There are several dates for Confederate Memorial Day. The April 26 date celebrates the surrender of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston at Bennett Place near Durham, which effectively ended to war. The May 10 date, the surrender of Jefferson Davis or the death of Stonewall Jackson in 1863.  As a Southerner, I cannot help but notice the romantic and sentimental celebration of “Lost” in these memorials of “The Lost Cause”.  In contrast to the triumphalistic Northern Memorial Day prior to World War I.

Memorial Day Flags

In all, Memorial Days are remembrances of the failure of politics that war is, and the human consequences of such failure. And celebrations of obedience to the nation states that sent these men and women to war. All colored with patriotism and flag-waving and bunting and crass commercialism and escape.

All wars have been a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” as the Northern draft riots in 1863 pointed out. Hundreds of thousands of poor Southerners who had no slaves nor any prospect of creating a plantation even if the entire continent comprised slave states, fought because they thought they had prospects or simply because they were drafted or were paid to go in the place of a rich man’s son or a rich man himself.

On Memorial Day we should remember that the post-traumatic stress syndrome of one war can be the cause of the next. Or the insane notion that males in our society have to “prove their manhood” in war. As if peacetime never demands courage, quick thinking, diligence, and persistence–the supposed marks of the military that go by the name of “discipline”.

The nation that celebrates absolute individual freedom also lionizes the the one institution in society in which obedience is absolute, the protections of the Bill of Rights don’t exist, and is the only legitimate (in the eyes of conservatives) employer of last resort. It is the one indispensable government institution, and thus socialist at its core. And no one finds this strange.

No one finds it strange because it is an institution in which your life depends on people you don’t necessarily choose to be with or don’t necessarily like but whom you trust to defend your life in battle as they trust you to defend theirs. And who you mourn when you hear of their falling. That bond captured in the phrase “band of brothers”.

They do need honor on this day, but also do the folks who sacrificed careers, spent time in jail, were beaten, or were killed for saying not only that “War is nonsense” but that “This war is nonsense.” As best we know, Henry Thoreau was one of the first. The Mexican War was the first with an anti-war movement.

James Russell Lowell was another of those critics of the Mexican War. The last stanza of his anti-slavery poem “The Crisis” (which forms the basis of the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation”) is apropos for this Memorial Day.

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her campfires? We ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.

The Jail Support Group for the NATO 5 is raising money for the upcoming trial in September of folks arrested with me in the raid on May 19, 2012.     It seems that the either through design or intent the trial will begin on a day close to the second anniversary of the beginning of Occupy Wall Street.

Here is their call to action:

International Week of Solidarity with the NATO 5
May 16–21, 2013

We are calling on comrades around the world to help raise awareness of the NATO 5 cases and support funds for the defendants on the one-year anniversary of their preemptive arrests.

On May 16, 2012, Chicago cops raided an apartment in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago in an all-too-common attempt to scare people away from the imminent protests against the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) summit. With guns drawn, the cops arrested 11 people in or around the apartment and quickly disappeared them into the bowels of the extensive network of detention facilities in Cook County, Illinois.

After a few days, a few things started becoming clear: 2 of the arrested “activists” were actually undercover Chicago cops who had targeted the real activists for arrest, 6 of them were illegally held and released at the last possible minute before court action could be taken to force their release, and 3 had been charged with trumped-up, politically motivated terrorism charges. These three—Brent Betterly, Brian Jacob Church, Jared Chase—are now known as the NATO 3. They were ultimately charged with 11 felony counts, including material support for terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and creating Molotov cocktails. They face up to 40 years in prison and are expected to go to trial in September. Their lawyers recently filed a motion to dismiss the terrorism charges for being unconstitutional.

Two other Chicago-area activists—Mark Neiweem and Sebastian Senakiewicz—were also preemptively arrested. Mark was arrested in a spectacular snatch-and-grab as he was leaving a restaurant. He was charged with soliciting materials for an explosive device, which carried up to 30 years in prison, and probation violation for a previous felony conviction. In April 2013, he accepted a non-cooperating plea deal to the probation violation charge and to solicitation and attempted possession of an explosive or incendiary device. He was sentenced to a 3-year sentence in a state prison. Sebastian was arrested in another spectacular house raid and charged with falsely making a terrorist threat for allegedly claiming that he had explosive materials and wanted to use them during the convention. Facing 15 years in prison followed by deportation to his native Poland after serving his sentence, he took a non-cooperating plea deal last November. He was sentenced to 4 years with a recommendation of 4 months in boot camp, which he began serving in late March 2013. He is expected to begin his immigration proceedings immediately after completing boot camp.

