unlikely. The current US government’s capacity for committing armed violence against the domestic population, intended to protect the capitalist ruling elite system, precludes the possibility of another civil war.

Electoral Organizing As a Failed Means of Change

The ruling class doesn’t want us to vote not only because it’s expensive and profitable to buy our votes through the campaign finance bribery and propaganda system, but also voting legitimates the corporate-state. Thus, electoral organizing hasn’t yielded desirable results for the people. Podemos (We Can) in Spain has become “we can’t.” Founded by political scientist Pablo Iglesias in March 2014, Podemos is a populist left-wing party in Spain. It arose from the Indignados movement in 2011 (coincident with Occupy in the USA and the Arab Spring, also) against the usual corruption, government budget austerity, and increasing income inequality.

Although the number of seats won by Podemos in Spain’s most recent elections were larger than any ever won by a third party, they were far from enough to have majority control. Forming a coalition government with the two most powerful parties has been impossible and could result in the Spanish king dissolving the parliament and calling for new elections. Even if that doesn’t happen, Podemos will have to work with the established parties and compromise on many issues dear to their own supporters. It appears that some people in Spain want change, but the majority are clinging to the state electoral system and, as usual, electing a majority of the established parties’ candidates. Podemos, a people’s electoral movement, is not supported by the majority of the people. How can a movement be called a People’s Movement if the people are too afraid of system change to fully support it? Spain’s wealthy ruling class and international banks remain dominant.

The coalition for the Radical Left in Greece known as Syriza has not only been an electoral failure, but also a betrayal of the people who supported them. Unlike Podemos, Syriza had the solid support of the public, but they bowed to pressure from the established system and its financial masters. The people voted for Syriza in order to end the austerity policies imposed by the IMF, but Syriza caved to the economic demands of the ruling class.

Electoral organizing, working within the established political systems has not challenged or changed the power system of the ruling class. The famous words of Audre Lorde, an American writer of Caribbean descent, seem to apply: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Although Lorde wrote those words in criticism of the white feminist movement, they can be applied to the various tools and systems of the ruling class, in this case applied to the political system. Using the master’s tools (voting, electoral organizing) will never dismantle the master’s house nor his power structure. Working within the system benefits the system, not the people who would change it.

Beggars Can’t Be Choosers

The current method for change in the US is one of pleading for legislation. “Please, Congress, get money out of politics!” was the cry of protesters recently in Washington. Over 800 people were arrested during the first four days of non-violent civil disobedience actions scheduled by Democracy Spring protests in Washington this April. These actions were meaningless. They didn’t disrupt the system, hurt or challenge it. These protesters provided an excuse for a lot of overtime pay for the police, and they will be filling city government coffers with the fines and court costs they’ll be charged (and will most likely obediently and proudly pay, thinking of it as money paid “fighting for their freedoms”). The ruling class doesn’t care about briefly arrested protesters, and it will take much more than a week of protests and minor civil disobedience to catch their attention. Public actions that do nothing to challenge or financially endanger the ruling class will do nothing to foment change.

Prior to the Democracy Spring fiasco, some workers have occasionally been marching and pleading with signs begging for a minimum wage increase, “fighting for $15,” while other people have begun squabbling over who is allowed to use which public restroom, pleading for understanding the needs of transgenders. A minimum wage of $15 isn’t even a living wage, and the safety of a small group of people using public restrooms can surely be accommodated by national or local debates or a government-funded study which would please the capitalist ruling class. We need protests aimed at systemic change, not social issues that leave the system intact. Single-issue and identity politics result in distractions away from the major problems that are killing us and the Earth, problems that can be directly linked to capitalism and the money-power system it has created.

Frightening the Ruling Class

Armed struggle, electoral organizing, and pleading protesters do not work in dismantling the oligarchy. Armed struggle tends to cause immense suffering for the people and eventual gains for the ruling class. The system that enables their domination remains intact. Electoral organizing results in betrayal or such a lack of enough popular support as to be ineffective. Pleading protesters who do nothing to disrupt the system are ignored. What method can possibly work against today’s militarized corporate-state?

