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Violent Conditions Generate Violent Revolts: The Logic of Rebellion
Violent Conditions Generate Violent Revolts: The Logic of Rebellion
My eyes were glued to my television set as I watched civil unrest unfold in Baltimore. Yet, as a historian who has studied urban rebellions, I was not surprised. Since last August, the question for me has not been why, but when.
I watched CNN’s and MSNBC’s coverage. What I noticed was not surprising, but vexing, nonetheless. Commentators like Al Sharpton, Dr. Jamal Bryant, and others resorted to condemning and condescending participants and denying the uprising’s political significance. The assumption that violence is senseless and apolitical was embedded in their sanctimony.
Now, I do not aim to advocate for the use of collective violence, but I believe it is imperative that we analyze its political significance. In yesterday’s press conference, President Obama argued that the “riot” distracted us from the pursuit of reform. I argue otherwise, the Baltimore rebellion not only highlights the problem of policing, it opens a space for analysis and conversation of all of the structural problems that President Obama mentioned in his reactions yesterday. Rebellions historically have also created political opportunities for reform. Dismissing collective violence as senseless, criminal, and apolitical narrows our frame for understanding the history of interconnected problems plaguing cities and municipalities like Baltimore and Ferguson such as racial and economic segregation and redlining, deindustrialization, overpolicing, the emergence of mass incarceration, and even criminal activity. I argue that collective violence is protest politics. Violent protest does contain a logic, even if it appears chaotic.
The pressing question underlying live analyses of the Baltimore uprising was: Why do African Americans rebel?
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96 Percent Of Americans Expect More Civil Unrest In U.S. Cities This Summer
96 Percent Of Americans Expect More Civil Unrest In U.S. Cities This Summer
Are you ready for rioting, looting and mindless violence in major U.S. cities all summer long? According to a brand new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 96 percent of all Americans believe that there will be more civil unrest in America this summer. That leaves only 4 percent of people that believe that everything will be just fine. In this day and age, it is virtually impossible to get 96 percent of Americans to agree onanything. So the fact that just about everyone agrees that we are going to see more civil unrest should really tell you something. The anger that has been building under the surface for so many years in this country has finally started to erupt. If you have been following my website for a while, you know that this is something that I have been warning about for a very long time. Many people may have thought that I was exaggerating when I talked about the civil unrest that was coming to American cities. But I was not exaggerating at all. In fact, if anything I was downplaying it. In the years to come, we are going to see things happen in our cities that are going to absolutely shock the world.
Ever since the violence first erupted in Baltimore, what has surprised me more than anything has been the level of hate that I am seeing all over the Internet. I am seeing white people openly proclaim how much they hate black people. I am seeing black people openly proclaim how much they hate white people. I am seeing things said about the police that are absolutely horrifying.
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High Levels of Youth Unemployment – and Runaway Inequality – Cause Riots
High Levels of Youth Unemployment – and Runaway Inequality – Cause Riots
Recipe For Disaster
We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.
The great American historian Will Grant wrote in 1969:
In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
A 2011 study this month by economists Hans-Joachim Voth and Jacopo Ponticelli shows that – from 1919 to the present – austerity has increased the risk of violence and instability.
Peter Turchin (professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and an adjunct professor in the departments of Anthropology and Mathematics at the University of Connecticut) pointed out in 2013 that inequality is cyclical, skyrocketing until – periodically – revolution forces concessions from those who have grabbed all the wealth.
Indeed, leading institutions and economists all over world warn that runaway inequality could cause violence and unrest.
For those who work for a living, the level of inequality in America today is arguably the highest in world history.
A high level of youth unemployment is also a leading cause of riots. As we noted in 2011:
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Turning America into a Battlefield: A Blueprint for Locking Down the Nation
Turning America into a Battlefield: A Blueprint for Locking Down the Nation
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.—President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
A standing army—something that propelled the early colonists into revolution—strips the American people of any vestige of freedom. How can there be any semblance of freedom when there are tanks in the streets, military encampments in cities, Blackhawk helicopters and armed drones patrolling overhead?
It was for this reason that those who established America vested control of the military in a civilian government, with a civilian commander-in-chief. They did not want a military government, ruled by force. Rather, they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.
Unfortunately, with the Constitution under constant attack, the military’s power, influence and authority have grown dramatically. Even the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force, has been weakened by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, who ushered in exemptions allowing troops to deploy domestically and arrest civilians in the wake of alleged terrorist acts.
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Ready for the revolution?
Ready for the revolution?
Once aggrandizers are given an inch of leeway under favorable resource conditions, they quickly stretch that inch into a mile and keep on going.