As the one-year anniversary of these preemptive, politically motivated arrests draws near, we are calling for a week of solidarity actions and fundraisers for the NATO 5. All five defendants have been incarcerated since their arrests last May. Being held hostage in jail is extremely expensive for prisoners, as they are forced to purchase all their hygiene products, writing supplies, additional food to supplement the starvation portions given to them each day, and other basic necessities from the jail’s commissary at exorbitant prices. The legal defense costs for the defendants is also mounting, as their lawyers are working hard to help them win their freedom and there is a ton of evidence to sift through and other preparations to make.

This May, stand in solidarity with the NATO 5! Organize a house party, bake sale, silent auction, cabaret, raffle, rally, noise demo, art auction, street theater performance, concert…whatever you and your friends want! You can also write the defendants to let them know what you have planned (https://nato5support.wordpress.com/contact/).

The NATO 5 cases are linked by a few common threads. People around the world have come together to protest NATO’s role in worldwide military expenditures and operations, the organization’s penchant for wantonly killing civilians for the benefit of its member nations—particularly the United States—and its disregard for human rights. Additionally, undercover Chicago police officers targeted and entrapped the activists because of their politics, which is part of a broader pattern of state repression against political activists, in which charging activists as terrorists is one of many strategies being used to silence dissent and dismantle activist communities. Other recent cases in which activists have been targeted include the Cleveland 4 (http://www.cleveland4solidarity.org/), the Green Scare cases (http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/), and the Pacific Northwest Grand Jury resisters (http://nopoliticalrepression.wordpress.com/).

Many of these prisoners need your financial support and solidarity as well. The Pacific Northwest Grand Jury resisters are calling for a week of solidarity actions from April 24–May 1 (http://saynothing.noblogs.org/call-for-coordinated-week-of-solidarity-actions/) and the Tinley Park 5 are calling for a day of solidarity on May 19 (http://www.anarchistnews.org/content/one-year-anniversary-arrest-tp5). And don’t forget about June 11th, the International Day of Solidarity with long-term anarchist prisoners Eric McDavid and Marie Mason (http://june11.org/).

Make this spring and summer a time of solidarity for the NATO 5 and all targets of state repression!

Dave Pollard, author of The Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work on his blog “how to save the world” has what he calls Preparing for Collapse: The New Political Map. It is an interesting taxonomy of the varieties of political animals roaming around in this pre-collapse epoch. (h/t Dicey Troop for the map)

A new "map" visualizing activist groups inspires thoughts of the difficult path ahead.

Forget the old political struggles. The major struggle of ideas right now is between those who think global civilizational collapse is inevitable and those who who think that global civilization either can be or will be reformed and saved. The key difference between the two is whether humans can avoid suffering the collapse. The major struggle in practice is between those who advocate individualistic strategies and those who advocate social strategies.

He treats them in order, and the names of the positions are pretty self-explanatory. Here is the list:

A. Deniers
B. Rapturists
C. Globalists and Shock Doctrine Randians
D. Technotopians, neo-environmentalists, and post-humanists
E. Integrals and reprogrammers
F. Humanists, Occupy movements, metamovements, and human consciousness movements
G. Transition movements and the resilience movement
H. Deep green activists
I. Communitarians
J. Existentialists and dark mountaineers
K. Neo-survivalists

It’s a very helpful map that can be used in several different ways. You can map groups and organizations to the category. You can map authors or current social and political works to the categories. You can map your commitments to the categories. You can map your moods through the day, week, or year to the categories.

One of the recurring questions in comments is what exactly to do, what is the plan, what agency do we have as individuals in the face of the current seemingly ever-worsening crisis. That as it turns out is a difficult question and subject to howls of derision from anyone not currently in the same category as you on the political map. So of course, folks are reluctant to engage in more than another round or two of exploring the awfulness.

One of the places I shop often is a thrift store operated by a rescue mission. The books placed on their freebie shelves are often worth taking. This past week I picked up Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, The New Student Left, an anthology of New Left tracts and articles that was published in 1966 and republished by Beacon Press in 1967. The earliest writing is from 1960; the latest from 1965. And, yes, it of course includes excerpts from the Port Huron Statement of 1962. The following are some excerpts that spoke to me about our current condition and how there are a lot of elements unchanged from 47-53 years ago.