The first clue is plucked from the US history of 50 years ago — the Hippie movement from the mid 1960’s to the early 1970’s, “Hippie movement” being the label that applies to the US component of the global uprising during those years. This was a generation who challenged the ruling elite and their accepted norms. They wanted to Make Love, not War. They wanted the “real” instead of the “plastic” (fake). Just as important, they rejected materialism (consumerism); they embraced environmentalism.

Hippies thought they were rejecting the “establishment” and challenging “the man,” but they were actually rejecting capitalism, the wheel of the ruling class used to drive the government itself. The way of life the Hippies lived was one of counter culture, in opposition to American capitalist consumer culture. The sixties expression of dissent, in terms of counter-culture, reminds the authors of Graeber’s concept of counterpower¹, though we prefer the former term because it conveys a concept of broad rejection of consumerism, corporatization, competition, nationalism, suburban mall development (the antithesis was the back-to-the-land organic farming movement), celebrity culture, money meritocracy, hierarchy, the Puritan work ethic, racism (driven by the Black Power movement), social isolation, and war. Perhaps the most egregious shortcoming was a persistent patriarchy that was soon under challenge by a nascent women’s movement.

How could the wealthy ruling class effectively grow the consumer market if a generation of young people were determined to be non-consumers? How could the ruling class make money from war if the population turned against that “profitable alternative?” Who could possibly instigate war among a people determined to love one another and the Earth, too? What would become of Big Oil and Big Coal among an environmentally-conscious public?

Corporate Counter-Revolutionary Revenge on Counter Culture

Lewis F. Powell, Jr., a corporate lawyer, later appointed to the Supreme Court, detected the dangers to the capitalist oligarchy presented by the sixties counter-culture. Powell served on city and state boards of education in Virginia, and performed much legal work for tobacco companies. Shortly before he was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon, he drafted a confidential letter (now known as the Powell Memo².)  The memo, entitled “Attack on American Free Enterprise System,” urged corporate America to become active in politics and the formation of legislation.

Expanding Hippie counter culture was antithetical to capitalism, though lacking in organization due to a narcissistic “do your own thing” movement attitude. Ruling elites, through their corporations, united to preserve and expand the elitist power system. Unbeknownst to the youth of that time, the culture they produced was what was needed to bring down the abusive economic system of capitalism. However, Powell articulated the potential threat and alerted corporate America of the dangers. He was positioned to help the corporate cause after being appointed to the Supreme Court. The ruling class set about corrupting the Hippie movement, actively using the government to distribute hard drugs among the youth and using media to demonize them. Media stereotyped Hippies as being interested only in “sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.” They were called “stoners and slackers,” lazy bums and drug addicts who didn’t want to work like “good, responsible citizens.”

At the same time, corporate America began commodifying the Hippie movement. Department stores carried tie-dyed shirts, designer jeans, and “granny dresses.” Clothing that was formerly purchased by Hippies at yard sales and thrift stores was co-opted by big-name capitalist fashion designers. The “British invasion” of the Beatles and other groups from Great Britain provided more youth culture to commodify with the Mod Look — “tent dresses” and “granny glasses” were two fashion trends. The ruling class took this threat seriously and immersed themselves into molding the public into mass consumers.

Movements falter and fade. Young people age, and eventually become trapped in the capitalist system. The “day job” is the only alternative to poverty and homelessness for the masses. Once-vibrant youths on college campuses were sucked into the system and, unknowingly, many became members of the indoctrinated educated class who actually enable the oligarchy. The Hippie movement, lacking the political consciousness of the Black Power movement, never materialized as a social force to challenge the capitalist system. They didn’t recognize the class war being waged against them, and the general public as well, by the plutocrats.

The beaded curtains hanging in doorways, the Summer of Love, the scent of flowers and incense, and the emotional high of intoxicating hope for the future slowly disintegrated as the social engineers ushered in the disco culture. Suddenly youth were singing Bee Gees’ tunes, concerned only with “Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive,” disco dancing, and being willingly herded in droves to trendy new suburban shopping malls that destroyed urban downtown culture. The plutocrats won the battle without anyone realizing that a class war was raging against them. Indeed, the language of liberation that included such concepts as ruling class, plutocrats, class war, oppression, and liberation were missing. An ideological divide manifested between the Black Power movement in contrast with the Hippie, Free Speech, and Anti-War movements — the former possessing a deeper understanding of the realities of American capitalism.