— Brian Hayden
Once upon a time, there lived the ancestral apes that gave rise to humans, chimpanzees and bonobos.
In all likelihood, they lived in bands dominated by the strongest, most aggressive individuals — the male alphas. This tends to produce a rather disagreeable state of affairs where anyone can be humiliated or brutalized at any moment, and the best food and most mates go to just a few. Evenbaboons would rather opt out when the opportunity arises! In addition, our growing brains demanded the fats found only in scarce meat which the alphascommandeered.
Evolution snaked forward. The chimps pretty much put up with the true and tried. Bonobos evolved out of this unpleasant arrangement into an alliance of females, cemented by mutual sexual pleasuring. Humans likewise evolved out and into an alliance of betas, cemented by unprecedented, increasingly more subtle communication abilities, eventually including laughter and speech.
In conjunction with weapons-at-a-distance that equalized brawn and brains, power came to be shared, and so was the meat. The resulting egalitarian bands, a durable and satisfying arrangement, saw humans through the harshness of repeated ice ages and other natural calamities. During this time, humans became survivors par excellence on the planetary stage. The egalitarian strategy of “vigilant sharing” had proven itself a winner.
When did our first egalitarian revolution occur? Nobody knows, as yet. Some experts posit it could be as far back as when we came down from the trees, others place it into our sapienstimeline. The oldest known wooden, fire-hardened spears come from about 300-400,000 years ago.
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Logic of power II
Logic of power II
We’re not trying to live like our ancestors, but to do something totally new: to preserve the most helpful complex technologies, while shifting to a political and economic system where power is fully shared.
— Ran Prieur
It seems like ages ago when I wrote about the logic of power. To sum up that post, I argued that it is not possible to fix domination by seizing power. When a group outdominates the current dominators, they become the new dominators. This really ought to be clear by now to anyone looking to “change the world.” It has nothing to do with faulty characters of the revolutionaries. It has to do with the logic of power. Boggles the mind, though; people still try again and again to grab power from their “oppressors.” And they are equally frequently admonishing fellow revolutionary spirits to “dismantle” power as though it were scaffolding.
What is power, anyway? It seems to me that power in its most basic sense is potency. Ability to do, to accomplish. We are all given power along with life, and all adults have, fundamentally, more or less the same amount. In the personal sense, of course, individuals vary somewhat, depending on their levels of energy, their vitality, strength and perseverance, and their specific talents. Their power also waxes and wanes depending on state of health, age, and other factors. But in the “state of nature” personal power fluctuates within a relatively narrow range.
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Paul Tudor Jones Warns This “Disastrous Market Mania” Will End “By Revolution, Taxes, Or War”
Paul Tudor Jones Warns This “Disastrous Market Mania” Will End “By Revolution, Taxes, Or War”
“This gap between the 1% and the rest of America, and between the US and the rest of the world, cannot and will not persist,” warns renowned trader Paul Tudor Jones during his recent TED Talks speech, as he addressed the question – can capital be just? Hoping to expand the “narrow definitions of capitalism,” that threaten the underpinnings of society, Tudor Jones exclaims, “we’re in the middle of a disastrous market mania,” adding “one of worst of my life.” Perhaps most ominously, he concludes, historically this ends “by revolution, higher taxes or wars. None are on my bucket list.”
Can capital be just? As a firm believer in capitalism and the free market, Paul Tudor Jones II believes that it can be. Tudor is the founder of the Tudor Investment Corporation and the Tudor Group, which trade in the fixed-income, equity, currency and commodity markets. He thinks it is time to expand the “narrow definitions of capitalism” that threaten the underpinnings of our society and develop a new model for corporate profit that includes justness and responsibility.
It’s a good time for companies: in the US, corporate revenues are at their highest point in 40 years. The problem, Tudor points out, is that as profit margins grow, so does income inequality. And income inequality is closely linked to lower life expectancy, literacy and math proficiency, infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, trust among ourselves, obesity, and, finally, social mobility. In these measures, the US is off the charts.
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Snowden Calls for Disobedience Against the U.S. Government
Snowden Calls for Disobedience Against the U.S. Government
In a question and answer session on Reddit earlier today, Edward Snowden wrote:
The progress of Western civilization and human rights is actually founded on the violation of law. America was of course born out of a violent revolution that was an outrageous treason against the crown and established order of the day. History shows that the righting of historical wrongs is often born from acts of unrepentant criminality. Slavery. The protection of persecuted Jews.
But even on less extremist topics, we can find similar examples. How about the prohibition of alcohol? Gay marriage? Marijuana?
Where would we be today if the government, enjoying powers of perfect surveillance and enforcement, had — entirely within the law — rounded up, imprisoned, and shamed all of these lawbreakers?