The radical style [in contrast to the dogmatic style], on the other hand, takes as its presupposition Dewey’s claim that we are free to the extent that we know what we are about. Radicalism as style involves penetration of a social problem to its roots, its real causes. Radicalism presumes a willingness to continually press forward the query: Why? Radicalism finds no rest in its conclusions; answers are seen as provisional, to be discarded in the face of new evidence or changed conditions. This is, in one sense, a difficult mental task and, in a more profound moral sense, it represents a serious personal decision to be introspective, to be exposed always to the stinging glare of change, to be willing to reconstruct our social views…In its harshest condensation, radicalism of style demands that we oppose delusions and be free. It demands that we change our life. — Thomas Hayden, “Letter to the New (Young) Left”, 1961

Tom Hayden, when he wrote those words was 22 years old. Can you pardon some of the romanticism that the hard realities of the 1960s knocked away?

Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. — The Port Huron Statement, adopted by Students for a Democratic Society, 1962

And yet, here we are alive followed by a new generation with that same sense.

We are citizens before we are partisans. If our immediate success is not built upon friendship, it is bad art. If our community is robustly concerned with the common good, even the immediate success of bad artists will be less likely. But if bad artists should reach high office, our art will have constructed a community that can endure beyond their caprice. Our first concern is with our community. We are needed. We need each other. — Christopher Reiner, “Politics as an Art: The Civic Vision”, 1962

I would argue that at this moment we need to have another discussion about politics as an art. We are forever bring the arts into our expression of politics–from posters to music. What does it mean to consider politics as a performance art–to get beyond the sterility of stale kabuki.

Here is the real contradiction. The bureaucrats hold history as ended. As a result significant parts of the population both on campus and off are dispossessed, and these dispossessed are not about to accept this a-historical point of view. It is out of this the the conflict has occurred with the University bureaucracy and will continue to occur until it is clear that the University can not function.

The things we are asking for in our civil rights protest have a deceptively quaint ring. We are asking for the due process of law. We are asking for our actions to be judged by committees of our peers. We are asking that regulations ought to be considered as arrived at legitimately only from the consensus of the governed. These phrases are all pretty old, but they are not being taken seriously in America today, nor are they being taken seriously on the Berkeley campus. — Mario Savio, “And End to History”, December 1964

Most of the anthology is taken up with documents from the civil rights movement, and especially from the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and SDS’s Economic Research and Action Project. The appendix contains additions in the 1967 edition pertinent to the anti-war movement:

A few days ago a tweet pointed out that the Rand Corporation had released a study, US Global Defense Posture, 1783-2011. Given the upcoming budget controversy about the military budget and the coming end of “combat operations” in Afghanistan, I decided that this might be an interesting read. And it is, in a way. It’s a 146-page summary of the history of the US military’s global deployment over its entire history up through 2011. It is readable and has extensive footnotes and a bibliography.

RAND Corporation offices in Pittsburgh. A look at how RAND produced a historical study of American imperialism using taxpayer dollars.

It creates a classification of US military postures.

Since independence, senior officials have developed and at least partially implemented seven distinct and identifiable U.S. global postures:
continental defense (1783–1815), continental defense and commercialism (1815–1898), oceanic posture and surge deployments (1906–1938), hemispheric defense (1938–1941), perimeter defense in depth (1943–1949), consolidated defense in depth (1950–1989), and expeditionary defense in depth (1990–present).

The study uses three factors to classify those periods: the stationing within or outside the continental United States, whether troops are deployed as a garrison force (protection) or as an expeditionary force (power projection), and whether the defense is a perimeter defense or a defense in depth.

Finally, the study offers the following recommendations:

Plan strategically
Think globally
Connect basing efforts inside and outside the contintental United States
Develop a lighter and more agile footprint overseas
Opportunistically expand the US presence abroad in critical regions

Just to position this study in terms of its approach to national security, here is the opening paragraph:

Over the past 220 years, as the United States has matured from a young nation struggling to survive into a global hegemon, its military has experienced a corresponding increase in size and capability, growing from a single Army regiment and a handful of frigates into the preeminent global military force with unmatched land, air, space, and maritime forces.

The author is Stacie L. Pettyjohn and the list of acknowledgements:

I particularly want to acknowledge the assistance of Douglas Feith, Brian Arakelian, Thomas Ehrhard, Lt Gen Christopher Miller, Lt Gen Paul Selva, Maj Gen James Holmes, Col David Fahrenkrug, Col Mark Burns, Lee Alloway, Fernando Manrique, Maj Aaron Clark, Group Captain Dean Andrew, Col Bruno Foussard, Lt Col Peter Garretson, Michael Fitzgerald, Scott Wheeler, James Mitre, Lance Hampton, Andrew Plieninger, Lt Col Russell Davis, Yvonne Kinkaid, Debra Moss, Col James Casey, and James Tobias. Special thanks go to Evan Montgomery for his comments on multiple drafts of this report. I would also like to thank Robert Harkavy and RAND colleagues Michael McNerney and Thomas Szayna for their thorough reviews of the manuscript.

