meemsaf

Again and again, it always comes down to power.

Yes, there are better policies that could be implemented. Better for whom? Not for the powerful. If the powerful backed them, or if the powerless gained power, they would be realistic. Simply insisting “it could be so” does not, as a rule, make it so.

Our tendency to forget this, to behave as if all is needed is a good proposal and convincing rhetoric, is not coincidental – it has been carefully cultivated over decades. All effective ways of building and challenging real power have been systematically demolished, disparaged, and delegitimated by the powerful.

We are left playing make-believe, under the illusion that power can be swayed, when in reality power (capital) continues to concentrate and reproduce itself, availing itself of proposals useful for its continuance and ruthlessly rooting out any force so much as bothersome to it.

Yes, we are allowed to point these things out. Nothing I am saying here is remotely new or unusual. But look at every attempt to act on these key insights: look at the fate of Communist parties in the USA and Europe, look at the fate of Allende and Lumumba, look at the Black Panther Party. Consider the SYRIZA government in Greece. Heck, consider Occupy Wall Street and its sister movements worldwide. Any attempt to build or challenge real power is handily derailed, derided, or simply massacred away.

We are told the alternative is to play the democratic game and push for change from within its rules. But that is what every example I just named was doing. Or at least most of them. We are told to play the game, and allowed to, because as soon as we show any signs of being able to conceivably win, ever, the powerful switch to playing a different game, one we are never allowed to play, one many of us consider deeply illegitimate because we have internalized the rules we were handed down: the game of power. The game of organized violence.

I do not love violence. I honestly can’t stomach even a little of it. But I no longer buy into the illusion that the present state of things is devoid of violence – and I no longer buy the lie that fundamental change can happen without any. Ironically, any attempt to make that happen is doomed to be crushed – violently.

Originally written in October of 2020