Ultimately, if people lose their willingness to recognize that there are times in our history when legality becomes distinct from morality, we aren’t just ceding control of our rights to government, but our agency in determining our futures.
How does this relate to politics? Well, I suspect that governments today are more concerned with the loss of their ability to control and regulate the behavior of their citizens than they are with their citizens’ discontent.
How do we make that work for us? We can devise means, through the application and sophistication of science, to remind governments that if they will not be responsible stewards of our rights, we the people will implement systems that provide for a means of not just enforcing our rights, but removing from governments the ability to interfere with those rights.
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The Butlerian Carnival
The Butlerian Carnival
Over the last week or so, I’ve heard from a remarkable number of people who feel that a major crisis is in the offing. The people in question don’t know each other, many of them have even less contact with the mass media than I do, and the sense they’ve tried to express to me is inchoate enough that they’ve been left fumbling for words, but they all end up reaching for the same metaphors: that something in the air just now seems reminiscent of the American colonies in 1775, France in 1789, America in 1860, Europe in 1914, or the world in 1939: a sense of being poised on the brink of convulsive change, with the sound of gunfire and marching boots coming ever more clearly from the dimly seen abyss ahead.
It’s not an unreasonable feeling, all things considered. In Washington DC, Obama’s flunkies are beating the war drums over Ukraine, threatening to send shipments of allegedly “defensive” weapons to join the mercenaries and military advisors we’ve already not-so-covertly got over there. Russian officials have responded to American saber-rattling by stating flatly that a US decision to arm Kiev will be the signal for all-out war. The current Ukrainian regime, installed by a US-sponsored coup and backed by NATO, means to Russia precisely what a hostile Canadian government installed by a Chinese-sponsored coup and backed by the People’s Liberation Army would mean to the United States; if Obama’s trademark cluelessness leads him to ignore that far from minor point and decide that the Russians are bluffing, we could be facing a European war within weeks.
Head south and west from the fighting around Donetsk, and another flashpoint is heating up toward an explosion of its own just now. Yes, that would be Greece, where the new Syriza government has refused to back down from the promises that got it into office: promises that center on the rejection of the so-called “austerity” policies that have all but destroyed the Greek economy since they were imposed in 2009. This shouldn’t be news to anyone; those same policies, though they’ve been praised to the skies by neoliberal economists for decades now as a guaranteed ticket to prosperity, have had precisely the opposite effect in every single country where they’ve been put in place.
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Understanding The Fear Of Self-Defense And Revolution
Understanding The Fear Of Self-Defense And Revolution
Our era is a strange one when considering how social attitudes have developed in such a contrary fashion to the rest of history. I think that our forefathers would look upon our current culture with bewilderment when confronted with the fact that our generation has all but abandoned the option of physical rebellion as a tool for social change. Even among the most enslaved of nations and peoples, the idea of revolution has been held in regard as an entirely moral and principled affair involving every individual, no matter their age or economic station. Today, however, that which we call “revolution” has been delegated mostly to college-age intellectuals and has been so watered down and whitewashed with politically correct restrictions that the concept is hardly recognizable.
I believe the civil rights movements in America and in India in the 20th century have in many ways warped the public view of how opposition to totalitarianism is actually accomplished. I find it interesting that movements led by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. enjoy so much adoration in mainstream media and in public schooling, while the American Revolution is often either misrepresented or not discussed at all. Gandhi’s movement was, in concrete terms, a failure until Indians had actually began organizing to physically fight the British, causing the Crown to attempt to defuse the movement by suddenly offering up a reformation of Indian governance (one that would continue to benefit them). When one examines the facts surrounding Cointelpro operations by the FBI and CIA during the civil rights movement in America, one realizes that half the efforts and actions were legitimate and the other half entirely manipulated.
Over the course of half a century, the philosophy of “anti-violence” has come to include a distinct distaste for self-defense. Self-defense is now consistently equated to “violence” (and is, thus, immoral), regardless of environmental circumstances.
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Even When the Sociopaths Lose They Win
Even When the Sociopaths Lose They Win
How exactly do you cook a nutritious meal if all you have are spoiled ingredients? The answer depends upon your definition of nutritious and who is eating the meal……and, of course, your level of hunger and growing desperation. It is telling how much less discerning we become when the hunger pains boom in our belly and our mind becomes ever more focused on the single minded obsession of relieving our pain rather than pursuing our pleasure. Although at some point down the slippery slope relieving our pain is pursuing our pleasure.