RAND colleagues Stephen Worman, Paula Thornhill, Alan Vick, Andrew Hoehn, Jacob Heim, Jeff Hagen, Karl Mueller, Lynn Davis, Ely Ratner, and Eric Heginbotham provided valuable feedback and suggestions.

Where we started in 1783 was with “the ingrained American revolutionary fear that centrally controlled armed forces represented a threat to freedom at home, combined with the relative security afforded by the Atlantic Ocean, a 3,000-mile wide moat, and the nation’s expanding strategic depth, enabled the United States to rely on a small standing military establishment that would be bolstered by citizen-soldier reinforcements in the event of a war.”

There were a few coastal forts and a string of frontier forts that extended from the Great Lakes to New Orleans manned by 2500. In 1800, the population was 5 million. An equivalent standing force today would be about 160,000. There are 1.4 million active and 1.4 million reserve personnel in the US military today with around 5 million people reaching military age annually. That should put some perspective on what’s required for basic continental defense and our current defense posture. But I digress from discussing the study.

And why the US Air Force spent taxpayer money on the study.

First of all:

In making Ryan his running mate, Mitt Romney guaranteed that this election will be about big principles, but he also underscored a little-noted transformation in American politics: Liberals and conservatives have switched sides on the matter of which camp constitutes the party of theory and which is the party of practice. Americans usually reject the party of theory, which is what conservatism has now become.– E.J. Dionne

This is a reflective that resulted from reading Van Jones, Rebuilding the Dream, Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Jimmy Carter, White House Diary and Chris Hayes, The Twilight of the Elites: America after Meritocracy. That I read them doesn’t mean that I am parroting them.

Jones’s book is superficial but provides some points of engaging the conflict between movemental politics and institutional politics.

Hedges and Sacco describe the situation in the US that has made movemental politics necessary and urgent. Unfortunately, Hedges and Sacco after profiling the situation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in Camden NJ, in the coal country of West Virginia, and in the migrant farmworker hub of Immolakee FL do not follow up with the devastation that has occurred in suburban America that thought itself immune from the struggles of these other places. Finally, he profiles Occupy Wall Street with as much superficiality as Jones does concerning movemental politics. And he relies on the same activists at Occupy Wall Street that showed up on Colbert and other media coverage of the encampment. They are good at expressing their experiences but what comes out is not the whole story even as viewed through the limited lens of livestreams.

Carter’s diary from his White House years is instructive as to the day-by-day unfolding of events in the White House and how a President perceives those events and what decisions are required of the President. Given Carter’s candor, it is as close to an inside description of the “inside game” that we are likely to get.

Finally, Hayes looks at the assumptions about meritocracy that drove the liberal era in America and how the environment of money gradually corrupted them. Also Hayes examines the idea of merit and social mobility itself in a commendably nuanced argument.

Movemental Politics

Movemental politics is that which shakes up the institutions (and even entire societies) and shifts the terms of political debate. It is the proverbial “street” filled with the opinions of the public and the prodding of activists. It is what institutional politicians want to co-opt or suppress because it is too unpredictable, too critical of institutions, and too dangerous to established interests. It is the barricades of 1848, the secret network of the Underground Railroad, the reformist campaigns of the prohibitionist feminists, the church meetings of the Civil Rights movement, the strikes by the United Mine Workers, the United Farm Workers, and Solidarnosc. It is the hundreds of thousands in the streets opposed to the Vietnam War and the Iraq War. And it is the protests in Mexico City, Spain, Rio+10, #NoNATO, Occupy Wall Street and on and on. It criticizes, it confronts, and it builds alternatives. It is where the left claims to feel comfortable. It is where there are conflicts between various political alternatives. And grassroots debates on grassroots terms.

So what do we know about movemental politics?

Movements appear from nowhere

There might be a sense for decades that there are some serious issues that need to be dealt with and yet not movement appears. There is a common experience among organizers of engaging in endless conversations and persuasion and debates and actions–and nothing happens. All of the discussions about “Where is the revolution?” are the despair of folks who have given much thought and effort and meet with utter indifference to the point that outright opposition would be a step forward. And then, when least expected, a bunch of people rise up and push the issue. And the resonance of their action prompts a cascade of other people to do the same. And the movement ripples out from there. Something happens that is totally unexpected. And catches the guardians of institutional politics flat-footed.

