An e-Rant about Politics, Religion, Software, etc.

When political activists engage in discussions with sympathetic non-activists, we often encounter the idea that all the work of protesting injustice, educating the public, and agitating for change is futile in the face of the monolithic weight of social inertia and elite power structures. Indeed, despite being armed with a knowledge of the history of how political activism has shaped the world and brought about progressive changes, we can still find that, when we beats our fists against the imposing wall of power time and time again and our fingers stand bleeding at that effort while not a single damn brick has been dislodged, it can be discouraging to say the least.

Here’s a comment that I ran across today on a post from the excellent Kasama Project:

It is interesting and appropriate, G, that you bring up the Milgram experiments (“The Perils of Obedience” I think, is the title of the paper he wrote about them). Overall, Milgram’s studies found that a huge percentage of the population (at that time)–as he summed it up, it didn’t matter what social strata or country the people came from–would go along, playing their obedient role in helping to electro-shock a stranger beyond the point of rendering them unconscious, even when that victim complained aloud that they had a heart problem, so long as the subject was told clearly by a team of lab coat technicians that 1) the Experiment required that the test-shocking go on, and 2) that the subject (who was asked to press a button, giving the victim a shock each time he or she gives a wrong answer… or no answer at all) will NOT be held responsible for the effects of the experiment; the scientists take “full responsibility.” Something like 90% go all the way to not only torturing, but potentially killing the shocked-subject. Shocking indeed.

Nonetheless, one remarkable finding of Milgram’s studies–he ran the experiment many many times, playing with different variables along the way–has always represented a certain basis for hope. Namely: the fact that when the study was staged so that one of the three lab coat technicians (all played by actors of course) rebelled, verbally protesting and then refusing to continue with the lab experiment, ALL OF THE TEST SUBJECTS (the shock-button pushers) ALSO REFUSED AND STOPPED. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

I have always thought of this as a kind of allegory for how the rebellious actions of a minority or even a single person–particularly someone that occupies some position of authority within a particular community–can utterly transform a situation, opening up the possibility of others’ real freedom. That is, we might say that it is the psychic space created by the rebellion amongst the so-called “experts” that enables the “subjects” to act upon their own impulses, which were already present, but were suppressed in service to a up-till-now unified and seemingly monolithic authority.

I take comfort from this in the knowledge that even if it sometimes seems like activists are talking to the air, speaking out about injustice and speaking up for the voiceless and oppressed is never futile. Every voice is like a little light that opens up just a little more space in the darkness allowing some other soul to find his match and light his own candle to join the growing chorus of lights. Eventually, there comes a point where there is sufficient brightness for everyone to locate their own light source if they have one, and then, this flood of lights will banish the darkness to the tiny cracks and crevices.

• $100 million – The amount of aid pledged by Obama to help save lives and rebuild Haiti
• $150 million – The amount spent on Obama’s Inaugural Ball
• $2 million PER DAY – The cost of operating the US aircraft carrier that Obama sent to Haiti nearly a week ago
• $7 million PER DAY - The amount of military aid given to Israel by the US during Fiscal Year 2009
• $280+ million PER DAY – The cost of fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan so far
• Less than $2 per day – Until the recent tragedy, the amount of money paid to tens of thousands of Hatians working in sweatshops run by US based corporations like Disney

Recently, I’ve been frequently seeing people refer to Obama as a socialist and making accusations that the new stimulus package amounts to socialism and that the new administration has a “socialist agenda”. Cafe Press is filled with “clever” t-shirts where people have juxtaposed Obama’s face with that of figures such as Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

It’s enough to make me scream.

As a socialist, I find that these claims add injury to insult as these people are using the label as though it were a slight all the while bestowing it on an individual who is clearly not a socialist.

Bonafide socialist and radical historian Paul Street puts it quite nicely in a recent ZNet commentary on the filtering out of authentic Left voices in mainstream media:

Two weeks ago, the leading weekly U.S. magazine Newsweek actually published a cover story titled “We are All Socialists Now.”  By “socialism,” the corporate magazine appeared to mean any sort of escalated government intervention in the U.S. economy. There were two things missing from this remarkable Newsweek story:

1. Any remotely accurate understanding of socialism as it is grasped and advanced by its modern-day adherents: democratic workers’ and peoples’ control of economic and political life in the interests of social use, equality, and the common good instead of private gain and social hierarchy. As Lance Selfa, a Marxist author, notes at the end of his recent and officially invisible (in the broader political culture) historical analysis of the Democratic Party, “in a socialist society, workers would take control of the factories and offices.  The repressive apparatuses of the state – from prisons to the military would be brought under democratic control and then abolished.”

2. Discussion with a single solitary living U.S socialist to get his or her take on whether or not the U.S. has now suddenly and miraculously embraced a socialist world view and program.  Such a person could easily be found but actual living socialists must remain offstage since they are and their ideals – shared to no small degree (as only a tiny percentage of Americans are permitted to know) by great historical personalities like Albert Einstein (author of a brilliant essay titled “Why Socialism” in the first issue of the Marxist journal Monthly Review), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Helen Keller – are officially invisible under the reigning corporate-Orwellian rules.

I will return in a future commentary to a closer examination of Newsweek’s fascinating “We Are All Socialists Now” claim.  In the meantime, I, an officially invisible American, leave you, dear reader, with the definition of capitalism in the second (1979) and unabridged edition of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary.  Please note that it contains ample room for significant government intervention and that it contains no reference to the “democracy” and “freedom” with which it is routinely and falsely conflated in “mainstream” U.S. media and political discourse: “the economic system in which all or most of the means of production and distribution, as land, factories, railroads, etc., are privately owned and operated for profit, originally under fully competitive conditions: it has been generally characterized by a tendency toward concentration of wealth and, its latter phase, by the growth of great corporations, increased government controls, etc.”