If I carefully tend my garden, making certain the soil is thoroughly turned and pulverized, the seeds and seedlings properly planted, the area fertilized, weeded and watered and yet my garden’s yield is poor year after year after year, at what point do I begin to question the basis for my assumptions? And clearly there is an assumption of a better yield if I continue to do the same thing and expect different results.
Perhaps the soil is too acidic or alkaline, the area in shadow too long or the crop selection not suited for the soil or geographic location. The issue might be any or all of the above, or it might be something entirely different. Only a fearless and thorough examination of both the garden and gardener will reveal the systemic faults, and thereby the remedies to be employed.
It is a common belief in the West that revolution, at least when ‘successful’ (which usually means a forced change in leadership) produces reasonably good outcomes for the population at large. I contend this is wishful thinking and a deliberately seeded misnomer designed to obscure and conceal the ugly recognition that most often the new boss is quite similar in method and madness to the old boss. Change via revolution should not be conflated with better, nor should it be assumed better is the inevitable outcome.
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Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Challenging the Divine Right of Big Energy | TomDispatch
Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, Challenging the Divine Right of Big Energy | TomDispatch.
It was the most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen for just one reason: it was dated the 21st day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it recorded an ordinary land auction in France in what we would call the late summer of 1798. But the extraordinary date signaled that it was created when the French Revolution was still the overarching reality of everyday life and such fundamentals as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. The new calendar that renamed 1792 as Year One had, after all, been created to start society all over again.
In that little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin had made only a few weeks earlier. In the course of a speech she gave while accepting a book award she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”
That document I held was written only a few years after the French had gotten over the idea that the divine right of kings was an inescapable reality. The revolutionaries had executed their king for his crimes and were then trying out other forms of government. It’s popular to say that the experiment failed, but that’s too narrow an interpretation. France never again regressed to an absolutist monarchy and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (while terrifying monarchs and aristocrats everywhere).
The Great Change: Revolucíon
We arrived to rural México in time for the 104th anniversary of Dia de la Revolucíon.The dirt streets of this small village whose central plaza we sit in to write this were lined with people waving flags and singing Cielito Lindo to their children, dressed as revolutionaries, on parade.
Ay, ay, ay, ay,
Canta y no llores,
Porque cantando se alegran,
cielito lindo, los corazones.[Ay, yai, yai, yai,
sing and don’t cry,
because singing gladdens,
my pretty little love (or our little heaven), the hearts. ]
The hearts here are not gladdened at the moment. México has just witnessed the largest street demonstrations in its history, complete with plainclothes agents provocateur smashing windows in Mexico City before being videotaped getting back into their police van (the official government line is that they were “anarchist infiltration”).
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Guest Post: Why Monetizing Debt Could End In Revolutions | Zero Hedge
Guest Post: Why Monetizing Debt Could End In Revolutions | Zero Hedge.
Much has been made of the decision by the Japanese government to inject another $700 billion into their ailing economy. While some may see this as an earnest attempt to save Japan from further stagnation and deflation, even some of the mainstream media (e.g. Bloomberg) are questioning the wisdom of this reckless act.
Over the last few decades, since the crash of 1989, Japan has injected billions into its banks and stock-market to help its economy but all of it has been a miserable failure. America has, via the Federal Reserve, increased its national debt to formerly unthinkable numbers with almost no effect on its ailing economy. Most of Europe has huge public debt as a result of bank bailouts, but still suffers from stagnating or shrinking economies.
In fact, any privately owned central bank that has undertaken monetization policies (creating more public debt) has failed to improve their nation’s economy and merely created a transfer of wealth from the general public to corporate hands.
Of course, government owned banks such as in China and Russia are and do take somewhat different actions given that they are owned by the public (state owned) and not private individuals or corporate entities. Therein lies the crux of the matter – private ownership means private interests, therefore the needs of the country and the populace are of no concern at all.
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Special Report: Why Ukraine’s revolution remains unfinished | Reuters
Special Report: Why Ukraine’s revolution remains unfinished | Reuters.
(Reuters) – In the afternoon of February 20, after the morning’s dead had been cleared away, Volodymyr Melnychuk arrived outside Kiev’s October palace.
Higher up the hill stood the seats of Ukrainian government, defended by thousands of police. Below lay Independence Square, or Maidan, covered in protesters’ camps and scarred with barricades and the detritus of battle.
In fierce clashes that morning scores of protesters and government forces had been killed. Calm now prevailed, and Melnychuk, a handyman who helped build barricades at the protests, had arranged to meet a friend at the palace’s white portico.
A bullet hit him as he stood next to his partner of 13 years, Maria Kvyatkovska. The shot entered Melnychuk’s left cheek and exited near the back of his neck, felling him instantly.
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