Movements are attractive

When the catalyzing event happens, no one has to motivate people to act or to show up in the street. Sometimes it is spontaneous. Other times a planned event is overwhelmed with a response. The sense of something significant attracts people who might otherwise not leave home or leave their everyday routines. People switch off their TVs and get off their duffs. Like the appearance of a movement, this aspect is also uncontrollable. That is, there is no way that you can market to get the cascading response that occurs. The cascading extends as far and as rapidly as the social media of the time permits communications about the events of the movement.

Movements begin among marginal people and initially represent a minority opinion

Let’s be clear what marginal means in this statement. Movements begin among people who stand in two different worlds that are in conflict. American merchants in the 18th century considered themselves to be English citizens, yet were treated as a foreign colony, like an inhabitant of British India or Hong Kong. Domestic US commerce was colonial commerce. The sit-ins in Greensboro were of African-American college students who were in a segregated society that denied them access to a workers lunch counter. The anti-Vietnam War protests started with college students (especially at elite colleges) who were told that education was important to society but who were being drafted and being killed as soon as they completed that education. The Occupy Wall Street movement started with folks who found that education would not give them a life as good as, let alone better, than that of their parents and who yet were chained to student loans that were forever. When it appeared, the idea of American independence was a minority opinion and remained so until it was gained. The Civil Rights movement was a minority of activists in a sea of people who then and now have to behave according to the notion of white privilege. The labor movement always and still is an minority. The feminist movement remains a minority opinion among women who have gained the right to vote and work in self-motivated proffessional positions. And Occupy Wall Street remains a minority position, especially and surprisingly, among progressives and the left.

Movements have no clear plan but pursue many objectives at once

Everything looks so planned out in hindsight the narrative of the great transformation wrought by the movement is recounted. Large than life figures, grand actions, inevitable victory. When the cascade occurs, it catches the folks who have been working at it for a long time by surprise. The response from the New England countryside to the British occupation of Boston, for example. The many sit-ins that followed Greensboro sit-in. The first draft card burning in the Vietnam War protests. The turnout at Occupy Wall Street on October 1, the day of the Brooklyn Bridge arrests.

And the response to the cascade is the first attempts a real organization. Before there were not enough people to worry about organization; now people are going in all different directions. Correspondence committees were organized across the 13 colonies; a rudimentary postal service was organized for their correspondence; militias were spontaneously organized and began drilling. Or in the 1960s, sit-ins were organized throughout the South to desegregate libraries, swim-in to desegregate public parks, African-American celebrities with a white fan base sat in to desegregate airport restaurants or booked hotel rooms at the “white” hotel. White college students and SNCC joined in Freedom rides on buses; they would insist on being able to eat together at restaurants, wait in the same waiting rooms at bus station. Voter education drives were launched across the South, challenging literacy tests and poll taxes. When the Democratic Party looked the other way, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was organized. Occupy Wall street conducted general assemblies and operated work groups that were self-organized; those dealt with media, sanitation, food, direct action, …..They involved themselves in feeding the homeless, occupying properties about to be foreclosed, conducting street theater at banks and mass rallies in public places–and they camped out 24-7. Now they Walkupy and Chalkupy. Both holding the institutions accountable and converse about the vision for an alternative.

Movements have to be translated into institutions at some point if their objectives of change are to be realized.

The social order, “society”, is institutional. It comprises common habitual patterns of interaction between and among individuals. It defines habitual communication networks that have some hierarchy of privilege of information. It aggregates patterns of status and deference that tend to be lasting. It allows individuals to have expectations of behavior that are generally fulfilled. And for all of history to this point, it has punished extreme deviance (and often much less extreme deviance) from those common expectations. When an Occupy Wall Street encampment debates how to have sanitation, food, safety, and the technological infrastructure taken care of on a continuing basis, a movement is deliberating how to institutionalize its presence in the existing society. When a revolution actually occurs and a movement takes the power of a state, it faces the question of how to institutionalize its principles and prevent the collapse of the social order and a counter-revolution. In order to accomplish this successfully, a movement must have a sufficient understanding of the institutions that they intend to change, ideas about the details of what needs to change, ability to communicate to the folks who understand and work in those institutions, and an understanding of the hazards of institutional capture of the movement. This is an abrupt change in the requirements for success of the movement; few movements make this transition successfully. Some attempt it prematurely and are co-opted; others delay it and finally dissipate as a movement from a perception of failure to have an impact. From the point of view of those within the movement, it is impossible to know with certainty where you are positioned between co-option and dissipation, and this creates a lot of controversy and potential divisions in movements in which everyone acts as if they are certain of their perceptions of the historical moment.