The Return of Revolutionary Counter Culture

After almost half a century of slumber, another populist movement began in New York City’s Zuccotti Park during September 2011. It was dubbed the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement (later shortened to simply “Occupy”), and quickly spread to cities throughout the country, the biggest movements being in New York City and on the West Coast in the Oakland/San Francisco Bay area. What began as a demonstration against Wall Street elite quickly became a counter-culture movement. People began exploring direct democracy, setting up their own schools and childcare, holding organized meetings to determine political goals and how to best help their communities; people were peacefully uniting and working together, all things that challenged the capitalist culture of the ruling class. Like the Hippie movement, Occupy was non-violent, but unlike the Hippies, Occupy protesters were actively organizing for change — drastic change to the oligarchy by experimenting with systems that used Direct Democracy under the people’s control through various committees in front of which anyone could speak.

As in the 60’s and 70’s, the ruling class became nervous. However, this time, they were immensely more powerful and well-prepared. They had the full resources of their corporate media, all mainstream outlets having been consolidated into only six sources and in the hands of the plutocrats. They also had the full resources of the government they own and control. Media began the campaign to demonize Occupy protesters, casting them as drug users gathering for sex and defecating on public property, creating health hazards. Officials brought known drug addicts to Occupy gatherings, addicts who would cause arguments and fist fights which, of course, corporate media was on the scene to broadcast. Union members were brought in to infiltrate OWS organizational meetings in order to pit one group against another, focusing on single group interests and thus, dividing the people whose objectives were to address the needs of the whole community.

The political servants of the ruling class stepped up, including the President who encouraged city localities to quickly pass laws against the protesters occupying public property in tents and enforce any current laws that could “legally” disburse the growing crowds. The militarized police force did its duty for the ruling class— pepper spraying the masses, beating many of them, injuring many more with their rubber bullets, and injuring protesters in custody after arrest.

The ruling class successfully quashed the Occupy Movement. The threat of counter culture was once again nullified. Since the Hippie Movement of the 1960’s, US politics has ensured that such a challenge to the ruling class will never happen again. When there is evidence of a popular movement coalescing, political forces step in and, in service to the ruling class, these movements are co-opted by one of the two dominant political parties. Co-optation ensures that the movement operates within the system instead of challenging it. For example, instead of the Tea Party Movement becoming a viable competitor against the Republican Party, it was co-opted and absorbed by Republicans. Efforts to co-opt the Occupy Movement by the Democrats failed. Movement organizers as well as their supporters rejected that Occupy be associated with the Democratic Party at which point, the oligarchy unleashed its network of media, police, and politicians against protesters.

Before Occupy in the United States, there was the Arab Spring which began in Tunisia during December 2010. In 2011, “democracy movements” spread to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. These peaceful movements were beaten down by state violence as well as outside interference and internal violence mainly at the hands of militant fundamentalist sects. Tunisia emerged with a new constitution, but little change to the money-power system. A few secular political leaders were assassinated as religious zealots sought to secure power through fear. An Islamist mass shooting attack occurred at a Tunisian tourist area near the city of Sousse in June 2015 and a bomb exploded on a bus carrying 12 members of the presidential guard in November of 2015. Egypt is under another freely elected military dictatorship as it has been since the days of Nasser in June of 1956. Several Egyptian protesters were killed by state forces during the uprising which began eleven days after the Tunisian government was overthrown. Thousands were imprisoned. Thousands more are being imprisoned today who dare to criticize the current government under al-Sisi.

Neither the peaceful protests of Tunisians nor of Egyptians secured them a nonviolent and revolutionary path to change; the people’s causes have been a victim of violence. Libya and Syria remain in physical and social ruins. Yemen is being bombed by Saudi Arabia (supported and supplied by the USA and the UK) while the Saudi kingdom and those in Bahrain and Jordan remain intact. Although not a total success, the Arab Spring can be characterized as an important component in the social evolution of North Africa and the Middle East.

After the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, the same scenario of peaceful protests meeting with state violence played out in Turkey at Gezi Park beginning in late May of 2013. As soon as peaceful protesters began organizing to challenge the existing state, setting up their own forms of government through popular committees, and acting as a cohesive counter-culture movement, the ruling class attacked them in the same manner as Occupy, but even more violently. There were deaths at these protests due to violence instigated by the state, not the protesters.

