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i was watching a film last night called "far from poland"--it's a curious documentary about the solidarity movement in its early phases--the period of the general strike before the initial government crackdown. a line that kep coming up: 10 million people are remaking their world, in real time: they are remaking language, they are remaking social relations--they are taking control of social and economic relations, and they're doing it collectively.
i liked that. it reminded me that it's possible--you know, revolution, but not one directed by some military cadre--revolution that follows from the wholesale withdrawing of consent from the existing order and the practical remaking of social relations.
revolution is in a sense easy.
we just have to withdraw consent and do something else.
but we have to be able not only to imagine that its possible, we have to know it.
and even if that did not result in a revolution, it'd go a long way toward shaking the foundations of this dismal, mediocre order that we presently live with.
i think the existing order is incoherent.
i think that the mediocrities that are running for president are walking talking demonstrations of the incoherence of the existing order.
i think that the main thing holding this order together at this point is fear. people have allowed themselves to be convinced that the existing order is rational because it exists, that it defines the limits of the possible as it defines debate parameters.
people are willing to endure incoherence because they cannot imagine an alternative--and for those who cannot imagine an alternative, there is no alternative--we collectively perform in politics the results of our own inability to imagine that the idiocy we live with is not the only option.
so long as we collectively think this, we are right--so long as we think this, we are also well and truly fucked.
so the underlying problem is ideological, i think: the lack of a viable counter-discourse, the lack of a new radical movement--which for teh existing order would function as a feedback loop AND as an adversary and so would force that order to adapt to conditions that are not of its own making.
military expenditures for example, remain at bloated, obscene levels in part as a legacy of the reagan period, in part as an element that holds together the conservative coalition, in part as an expression of the incoherence of neoconservative ideology in general.
the demonstration of that incoherence is the war in iraq.
there really is nothing more that need be said on this.
so military expenditures are an element within--and that holds together--the republican political machine. the democrat's machine is symmetrical, but involves different factions of the dominant order. both parties operate within the general framework of neoliberalism. both parties, therefore, offer nothing more than faction-switches within the context of the existing, incoherent ideological context.
so the only pressure that is brought to bear to scale back military expenditure and transfer those funds to other areas comes from the rituals of faction rotation.
but since there is no particular disagreement at the level of overall ideology between the parties, there is nothing but faction rotation.
we confuse that with a viable political spectrum of choices--and we kid ourselves. but hey, if you're afraid, you look to anything that will make you less afraid. so it is reassuring to imagine that this ideological uniformity is coherent--it doesn't have to *be* coherent--it is coherent because it exists and because it exists, its functions are therapeutic first and foremost.
this is a big reason why i will vote for the lesser evil, but at the same time i think american politics is a huge, pathetic joke.
another way: fear of dissent results in a tendency to self-enclosure. self-enclosure is also a self-blinding. that you are blind, however, does not mean that you cease to function: rather you function in a context that is basically one in which you substitute what you want to see for what is.
this is among the fastest ways to make incoherence dangerous by making it total.
thus spake my inner anarchist.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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