The translation of a movement’s principles into institutions is frequently conflated with a strategy that works inside institutions to accomplish change–the “inside” part of Van Jones’s formulation.

Translation of movement principles into institutions can be from taking over and changing existing institutions or it can be repurposing existing institutions. The strategy of working inside institutions is one of the movement co-opting the institutions instead of the reverse. Because the whole idea of institutions is to have persistent social relationships, a strategy of co-option from the inside runs up against those aspects of the institution that are resistant to change and whose purpose is to maintain the stability of social relationships in the institution. Most inside strategies wilt when movements discover that they are being opposed within the institutions. A signficant remainder find that in maneuvering around this opposition they wind up being co-opted. What appears to be a strategy of less conflict and easy victories turns out to be illusory. That does not mean that it cannot be an effective strategy in some circumstances — as long as the movement is clear about the difficult and maintains awareness of the risks.

Institutional Politics

Institutional politics comprises the persuasion and power relationships that apply to decisions within persistent social relationships. Its the uncomfortable part of meetings, Occupy general assemblies, family life, office operations, teams and so on. Most frequently it goes by the name “office politics”. It has to do with the strategies and tactics by which individuals and factions seek to direct institutions regardless of the formality or hierarchy of the structure of the institution. It is what people dismiss when they dismiss something as “just politics”. Here are some observations that don’t need much explanation to anyone who has ever tried to get something organized.

Over time, networks of communication tend to evolve into hierarchies in order to simplify the number of communication relationships required to get something done.

Part of this is the trimming of communications links because everyone communicating with everyone is cumbersome. Other times it is because it fits someone’s or some group’s principle of “efficiency”. Other times, it’s a deliberate strategy to establish one group in leadership at the expense of others.

Over time, people tend to ascribe authority to people at nodes in the communication network.

You can see this in the blogosphere in the authority of position ascribed to bloggers who run popular blogs or bloggers who attract a large audience. This ascription of authority becomes a halo effect for the treatment of everything written on the blog. And the media seeks out the most popular bloggers, or at least grants them the authority to speak on behalf of some section of the blogosphere. This is the same way that folks were identified as “leaders” of Occupy Wall Street. The ones at the nodes of communication must be who is driving the direction of Occupy Wall Street — even when they weren’t necessarily.

Division of labor tends to become persistent based on interests or skills, or both.

People like to have competent people do stuff. People also like to do stuff they feel competent at doing.

Persistent groups self-organized by interests or skills, or both, add to the complexity of communication.

Folks with necessary technical specialties have to educate folks into the limitations of those specialties and work to have “normal people” feel comfortable with the considerations of those specialties in order to avoid becoming privileged by the necessity of what one does or to encourage folks to challenge what might be unwarranted technical assertions.

Consensus requires wider and wider inclusiveness of information in setting direction.

That is what consensus is, by definition.

Effectiveness in action requires the exclusion of irrelevant actions.

That point should be self-evident.

Small groups develop boundaries that define what is inside their scope and what is outside.

Without outside information, small groups tend toward self-importance and unwarranted universalization of their positions–and action as a faction in conflict with other factions.

Groups become their own symbols

Over time, people ascribe an identity, a set of motives, a character of thought and behavior, and an enduring purpose to the institution itself and independent of the aggregate of the relationships between people associated with the institution. This has the effect of reifying a set of behavioral expectations in a corporate form. Lewis Mumford called this ascription the “myth of the machine”. The institution is now seen instrumentally by those inside its context and by people outside its context (“society at large”).

Awareness of the details of how institutional politics works in a particular institution is an invaluable resource in creating strategies for change, even from outside the institution.

This is what is normally referred to as getting to know the institutional culture.

Even people with formal authority and perceived absolute power have to operate within the limits of institutional politics.

This is what folks often miss about the highly placed folks in an institution, believed to rule at will. And what hubris collapses.

There are always countervailing institutions in society at large to any institution and countervailing factions within any institution to the current way the institution operates.

All institutions work at cross-purposes; the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. No institution is monolithic.

Strategies in institutional politics frame direct tactics in terms of the prevailing self-understanding of the institution — the conventional understanding of its identity, motives, character, and purpose.

These work over against what the institution pretends to be. Consider how Occupy Sandy exposed the privileged assumptions behind disaster relief by the Red Cross.

