Make Revolution Not War

The intent of this page is to explore how Portlandians might work towards focusing and strengthening economic investment at the regional (Cascadian), local (Portland metro) and even neighborhood level while doing everything possible to reduce entanglements with the most pernicious elements of the global economy. For well over three decades policy makers have subjected Americans, most Europeans and others to a relentless and sustained propaganda assault promoting a particular form of neoliberal, globalized "free market." According to the sales pitch, handing over the keys to the global economy to a relative handful of society's most aggressive, acquisitive and profit-motivated "wealth creators" would not only allow them to enrich themselves, but allow them to trickle a steady stream of that wealth down onto the rest of us. In reality, the wealth gusher flowed out of nearly everyone's pockets and into the coffers of a tiny elite.

Getting Started

OK. So everything's screwed. What can we do?

Perhaps the most important starting point is to inform yourself. Arming yourself with at least a basic understanding of why the dominant political and economic structures of our society are only marginally functional (at best) for most of us is a potentially valuable touchstone you can use to keep yourself mentally and emotionally oriented.

Trickle-Down Slavery

In his book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, author Kevin Bales defines slavery as "a relationship in which one person is controlled by violence through violence, the threat of violence, or psychological coercion, has lost free will and free movement, is exploited economically, and paid nothing beyond subsistence." Using this measurement, Bales estimates that "more than twenty-seven million people are still trapped in one of history's oldest social institutions." His investigations reveal how this "new slavery," producing $13 billion in goods and services, "is inextricably linked to the global economy."

According to their website, Free the Slaves -- the organization Bales founded -- makes it their mission to "liberate slaves around the world & attack the systems that allow slavery to exist." Those systems, however, are daunting. Not only do they include the "global free market's" poisonous alphabet soup of usual culprits -- IMF, World Bank, GATT, NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO, MAI, GATS, FTAA, BIS and so on -- they also include the much beloved The U.S. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).

Perhaps it's not surprising to discover that neoliberal, "free markets" contribute to slavery. Limiting freedom to the marketplace, after all, gives that marketplace permission to buy the land out from under the feet of you and your indigenous neighbors, then drive you off of it. Even if it's the same land you and your ancestors have lived on since the beginning of time. It's the kind of freedom that can sell you a fraudulent mortgage on an overpriced suburban McCrackerbox, deflate its value by crashing the global economy, then foreclose you out of your home even as it plucks the remaining coins from your pocket in order to bail itself out of the financial catastrophe of its own making. Markets want to be free. Markets want people to serve as commodities within the globalized "labor market." Drowning at the bottom of this free market "labor pool," sucked in by globalization's relentless undertow, is the slave.

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The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons, by contrast, is not usually associated with "freedom." Under the influence of "free market fundamentalism," however, the Bureau is eager to throw the prison gates wide open. To the marketplace, at least. "But," you might wonder, "I thought the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons is as American as mom, apple pie and predator drones. How could something as un-American old-school American as slavery get mixed up with our beloved Bureau, the epitome of Americanism?" The answer, of course, is "privatization" -- the New Americanism. New Americanism stipulates that the land of the free market is the home of the slave. It's a homeland secured by the abject bravery of fine young predator drone pilots who -- with the click of a mouse and jerk of a joystick -- display their abject braveism by transforming impoverished villagers all over the globe into the tiny, bloody, blown-up chunks of flesh, bone and sinew of "neutralized threat."

The New Feudalism and You

You Americans, you have mastered the art of living with the unacceptable.
-- Breyten Breytenbach

In order to come to grips with how and why the Land of the Free is undergoing an enforced disfigurement into the Home of the Slaves, it's important to the role of feudalism, in both its historical and its emerging contexts. A relentless, extreme and uncompromising assault on working people is underway right now. It’s the worst attack on ordinary workers seen in decades, and it’s taking place all over the globe. This latest battle comes on the heels of a four decade long war waged on working people by large corporations, corporate-owned politicians, paid-off judges, corporate-controlled media, right wing “think tanks” and chambers of commerce.