Currently a new counter-culture movement has emerged in France,  literally meaning “Night Stand” and loosely translated as “rise up or stand up at night.” What started out as a one-day march against proposed draconian labor laws, Nuit Debout quickly erupted out of the hands of the organizers into a subversive, revolutionary movement by the expression of an attitude of creating a separate socio-political space, a counter-cultural space, unconcerned with the formal legislative process. These autonomous zones are best described by David Graeber³ and Bookchin’s Municipal Libertarianism⁴, and Boggs’ discussion of what he calls prefigurative communism⁵. This was the collective strategy of the global revolutionary movements of 1968, and on back to the Paris Commune of 1871 of which Nuit Debout is a modern version. The European concept of “convergence des luttes” (Convergence of Struggles) is similar to Counter Culture in the US. The Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring were not failures. They were beaten down by state violence, yet these experiments were nascent revolutionary substitutes for the current dominant cultural systems.

Where Do We Go From Here? Prospects and Pitfalls

American fascism, the Dark Ages II, and systemic collapse due to ecosystem damage and/or economic collapse are serious possibilities. Without mass mobilization, business and government as usual will certainly result in dire consequences for humans and the planetary ecosystem. Without mass mobilization, we have no future, if indeed we even have a future worth contemplating. We have arrived at an unprecedented moment in human evolutionary history. We could drive ourselves into extinction — though hard to imagine, the human population of more than seven billion could collapse to zero in a relatively short time if the planetary ecosystem support functions collapse. Remember, most of us are dependent on agriculture, and agriculture is highly sensitive to ecosystem damage.

If we assume the realization of significant mass mobilizations, we have room for imagining different social relations and relations to the planetary ecosystem. Egalitarian revolutionary change, as we envision one pathway, lies in counter-culture movements that embrace different, democratic value sets (democracy-all-around, at work, at governance, at play). We must build mass counter-cultural movements replacing those of the dominant culture (competition, economic tyranny; political oligarchy), as controlled by and benefiting elites. These movements would focus on creating actual physical land-based as well as social conceptual autonomous zones. Such zones, discontinuous, may take form in communities, cultural regions, ecosystem bioregions, Commons-based, direct self-governance, thus replacing municipal and corporate hierarchy with community-and-worker-owned and controlled enterprises. The domains of modern life: home, school, work, government, and casual socializing would be integrated into a new concept of community. Revolution by organizing and experimenting with ways that challenge and change the current cultural systems are the methods needed to eliminate the tyranny of illegitimate and abusive power.

Where do we go from here? The critical problems of civilization are centralized, concentrated monetary wealth, state power, and the theft of the Commons. To address these problems requires the inverse, to decentralize economic and political power. The goal is to introduce direct democracy in all domains of life, including economic and political matters. Private wealth and the private property that wealth buys are the central problems of concentrated wealth. State power, concentrated and sold to private wealth through the bribery of a specialized political class, completes the survey of illegitimate power.

Our tasks are to decentralize wealth by production for use not for exchange, to reject the money system altogether, and to replace private property through reclaiming the Commons. We prefer melding the ancient concept of commons and modern concept of counter culture (and counterpower) because these world views encompass the whole person-in-society-and-nature, in contrast to classic Marxist conceptions that identify an artificial social construct labelled “industrial workers” (men in factories). These measures reverse the ongoing enclosure movement (theft of land and so-called intellectual property), and decentralize state power through the construction of local, self-governing autonomous systems managed by worker-and-community controlled production, community-control of land use— all managed by way of direct local democracy expanded horizontally into larger-scale systems of federations, thus replacing the independent state system with self-governance.

Grubacic and Hearn discuss at length their concept of “exilic communities” closely corresponding to prefigurative communism and counter culture (counterpower).⁶ We note here that the rock music group, The Rolling Stones, released an album titled “Exile on Main Street” in 1972 which unconsciously presaged the end of the sixties counter-culture movement. The American Hippie movement, a component of a global uprising, was the first modern exiled community found on the ideological edge of Main Street, USA.