Strategies in institutional politics frame indirect tactics as influencing personal social networks of people within the institution either with respect to any hierarchy of relationships or against it depending on the strategic objectives and circumstances.

The chain of command is one social network, but not the only one.

The Take-Away

Movemental politics and institutional politics are different in character and the people who are attracted to one or the other have different preferred styles of getting things done, arriving at decisions, and holding accountability. In neither case can a person expect to dictate decisions just because they assert something as necessary or desirable. In movemental politics there is lots of open conflict; institutions suppress conflict and see it emerge over bogus issues.

Electoral Politics

Electoral politics is a hybrid of movemental politics and institutional politics. It’s intent is to keep institutions from becoming rigid and out of touch with reality or to institutionalize a revolution. It provides an institution within which, in principle, movements can surface and become institutionalized as policy. In practice, it is subject to elaborate strategies to prevent the change presented by movements and the upsetting of the status quo. Here are some observations about electoral politics.

The easiest way to sway elections is to buy votes.

In the early days of US elections, a jug of whiskey at the polling place was sufficient, and most all of the Founding Fathers used this method to gain votes of the folks in their districts. So the competition between candidates was often a matter of who had the better whiskey or who was most generous.

What should be a continuous political conversation between elections has been reduced first to a marketing campaign around elections and then to a continuous marketing campaign.

Marketing campaigns are top-down persuasion strategies that make decisions about platforms of positions, promotional strategy, and direct sales (called canvassing) based on research of demographics and wants. They are one-way communications based on persuading people of a pre-established way of thinking about issues.

Election campaigns following a marketing model are candidate-centric and initiated by candidates or parties that recruit and select candidates for their ability to win a specific election.

Consider how political parties currently operate.

Political parties are institutions, not movements.

The fact that political parties not movements is a fact that political parties try to obscure by astrotufing movemental campaigns. And all, yes all, political campaigns in the US and 2012 were run as astroturfed campaigns, enlisting volunteers in recruitment, promotion, persuasion, and facilitating getting out the vote.

A truly movemental electoral campaign would arrive at a large enough consensus to win first and then recruit and vet the candidates from the bottom up on the basis of their ability to deliver the institutional change.

Note that the movement creates and focuses the constituency beforehand and makes it available to a candidate who pledges certain institutional results. The movement retains enough discipline to select another candidate the next time around — and win. That is the fact that holds an elected official to their pledge.

The critical element of the electoral process under a movemental model is the creation of an authentic consensus from the bottom up.

The implication of this is that the issues cannot be pre-loaded or forced or manipulated in the process of arriving at the consensus. There must be honest two-way communication, something that most involved in politics and political action have forgotten how to do because it is more difficult and time-consuming that adopting the marketing model.

In order to create authentic consensus, we as a society must recapture authentic political communication, involving empathy, persuasion, and compromise.

Politics is about communication and arriving at decisions about how a society operates in the short term and the long term. It is about power to the extent that individual people want to exclusively dictate those decisions. Arriving at a consensus means trading power for solidarity in a way that increases everyone’s power and dignity in social action. How to do this to ensure everyone’s power and dignity is challenge in translating movemental politics into institutional politics and in keeping the institutions open to change.

The Take-Away

Elections intend to take the violence out of changes in power. That makes honest-to-goodness elections resulting from movemental politics frightening to the status quo and produces all sorts of institutional constraints to prevent actual change of power from happening or the broadening of the number of people who have actual power through elections. These constraints make institutions rigid and resistent to change so that change, when it comes, tends to be disruptive and violent. What we have seen in the past two years is a global movement to create a political environment in time and space that is of equal importance to the economic environment. And in every country, the authorities defend the tyranny of the economic over time and space. Economic powers define where people can assemble and discuss politics, and economic powers define the time that people have in order to care for civil society. Fixing this imbalance between economic life and political life is an important precondition of fixing all of the problems with electoral politics. There are 168 hours in a week, of which 72 is required individual maintenance time. Balance would imply that of the remaining time, 32 or so hours would be devoted to economic contribution, 32 or so hours would be devoted to cultural contribution, and 32 or so hours would be devoted to political contribution. And enough of the political time must be overlapping across the society to allow the creation of a consensus. Otherwise, “Can we talk.” is met with “I’m too busy.”

And the political contradiction that we face is that the masses of people who must be involved in a global consensus have been forced and manipulated by the current institutions into being “too busy”. It is expected, even if it is neither productive nor healthy.

