Wages of Rebellion (12 page)

The rich, throughout history, have found methods and subterfuges to subjugate and resubjugate the working class. And workers have cyclically awoken throughout history to revolt. The founding fathers, largely wealthy slaveholders, feared direct democracy and enthusiastically embraced the slaughter of indigenous peoples to seize their land and resources. They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The laboring classes were to be kept at bay. The electoral college, the original power of the states to appoint senators, and the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic. We had to fight for our rights and our voice. Hundreds of workers attempting to form unions were killed and thousands were wounded in our labor wars. Tens of thousands more were fired and blacklisted.

The democratic openings we achieved were fought and paid for with the blood of abolitionists, African Americans, suffragists, workers, and antiwar and civil rights activists. Our radical movements, repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the name of anticommunism, were the real engines of equality and social justice. Now that unions have been broken and sweatshops implanted in the developing world, the squalor and suffering inflicted on workers by the oligarchic class in the nineteenth century is mirrored in the present. Dissent is once again a criminal act. The Mellons, Rockefellers, and Carnegies at the turn of the last century sought to create a nation of masters and serfs. The modern corporate incarnation of this nineteenth-century oligarchic elite has created a worldwide neofeudalism under which workers across the planet toil in misery while corporate oligarchs amass hundreds of millions in personal wealth.

Rebellion against this global oligarchic elite, however, percolates across the planet.

The
China Labour Bulletin
estimates that there were at least 373 strikes in China from January to June 24, 2014,
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and 1,171 strikes or worker protests from mid-2011 to 2013.
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Workers carried out strikes at factories that made products for multinationals such as IBM, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Nike, and Adidas.
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In a single strike in April 2014, more than 40,000 workers walked off the job at a factory in Dongguan that produced shoes for Nike and Adidas.
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The workers went on strike after they discovered that their work contracts were fraudulent and the company had been underpaying the social insurance to which they were legally entitled for at least two decades.
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The monthly minimum wage for these production workers was 1,310 yuan, or $210.27, a month. Nike running shoes cost 1,469 yuan, or $235.79.
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Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs upward. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is either submission or revolt.

“D
id you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”
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Revolutions, when they begin, are invisible, at least to the wider society. They start with the slow discrediting and dismantling of an old ideology and an old language used to interpret reality and justify power. Human societies are captive to and controlled by language. When the old ideas are shattered, when it is clear that the official words and ideas no longer match the reality, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. Our battle is a battle over what the experimental psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker refers to as “mutual knowledge.”
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“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society,” the linguist Edward Sapir writes.

Our inability, as citizens, to influence power in a system of corporate or inverted totalitarianism, along with the loss of our civil liberties, weakens the traditional political vocabulary of a capitalist democracy. The descent of nearly half the country into poverty or near-poverty diminishes the effectiveness of the rhetoric about limitless growth and ceaseless material progress. It undermines the myth of American prosperity. The truths are dimly apparent. But we have yet to sever ourselves from the old way of speaking and formulate a new language to explain us to ourselves. Until this happens, the corporate state can harness the old language like a weapon and employ the institutions of power and organs of state security to perpetuate itself.

