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my basic argument is about the highly restricted nature of the political in the states.
i've been thinking about this for a long time---it's one of the places that resonates with my more anarchist side i suppose---but the ability to strike, to organize and carry out an explicitly political strike action, seems to me a necessary and desirable extension of the notion of popular sovereignty in itself, and what's more it can function as a material feedback loop for the existing order (if you like) by enabling basic criticisms of it to be articulated and acted upon. and it gives the actions a weight that demonstrations alone do not have because a political strike action is an exercise of power, where a demonstration is a theater of discontent. a political strike demonstrates that power does not reside in the existing state apparatus alone, that it also, and in a meaningful way, rests with all of us--and it can only rest with us if we are in a position to use it--and so being able to act in this kind of way seems to me fundamental.
without it, popular sovereignty is just a sequence of words that we use from time to time to persuade ourselves to feel better about living within a basically top-down authoritarian system that churns itself ritually every four years.
this is not to say that demos and other such actions are worthless, but the effects that they can have is a direct function of the extent to which the theater of a demonstration exists, so is a function, in the present context, of press coverage. so power resides with the press in that it chooses what to cover and how to cover it. the civil rights movement is a good example of what is possible, under the correct circumstances, and given intelligent organization, for such actions. the actions against the war in vietnam, though more explicitly political, did not stop the war, registered little in the way of effects on the conduct of the war---despite the impact they had in other areas (in enabling transformations at the level of official popular culture, say)---and what's more were effectively erased from history by the right revisionism that was of a piece with the ascendancy of ronald reagan. short term unintended win, long term complete failure.
if you participated in any of the actions against the iraq debacle--and i did---you know that the coverage of the actions was minimal at best, that it relied on police counts as to numbers and treated them in conservative-style "objectivity" by counterpoising a paragraph about the main demo with another about the 10 people who would show up as counter-demonstrators in support of that farce as if they had the same weight. i think the movement against the war fell apart for two main reasons--the futility of the actions given the way they were not really presented in the press, and the decision on the part of move on to no longer do the organizing.
there's more, but i gave myself the duration of a cigarette to type this.
now i gotta go.
crompsin--you're right, but there's stuff that'll break.
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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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