This war on working people is not new. What is new are the stakes. It is no secret that anti-worker forces have kept working people in their cross hairs for decades. What’s different this time is these same forces now aim to kill. The terrible plagues unleashed by the Great Recession -- rising unemployment, falling wages and growing desperation -- are precious gifts to those obsessed with keeping working people afraid and off balance.

Copping A Buzz

The assault on working people comes with a purposeful lexicon. This vicious vocabulary includes a buzzword and a buzz phrase. The buzzword of the moment is “austerity.” It comes on the heels of a buzz phrase: “too big to fail.” Each buzz contains exactly four syllables. The initial buzz explains why, despite your better judgement, you absolutely, positively had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out a criminal gang of overpaid Wall Street gamblers whose reckless greed crashed the entire global economy. The buzz that followed insists there’s no money left over for you or your family, not even chump change. Working people didn’t cause this economic train wreck, but we’re forced to pay for it.

The first buzz guarantees that the most avaricious amongst us can immediately go right back to wild partying without ever having to even think about sobering up, despite indulging in a decades-long orgy of obscene wealth accumulation and value destruction that drove the whole planet into bankruptcy. The second buzz describes the horrific tab these orgy masters have foisted onto the rest of us, and the hangover they’re demanding that we suffer on their behalf. The fact that their party tab is one we can’t afford to pay, and the hangover is so severe that we may never recover from it is not their concern.

Let’s understand that the goal here is not to incite a class war. Unfortunately, the class war began long ago and working people didn’t start it. Our goal instead is to look at what working folks are up against, and the available choices we might consider as we pick up the pieces and fix what we don’t own and didn’t break. A quick history lesson is a good place to start.

The Olden Days -- Feudalism 1.0

Ye olde feudalism from days of yore.

Before the arrival of industrial capitalism, feudal societies were found throughout medieval Europe and elsewhere. They consisted of a social hierarchy that looked something like this:

• The Crown (king, queen or other royalty) granted land holdings to nobles in exchange for military service.
• Nobles (barons and lords) appointed knights and vassals to serve as tenants on the land granted to them by the Crown.
• Knights / Vassals presided over serfs (or peasants). Considered “high born,” knights came from noble families while the “low born” vassals usually rose up from more common folk.
• Serfs / Peasants worked the land and were obliged to turn over a large share of the produce in exchange for “military protection.”

The emerging industrial age disrupted this arrangement by requiring peasants to leave rural farms and congregate in urban slums where they toiled in mechanized factories. In addition to “the rise of the factory towns” and “the emergence of slums,” this migration from medieval agrarianism to urban industrialism demanded “the long working hours of children, the low wages of certain categories of workers, the rise in the rate of population increase, (and) the concentration of industries.”

So why did they do it? Why did rural peasants leave their homes in the countryside to live in urban squalor and toil for long, miserable hours in dangerous factories under some of the most brutal conditions imaginable? Most of the time, they had no choice. Elites in any society are ingenious at finding ways of keeping common folk dependent and destabilized. When all means to provide for themselves are taken away, and there’s nowhere else to turn, formerly self-sufficient subsistence farmers are forced to depend on others to put them to productive use.

Grand Theft Commons

An effective way to make folks helpless and dependent is to take all means for maintaining self-sufficiency and independence away from them. In Medieval Europe, one tactic for turning independence into dependency was to employ what some social historians call “Enclosure” or “primitive accumulation.” That’s just fancy talk for “theft.” If it was a video game you’d call it “Grand Theft Commons.”

The “Enclosure” was the process of driving peasants off the land. The argument for doing this centered on the one-sided fairy tale that peasants didn’t really own the land. They merely lived on the land. Just as their parents, grandparents, great grandparents and even greater grandparents had lived there before them. Indeed, much of the land rural peasants depended on for their livelihoods was known as the commons. “Enclosure” was the legalese used to deprive peasants of their land, separating them from their subsistence-based livelihoods and forcing them into wage slavery.

Over time, rule by royalty gave way to alternate forms of government, including representative democracy. The nation state became the new Crown. Robber barons like Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller became the new nobility. The executives and managers they hired served as their vassals. Workers, of course, were handed the role of industrialized serfs.