The first task of autonomous zones within a flat federation should be the creation of a new constitution. The original constitution cannot be improved because it was written by the patriarchy, the Founding Fathers. This archaic document is taught as if it were religious doctrine, distanced from anything that can be improved or examined in a historical context. We will need a new constitution defining the manner in which autonomous zones coordinate large-scale activities through federation with delegates sent directly from local zones — no elections, no president or prime minister, no parliament or congress. A new constitution might include Canada and Mexico because it would be a plan of mutual aid and cooperation not domination, replacing NAFTA. We already have international economic agreements, but do not have transnational political cooperation. We assert as Graeber has observed that nationalism is a fiction.⁷

Constructing autonomous zones, exiled communities, counter cultures, through the conscious application of counterpower is facilitated by the fact of the fragility of American and Western European nation-states. The states are held together with the glue of state violence. All states are failed states vulnerable to exiled counter-cultural metamorphoses. Malcolm X, declaring “the ballot or the bullet” as means to end racism, defined two historic strategies employed to achieve egalitarian social change. A third way, counter-culture movements, acting to claim both physical and social space, has emerged since the Paris Commune of 1871 as a powerful decentralization strategy.

Exiled communities might not be codified, or they might choose to adopt a formal, written contract, a constitution that might include language regarding the rights of people and the planet, using the UN Declaration of Human Rights to stimulate debate. What this new contract might include should be determined by the people through direct public debate conducted within each autonomous zone, sent horizontally by delegates to regional and global federation bodies. We don’t need leaders deciding our future. Through local, Commons-based, bioregional, utopian collective experimentation, egalitarian social and political spaces emerge, driven by mutual aid and direct democracy.

Indeed, our definition of Utopia incorporates the expectation of conflict, the adoption of principles of human rights within a context of decentralized power, the inclusion of dissent within the core of society, not marginalized, and the adoption of means of conflict resolution formalizing dignified exit. Counter-cultural movements characterized by creation and expansion of exiled communities embedded in the existing urban space engage in conflict with the dominant culture, presenting visible decentralized direct democracy at home, at work, and in the political domain. The exiled perceive not the state as the obstacle to Utopia, but class oppression manifested as impediments to individual and collective desire.

We are compelled to change everything, nothing less than everything. Everything is suspect. Everything is corrupted and co-opted and enslaving and fraudulent and destructive. Everything.

Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.

— Emma Goldman, in “Socialism: Caught in the Political Trap”, a lecture (c. 1912), published in Red Emma Speaks, Part 1 (1972), edited by Alix Kates Shulman

1. Graeber, David. 2004. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Prickly Pear Press []
2. Powell, Lewis F. 1971. Powell Memorandum, dated August 23, 1971 []
3. Graeber, David. 2002. “Reinventing Democracy“. In: In These Times. February 19, 2002 []
4. Bookchin, Murray. 1987. “Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda“, in: From Urbanization to Cities (1987; London: Cassell, 1995), with revisions []
5. Boggs. Carl. 2010. Marxism, prefigurative communism, and the problem of workers’ control. Libcom []
6. Grubacic, Andrej, and O’Hearn, Denis. 2016. Living at the Edges of Capitalism Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid. UC Press. []
7. Graeber, David. 2007. “There never was a West“, In: Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. AK Press. []

Susan Cain’s introduction to human rights activism was as a high school student participating in the Memphis, Tennessee Sanitation Workers' Strike during its peak in March 1968, and she retains an active interest in human rights and US foreign policy. She once was a blues singer, now writing about international political "blues." Mark Mason emerged from a childhood desert crucible, real and cultural, to find himself shaking the hand of Robert Kennedy shortly before his assassination. Subsequent to protesting the Vietnam War, he studied human evolution at UCLA and UC Berkeley, teaching briefly. Since the realization of the Occupy movement, Mark has been providing commentary on US policies to the international media. They have a paper published on TRNN and syndicated at The Dandelion Salad, Read other articles by Mark Mason and Susan Cain.

This article was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2016 at 3:34pm and is filed under Activism, Capitalism, Civil Disobedience, Corporate Globalization,Culture, Democracy, Democrats, Egypt, Empire, Environment, Fascism, France,Greece, Libya, Media, Militarism, Occupy movement, Police, Propaganda, Qatar,Revolution, Right Wing Jerks, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia,Yemen.