Zbigniew Brezinski’s new book Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power seeks to address these four questions:

Zbigniew Brzezinski (Photo: Polish Government / Wikimedia Commons)

1. What are the implications of the changing distribution of global power from the West to the East, and how is it being affected by the new reality of a politically awakened humanity?

2. Why is America’s global appeal waning, what are the symptoms of America’s domestic and international decline, and how did America waste the unique global opportunity offered by the peaceful end of the Cold War? Conversely, what are America’s recuperative strengths and what geopolitical reorientation is necessary to revitalize America’s world role?

3. What would be the likely geopolitical consequence if America declined from its globally pre-eminent position, who would be the almost immediate political victims of such a decline, what effects would it have on the global-scale problems of the twenty-first century, and could China assume America’s central role in world affairs by 2025?

4. Looking beyond 2025, how should a resurgent America define its long-term geopolitical goals, and how could America, with its traditional European allies, seek to engage Turkey and Russia in order to construct an even larger and more vigorous West? Simultaneously, how could America achieve balance in the East between the need for close cooperation with China and the fact that a constructive American role in Asia should be neither exclusively China-centric nor involve dangerous entanglements in Asian conflicts?

You might detect an optimistic note in the way that Brezinski has asked the questions, but reading between the lines what is apparent is that Zbigniew Brezinski is granting that the US imperial adventure launched in the idea of the American Century is over. The US empire with its veneer of the US being first among equals is giving way to a transitional period that is highly risky. And Brezinski is not sure that the US has the domestic politics, economy, or national leadership that can avoid catastrophe. When Brezinski was in the Carter White House, the administration that negotiated the Camp David agreements and brought Deng Xiaoping to Atlanta to finesse the “one China, two systems” cover for China becoming a permanent UN Security Council member–when all this progress happened, it was not supposed to end this way with US power dramatically weakened within a decade.

Well, it's something (photo: Jo Bourne/flickr)

I had returned from attending a book signing by Kevin Gosztola of his book Truth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning and arrived back at the Halsted El station in Bridgeport, Chicago around 10:00 pm. I took the bus to within five blocks of the apartment that was housing a number of protesters for the upcoming protest of NATO on May 20. When I climbed the back stairs to the second floor apartment, I met two people on the second floor porch I had not seen before. A guy with a black bushy beard introduced himself as Turk and said that the lady in the hoodie with him was his cousin Nadia.

After introducing myself, I went inside and told folks who had been staying there about Kevin’s book signing and sat down at the table. While I was seated at the table, Turk came to chat some more and said his name was Mo and then went to join the other folks in the living room of the apartment.

I was tired and went to sleep in my sleeping bag on the kitchen floor while the others were talking and partying in the front room.

I awoke to the sound of a loud bang near me and the shout of “Police!” As I opened my eyes to see what was going on, I was staring into the muzzle of an automatic handgun held by one officer and a flashlight shining in my face, held by another officer. They ordered me to stand up, and helped me get out of the sleeping bag when I complied. They told me to hold my hands up and spread my legs while they frisked me and then ordered me to put my hands behind my back as they led me by the arm into the living room where the others were standing, legs apart, hands behind their backs, and heads resting against the wall. We were frisked again; the officer who frisked me felt the chest belt of my heart monitor and the strap of my money belt (called in the inventory a “fanny pack”). He searched through the money belt and found my drivers license, Medicare card, senior discount transit IDs, and a CTA 30-day fare card. He took the drivers license and left the rest and left me wearing my money belt.

After everyone had been frisked, we were handcuffed (tightly), led into a bedroom and told to sit down. One of the others chastised the officers saying that they should “be easy on the old guy,” meaning me. The officers brought a chair for me to sit in, facing the others and with my back to the bedroom door. The officers then asked those of us who hadn’t had cell phones on us where they were. I told them that it was in my electronics bag; they found it and a small camera that looked like a cell phone and came back to confirm that they were mine. I identified which was the cell phone and which was the camera.

During this time, someone asked “Where is the warrant?” and someone else asked “What are we being charged with?” An officer replied, “You’ll find out in court.”

Having secured all the cell phones, the officers began dividing the group to transport based on the orders from a commander of the Organized Crime Unit. (I identified his rank as a gold leaf and saw “Organized Crime Unit” on his name plate peeking out from under his “Police” vest. I also noticed that the officers were dressed in black shirts, not the light blue of beat cops in Chicago. They brought those of us who did not have shoes our shoes; the logic for who went first became who had shoes on. I stepped into my shoes, unlaced and the officer leading me by my right arm led me (and supporting my balance) as we slowly went down the back stairs of the building.