“Industrialized serfs” in Europe, the United States and other regions gradually gained greater economic rights, often only after long and bitter struggles. In the United States, the most rapid gains came with reforms enacted during the New Deal era of the 1930s, in the midst of the Great Depression. Living standards for American workers continued to improve with the emergence of the United States as the dominant economic and military power at the end of World War Two.

For the next several decades living standards for workers in the United States and Western Europe continued to improve. The balance of social and economic power continued to tilt towards ordinary workers, although it never tipped the scales away from elite rule. Even so, the capitalist world’s ownership class grew more and more alarmed. By the 1960s, the general consensus among this ownership class was that ordinary workers had too much power. They worried that society’s rightful masters (the major economic, social and political elite) were losing control.

By the 1960s, uppity workers had become a problem for society’s elites. Despite efforts to limit labor power, including legislation like the Taft–Hartley Act (dubbed the “slave-labor bill” by labor leaders, and in “conflict with important principles of our democratic society” according to President Truman), big business felt that “big labor” still wielded far too much power. A decision emerged to “discipline” labor by slowing, stopping and even reversing the economic and political gains that labor had won, often at great cost, over previous generations.

Big Business Gets Organized

On August 23, 1971 future Supreme Court justice, Lewis F. Powell wrote a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. At that time Powell was a corporate lawyer and a member on the boards of eleven corporations. Later dubbed “the Powell Manifesto,” the memo called for big business to awake from its “apathy” and “conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system.” Two months later President Nixon nominated Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The system” that many Americans “propagandized” against was already engaged in “guerrilla warfare” against its detractors. The “Powell Manifesto” merely gave it permission to declare open war on anyone or anything standing in the way of big business interests. Within a decade two pro-business, anti-labor arch-conservatives -- Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan -- were installed as the new “leaders of the free world.” Executive pay skyrocketed while pay raises for ordinary workers came to a screeching halt. Health care and retirement benefits were slashed or eliminated. Trade unions were suppressed while union membership shrank.

Americans began working longer hours for less pay. Living standards that once took a single breadwinner to maintain now required two incomes. With both parents at work (or the only parent economically forced away from home) American kids were forced to fend for themselves. The “lucky” kids found a surrogate “parent” in a babysitter, daycare provider or member of the child’s extended family. Less lucky children became “latchkey kids,” were “raised by television,” joined gangs or had to find some other way to fend for themselves.

Community Resources

Local

• Right 2 Survive | Right 2 Survive PDX (blog)

"Working to empower the houseless and disenfranchised, and to oppose abuses of power by government."

Regional

• Good Grief America - The Peoples Union --- Stop Foreclosures --- Rebuild Community!

The devastation of foreclosure; what can be done (Audio | 55:37 minutes) More Talk Radio hosts Cecil Prescod speaks with Nancie Koerber from Good Grief America.

Housing was the vehicle that Wall Street used to drain the life out of America. The result has caused record unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness and the unweaving of our community fiber. All linked to this issue are increased suicides, divorces, bankruptcies, and small business failure. Our community services such as food stamps, unemployment, foster care, homeless shelters and many others are over burdened and unable to meet the needs of struggling families.

National

• Take Back the Land

The Take Back the Land Movement is a national network of organizations dedicated to elevating housing to the level of a human right and securing community control over land. The Movement must be led by impacted communities and is firmly rooted in 'Positive Action' campaigns, including those which break the immoral laws which allow banks to gain billions in profit while human beings are made homeless.

• Food Not Bombs | The Food Not Bombs Movement: Cook for peace. (Also available many local communities, including Portland.)

External Links

Energy

• Oregonians For Renewable Energy Policy

Finance

• Oregonians for a State Bank
• Abusive Offshore Tax Avoidance Schemes - Glossary of Offshore Terms
• The truth about tax havens | The truth about tax havens: part 2
• Rogue Economics Undermines World Justice

See Also

Foreclosure | Portland General Strike | Food Not Bombs | City Wiki | Rally For Peace: Time To Break The Spell,