In the
Prison Notebooks
, Antonio Gramsci calls such a moment in history an “interregnum”—a time when the reigning ideology is bankrupt but has yet to be replaced by a new one. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, [and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” Gramsci writes.
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We have been captivated in the modern age by what John Ralston Saul calls “a theology of pure power” built on “organization, technology and information.” Our new priest, he writes, is the technocrat, “the man who understands the organization, makes use of the technology and controls access to the information, which is a compendium of facts.” These technocrats have “rendered powerless the law,” which is no longer used, as it was designed, “to protect the individual from the unreasonable actions of others, especially those in power.” It is a weapon of injustice wielded by those who have married “the state and the means of production.” This marriage, Saul notes, makes it “almost impossible for the law to judge illegal that which is wrong.”
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The cult of rationality in the hands of technocrats has become an absolutist ideology. Technocrats, Saul notes, are “slaves to dogma” and “hedonists of power.” This cult presents itself as the solution to the problems it perpetuates—as if the fossil fuel industry could solve the energy crisis or global banks the financial crisis. Saul warns that if we do not free ourselves from this cult—and like Pinker and Berkman, he believes that this is only possible once we develop a new language to describe reality—we will be vanquished by these technocrats. “Their obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force—a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world,” he writes.
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The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, in his 1942 novella
Chess Story
, chronicles the arcane specializations that have created technocrats unable to question the systems they serve, as well as a society that foolishly reveres them. Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion, represents the technocrat. His mental energy is invested solely in the sixty-four squares on a chessboard. Apart from the game, he is a dolt, a “momomaniac” like all monomaniacs, who “burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.” When Czentovic “senses an educated person he crawls into his shell. That way no one will ever be able to boast of having heard him say something stupid or of having plunged the depths of his seemingly boundless ignorance.”
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An Austrian lawyer known as Dr. B, who had been held by the Gestapo for many months in solitary confinement, challenges Czentovic to a game of chess. During his confinement, the lawyer’s only reading material was a chess manual, which he memorized. He reconstructed games in his head. Forced in captivity to replicate the single-minded obsession of the technocrat Czentovic, Dr. B also became trapped inside a specialized world, but unlike Czentovic, he went insane focusing on a tiny, specialized piece of human activity. His insanity returns once he challenges the chess champion.

Zweig, who mourned for the broad liberal culture of educated Europe swallowed up by fascism and modern bureaucracy, warns of the
absurdity and danger of a world run by technocrats. For Zweig, the rise of the industrial age and the industrial man and woman is a terrifying metamorphosis in the relationship of human beings to the world. As specialists and bureaucrats, human beings become tools, able to make systems of exploitation and even terror function efficiently without the slightest sense of personal responsibility or understanding. They retreat into the arcane language of all specialists to mask what they are doing and give to their work a sanitized, clinical veneer.

This is Hannah Arendt’s central point in
Eichmann in Jerusalem
. Technocratic human beings are spiritually dead. They are capable of anything, no matter how heinous, because they do not reflect upon or question the ultimate goal. “The longer one listened to him,” Arendt writes of Eichmann on trial, “the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to
think
, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”
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Zweig, horrified by a world run by technocrats, committed suicide with his wife in 1942. He knew that, from then on, it was the Czentovics who would be exalted in the service of state and corporate monstrosities.

Resistance, as Berkman points out, is first about learning to speak differently and abandoning the vocabulary of the “rational” technocrats who rule. Once we discover new words and ideas through which to perceive and explain reality, we free ourselves from neoliberalism, which functions, as Benjamin knew, like a state religion. This effort will take place outside the boundaries of popular culture and academia, where the deadening weight of the dominant ideology curtails creativity and independent thought.

S
ubcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the spokesman for the Zapatistas (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, or EZLN), announced in May 2014 that his rebel persona no longer existed. He had gone, he said, from being a “spokesman to a distraction.” His persona had fed an easy
and cheap media narrative and turned a social revolution into a cartoon for the mass media, he explained. This persona had allowed the commercial press and the outside world to ignore traditional community leaders and indigenous commanders and wrap a movement around a fictitious personality. His persona, Marcos said, had trivialized a movement.

“The entire system, but above all its media, plays the game of creating celebrities who it later destroys if they don’t yield to its designs,” Marcos declared.
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The Zapatistas formed the most important resistance movement of the last two decades. They were a refreshing departure from the dreary, jargon-filled rhetoric of the Stalinist/Third Worldist sections of the old radical left. The Zapatistas recaptured the language of poetry, art, lyricism, and humor and became a visible counterweight to the despoiling of the planet and the subjugation of the poor by global capitalism. They repeatedly reinvented themselves—as Marcos did—to survive. The Zapatistas gave global resistance movements a new language, drawn in part from the indigenous communal Mayan culture, as well as from the writings of figures such as Eduardo Galeano and Gabriel García Márquez. Offering a new paradigm for action, they understood that corporate capitalism has launched a war against us. And they showed us how to fight back.